Corporations Got Way More Powerful Than The Mob

And nowhere near as polite. RIP Tropicana Resort & Casino.

‘Party Girl, Las Vegas’ self portrait 1979 by Mernie Buchanan, ink on paper

Over 1,500 explosive charges dropped the two 23-story towers left standing in a stripped wasteland that was one of the world’s elegant playgrounds. This happened in October 2024. I just found out. Long ago memories went ka BOOM.

In the late 1970s Syndicates still ran Las Vegas casinos. The ‘families’ were generous hosts, had style, elegance, more class and far better manners than the armies of dicey characters who used and abused newly minted laws to oust ‘organized crime’ — men not unlike today’s billionaires and their stooges currently dismantling our democracy. I witnessed this early example of Corporates and other profiteers (politicians, Mormons…) stomping their jackboots all over everyone’s good time.

A recent grad with an art degree from UNLV, I became a free-roaming gig worker in a vacation mecca palace. Here’s a story lifted from my memoir…

I was a flower girl to the fun-seekers, working for Rita and Vito at the venerable Tropicana Resort on the Las Vegas Strip. A job like this in a niche market so specialized only succeeds when money floats around like plastic in the Great Garbage Patch, and can be gleaned by selling something as silly as a fresh rose in a hot, dry climate. Few…