Protests Deliberately Disrupt Gambling in Las Vegas
1971 Actress Jane Fonda and renowned activists led about 900 people down the Las Vegas Strip on March 6, 1971, a Saturday, in protest of welfare cutbacks. “Today we launched a spring offensive and…
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1971 Actress Jane Fonda and renowned activists led about 900 people down the Las Vegas Strip on March 6, 1971, a Saturday, in protest of welfare cutbacks. “Today we launched a spring offensive and…
1944 “Are you in favor of banning beano when played for prizes?” This was one of Massachusetts’ 1944 ballot questions. By the 1940s, beano — played with beans as markers, hence the name, and popular on…
1988-1989 Tipped off by the contents of various lawsuits and complaints by employees, Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB) agents raided the Imperial Palace Hotel and Casino* on September 27, 1988. The 2,700-room property located on…
1956 When auditors for Nevada reviewed its books, they discovered the El Rancho casino on the Las Vegas Strip had underpaid the requisite gambling taxes over nine quarters by $39,000 ($350,500 today). Despite the claims…
1949 The article, “Las Vegas Gamblers Arming in Control Battle,” ran on the front page of a Los Angeles newspaper in the third week of December, to the chagrin of Nevada gambling regulators, casino owners,…
1950-Today When people are on the Las Vegas Strip, they’re really in Paradise — the town, that is. In 1950, a rumor surfaced that the City of Las Vegas’ boundaries would be expanded to include…
1970s Caesars Palace in Las Vegas extended $160 million in credit to players in 1977. This was more than the then-considered staggering $106 million cost of the original MGM Grand (early ’70s), also in Sin City, and…
1974-1975 For many Japan-based businessmen, gambling trips to Caesars Palace in Las Vegas turned nightmarish. Kikumaru Okuda, 46, also a resident of the Land of the Rising Sun, and a film producer with Toho Film Company,…
1956 The gambling licensees of the Dunes and Silver Slipper casinos applied to restart bingo on the premises, but the Nevada Gaming Commission denied their request, stating that the return of the game to the Las…
1974-1983 A revolt of the performers — athletes in this case — threatened to close a popular attraction at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas — jai alai. Unique to the Strip at the…
1955 At least 10 hotel-casinos on the Las Vegas Strip offered entertainment, typically marquee names like Liberace and Mario Lanza, who’d played Sin City time and again. The Royal Nevada, though, changed it up with a…
1964 The Dunes in Las Vegas, Nevada switched from writing off unpaid IOUs to claiming them as income, allegedly to keep Internal Revenue Service agents from harassing its customers — asking guests in the hotel…
1968 Howard Hughes, billionaire industrialist, received the Nevada Gaming Commission’s blessing to buy the Stardust hotel-casino in Las Vegas, Nevada for $30.5 million and moved forward with the acquisition. He already owned five such properties…
1975 In the spring, Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder, a Las Vegas oddsmaker and bookie, allegedly punched, knocked down and kicked casino magnate, Nathan “Nate” S. Jacobson, in a Caesars Palace hallway in a confrontation over…
1937-1970 Card dealing was a male-dominated profession in Nevada’s casinos until 1937, when Harolds Club, in Reno, put the first woman at a 21 table to deal. Co-owner Harold Smith previously had been hiring women,…
1958-1961 The debut of topless showgirls in Las Vegas roused disapproval — not surprising given it occurred early in the Leave it to Beaver era. The Stardust was the first to abandon bras and tops,…
