Disabled homeless shielded by an awning at a shuttered Bank of America branch, East Flamingo Road, Las Vegas, Nevada, January 17, 2023.
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The unsolicited press release below recently arrived via email at the New to Las Vegas world headquarters. The sender was Publishers Clearing House. That’s the controversial well-known Long Island outfit fronted by celebrity Steve Harvey that promotes the sale of magazine subscriptions through big awards from dubious sweepstakes (one does not have to subscribe to a publication to win, even if some participants might be excused for thinking so). Judging from long-term circulation numbers in the magazine industry, I’m not sure how effective this ploy is.
But boy, PCH could teach Las Vegas casino operators something about setting odds.
The PCH press release announced a big event that will take place later today, Wednesday, January 11, in that mecca of risk, the Las Vegas area. The last line says “EMBARGO: DO NOT POST INFORMATION UNTIL WINNER HAS BEEN ANNOUNCED.” But since I never asked for the press release nor agreed to any embargo, and contract law in this country says an offer needs an acceptance to be enforceable, and this is not a matter of life or death, I am under no such legal restraint. (PCH’s sole remedy would be to take me off its email list, which would be such a shame.) So here is the text, with some contact information redacted by me out of sheer mercy: Continue reading
What’s left of Nothing, Arizona
On a recent car trip back to Las Vegas, I actually saw Nothing.
Or something.
The faded billboard sign pictured with this post, along with an abandoned falling-apart convenience store nearby, is all that’s physically left of Nothing, Arizona.
Nothing is about 180 miles southeast of the New To Las Vegas world headquarters at an elevation of 3,269 feet. It sits near the center of Arizona rattlesnake country along an extremely remote desert portion of U.S. 93. That’s the ancient, often treacherous direct road between the Phoenix and Las Vegas areas. U.S. 93 actually went over the narrow top of the Hoover Dam until a nearby bypass bridge partly prompted by post-9/11 concerns of a truck bomb was finally opened in 2010.
The population of Nothing, founded less than 50 years ago, topped out at something like 9. From what I know and could see, it’s down (appropriately enough for its name) to zero and has been there for maybe a decade. In my experience this is a pretty short time frame for creation of a ghost town (or perhaps ghost settlement, as Nothing never even rose to anything near the level of a town), especially in the present-day West. But then again, unlike the 19th and early 20th century mineral rushes that at least lasted until the mines played out, there wasn’t anything resembling a boom that triggered Nothing.
Literally, Nothing is the Seinfeld of places. And like the TV “show about nothing” with its seemingly inconsequential plots, the vicinage imparts a clear message even if at first not obvious. Continue reading
It was nearly 30 years ago when The New York Times Magazine riled the waters of suburbia/exurbia with a cover story. “The Devil in Long Island” was writer Ron Rosenbaum’s review of the seemingly large amount of strange doings in Nassau and Suffolk Counties. That’s the home to a collection of bedroom communities, now with 2.9 million residents, stretching eastward for 100 miles from New York City along the continental U.S.’s largest island. Published on August 22, 1993, the much-commented-upon 9,000-word article distressed local leaders who, among other things, thought it would hurt economic development by unfairly stigmatizing the area.
Now that I have become New To Las Vegas, I think I have found the Southwest equivalent of the nearby diabolic inferno Rosenbaum described. It is the huge but exceedingly thinly populated Nye County. The jurisdiction is a stretch of mountains, desert, desolate mining ghost towns and a Death Valley National Park portion immediately to the west and northwest of Clark County, home of Las Vegas. Like Long Island, Nye County is often in the news for lousy reasons–amazingly so, given its tiny population of just 53,000.
In perhaps their most infamous moment, Nye County voters in 2018 overwhelmingly elected a dead pimp–brothel owner Dennis Hof, who croaked right before the election–to the Nevada Assembly.
’nuff said. Continue reading
Almost none of my Las Vegas predictions for 2022 from last December came true. But of course they weren’t supposed to. It was just me, still New To Las Vegas, committing satirical social commentary. Here I go again for 2023.
–Fresh off his second straight defeat for statewide office, Adam “Fourth Generation Nevadan” Laxalt moves back to the Washington, D.C., area where he grew up and lived much more of his life.
–Facing a lawsuit claiming deceptive marketing, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority changes the official slogan from “What Happens Here, Only Happens Here” to “What Happens Here, Could Happen To You.”
–The Nevada Department of Education throws a party after a new national study ranks the state’s public schools only the 48th worst in the country, an improvement.
