Sally Denton & Roger Morris: The Money And The Power: The Making Of Las Vegas And Its Hold On America, 1947-2000

From the outset, authors Sally Denton and Roger Morris make no attempts to hide the through-the-looking-glass quality of The Money And The Power, their sprawling chronicle of modern Las Vegas. "If the city has become a shadow capital at the beginning of a new millennium," they write, referring to the corporatization of Vegas as an embodiment and source of a broader event, "that is less because it somehow conquered the rest of the nation than that the nation came round more openly to what it represented, and ignored or denied its own emerging reality, much as it remained blind to the larger meaning of Las Vegas." But why limit the scope of that event to the United States, when Paris, New York, ancient Rome, Venice, and nearly every other part of the world all co-exist in theme-park form within a few square blocks of one another on the Strip? Over the course of their history, Denton and Morris, husband-and-wife investigative reporters, create a history of Las Vegas that's labyrinthine in detail and direct in course. Once a clear nexus of flagrant criminal activity, Vegas has put on protective layers of legitimacy even as the influence of the nefarious forces controlling it has expanded. By Denton and Morris' reckoning, the difference between Mafia mastermind Meyer Lansky and casino tycoon Steve Wynn isn't so much a matter of degree as a question of public relations and methodology. While the authors' Vegas occasionally feels like a magnet for conspiracy theories, they do exercise enough restraint and provide enough detail to make the book difficult to dismiss. (Morris' tenure on the senior staff of the National Security Council under Johnson and Nixon doesn't hurt.) But the level of detail also tends to be a problem. When Denton and Morris pause to concentrate on specific moments, like the Nevada nuclear tests and Howard Hughes' arrival, they reveal a considerable storytelling gift. In other moments, the breathless rush of schemes and players—the mob, the FBI, Mormons, the CIA, Cubans of all extreme political persuasions, presidents—begins to blur at the edges. Does the authors' notion of a shadow capital hold up to scrutiny? They provide their own best defense by referencing the doomed attempts at reform by Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver, whose Cassandra-like warnings against growing criminal influence arrived just before Vegas began to get big enough for its controllers to hide within its aura of good times and easy money.