Re: Welcome to AVLV Mr. V


"Mr. V" <zencraps@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1141073651.522949.224130@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Not to worry, Doc.

Whether we get along or not makes about as much difference as a fart in
a windstorm.

Out of the crucible of conflict comes the truth.


You aren't alone. Here is what some fairly major news media have had to say
about the subject:


The thesis of Ovid Demaris' book about Atlantic City's emergence as a casino
town is expressed in its closing paragraph: "Gambling is a parasitic
enterprise that thrives on the weaknesses of people," he writes. "It leaves
in its wake corruption, debasement, despair, and the subversion of moral
authority."

"The Boardwalk Jungle" is not about the former -- the broken families or
lost retirement checks that can be the legacy of gambling -- but the latter,
the effect the casino industry has on the politicians who administer it and
the city that hosts it. And to hear Demaris tell it, it's not a pretty
picture.

More than two decades ago Demaris wrote a bestselling book about Las Vegas
called "The Green Felt Jungle." With some of the same enthusiasm, but not
the same rich history, he now tackles Atlantic City, the fabled resort that
fell on hard times when the world began passing it by in the 1950s. "The
Boardwalk Jungle" is peopled with politicians looking for the main chance,
creeps who want to run the Mafia and casino owners who hang around with the
wrong crowd.

But does organized crime run Atlantic City's gaming industry?

First, in the interest of full journalistic disclosure, I should say that I
have not only gambled in Atlantic City since Resorts International opened
the first casino there eight years ago, but I have also received
complimentary rooms, food and beverages from several casinos in which I've
played.

But even the most degenerate gambler or pampered visitor to Atlantic City
can't help but conclude, as Demaris does, that the grand experiment of
legalizing casino gambling there has failed. When New Jersey citizens voted
to permit casinos in Atlantic City, politicians promised the state would
profit from increased tax revenue and Atlantic City would blossom anew.

The state did begin pocketing tax monies (about $800 million so far) but,
except for the 11 flashy casino-hotels, Atlantic City is still in decay.
Politics has been in disarray, housing is substandard and more local
businesses have closed than opened -- there's only one supermarket and no
movie theater in the town.

Oh, 40,000 new jobs were created, but the havoc land speculators and the
casinos visited upon the local real estate market means decent, affordable
housing is nearly nonexistent in Atlantic City. And, sure, people are
returning by the busloads, but they usually pour their money into casino
coffers and go directly home. The average gambler stays six hours in
Atlantic City, compared with three days in Las Vegas.

One of the most important parts of "The Boardwalk Jungle" is the examination
of state politicians and bureaucrats charged with regulating the casinos.
The politicians were the ones who said that if the casinos didn't work, they
could be closed down, which Demaris correctly points out is akin to putting
the genie back in the bottle.

And he argues that state authorities have been largely outgunned from the
start, despite tough talk from Gov. Brendan Byrne, who thundered, "I've said
it before and I will repeat it again to organized crime: Keep your filthy
hands off Atlantic City! Keep the hell out of our state!"

The original five members of the state's Casino Control Commission included
a housewife, an heir to a pharmaceutical empire and a small-town mayor who
also owned a car dealership. The commission's makeup may have been
politically advantageous, but fielding that team against the sharpies of the
gaming industry is like sending a swordsman against a tank.

I can't share Demaris' outrage at the casinos' practice of hiring
well-connected lawyers and lobbyists to secure their licenses and, later,
favorable gaming rules. You don't have to look any further than Capitol Hill
to conclude that you buy the best talent available to plead your case,
whatever the forum. But I share his concern about New Jersey's naive
approach to overseeing the casinos.

Some of the sins Demaris lays at the feet of the casinos -- increased
prostitution, a burgeoning crime rate, the rise of clip joints and drug
pushers -- could just as easily have occurred in Atlantic City had the
Pentagon decided to build a major military facility there.

* The greater questions for Atlantic City and its citizens revolve around
rebuilding the place, keeping the casinos honest and dealing with the social
toll -- Demaris' "debasement and despair" -- that sometimes goes hand in
hand with gambling.

That is clearly the burden of the politicians who were wrong in thinking the
prospect of easy money would lead to easy solutions.

Washington Post, 5/13/86

------------------


From his den in a Spanish-style home on the heights of this placid
community, Ovid Demaris writes about some of the toughest and nastiest
people in the country.

With his mountainous research spread around a pool table for easy access,
Demaris taps out on his word processor the manuscripts that infuriate so
many powerful people.

In the early 1960s, Demaris did much to inform the general citizenry about
the sordid underpinnings of the Las Vegas gambling palaces. That was "The
Green Felt Jungle," wherein he and co-author Ed Reid laid out a
concatenation of greedy Mafia mobsters, politicians and business moguls
behind the glittering facades of casinos playing host to millions of
visitors and their money.

