How extreme heat helped make Las Vegas

Posted on by July 17, 2023
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See important update at end of story.

Las Vegas extreme heat

Official National Weather Service alert today for Las Vegas

We’re all waiting today, Sunday, July 16, 2023, in Las Vegas to see if the temperature will hit or exceed the all-time any-day-of-the-year official local record high of 117 degrees Fahrenheit. That mark has been touched four times in recorded history, twice since I became New To Las Vegas in 2016. We should know by 7:00 p.m. PT. Yesterday’s high was 113.

Accompanying this vigil is lots of moaning and groaning and swearing by locals about how unbearable it is to be hereabouts during the day and even at night, when the lows still hover around 90. All this is absolutely true. But there are plenty of other places around the country–like Death Valley barely two hours away by car (if it doesn’t overheat on the ride) and even the Woodland Hills section of Los Angeles–and throughout the world that are frequently hotter.

However, for some reason Las Vegas during the summer seems to have become a national proxy for hot weather. Perhaps it’s the phenomenon I previously have described in which bad stuff that happens in Las Vegas gets insane publicity even though the same things happen elsewhere. In the case of hot weather maybe it has something to do with the satisfying notion to some of Sin City burning in hell. I even confess to playing that game a bit with a running box at the top of this blog listing the current temperature, automatically updated hourly. (My data comes from private OpenWeatherMap.com and sometimes varies a bit from the National Weather Service, the official record-keeper.)

Now I don’t want to make light of genuine suffering and deaths caused by heat, which certainly happen around Las Vegas, a place that has been called the country’s fastest-warming city. But having lived in a few other toasty climates–Houston, Albuquerque, the hot Santa Clarita Valley near Los Angeles and even Cairo, Egypt–me thinks many of the locals here doth protest a little too much. As I see it, it is the extreme heat–getting all the more extreme thanks to global warming–that helped give Las Vegas a viable economy in the first place. Hear me out on this. Continue reading →

RIP for Las Vegas brain surgeon/pol who lived in his own ‘hoarders’ museum

Posted on by October 4, 2023
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Lonnie Hammargren

Life-size long-ago campaign poster of Lonnie Hammargren in the street gutter at his home a few days after his death

Boy was the life of Lonnie Hammargren a terrific story. Like a terrific movie.

In a medically underserved state he had been one of Nevada’s first neurosurgeons–sometimes  controversial, eventually giving up his practice citing huge insurance premiums, perhaps due to publicly noted malpractice settlements/complaints. He was elected Nevada lieutenant governor–but subsequently came in third in a Republican primary bid for governor due to little party support.

Lonnie was also a nationally known hoarder, living in three adjoining Las Vegas houses he bought to store his thousands of collected items. In later years the “Hammargren Home of Nevada History,” as a sign called it, was opened to the public a single weekend a year, to the annoyance of some neighbors in the upper-class neighborhood–until after he lost one house to the bank amid mounting debts.

Slowly, Lonnie faded from view personally. But some of his collecting–a Batmobile in the front yard, military figurines on the roof, a towering green Tyrannosaurus Rex replica in a back yard easily seen by passing motorists on a busy street–remained visible to help let the world know this was a venue of something–and someone–really weird.

So perhaps it was fitting that a few days after Lonnie–as everyone called him–died last month at age 85, a life-sized poster of him in doctor’s garb from a long-ago political campaign lay in the gutter of the street in front of his compound, from where it had blown. The poster is in the nearby photo, which I took. For seven years I have walked past Lonnie’s spread nearly every day during the morning constitutional with the dog. Lonnie and his long-suffering second wife Sandy lived just a few blocks from the New To Las Vegas world headquarters.

The weathered, partly damaged poster on the ground, which was removed by day’s end, immediately triggered a thought. That was of the shattered snow globe as the troubled, financially distressed Charles Foster Kane–also an excessive collector–utters the mysterious word “Rosebud” while dying before flashbacks at the start of the celebrated 1941 Orson Wells movie “Citizen Kane.” Nearly two hours later, movie-goers learn (spoiler alert for the eight people out there who haven’t seen the film) that Rosebud was the brand name of Kane’s childhood snow sled and that he still had it at the time of his death at his jammed-with-junk estate called Xanadu.

