Living Las Vegas

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Top Vegas Hotels: Bellagio, Luxor, Rio

Roads from the Ashes: An Odyssey in Real Life on the Virtual Frontier, by Megan Edwards

Books & Movies

Days of Wine and Mobsters

Las Vegas is in love with its mobsters. Even though anyone who has ever read the slightest tidbit of Las Vegas history knows that Bugsy Siegel didn’t found the place, he gets the credit. And not only that, he gets the glory and romance. The most commonly repeated cliché in Vegasland is, “Things were so much better when the mob ran this place.” …

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Book Review: Cullotta

Cullotta: The Life of a Chicago Criminal, Las Vegas Mobster, and Government Witness, by Dennis N. Griffin and Frank Cullotta

I can’t say I was dying to read this book. Sure, mobsters make great cinema, and sure, I watched the last episode of “The Sopranos” along with the rest of the country. But I still don’t find hit men very appealing, and that’s what Frank Cullotta is, an old killer who ratted out his former cohorts when it looked like he was going to get the same bullet-in-the-head treatment he’d been dishing out himself…

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Book Review: Skin City

If you’re interested in finding out more about what’s happening in Vegas these days (and staying here), allow Jack Sheehan to be your Sakajawea. In Skin City: Uncovering the Las Vegas Sex Industry, he takes his readers on a tour to gentlemen’s clubs, swing parties, porno video awards ceremonies, interviews with madams, sheriffs, strippers, prostitutes, gigolos, and many other hard-working folks who help keep Las Vegas’s reputation for sin fresh and well-deserved.

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Book Review: Whale Hunt in the Desert

Whale Hunt in the Desert: The Secret Las Vegas of Superhost Steve Cyr
by Deke Castleman

The word has become so mainstream now that most people know that it doesn’t take a big waistband to get labeled a whale in Las Vegas. The blubber’s in the bank, and the only other required attribute is a willingness to lay lots of it down on green felt. Although I will never come anywhere close to earning a cetaceous epithet, I am nonetheless fascinated by the world these megabuck gamblers inhabit when they come to Las Vegas. For this reason, I am forever grateful to Deke Castleman, who has succeeded in painting a vivid picture of who they are, why they come here, what they do when they get here, and how much money flushes through them in the process…

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Book Review: Vegas, the Mob, and the Dead Pig on the Dance Floor

The phrase that keeps jumping to mind when I try to sum this book up is “raw material.” Michael Broderick has packed not only the story of his life within these pages, but also quite a bit about the evolution of Las Vegas over the last forty years. No punches are pulled, because Broderick published the book himself, thereby sidestepping any revisions an editor might have suggested. This is both a plus — these are unexpurgated, undiluted memoirs of life in the Mob years in Las Vegas…

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