Now the feisty free-lance journalist has done the same thing for (or to) the
latest haven for legalized casino-style gambling, Atlantic City, N.J. In
"The Boardwalk Jungle," the home of the Boardwalk and saltwater taffy comes
out looking as scuzzy, physically and ethically, as its spiritual cousin in
the desert, Las Vegas.

Relaxing over a health-oriented lunch at his home, a trim-at-66 Demaris
grinned through his gray beard. He has just published his 13th hardcover
book, beginning with "The Green Felt Jungle" in 1962.

"By golly, (the first book) hit the best-seller list and was on the list for
26 weeks. It sold in maybe 25 countries. I'm still getting royalties from
Japan."

Written without any patina of gee-wizardry, "The Green Felt Jungle" helped
put Las Vegas on the map. Its title entered the common vocabulary.

A Lifetime's Work

Demaris likes to think of the 24-year-old book and his new one on Atlantic
City as bookends for his life's output, although he is still writing. His
work includes several novels, but most of it is hard-hitting nonfiction,
largely dealing with the business of organized crime and its sordid but
commonplace alliances with business and public officialdom.

Among the major works between them was a sort of Who's Who of Chicago-based
power called "Captive City," as well as a 1981 national best seller "The
Last Mafioso," his biography of organized crime hit man Aladena (Jimmy the
Weasel) Fratianno. The latter book, which also had a whole lot about Las
Vegas in it, probably made more people aware of Demaris than anything else
he has written. National television and press interviews played a big part
in this personal recognition, especially in light of various controversies
whipped up by that book's revelations about notables who try to maintain a
respectable image.

While much of Demaris' subject matter in "The Boardwalk Jungle" has been
written about episodically in newspapers, he has shown the detailed patterns
of the casinoization of Atlantic City as a mosaic of corruption.

As in the case of some of his other books, and notably "Captive City," the
new Atlantic City work could well be taken up by law enforcement as a
reference book.

One of the chief reasons he is able to do this kind of job, as Demaris
explained, is the huge archives of police intelligence agencies that he
squirreled away when he had access to them over the years of writing about
crime for national magazines and researching his earliest books.

Rare Resources

The original files have since been destroyed by the agencies concerned,
making Demaris' files ever rarer resources.

The privately backed Chicago Crime Commission had "great files in the
mid-'60s," Demaris said. While working on his new book, he said, he asked
the commission for background on some influential Chicagoans but was told
the commission "said they didn't have anything."

Similarly, he said, the Internal Revenue Service has cleaned out its files
and "There's no background any more."

And he described the same experience with the FBI: ". . . if you get
something from the FBI through Freedom of Information (Act), all you get is
stuff that's been cut out -- it has those little holes all over the place,
and you see two or three words, so you never can put it together."

"It's worthless to file for Freedom of Information stuff, I've found.
Your're never going to get anything valuable. My stuff is stuff that I've
had for years, and I was able to resurrect it and to use it."

He chuckled about that happy circumstance.

Few of Demaris' contemporaries are still in law enforcement, so little
institutional memory is left to be tapped, he said.

"So," Demaris said, "I have shared my files with other people," adding that
some of his material also has been the subject more than once of a subpoena
for civil and criminal law proceedings.

New Jersey lawmen are learning a lot from the book, he said, adding that one
of its agents recently said: "We have just bought a whole bunch of the
books."

"The Boardwalk Jungle" traces in detail the personal histories and
misadventures of many of executives of the big-time casino operating
corporations that have built multimillion-dollar gambling palaces in
Atlantic City.

He gives special attention to the background of some people connected with
the city's first licensed casino operator, Resorts International. The
company enriched a lot of political lawyers in New Jersey 10 years ago in
the process of obtaining state legislation authorizing casinos and later in
its licensing fight despite opposition by staff watchdogs. They were
overruled by Gov. Brendan Byrne's appointees at the Casino Control
Commission under Chairman Joseph Lordi, himself forced out of office later
during the Abscam scandal.

Organized Crime Families

While the origins of Resorts International were in the Bahamas, most of the
other big Atlantic City operators already had kingdoms in Las Vegas, where
the Chicago, Cleveland and Milwaukee organized crime families have had a
long and profitable run.

One by one, Demaris lays out the histories of Caesars World, the Golden
Nugget, Bally, Harrah's, Ramada Inns and Hilton Hotels and reads their
pedigrees, including details about backgrounds and questionable associations
of a number of their key people. As in a number of Demaris' books, he makes
room in this one for further adventures of Frank Sinatra, the entertainer
with perhaps the longest and most controversial connections with the
gambling halls of Las Vegas and later of Atlantic City.

Still another major area of "The Boardwalk Jungle," and one Demaris invests
with strong dramatic flavor, is of the history of the Mafia bosses who have
long made Atlantic City their private turf.

