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A review by travellingcari
Super Casino: Inside the New Las Vegas by Pete Earley
There are definitely more than two books about the city but my summer reading’s focus was: Pete Earley’s Super Casino and Andres Martinez’ [b:24/7: Living It Up and Doubling Down|285300|24/7 Living It Up and Doubling Down|Andres Martinez|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320396176s/285300.jpg|276797]. Both books are slightly dated in that they focused on the city’s late 90s/early 2000s boom, but with the ever changing face of Vegas they remain remarkably current.
Super Casino was the book I read first and is the one that I’d recommend to people as curious about Vegas’ history as the city’s present. Pete Earley was given complete access to the Luxor’s staff as they were renovating it in the late 1990s. However, the bigger story behind the Luxor, Excalibur, Circus Circus and the as-yet built as this book’s publishing, Mandalay Bay, is that of Circus Circus and the changing funding of Las Vegas.
Super Casino explores Las Vegas from the days of the “Midwestern Investors” aka the Mob and the Rat Pack to corporate sponsors, Steve Wynn and Celine Dion. A key part in both books that just made me said was Siegfried & Roy at the Mirage-one act I wish I’d had the chance to see before Roy’s injury and their subsequent permanent closure.
Super Casino was the book I read first and is the one that I’d recommend to people as curious about Vegas’ history as the city’s present. Pete Earley was given complete access to the Luxor’s staff as they were renovating it in the late 1990s. However, the bigger story behind the Luxor, Excalibur, Circus Circus and the as-yet built as this book’s publishing, Mandalay Bay, is that of Circus Circus and the changing funding of Las Vegas.
Super Casino explores Las Vegas from the days of the “Midwestern Investors” aka the Mob and the Rat Pack to corporate sponsors, Steve Wynn and Celine Dion. A key part in both books that just made me said was Siegfried & Roy at the Mirage-one act I wish I’d had the chance to see before Roy’s injury and their subsequent permanent closure.
Forget the gangsters: Moe Sedway, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, Tony “the Ant” Spilotro. Forget the Rat Pack: Frank, Dino, Sammy, Peter, and Joey. Forget the glamorous Sands hotel and casino where leggy showgirls suntanned alongside a swimming pool with a “floating” craps table built right in its center. Anyone who still thinks of Las Vegas as a holiday haven for pug-nosed mafiosos with bulges under their jackets and suitcases stuffed with cash, or as the scandalous desert playground of Hollywood’s rich and raucous, is living in the past. The legendary Dunes hotel and casino, built in the 1950s with loans from the Teamster Union’s Central States Pension Fund arranged by mobsters, was imploded in 1993 before two hundred thousand onlookers chanting “Blow it up!” Howard Hughes, the eccentric billionaire who once owned most of the big casinos in town, is now only a historical footnote. Liberace’s trademark candelabra sits in a museum. Elvis has been gone so long that tourists often think his legions of impersonators look more like “the King” than he did. The “old” Las Vegas is dead. A “new” Las Vegas has risen.