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190  12 Jim’s Hot Vegas Tip Camillo threw himself on the mercy of other animals, with no better luck, and all the winnings went into the bookie’s cash drawer. He saw it would be better to rest for a while. But there is no eternal rest, not even in the grave. One day, along comes an archaeologist digging up bones and eras. —Machado de Assis, “The Animal Game” Jim’s next big chance to extend his money-laundering operation came in the spring of 1981, when Bank of Industry director Owen H. Lewis told him about the hot investment tip he had received from his pal Clifford Aaron Jones, one of the most storied and politically connected casino lawyers in Las Vegas history. Desperate for new places to hide his money, Jim liked what he heard from Nevada’s former lieutenant governor. His ensuing casino adventures, filled with international political intrigue and even the furtive delivery of a paper bag stuffed with hundred-dollar bills, offers a rare peek at dealings that Jones usually hid from public view. Thanks to the interviews that Jones gave to Agent Keller in October 1983, the episode also reveals that the bank had turned into a sort of social club for wealthy shareholders, with Jim, its social director, hustling colleagues to make casino investments and tag along on jet-setting excursions to Hawaii, Europe, and East Asia. But Jones did not open up to Keller because he liked him. He did it to avoid incriminating himself in Jim’s money-laundering scheme. The shadow dance of his interviews shows that he came to that decision slowly, one calculated revelation at a time. His actions had nothing in common with the promising slip of the tongue that first brought Jim to his door. Jim got the tip from Lewis, who got it from his old friend Jerome Louis Block, an insurance broker who had been Jones’s longtime friend and jim’s hot vegas tip 191 business partner. The deal, Jones told Lewis, involved taking over a hot gambling casino, a “big moneymaker,” in Colombo, capital of the island nation of Sri Lanka. American dollars, Jones said confidently, could buy a lot more casino action outside the United States than they could in Vegas, where gambling had gone tamely corporate. Like a devotee who had been allowed into Sin City’s temple of secrets, Lewis eagerly spread the word to Jim and the other Bank of Industry directors. Several of them said they wanted in. The Industry crowd’s enthusiasm inspired Jones to offer them a bigger, more expensive casino investment tip several months later. Jim shared a history with Lewis that made his pal’s tip seem credible.1 Like Jim, Lewis was a wealthy real estate developer in his own right and an unapologetic, bare-knuckle promoter of Southern California’s development industry. He had also represented the first supervisorial district on the Los Angeles County regional planning commission, as Jim had. And like Jim’s, his dealings had attracted controversy and the epithet, the “official sprawl champion” of Los Angeles County.2 After serving for eighteen years as planning commission chair and vice chair, Lewis resigned from his post in late 1980. Although the seventy-three-year-old blamed his departure on his bad heart, the report that the Los Angeles County district attorney had forwarded in August to the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission mentioned suspicions of criminal self-dealing. The district attorney had investigated Lewis’s failure to report a 315,000-dollar promissory note he had received from a mobile home company, “alterations of an ownership affidavit filed on property Lewis owned” in the city of Claremont, and possible “improper influence on planning department employees who were reviewing [his Claremont subdivision].” The affidavit in question, dated May 18, 1978,“listed Lewis as owner of the property.” But Wesley Lind, the engineer who had subdivided the forty-two-acre Claremont property, stepped forward to rescue the commissioner’s reputation. Lind, who would later lend a hand in Jim’s money-laundering enterprise, said that he himself had innocently erased Lewis’s name from the affidavit and signed his own in its place after he had reached “an oral agreement to purchase the property from Lewis.” These explanations helped Lewis escape criminal charges, but the conflict-of-interest probe that the district attorney was preparing forced him to cut a deal...

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