Referring to the private histories he painstakingly assembles on his cast of
real-life characters, Demaris said, "I love to put that stuff together."

He spent eight months in Chicago researching his "Captive City," and said
each day he would dump his accumulation of files into suitcases, which were
dispatched to California.

How does he go through the immense volumes of interviews, government
wiretaps, trial transcripts and reports?

"It requires an incredible amount of reading," said the author.

Wanting to do a dramatic treatment on a particular mobster for the book, he
had to gone through an entire transcript of a criminal trail, statements the
gangster gave to various law agencies and what he said before a Senate
committee.

"I put all that stuff together and try to weed it out and get a little bit
of gold here and a little bit of gold there," he said. "I was able to
construct it, people walking and talking and moving and doing things. That
way requires a lot of work."

To this research, Demaris adds interviews and then draws his own
conclusions. His work, he said, is "not written as a platform for all sides
to get on and talk. It's my viewpoint of what (Atlantic City) is like."

'The Ego Factor'

Demaris used to write a lot of major pieces for Esquire magazine and long
ago learned about "the ego factor" that often brings people in official
positions to talk to a writer even when they might be vulnerable to facts he
might learn. Being known for his books makes it even better, he said.

"They want to talk to me to tell me what a great job they're doing. They
want to be immortalized. They want to be in the book. They can hold the book
out and say, 'Look at the index; I'm in there.'

"And people who resist the longest, you can't shut them up once you get them
started."

Demaris tells an anecdote about being given a 15-minute appointment with
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark when the author was researching "The
Director," a book he did on J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI. After two hours the
justice seemed to be just warming to the subject, and Demaris had to
tactfully interrupt him to get to another appointment.

The writer grew up in a Maine mill town ("I was one of the few people who
had to work his way through high school."). He said he came to writing after
starting out in law school following World War II, after finishing five
years in the Air Force. Of law school, he said: "I hated it." He switched to
journalism, getting a master's degree from Boston University. He worked on a
local paper, then for United Press while in school and immediately
afterward.

He started doing free-lance writing to escape United Press ("What a
sweatshop."). He sold short stories and articles to Popular Mechanics and
other magazines, but he didn't sell enough to support his wife and two
children, so he worked on a newspaper while he taught high school for six
months "and hated that, too."

In 1952 he pulled up stakes in New England, bought a car and headed for Los
Angeles. He started calling advertising agencies out of the phone book, and
landed a copy-writing job. Later he went to work writing ads at The Times,
working on a book in his spare time. In 1956 he started full time as a
free-lance writer, though he conceded it was "not an easy life." By 1960 he
had sold 16 paperback original suspense novels, he said.

That year he went to Las Vegas to research a book on mobster Bugsy Siegel.
He was put in touch with reporter Ed Reid of the Sun, who proposed getting
together to do a book on the town's casinos.

" 'The Green Felt Jungle' was a smash success," Demaris said. "Some
newspapers gave it a whole page. One even used green ink for it."

Other Books

Along the way he did a book, with Garry Wills, about Jack Ruby, the man who
killed Lee Harvey Oswald, as well as the personal story of Judith Exner, one
of President Kennedy's former girlfriends.

Only a couple of Demaris' hardcover books have been novels, including the
second-most recent, which has a Las Vegas setting. But he's now at work on
another novel and said he loves the form:

"Fiction is so much nicer. When you write the other stuff, every time you
write a line you've got to go and check five sources. Then I spent nine
weeks with a (publisher's) lawyer, every day, going through the book. . . .
It's like doing the book all over again. I had to go and find the stuff in
my files.

"When you're writing fiction, it's just you and the typewriter, and your
notes, you know. . . You write dialogue, you write situations and you get
people into and out of situations. They become your friends. They become
people you know. . .

"I read it at nighttime and I don't remember writing it. It's like you're
almost unconscious when you're doing this sort of thing. Now the person
that's going to die doesn't die, and somebody else dies. They're taking
over, you know? If they become real to you, they sort of take over their own
lives. . . . I've sat at the typewriter and cried when somebody dies that I
really liked. It's living in a fantasy world, right? That's what creativity
is, isn't it?"

And all of that is the antithesis of "The Boardwalk Jungle," which is
straight-ahead narrative exposition. It didn't make him cry.

LA Times 5/22/86

---------------------


Before I knew how to gamble, I used to gamble a lot. I remember approaching
a blackjack table in an after-hours joint on Sullivan Street in New York
about 15 years ago. I bought in, and I asked the dealer what the house rules
were. Every illegal game seemed to have a slight variation on the
push-goes-to-the-house policy that separated illicit from licit blackjack.

"The house rules?" the guy said. "The house rules are the house always
wins."