That poster wasn’t Lonnie’s Rosebud. But as it turns out, I might have seen his Rosebud a few years ago. Stay with me on this. Continue reading →

‘The Green Felt Jungle’–scandalous exposé that utterly defined Las Vegas–turns 60

Posted on by July 12, 2023
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The Green Felt JungleThere never has been anything else like it in the history of Las Vegas, and it turns 60 years old this year. I’m referring to The Green Felt Jungle. That’s the 1963 book by Ed Reid and Ovid Demaris about mob control of America’s growing gambling mecca. TGFJ became a gigantic international best-seller for years, and the subject of public commentary even longer. Besides a title that quickly added a memorable phrase to the lexicon still used as a synonym for Las Vegas, TGFJ thoroughly colored America’s perception of the city as a dangerous place–but maybe an interesting one worth visiting. The book even managed to play an important role in a presidential election, as well as in civic debates around the country, while helping to change public policy in Nevada.

Although all the major characters–and since the 1980s the Mob–are now gone, the 231-page tell-all remains a rip-roaring good read, even if overwritten in places. TGFJ is the only one of a trio of book-length Las Vegas exposés published in the mid-1960s that has stood the test of time. The book even helps to explain Las Vegas’s continuing difficulty with true economic diversification away from gambling and entertainment.

Written by co-authors simultaneously similar and different, TGFJ was full of innuendo and utterly withering intimate descriptions about some of Las Vegas’s most powerful folks. The book was published at a time when defamation laws were far more favorable for plaintiffs than they are now. But TGFJ, its authors and the publisher, Trident Press of New York and later the Pocket Books unit of Simon and Schuster, never faced a single libel suit, for reasons I’ll explain below.

The book is long out of print. But so many millions of copies were published in its heyday, especially a revised paperback edition in 1964 that included 24 pages of photographs and a 27-page addendum detailing all the hell the book’s hard-cover first edition had caused, that it’s easily available today from used book sites for less than $10. Continue reading →

Nevada regulator MIA on every single illegal faux charity pitch in Las Vegas

Posted on by July 10, 2023
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faux charity pitches in Las VegasNevada appears to be one of the very few states with a law on the books giving regulators an extremely easy way to crack down on what I call “faux charities.’ These are political action committees that sound like charities benefiting such causes as law enforcement or veterans when they cold-call you asking you for money but aren’t. Instead, they spend almost all the money raised in fundraising and hidden fees for their operators.  Donors usually don’t even know they’ve been rooked. These callers don’t go out of their way to point out that any donations are not tax-deductible, and sometimes falsely say they are charities. I’ve been writing about these outfits for years. (In the nearby search box, just enter “faux charity”–and watch the hits explode on your screen.) Others call them “scam charities.”

In 2021 the Nevada legislature passed, and then-Gov. Steve Sisolak signed, Senate Bill 62, which prohibits just about any non-religious outfit from soliciting donations within the state for a variety of causes, specifically identifying public safety, veterans, health care and anything sounding charitable, without first making filings with the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office that include financial information. The previous law required state registration only from traditional non-religious 501(c)(3) charities. As codified at Nevada Revised Statutes NRS 82A.025 et seq., the law gave the SOSO broad power to issue cease-and-desist orders, issue fines and presumably draw public attention to the issue. The law took effect October 1, 2021. No filing followed by a call asking for money? Bang, it’s a violation, leading to discipline and, perhaps, a scorching press release.

Simple, you think? Well, just 12 days after the law took effect, I wrote, “Let’s all join the watch party … We’ll see if Nevada regulators invoke their brand new law requiring registration before soliciting.”