–Cisco Aguilar, the newly elected Nevada Secretary of State, continues the policy of not enforcing a new state law requiring many telemarketers soliciting funds within Nevada for dubious causes to first register their cause with the state.
–Clark County officials call a press conference to declare that a new specialized court set up just to handle crime committed near Las Vegas Blvd. should not be interpreted to mean the Strip isn’t safe for tourists. Continue reading
See update at end of story
In my annual look last year at Las Vegas’s Injured Police Officers Fund, its new leadership said the nonprofit agency to aid families of fallen cops in the Las Vegas area would work to add transparency to its operations. So far, I haven’t seen evidence of this.
IPOF, as I will explain below, is a meritorious law-enforcement-themed nonprofit in many ways. But it still does not post its latest annual IRS 990 tax filing, a public record that contains a wealth of information, on its website. This isn’t legally required so long as a charity provides a copy to a requester upon request, but has been highly recommended by the IRS and charity watchdogs for years as a good governance practice for nonprofits.
At my request, IPOF recently sent me its 990 for the year ending December 31, 2021 (there’s always a long lag between the end of the reporting period and when the document becomes available). The filing still didn’t list–or give any hint of–the magnitude of what may have become IPOF’s major function: overseeing the collection of designated donations for specific fallen officers, which are then remitted to the officer or his next-of-kin.
It’s possible these individual campaigns in some years total in the millions of dollars, or at least dwarf the relatively modest numbers shown on the 990. I would suggest that tax-exempt nonprofits acting as the public face for such donations have an obligation to disclose the collective extent of such fundraising to the public. None of this is revealed on IPOF’s 990. Continue reading
Part of mail ballot in Las Vegas
See update at end of story
In this space on October 24, I made a bold prediction. Nevada’s unique and even cynical “None of These Candidates” ballot line could cost Republicans control of the U.S. Senate. No one else I saw at the time wrote about the spoiler scenario I envisioned from the New To Las Vegas world headquarters.
Now I’m getting ready to take a bow.
For four days in a painfully slow vote count, first-term incumbent Nevada Democratic senator Catherine Cortez Masto trailed upstart Republican Adam Laxalt. But on Saturday night, mainly on the strength of continual counting of mail-in ballots from heavily Democratic Clark County (home to Las Vegas and 74% of the state’s population), Laxalt finally fell behind. If that holds–and almost all the uncounted votes are from Clark County–Cortez Masto will become the 50th Democrat in the 100-member U.S. Senate. With Vice President Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote, that would give the Dems control for another two years regardless of who wins the run-off election next month in Georgia. CNN and the Associated Press just called the race for Cortez Masto.
Laxalt is now trailing Cortez Masto by 4,982 votes. But None of These Candidates is pulling more than twice as many votes, 11,877 votes. It’s widely believed among political pros in Nevada that NOTC disproportionately draws far more votes away from disaffected Republicans than it does from disaffected Democrats. Continue reading
Portion of mail-in ballot in Las Vegas
Nevada elections are quirky, and that was true long before voters in the county immediately to the west of Las Vegas elected a dead pimp to the state Assembly. But two unusual provisions in Nevada election law–banning write-in candidates while affording voters the option in statewide primary and general races to formally choose “None of These Candidates”–might actually determine whether Democrats or Republicans control the U.S. Senate come next January.
That’s because (1) the Senate is now split 50-50, and (2) first-term Nevada incumbent Democratic senator Catherine Cortez Masto is in a surprisingly tight race with Republican Adam Laxalt. Pollsters now rate the contest a toss-up.
This is where None of These Candidates (NOTC) might come into play as the spoiler. It is an article of faith among political experts in Nevada that NOTC attracts far more upset Republican-leaning voters in general elections than it does upset Democratic-leaning voters. There even have been several contests in Nevada where NOTC has gotten more voters than all candidates. (How do you put that on the “winning” candidate’s resume?) NOTC votes are disregarded when determining the winner, but the law requires that the results for NOTC be included in every official voting tally. A public shaming, I suppose.
Think I am engaging in rank hypotheticals? In 1998, long before I became New To Las Vegas, Harry Reid, the incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator (and later majority leader) seeking a third term, won by a scant 401 votes over Republican John Ensign. NOTC received 8,011 votes, 20 times Reid’s margin of victory. Continue reading
The coverage was hard to miss. “RJ sweeps top journalism awards,” screamed the headline stripped across the top of the regional news section cover of the print Las Vegas Review-Journal on Sunday, September 25. The story said the paper took “every top investigative and institutional award in the urban division” of the annual Nevada Press Foundation competition. The story jumped to two inside pages and was adorned by 29 photos of winning staffers. The pictures included Jeff German, the investigative reporter murdered just three weeks earlier allegedly by an elected official he was writing about.
