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Chapter Two The Rapid GrowthYears: Italian Americans Come to LasVegas During the twenty years following the second and successful opening of Bugsy Siegel's Flamingo Hotel in 1947, Italian Americans provided the building blocks for Las Vegas's gambling industry, the foundation upon which the town rapidly grew into a major resort city in the Sunbelt.1 They were well represented among the dealers, pit bosses, floormen, shift bosses, and casino managers. A rare week passed that Italian-American entertainers were not among the star performers; it was rarer still that Italian Americans were not among the lounge performers. Italian-American contractors helped to build not only the Strip and Downtown hotels, but also the homes, apartment houses, churches, and schools for the city's expanding population. While Italian-American businessmen and public officials contributed to LasVegas's transformation from a small desert town to a modern city, they were also most certainly overrepresented among"The Boys"-influential LasVegans with shadowy pasts. Averaging 6 percent of the U.S. population as a whole, Italian Americans constituted a growing proportion of the LasVegas population, their numbers increasing from 2 percent in 1940 to almost 10 percent in 1960.2 In contrast to the earlier Las Vegas settlers, almost all of whom were originally from California, northern Nevada , or mining areas in the West, the overwhelming majority of post-World War II Italian Americans predictably came from the large urban areas east of the Mississippi River, where more than 90 percent of all Italian Americans lived at the time. Interviews with Roman Catholic priests serving LasVegas parishes as well as Italian Americans who came to Las Vegas during the 1950s and 1960s, and a perusal of the obituaries of ItalianAmericans that appeared in LasVegas newspapers , indicate that particularly significant numbers of ItalianAmericans came from Buffalo, Brooklyn, Pittsburgh, Steubenville and Cleveland, Ohio, Chicago, Detroit , and St. Louis. Many came from Boston, the other boroughs of New York City, Kansas City, New Orleans, Newark, Philadelphia, Providence, Rhode Island , and Newport, Kentucky. Of course, some Italian Americans from northern Nevada and California continued to move to the LasVegas area; included among these migrants were some who had been raised in the East and who had later moved to California during or after World War II. 19 20 Beyond the Mafia Because legal gaming was profitable and expanding, and employment in the industry was based on personal relationships, LasVegas was particularly attractive for the many Italian Americans with experience in gambling.3 Ironically, Senator Estes Kefauver contributed to the appeal of LasVegas through his well-publicized investigations of organized crime in 1950-51, which led the public to demand enforcement of state laws prohibiting everything from numbers rackets to slot machines. This publicity attracted professional gamblers from every ethnic background to the legal gaming in LasVegas, but it also acted as a magnet, drawing Italian Americans and Jewish Americans whose established success in illegal gambling enterprises had already made them the focus of national and local law enforcement. The testimony of two individuals in particular, Emilio Georgetti and Moe Sedway, revealed how attractive Las Vegas had become to both East Coast and West Coast gambling entrepreneurs. Both Georgetti ~nd Sedway admitted their extensive involvement in illegal gambling and their efforts to gain at least partial ownership of LasVegas's increasingly lucrative Downtown casinos.4 Several Roman Catholic parish priests discerned some basic patterns in the migration of Italian Americans from Eastern cities. Not infrequently, one family member gained employment in the gaming industry and then, upon learning of other job opportunities, informed other family members or friends from the former Italian neighborhood. Sometimes older family members who had relatives and friends in Las Vegas retired there, too.5 No distinctively Italian neighborhoods existed. Indeed, Las Vegas growth patterns, including periodic housing shortages , precluded the development of white ethnic neighborhoods. New arrivals were often pleased just to find a house or an apartment; they could not worry about moving into an area with an ethnic makeup that mirrored the one they had left in the East or in California. Italian Americans in the Gaming Business Contrary to rather widely held beliefs about the extent of Italian-American ownership of LasVegas casinos, only one major Strip property, the Stardust, was built by an Italian American, Tony Cornero. His pre-Las Vegas career was similar to those of Moe Dalitz, Jake Kozloff, Milton Prell, Jay Sarno (a Jewish American whom some LasVegans mistakenly thought was of Italian background), and...

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