Sex and Lies in Las Vegas - Page 4

IS THERE OR ISN'T THERE?
This code of silence, second nature to the gamblers, was imposed upon the vast industry of retail sex in Las Vegas, one that continued to invite equal measures of fascination and condemnation. The system reigned supreme for almost 20 years, and worked so well that wildly differing~impressions of it were reported. Writing in 1953, Paul Ralli commented naively, "One of the best proofs that Las Vegas is reasonably outside the control of mob influence is the almost total absence of organized prostitution. Ten years ago, prostitution constituted the town's main attraction, next to gambling. But today, it's as though the call of Las Vegas is to the appetite of the pocketbook rather than that of the flesh." Hillyer and Best, other- wise far from priggish or censorious, wrote in 1955, "Las Vegas today is probably as clear of professional female enterprise as any other resort area its size. Maybe more so. Gambling is the greatest deterrent to sex since man invented the chastity belt."

Other writers, however, had different ideas. Typically, Green Felt Jungle established the negative extreme. "Money mysteriously breeds prostitutes the way decaying flesh breeds maggots. Where there's easy money there's whores; it's that basic. And where there's gambling, there's easy money." Reid and Demaris claimed that of Las Vegas's 1962 population of 65,000 residents, "a conservative 10 percent are in one way or another engaged in prostitution. Cabbies, bartenders, bellhops, newsboys, proprietors of various establishments (liquor stores, motels, etc.), gamblers, special deputies, and professional pimps make a sizable income by procuring for a veritable army of prostitutes."

In Gamblers Money (1965), WallyTurner saw the system a bit more objectively:

Every night lovely long-Iegged dancers appear on stage, contributing to the air of suppressed excitement that the gambling operators seek to create. AIe there prostitutes among them? Las Vegas being what it is, undoubtedly some of the girls sell themselves for money on occasion. To some of the [bosses], sex is just another commodity and they would insist that it be sold. But prostitution in Las Vegas has changed in the past few years. There are no houses where prostitutes live together. There are no streetwalkers. But there are many call girls, and frequently they do business only through the staff of one or more of the casinos. Some share their fees with the employees who called them. Others may be called directly by management to deal with a heavy winner and distract him, or at least keep him in town until the pendulum of the percentages swings again to the house and he is relieved of his winnings.

Vogliotti reported that a magazine writer came to Las Vegas to do a story on prostitution at the height of the Dalitz system, but didn't get very far. His parting judgment? "Only a Senate investigating committee could extract any truth." The writer found that "call girls, showgirls, cocktail waitresses all gave the same 'Who me?' as did the owners, lawyers, and police. It is a vast, smooth mendacity, a universal conspiracy to deny." Vogliotti declared that "the amount of prostitution in Las Vegas is, safely, that of Paris or Amsterdam, but the whole thing has been so beautifully distorted by writers that few men really know the picture."

Finally, Howard Hughes entered the picture, and all the careful construction, all the distinct lines, bled together like a watercolor in the rain.


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