But the previous Sunday’s paper had information at least equally significant about the RJ that was much, much harder to find. It was buried in a legal notice itself buried at the right-bottom corner of page 8-G of the real estate section, near classified ads for a missing parrot, taxi driver openings and the sale of “top XXX DVDs.” In effect the RJ fessed up to yet another year of paid circulation declines, leaving the count at barely a quarter of what it was when present ownership assumed control in 2015, the year before I became New To Las Vegas.
The RJ published the data, officially called the Statement of Ownership, Management and Circulation, only because it’s a condition of having a second-class mailing permit allowing lower postage for subscriptions. This is the same kind of government subsidy the paper’s conservative editorial pages regularly bash when offered to, say, ordinary folks in the form of entitlements. (A few years back, the paper published the annual statement so full of typos it violated the requirement that it be truthful and had to publish a corrected version a week later.) Continue reading
Way back in 1892, the highly influential New-York Tribune published the first-ever list of the richest Americans. And what a roster it was: an astonishing unranked compilation of the 4,047 persons the paper’s editors thought were “reputed to be worth a million or more.” (Based on the per-capita share then of the total U.S. economy, that’s the equivalent now of $1.5 billion each.)
But despite its scope–1 out of every 6,300 adult Americans and more than 10 times the number of swells that Malcolm Forbes nearly a century later starting in 1982 would call the Forbes 400–the Tribune list included no one living in Nevada. Why? “The enormously valuable silver mines of Nevada have laid the foundation of a large number of private fortunes,” the Tribune explained. “But the possessors of them now live in other states, the majority in San Francisco and New York City.”
They certainly didn’t live in Las Vegas. It was not yet a city and barely a place. Eight years later at the 1900 census the total population was recorded as a mere 18 (all of whom can be viewed on this single census enumeration page). The entire state population was just 42,000.
The New-York Tribune, which never again published such a rich list, is long out of business. But Forbes magazine is still around. The 41st edition of the Forbes 400 was published yesterday. The number of folks included from the Las Vegas area rose from last year by 50%.
To all of three.
That’s a shadow of the high point in 2016, the year I became New To Las Vegas, when nine folks from the area made the famous roster. Since then, failure to keep up with other fortunes, often technology-generated, has helped to take its toll on the local count. Continue reading
The New York Times, front page, Sunday, September 11, 2022
The murder of a working journalist anywhere is big news. This is especially true when it appears the motives were anger with past investigative reporting and a desire to stop future investigative reporting.
But as I have written in this space, bad things that take place in Las Vegas often get more attention elsewhere simply because of Las Vegas’s reputation for–bad things. I think that might help explain this headline and its display yesterday about the murder of Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Jeff German, allegedly at the hands of a terribly obscure elected official, on the most prominent and prestigious media venue in the world, the front page of the Sunday edition of The New York Times:
Violent End to a Career Exposing Las Vegas Sins
Editors, I think, love putting derivations of the word “sin” in close proximity to “Las Vegas” and then playing them up. By contrast, 45 years ago, The Times reported the June 2, 1977, bombing in Phoenix of investigative reporter Don Bolles of the Arizona Republic the next day on page 47, and his death 11 days later, equally buried on page 34. A veteran investigative reporter like German, Bolles was only investigating Mafia connections, of which Phoenix–like the Las Vegas of old–had plenty.
I don’t mean to pick just on The Times. If anything, the Las Vegas citizenry has only itself to blame for this kind of media treatment. After all, it was the publicly funded Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority that about 20 years ago came up with the wildly successful marketing slogan, “What Happens Here, Stays Here.” The alluring motto all but invited external media to see what was going on here. Of course, that also meant what happens here wouldn’t stay here for too long, as I have detailed in a series of reports entitled “It Didn’t Stay Here,” a list of which can be found elsewhere on this page.
History plays a big role in imaging. In 2018 ex-UNLV teacher Jonathan Foster published a book that identified Las Vegas as a “stigma city,” which he defined as a place whose perceived qualities “reside outside of a society’s norms at a given time.” Even today, Los Vegas promotes its mobbed-up past as a tourist draw, with restaurants and monuments named for killers and the government-backed Mob Museum in the downtown area. Indeed, in my view, as someone New To Las Vegas, the locals generally remain proud of their stigma. Continue reading
The caller to the New to Las Vegas world headquarters identified himself as Brian Hill. The purpose: to solicit a contribution for National Police Support Fund PAC, which he described as an organization to bolster law enforcement.
