Vienna skyline
With a monument devoted to a mobster, eateries named for their luminaries and even a museum to their m.o., Las Vegas brings in good coin from the legacy of its organized crime past. It’s a topic of continuing interest. I regularly get asked about this heritage, both by visitors to Sin City and by folks I encounter elsewhere once they realize I am New to Las Vegas.
So I’ve had a sense of déjà vu recently spending a little time around Vienna, the capital of Austria. This is a town still profiting from its geography literally just a few miles from the old Iron Curtain separating the democratic West from the vassal states of the former Soviet Union.
Both Las Vegas organized crime and the Soviet Union went poof in the 1980s. But in Vienna the aftermath of the Cold War remains good for the economy. According to news accounts, thousands of individuals locally play or aid the spy game for both the Russians and their adversaries, mainly the U.S. This is boosted in no small part by the fact that in officially politically neutral Austria, espionage is legal so long as the target is some other country. Vienna is routinely called the spy capital of Western Europe.
This is an aftermath of World War II. Austria, annexed to Germany by native son Adolf Hitler, found itself on the losing side against the U.S., England, France and their war-time ally, Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. Vienna itself was terribly damaged by Allied bombing.
In 1945 the victorious allies carved up all of Austria into occupation zones. Like the more famous arrangement in Berlin, the capital of Germany, Vienna itself was also divided into zones. But unlike Berlin, Vienna’s city center remained under a joint administration.
A decade later, in 1955, West and East cut a deal. The division would end and Russians would withdraw, provided that Austria stay out of NATO or any alliance with the Soviet Union. The arrangement helped facilitate the flow of massive Western financial aid to rebuild and restore Vienna to the graceful cultured city of music and art it had been for centuries. The country eventually joined the European Economic Union.
Russia uses Vienna as a forward station into Western Europe. Western intelligence experts say operatives help plot Russia’s invasion into Ukraine and probably assist assassins that Russian President Vladimir Putin send out to rub out perceived enemies. The West, of course, tries to counter all this.
All this overhead brings big bucks into the Vienna. It reminds me of accounts I have heard in Las Vegas from the mob era, which ran from the later 1940s to the mid-1980s. An army of couriers regularly ferried skimmed-off cash from the mobbed up casinos via planes to their overlords in Chicago, New York, Cleveland and other places. More jobs.
Vienna’s metro area population of 2 million is not far from Las Vegas’s 2.3 million. But the Austrian capital may lead the world in spy scandals per capita. There are frequent arrests, and top intelligence officials regularly defect to Russia. One former Austrian foreign minister now runs a think tank in Moscow, to which she moved last year. Putin attended her wedding a few years ago.
Some think Austria’s intelligence community is hopelessly compromised. This is not unlike the perception of Las Vegas law enforcement during the mob’s heyday.
But this much is certain. Both Las Vegas and Vienna are swarmed by tourists and doing well. Blasts from the past.