And he was right. Irrefutably, succinctly, plainly right. The late John
Scarne, the world's greatest gambling expert, said much the same: "The house
percentage guarantees that the operators can't lose, because they are not
really gambling." This is something that the legendary Benny Binion,
operator of the Horseshoe casino in Las Vegas, well understood. David
Johnston quotes Binion in "Temples of Chance": "Better to have a little
joint and a big bankroll than a big joint and a small bankroll." And, as
Johnston himself wryly observes, this "was the kind of advice no one ever
gave to Donald Trump or Merv Griffin."

"Temples of Chance" is one of a small armful of books -- it joins Ed Reid's
and Ovid Demaris' "The Green Felt Jungle" (1963), Wallace Turner's
"Gamblers' Money" (1965), Demaris' "The Boardwalk Jungle" (1987) and the
work that outweighs and overshadows them all, Scarne's "Complete Guide to
Gambling" (1961) -- that not only bare the machinations and intrigues at the
heart of the world's greatest sucker's racket, but also, in doing so,
illuminate that most undying marriage of those most deeply rooted and
defining of human traits, stupidity and greed.

Johnston, a former Atlantic City bureau chief and presently an investigative
business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, tells a story that is as
timely as "The Green Felt Jungle" was 30 years ago. Back then, Bugsy
Siegel's dream and demise, the Flamingo, the lurid birth of modern Las Vegas
itself, was barely 15 years old, and the casino business was still very much
the sovereign domain of men who best understood and best served the needs of
vast, illimitable suckerdom.

Such men today are for the most part gone or receding into the shadows, and
the casino business is now the domain of corporate America. In 1989, not
long before he died, Benny Binion, who had been convicted of murder early in
his career, bragged to a Texas newspaper reporter: "I'm still able to do my
own killings." Donald Trump, licensed by the New Jersey Casino Control
Commission in the decade of Binion's death, represented the new regime, a
spoiled, chalk-striped punk who, as Johnston says, "grew up riding through
New York's outer boroughs in his mother's Rolls-Royce." "Temples of Chance"
takes us from the days of immensely lucrative dumps such as Binion's
Horseshoe to the grotesque fiasco of the Taj Mahal Casino Resort, the
bankrupt plastic cathedral of kitsch erected by Trump as a monument to, as
it turned out, his own purblind pomposity and folly.

Casino gambling is now a socially acceptable, all-American pastime, and Las
Vegas and Atlantic City have become Disneyworlds of venality. In the 1980s,
Las Vegas, in a national television advertising campaign, began promoting
its new, improved sucker's racket as "The American Way to Play." (As
Johnston points out, Sig Rogich, the Strip publicity agent who concocted
that phrase, later was hired as an image-maker during George Bush's 1988
presidential campaign and subsequent presidency.)

Part theme park, part mall, part Lourdes -- just stand amid the slot
machines and watch the endless caravan of old ladies in wheelchairs rolling
themselves faithfully, desperately toward redemption -- the gaming industry
of the Merv Griffins and the Trumps and the junk-bond kings and the
bold-suspendered yuppie accountants is testament to the power of America's
lust for mediocrity. It is sin made bland, a pastel dream world in which the
hoi polloi might catch a whiff of Robin Leach's cologne or a glimpse of
Frank Sinatra Jr.'s gleaming ring.

Beneath the patina of this sucker-friendly dream world, however, the
cold-blooded nature of the racket has grown ever more calculated, by means
of computerized odds-stacking, subtle psychological lures expertly devised
to attract and evoke compulsive behavior in the addictive (and the just
plain dumb), and a variety of other methods introduced by the
graduate-schooled, spread***-spewing minions of the new order.

Johnston's story is by no means one of business alone. If those who now run
the casinos are less colorful than in the old days, those who set out to
bust them are not. "Temples of Chance" recounts the tale of Akio Kashiwagi,
the new casino era's most notorious gambler, who once wagered $14 million an
hour for days at a time. Hacked to death with a samurai sword in his native
Japan earlier this year, Kashiwagi went out owing Trump the Chump $6
million. Recounted as well are the gambling careers of Debra Kim Cohen, who
began a compulsive seven-year Atlantic City blackjack spree when she was 13,
and of Farayala Janna, the controller of the Medellin cocaine cartel's
second-largest bank account and perhaps the biggest casino welsher of the
past decade. But, throughout, Johnston never strays far from his central
precept that "licensing an enterprise does not change its nature."

Concluding that "Bad as the mob is, having corporate America dominate the
casino business is worse," "Temples of Chance" lays bare the industry of
corruption, avarice and malfeasance that churns ever onward beneath the
grinning Up-With-People mask of the American Way to Play. The truth, as that
guy in that after-hours joint said, is simple: Things were more honest back
when men did their own killing and nobody referred to a sucker's racket as
quality leisure time.

LA Times 11/15/92



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