The Nevada Tax Commission members agreed by unanimous vote to allow reporters to sit in and report on its voting sessions, meetings in which they made key decisions. Previously, voting had been done behind closed doors during “executive sessions,” or as journalists called them, “secret sessions.” Exceptions to the new policy included times when confidential…
1968-1971 A couple and a third man approached a 21 table in the Frontier in Las Vegas, Nevada on a Monday afternoon. The husband, Douglas Anderson, distracted the dealer. In that moment, his wife, Beverly Hanson, pulled a marked deck from her purse, handed it to the other man, Fred Padilla, who swapped it for…
1974 The Nevada Gaming Commission, the industry’s state regulatory body, amended regulations to allow employees to own stock in a casino where they worked, without having to get a gambling license, a process that involved filling out an application, being investigated and paying the requisite costs. Jerry’s Nugget in North Las Vegas was the first gambling…
1970-1973 When federal agents arrested Elliot Paul Price, 51, during a massive multi-city raid in 1970 and charged him with illegally transmitting race wire information across state lines via telephone, two dominos fell: • He lost his job as a casino host at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. • The Clark County Sheriff’s Office pulled his…
1969-present When executives of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Nevada hosted 12 people from Kansas City in 1969 as part of a gambling junket, it unexpectedly backfired. When their guests, after four days at the resort, boarded the plane to return home, Clark County sheriff’s deputies arrested all of them on charges of vagrancy because…
1966 Suddenly, in the fall, the Nevada Gaming Commission (NGC) directed 41-plus casinos to cease operation of specific electronic blackjack machines because they were “experiencing difficulties when played so as to render the devices more liable to win or lose” (Nevada State Journal, Oct. 21, 1966). These 101 devices, available in gambling rooms in Las…
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 on the Strip — the Castaways, Silver Slipper, Frontier, Sands and Desert Inn. (Adding the Stardust would’ve given him control…
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, doing so when it unveiled a show featuring the Bluebell Girls for the hotel-casino’s 1958 grand opening on The Strip.…
1967 New York publisher, Lyle Stuart, applied to the Nevada Gaming Commission for a gambling license to purchase 1 percent of the Aladdin Resort & Casino on the Las Vegas Strip for $25,000 ($178,000 today). Regulators, though, denied him one due to his “unsuitable background” because a subsidiary of his company sold books that contained…
1960 A cheap, spiral notebook held great power in Nevada’s gambling world for decades. It contained known U.S. mobsters whose underworld statuses and histories were such that the state gambling authorities didn’t want them anywhere near The Silver State’s casinos. This was a problem as these undesirables frequented major gambling operations in the state. Nevada…