Vol. 4, No. 6, June 2008
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Reid on the mob
I wasn’t wild about Sen. Harry Reid’s new memoir, The Good Fight, but I did enjoy some of the sequences that described his life as chairman of the Nevada Gaming Control Board back in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
So often that period is regarded as the great heyday of the mob, and I get so darn tired of hearing about how much better things were when thugs and murderers ran the town. Reid clearly is not one of those nostalgists. Interviewing him for Newsweek, I got to ask him what people were missing when they pine for that era.
“The people who wish it was the way it used to be don’t appreciate the fact that in those days, the city was 100,000 people. Now it’s a community of 2 million. We can never go backward,” he said.
Speaking on the mob museum planned for Downtown Las Vegas, Reid added: “The history was there. We can’t deny it and the people who come to Las Vegas should understand it’s a new era and we should not run from the fact. We can’t run from that any more than I can run from Searchlight.