In the intervening 20 months, I’ve been solicited scores of times by faux charities, some repeatedly. I’ve checked after each contact with the SOSO: Not a single one–not one--has been registered in compliance with NRS 82A.025 et seq. They all have dreadful financial inefficiencies, too. It’s not unreasonable for me to assume there have been hundreds of thousands of illegal pitches in Nevada, and more than a few dollars handed over to shady characters who do not spend much of the funds on the stated mission of influencing politics.

So last week, I filed a formal Nevada Public Records Act request with the SOSO. I asked for “copies of paperwork from your agency memorializing all fines and cease-and-desist orders issued against soliciting fundraisers” in violation of NRS 82A.025 et seq.

A few days ago, I received in writing my reply: “The Secretary of State’s Office has not issued any fines or cease-and-desist orders pursuant to NRS 82A.025 and therefore does not have any public records responsive” to my request. The letter was signed “The Office of the Secretary of State,” with no name attached. Continue reading →

Iffy police-themed PAC mocks regulators by soliciting illegally and lying in Las Vegas

Posted on by May 26, 2023
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Iffy police-themed PACOn October 1, 2021, a new law known as Senate Bill 62 took effect in Nevada. The measure, now codified as Nevada Revised Statutes NRS 82A.025 et seq, required most fundraising causes–specifically including those promoting law enforcement–to refrain from asking for money within the state until they first made filings with the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office. That agency was given the initial duty to enforce the new law by issuing civil penalties and cease-and-desist letters, or by referring offenders to the Nevada Attorney General’s Office.

On October 12, 2021, 12 days after the law took effect, I was cold-called at the New To Las Vegas world headquarters by American Police Officers Alliance PAC, a law enforcement-themed outfit (based in Arlington, Va.) if I ever heard of one. The caller went by “Paul.” I am using quotes because “Paul” was not a real person, but a computer controlled by a human using what is known as soundboard technology. “Paul,” referred me to “Mary”–another soundboard voice. I asked if APOA was registered with Nevada to solicit in the state. “Yes,” Mary replied. I immediate checked with the Nevada Secretary of State’s website. APOA was not registered. So APOA’s representative was a fibber in the Great State of Nevada.

I also reviewed APOA’s filings with federal regulators. It was quickly apparent APOA was what I call a “faux charity.” That’s a political action committee that presents as a charity but isn’t, spending almost all of the money raised in raising it and very little on the stated mission, supporting candidates and causes favoring law enforcement priorities. Others call them “scam” charities.

I wrote up my interaction with APOA at the time, which you can read in the update at the end of the post. I concluded, “We’ll see if Nevada regulators invoke their brand new law requiring registration before solicitation.”

Nearly two years later, I am bringing up APOA again due to an interesting convergence of events that may help provide insight on my query. Continue reading →

Why did old story about Hawaiians moving to Las Vegas make New York Times front page?

Posted on by May 23, 2023
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Hawaiians moving to Las Vegas

New York Times front page,      Sunday, May 21, 2023

There it was on the front page of at least some editions of the Sunday New York Times, perhaps the world’s most prominent journalism forum. “They’re ‘Priced Out of Paradise’ But Hawaiians Thrive in Desert,” read the print headline I saw yesterday above a breathless story about how natives of Hawaii for some time have been relocating to Las Vegas for economic reasons. The article jumped to a full inside page festooned with pictures of ex-Hawaiians rowing on Lake Mead or wearing native garb, and a supermarket shelf full of cans of Spam, part of a Hawaiian delicacy.

My question: Why is this such big news now? My first answer: Stuff about Las Vegas gets written simply because it’s about Las Vegas. That is both the joy and bane of America’s gambling capital.

My second answer: It was a Beauty and the Beast tale of folks leaving an idyllic paradise for what even the Times story called “an affordable faux version of the islands” rather than “the real thing.” At another point, the story by Eliza Fawcett cited the “migration from the impossibly lush natural landscape of the islands to the brash desert of Las Vegas.” In that context, the “beast” Vegas gets the short end of the stick–also a persistent theme of national media coverage.

Continue reading →