Siegel was murdered in 1947, but his vision for Las Vegas lived on: During the 1950s and 1960s, mobsters helped build the Sahara, the Sands, the New Frontier and the Riviera. Rivera named the valley Las Vegas, “the meadows,” after its spring-watered grasses. The first person of European ancestry to enter the Las Vegas valley was Rafael Rivera, who scouted the area in 1821 as part of Antonio Armijo’s expedition to open up a trade route-the Old Spanish Trail-between New Mexico and California. Las Vegas: Prehistory and FoundingĬanyon petroglyphs attest to human presence in southern Nevada for more than 10,000 years, and members of the Paiute tribe were in the area as early as A.D. Visitors came to partake in what the casinos offered: low-cost luxury and the thrill of fantasies fulfilled. Beginning in the 1940s, money from drugs and racketeering built casinos and was laundered within them. Las Vegas’s embrace of Old West-style freedoms-gambling and prostitution-provided a perfect home for East Coast organized crime. The city was founded by ranchers and railroad workers but quickly found that its greatest asset was not its springs but its casinos. Las Vegas: The Rise of the Mega-CasinosĪ desert metropolis built on gambling, vice and other forms of entertainment, in just a century of existence Las Vegas has drawn millions of visitors and trillions of dollars in wealth to southern Nevada. Las Vegas: The Strip, the Mob and the Age of Glamour.
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