ML - Vegas Magazine

2013 - Issue 6 - October

Vegas Magazine - Niche Media - There is a place beyond the crowds, beyond the ropes, where dreams are realized and success is celebrated. You are invited.

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PHOTOGRAPHY BY LEILA NAVIDI (SUZANNE) LEFT: A news clipping about Moe Dalitz's funeral in 1989. RIGHT: Suzanne Dalitz studies a photo from the early '60s of her father riding a horse in the Helldorado Parade. crimes except for driving while blind. He wanted to build a city, but the lens was always trained on him and never let up. I see it as an epic battle for the city and the soul of Las Vegas. Who were the players in that epic battle? The government, the FBI, the casino guys, the racket guys and gamblers, and obviously there were huge profits at stake, and obviously there were huge relationships inside those, too. There always are. Cross-relationships? Of course. What was the government's motivation? Money. Wall Street. Corporate America. Bring in the corporations, legitimize it, take out the element. Build the city of the future without the long shadow of organized crime. Eliminate the skim. Take the tax revenues. What was the motivation for your dad and his colleagues? They thought they had reinvented themselves as legitimate business guys, had built themselves an amazing business empire, and they wanted to continue here and have this be their statement and their legacy. This is the place they wanted to make their stand in the future with new lives. He had a gaming license. He knew the governors and the senators. There are letters back and forth. There are contributions back and forth. He engaged when government was happy to do so, was a patriot, a city promoter. This was not a guy looking for a quick buck off of gambling. The sense is that politicians were happy to use them for campaign donations, projects they were building, because it made them look good. Sunrise Hospital was built. Boulevard Mall was built. Do you think that's how politicians viewed them? I think so, but I can't tell you how many of them, when I'm introduced, come quietly to me and say, "Your father was so kind to me, so helpful to me. I really appreciated him and knew him well." I think those relationships were more than meets the eye, and of course politicians were creatures of opportunity, and so was my dad, but I like to think they had a certain sincerity in knowing what Moe Dalitz was about here, the foundation he put down, on top of which he built the town. Did the politicians turn on him? Some, and I don't know much about that history. How do you feel about Senator Harry Reid and former Governor Paul Laxalt, both of whom were around when your father was still on the scene? Harry Reid has been nothing but wonderful to me. I never knew Laxalt. I don't have much to say about them, but anything I have heard directly or indirectly has been very sweet. Who else would you put on that list? Can we not talk about it anymore? [Laughs] Because I'm going to say something wrong, and I really don't know that much about it, but I will say this: There was a period in the early '80s when my father was building the Sundance Hotel [which later became Downtown's Fitzgeralds Casino & Hotel and is now the D] and there was a moment it became clear that he would not be licensed because he was Moe Dalitz. You can argue that a guy in his 80s should not be building a hotel and casino, but he was seeing opportunities downtown. He thought it would be his crowning achievement and final redemption to get a license and run his last hotel. He called it the Last Hurrah, and it became the Sundance later. When it became clear that the city would not support him, I think it broke his heart, but the city had other things that it had planned. Steve Wynn was up on the Strip building the future, and so that's the way that one went, but that's the only moment I wish the city could have stood up for him. When you look at the images of the people whose photos are on display in the museum, do you think in another era they would have been bankers, financiers, doctors, lawyers? Some of the people on the wall were sociopaths. I'm sorry—a complete lack of moral calculation, moral foundation, an appetite for causing violence and pain, and a lack of compunction over the exploitation of the pain of others. That was not my father's case. The fact that he's on the wall creates this nuanced other part. Particularly the ones who came to Vegas: This was their reinvention moment, the new start. They were going to reshuffle the deck. I don't think my father ever would have been the violin player his mother wanted him to be, the good Jewish boy, but I think he proved in his later life that he always had those skills, that sense of how to create and build things, and that he would have done it earlier if he could have. But I don't know that, and I didn't know him when he was a young man. He looked brash and brazen. He was a tough guy. V VEGASMAGAZINE.COM 102-105_V_F_Reportage3_Oct13.indd 105 105 9/17/13 5:03 PM

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