LAS VEGAS has been the home of casino gambling for more than half a century. But later this year the Government’s Gambling Bill may give rise to a new generation of Las Vegas-style super-casinos in the UK. The £1,000 limit on fruit-machine jackpots will be removed, opening the way to £1 million prizes; though it was revealed this week that such machines will be restricted to the new casinos, so no chance of becoming a millionaire on the slot machine at the pub.
All this comes amid news that in Las Vegas a proposed merger between MGM Mirage and Mandalay may soon create the world’s biggest gaming operator. With the establishment of the new generation of UK casinos, though, the spirit of Las Vegas could soon be brought closer to home.
In the early years of the 20th century, Las Vegas was an undeveloped town with a population of a few thousand. In 1931 all that started to change when the state of Nevada legalised gambling. Go to The Money and the Power (Vintage) by Sally Denton and Roger Morris to learn how, in 1946, the New York gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel opened the Flamingo on a strip between Las Vegas and McCarren airport. He filled 40 acres of the surrounding desert with imported lawns, cork trees, and flamingos. A year later Siegel was murdered, but the strip had been born and the city’s famous association with organised crime had been established. Development continued — the MGM Grand, opened in 1973, was the largest hotel in the world at that time — but by the late 1970s mob rule was starting to collapse. Read Super Casino: Inside the New Las Vegas (Bantam) by Pete Earley to see how Wall Street stepped in with hundred of millions of dollars, effectively spending the mob out of town.
Las Vegas, though, has always divided opinion: a town of chance where lives are made on the spin of a wheel, or a cesspool of sin? Suburban Xanadu (Routledge) by David Schwartz is an attempt to understand the rise of casino resorts, their acceptance by legislators, and the thinking that sends millions of people into them every year despite the odds. To improve your chances try Casino Secrets (Atlantic Books) by Barney Vinson, and Bringing Down the House (Arrow) by Ben Mezrich to learn how, in the mid-1990s, six bright US students devised an infallible, underhand way of winning at blackjack and took casinos for millions before being caught.
Finally, try the gambler’s gambling novel, Norman Leigh’s Thirteen Against the Bank (Penguin) to understand the microcosm of life and the good and ill fortune that some find in a roulette wheel.
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Sir John Gielgud: A Life in Letters, mentioned in Required Reading on June 9, is published in the UK under the title of Gielgud’s Letters by Weidenfeld & Nicolson at £20.