I cut to the chase. A new Nevada law requires fundraisers in the state working on behalf of law enforcement causes to register and make filings, I said. Are you registered to solicit in Nevada?
“Hold on a sec,” the caller replied. There was a pause. “Hold on.”
Then “Brian Hill” hung up on me.
I’m using quotes around the name because Brian was not a real person. Rather, I was hearing a realistic-sounding voice generated by a computer monitored by an anonymous supervisor using what is known as soundboard technology. But the hang-up hardly surprised me. I’ve gotten calls before from “Brian Hill,” and I’ve researched NPSF, which is based in Arlington Va. It is not registered to cold-call in Nevada, according to the website of the Nevada Secretary of State. But in this minimal government state, I don’t expect authorities to do anything about that. When it comes to Carson City, what they say isn’t always what they do.
Moreover, from what I can tell from its filings, NPSF has terrible financial efficiencies, spending the overwhelming bulk of the money raised in raising it, leaving very, very little to further the stated mission. Would-be donors, of course, are not told this. There is no shortage of withering commentary on the Internet about NPSF, although not so much on financial matters. The criticism is tempered a bit by posts suggesting the outfit does actually advocate for cops, even if not a lot in my judgement given the amount of money raised.
The PAC in the name stands for political action committee, meaning NPFS is not a charity although its pitch on the phone about helping police officers might make you think it is. This accounts for some of the expressed hostility. Continue reading
This screenshot is from the Las Vegas Review-Journal online story on the big storm that drenched the Las Vegas area last night, as viewed at the New To Las Vegas world headquarters this morning. Who knew the Future Farmers of America had jurisdiction over airports? #CopyDeskReductions
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The celebrity gossip site TMZ broke the big news today that Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck got hitched over the weekend in Las Vegas. E! News reported marriage was solemnized–you know, the “I do” stuff–at the venerable A Little White Wedding Chapel. Can there be better evidence that Sin City is back as a destination?
Five years ago next week, not long after becoming New To Las Vegas, I wrote about the quicky wedding industry in Las Vegas and Nevada, and its surprising influence and importance in the regional economy. I described how it’s possible to get a marriage license on a weekend–as Ben and Jen did at 11:32 p.m. on Saturday night–and even described the history of A Little White Wedding Chapel. The post, with a touch of updating, is reproduced below. Were I writing anew on the important topic, I might change a few numbers–the pandemic certainly affected things–but not much else.
Las Vegas weddings are still a big industry
July 4 today marks the 246th birthday of the country’s founding. But there’s another anniversary of note this week. It was 75 years ago, in 1947, the world learned about something that happened in the New Mexico desert which later became known as the Roswell Incident. Over time–like more than 40 years–the affair morphed into a fantastic account that an alien flying saucer crashed and recovered alien bodies sat in a morgue somewhere amid a giant government cover-up. Notoriety about the Roswell Incident helped spur public interest about UFOs, which continues to this day. Last year, the Pentagon admitted to Congress that it can’t explain 143 incidents dating back to 2004 of what it now calls Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP).
Long before becoming New To Las Vegas, I lived in New Mexico and had occasion more than a quarter-century ago to delve at length into the legitimacy of the Roswell Incident. I took a hard look at the evidence and interviewed a lot of folks.
I’m not here to opine about all the other UFO claims out there (although I once wrote on another blog about the Maury Island Incident, a debunked UFO episode in Washington State the same summer as the Roswell Incident). But I am here to tell you there’s no good evidence that anything extraterrestrial happened around Roswell. And no bodies. The only noteworthy element I found was the ability of the Roswell Incident to turn alleged little green men into actual big green dollars for an army of enthusiasts including certain authors and some Roswell residents. (Las Vegas and Nevada are not immune from UFOs as a business opportunity, either, as I wrote here in 2017.)
In August 1996, I published my investigative findings in Crosswinds, at the time New Mexico’s largest alternative newspaper, co-owned and edited by my good friend, Steve Lawrence. Sadly, both Steve and his publication are now deceased. The lengthy story was entitled “Now where was it those aliens crashed?” The text, with any substantive updates [in brackets like this], is reproduced below. (A version of this post was published in this space in 2019.) Were I writing it from scratch today, I’m not sure I would revise anything beyond adding more evidence of the grift. A later article by me in 2001 also in Crosswinds debunked the Roswell Incident in even greater detail.
The New Mexico map illustrating this post was published with my 1996 story in Crosswinds. Please refer to it as you read, as it pretty much gives away the Roswell con. Continue reading