Bank of America facility, 3680 E. Flamingo Rd., Las Vegas, Nevada, March 18, 2024
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The Sun (London), 2012
Years before I became New to Las Vegas, Prince Harry gave the lie to “What Happens Here, Stays Here,” the racy marketing slogan dreamed up for the Las Vegas Visitors and Convention Authority. In 2012, after the gossip website TMZ broke the news, The Sun (London) published pictures of the then-third-in-line-to-the-British throne cavorting in the buff at the Wynn Las Vegas in a private suite festooned with fetching females.
Why do I bring this up now? Two reasons. First, one of the women who apparently was in the room on that sultry August night, who goes by the name Carrie Royale, said earlier this month she has never-before-seen photos of the Duke of Sussex in his birthday suit from then that she is hoping to reveal for big bucks. Royale is described as a “former dominatrix and model.”
Second, as visitors to this space know well, I compile a list of candidates for my running feature, “It Didn’t Stay Here.” It’s a roster of folks in trouble somewhere else for something that happened in Las Vegas, my cheeky rejoinder to the nothing-leaves-Vegas marketing pitch.
My addition of Harry puts him among some big names. They include Donald J. Trump (twice, once for partying in Las Vegas with Russians and their hangers-on who later got him into trouble, and again for funny accounting concerning the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas that found its way into that New York civil fraud suit against him). There’s Joseph R. Biden Jr. (a little too touchy-feely at a Las Vegas political rally). And French President Emanuel Macron (expense account excesses at a Las Vegas trade show trip when he was an economics minister). You can see the entire list nearby.
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Arizona bark scorpion (via Progressive Pest Control)
Nearly seven years ago in this space, I highlighted the presence in Las Vegas of scorpions. Specifically, I recounted how fortunate it was for the area’s marketing agency, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, that what are now upwards of 40 million tourists a year arrive blissfully unaware of the little buggers hereabouts.
Not any more.
News earlier this week of a California man’s claim that he was stung several times by a scorpion in a very private part of his body while sleeping in his bed at the swank high-rise Venetian Las Vegas on the Strip has exploded across the Internet. My Google search for mentions since Monday in the same article of “Las Vegas” and “scorpion” already has topped 100,000.
Media outlets reported the news were far and wide. There were the usual suspects in the U.S.–meaning just about everywhere. Abroad, I saw a staff-written story in the Hindustan Times, one of India’s largest English-language newspaper, describing in a dead-pan manner the “unexpected and distressing encounter” of Michael Farchi, visiting from the Los Angeles suburb of Agoura Hills on the day after Christmas. A long article appeared in London’s MailOnline.com, which gets 191 million visitor views a month.
Although he went to a hospital, Farchi survived. He even managed to snare the perp, a photo of which has been plastered everywhere. Farchi has lawyered up–his mouthpiece is Brian J. Virag, a Los Angeles lawyer who specializes in hotel insect cases and has trademarked the phrase “My Bed Bug Lawyer.” (Who knew bed bugs had lawyers?) But there doesn’t seem to be a lawsuit filed–yet. (An account by KLAS-TV in Las Vegas says the hotel eventually comped the room.) According to news accounts, the hotel hasn’t had much to say.
Still, to my mind, this is just another example of how stuff that isn’t all that unusual but which happens in Las Vegas gets insane attention elsewhere only because it happens in a place with Sin City as its unofficial nickname. I have written before about this phenomenon of the wrath of editors mirroring (or second-guessing) the wrath of God. According to studies I consulted, more than 1 million persons a year get stung by scorpions worldwide, while only 3,000 deaths are reported. You’re far more likely to die from the flu. All this hubbub about one non-fatal scorpion sting in Vegas, even if in a sensitive spot of the anatomy? Continue reading
See update at end of story
A highly dubious organization operating in violation of both state and now federal law is soliciting cash donations around Las Vegas in the name of–wait for this–law enforcement. Can it get any richer than that?
In the past month alone I’ve received a number of telephone calls at the New To Las Vegas world headquarters seeking a donation for either Police Officers Support Committee PAC or National Police Officers Alliance PAC. There’s no material legal difference. They both are names used by something called POSC PAC, ostensibly based in Woodbridge, Va., a suburb of Washington, D.C. The callers say donations will be used to benefit law enforcement.
POSC PAC, the reporting parent, was founded only in January 2023. Since then, it has solicited in Nevada (and presumably nationally) under its “brands.” But in Nevada it has done so without first registering and making filings as mandated by a 2021 Nevada law. Perhaps POSC PAC sensed (correctly, in my view) that the Silver State is not big on consumer protection.
I know about the calls during 2023 because I received some of them, and contemporaneously wrote them up (here and here). I flat out called POSC PAC yet another “faux charity.” That’s a political action committee (the PAC part) that sounds like a charity when making the pitch, but isn’t. Rather, it spends almost all the donations received on fundraising and other overhead and almost nothing on the stated mission of somehow advocating for law enforcement. Organizers often received undisclosed fees. It’s a swarmy racket.
A faux charity is not required to disclose its terrible financial efficiencies when cold-calling someone on the phone, usually using soundboard technology, a human voice controlled by a computer and a supervising operator who responds by choosing pre-recorded answers. When asked by a sucker would-be donor how donations are spent, the answer is often to consult an organizational website or check official periodic filings with government regulators.
Except that POSC PAC has no periodic filings to check!
The organization apparently missed the deadline for publicly reporting to the Internal Revenue Service all of its individual receipts and expenditures during 2023. The report, called a Form 8872 and required to be filed electronically, was due by January 31. “There is no delay in when the form is filed and when it is available” on the IRS website, an agency spokesperson told me. Continue reading