Sex and Lies in Las Vegas - Page 3

MOE, BUGSY, AND GIRLIE
The sex business had been part of Siegel's overall vision from the beginning. An inveterate ladies' man, he instinctively wanted to provide easy sex to seduce, ser- vice, and presumably satisfy the suckers. His Flamingo established two traditions of sex Las Vegas-style. First, he designed the hotel with separate modular wings, accessible without ever having to pass through a lobby or main entrance. This was at a time, in the late 1940s, when the men who ran hotels actively barred pros: grim, gray-haired matrons guarded elevators and Mack Sennet-type house detectives roamed the halls listening for the telltale evidence. At the Flamingo, a guy could spend every night with a different girl and never be seen by anybody.

The second tradition was that casinos should be "dressed up" with women. Young and pretty. Suggestively attired. Everywhere! Coat-check girls. Hat-check girls. Cigarette girls. Shills. Escorts. Loungers. Showgirls. And the ultimate juice girls: the pit cocktail waitresses. Some working girls were hired as hotel help to be

at the beck and call of the house; they quickly and quietly introduced other receptive workers to the lucrative sideline and simple system of being procured. Unfortunately, Bugsy left the hotel business before he had the opportunity to extend and fine-tune his sex agenda. But he laid the foundation of a program that would develop quickly and manage to maintain a delicate balance between passionately opposing policies for the next 20 years.

Though many operators no doubt contributed, it's conceivable that Moe Dalitz, owner of the Desert Inn and the man who first organized modern Las Vegas, originated the ultimate methods of supplying sex to guests. Dalitz was 50 when he came to Las Vegas, and he knew many things. He knew, like Bugsy, the sexual excitement implicit in gambling, and that women were integral to the casino scenery. But Dalitz had faced down the Kefauver Commission during his second year as an owner, and was aware of the growing distaste of the public for prostitution, so he knew the imperative of keeping it discreet. He also knew that countless women, of every description, were attracted to Las Vegas, and that un- controlled prostitution became very dangerous in urban areas because of its association with pimps, drugs, theft, and violence.

Finally, Dalitz knew that all the conflicting realities boiled down to two basic truths. First, gamblers needed sex: the suggestion of it, with women parading around on stage and decorating the floor; the mysterious myth of its ready avail- ability with gorgeous and expensive pros; and the eventual consummation-pre- scribed, safe, hidden-that gets the guy to sleep or wakes him up, makes him feel lucky when he wins or consoles him when he loses, keeps him around the tables a little longer, and sends him home having experienced what has been called the "Las Vegas total." But second, the sex trade had to be directly and carefully choreographed, from start to finish, in order to avoid any chance of offending the mil- lions of straights that filled the hotels, of becoming so obvious or vulgar or hazardous that it menaced in any way the smooth and consistent workings of the great god Percentage.
So Dalitz passed the word. Around the Desert Inn. Through his managers. To the front-line staff-the hosts, the pit bosses, the dealers, the bell captains, the bartenders. And to the other owners, to be passed down to their staffs. The rules, as usual, mostly revolved around juice. The girl had to be connected. She had to work for the hotel: be hired as a hooker and given a straight job for a front, or asked, after being hired, whether she was interested in turning tricks. Or she had to be recommended by a trusted employee who could vouch for her. The girl had to be cooperative. Her main objective was to see that the player spent more time at the tables and less time in the hotel room. She had to be reliable. And she'd better be honest. After all, the money that wallet thieves and chip hustlers stole belonged, in the words of Mario Puzo, "to the gambling casinos, and was just being temporarily held by the john." In the attitude of the gaming bosses, "larcenous girls were really stealing casino money."

Charges were standardized, from a quickie French up to the full trick, which was to cost no more than a "honeybee," "a bill"-a hundred dollars. Any deviation would be immediately and summarily rectified, by anyone of the number of private and public security forces that surrounded, in concentric circles, the casino counting rooms. Similarly, freelancers were actively discouraged. Any girl found hanging around the casino, restaurants, or lounges too long was earnestly apprised of the rules and either driven away or registered, as the case might be. Streetwalkers, part-time call girls, divorcees doing their "friendly forty-two," swinging coeds or housewives, cocktail waitresses, showgirls-any woman with enough beauty, body, or appeal to sell, and the capability of successfully compartmentalizing sex into a purely business transaction-all translated Bugsy Siegel's vision, and Moe Dalitz's version, into a vast and well-managed sex market in Las Vegas, throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

The personal connection extended to the solicitor as well. A man who wanted sex, from a high roller to a tinhorn, had to use the proper channels. The major plungers, well known to owners and executives, were supplied with a showgirl or a high-class courtesan as a matter of course. Lesser players, if well known to the cocktail waitresses and registered cruisers, could have their pick of the pit girls. Hotel guests were fired on by the bell captain or one of his boys; casino customers could become familiar enough with a pit boss or bartender to make a circumspect inquiry. Cab drivers and motel clerks carved their own niche within the system, but professional pimps were quickly discouraged. The word spread among the legions of male Las Vegas patrons: follow established protocol. Accrue some juice and use it judiciously. Thus the whole path was a procession of pedigree, from the whispered word to the soft knock on the door. It had to be man to man before it could be man to woman.

If you didn't know the procedure, however, you might walk away thinking that Las Vegas's fabled copious commercial copulation was one of the great myths of the day. Because above all; the pandering, procuring, and coupling had to be illegal. Herein lay the true beauty of the system, and the unmistakable signature of Siegel, Dalitz, arid all the other racketeers-turned-executives. For propriety, for privacy, and ultimately to protect the reputation of legal gambling, the whole delicate system, its makeup, mechanics, and management, had to operate outside the law. One false step, one loose lip, and the whole precarious structure could collapse like a house of cards.


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