Las Vegas Strip isn’t in Las Vegas, and other oddities

Posted on by March 15, 2023
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Las Vegas Strip

Ex-Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman somewhere near Las Vegas and the Strip (via Zimbio)

Everyone around the world knows about the Las Vegas Strip. But does everyone know it isn’t in Las Vegas?

Nor is the main campus of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Or the Las Vegas Convention Center. Or even the famous “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign, a photo of which graces the top of this blog. The about-to-be-built stadium for the NFL’s transplanted Las Vegas Raiders? Fuggedaboutit.

You may have seen over the years any number of photos, like the one gracing this post, of mob-lawyer-turned-Las-Vegas-mayor-turned-retiree Oscar Goodman sipping a cocktail in the presence of Strip showgirls. You might think he had some official jurisdiction and authority over the Strip. You would be wrong. There’s even a pretty good chance such photos weren’t taken in Las Vegas or the Strip (this one from 2014 certainly wasn’t).

The post office aids this charade. It allows many addresses in unincorporated Clark County, a land mass bigger than Delaware and Connecticut combined, to say they are in world-famous Las Vegas rather than, say, the unincorporated townships of Paradise (the area to which I moved after becoming New To Las Vegas that also includes most of the Strip, UNLV and the proposed stadium) or Winchester (another area that contains part of the Strip).

All the locals know this, of course, but, I suspect, few of the visitors. There’s some interesting history here. Continue reading →

It Didn’t Stay Here: Deported from Virginia for a Las Vegas-based Ponzi

Posted on by May 22, 2020
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It Didn't Stay Here

Angelina Lazar in 2006 during her Las Vegas days

More than a decade ago, Angelina Lazar spent time in Las Vegas running a business called Charismatic Exchange. It purported to be a dealer in foreign currency. She told would-be investors to expect a risk-free return of 20%–every month.

During 2005 and 2006, Lazar tried to cut a wide swath around Sin City. The Internet has glamorous photos of her from that time, like the one adorning this post. In one press release she called herself the “esteemed community mayor of Las Vegas.” Lazar curried favor with local and national Republican politicians.

She’s long gone from her apartment on W. Sahara Ave. and her offices on W. Lake Mead Boulevard and Howard Hughes Parkway. Nor is she likely to return in a physical sense. Last month, Lazar, 54, pleaded guilty in federal court in Alexandria Va., to running a Ponzi scheme out of Las Vegas. She was ordered to pay $20,000 in restitution and immediately deported to Canada, where she is a citizen.

Lazar thus becomes the latest candidate for my list, It Didn’t Stay Here. The roster consists of individuals who get into trouble someplace else for something that happened in Las Vegas. It is a play on “What Happens Here, Stays Here,” the famous promotional slogan of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. The full list can be found elsewhere on this page. Continue reading →

Las Vegas and environs profit from UFO aura

Posted on by August 13, 2017
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Las Vegas UFO

Alien Cathouse Vegas Brothel, Amargosa Valley, Nev.

By itself, the Las Vegas Strip is almost other-worldly, brimming as it does with neon lights, volcanoes, pyramids, towers and other strange shapes all jumbled together. So maybe it’s not all that surprising that Las Vegas and its environs revel in–or at least profit from–that enduring category of human curiosity called unidentified flying objects.

Strip souvenir stores have lots of UFO knickknacks–T-shirts sporting triangular heads of supposed extraterrestrial aliens and coffee mugs referencing Area 51. That’s the top-secret U.S. military base 90 miles north of town said to be involved, if you believe the gossip, in UFO body-storage (but far more likely, development of military aircraft like the U-2 spy plane and testing of captured foreign war planes). The minor league baseball team, the Triple A affiliate of the New York Mets, is called the Las Vegas 51s. Cashman Field, the team’s home stadium, is festooned with images of ETs.

At about $200 a pop, tour operators run all-day trips from Las Vegas to the very edge of Area 51, where the tiny town of Rachel, Nev. (population 54) sits on State Route 375. The utterly desolate road is officially named (I kid you not) the Extraterrestrial Highway, due to both the proximity of Area 51 and the number of UFO sightings reported thereabouts over the years. In Rachel, an “alien burger” is on the menu at the Little A’Le’Inn.

For a different kind of trip, one can visit the Alien Cathouse Vegas Brothel in Amargosa Valley, Nev., 60 miles northwest of Las Vegas, along U.S. 95 on the south side of the vast Nevada Test and Training Range off which Area 51 sits on the northeast side. That’s a house of legal prostitution and, I suppose, a destination if a UFO lands nearby and the pilot says, “Take me to your breeder.” Continue reading →

It Didn’t Stay Here: Unlicensed pilot flew jet to Las Vegas

Posted on by May 26, 2017
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It Didn't Stay Here

Falcon 10 turbojet (via Wikipedia)

When Orville and Wilbur Wright made their famous first powered flights at Kitty Hawk, N.C. on December 17, 1903, they didn’t have pilot licenses. No such things existed. But since 1927, every civilian pilot in the U.S. has had one. For nearly a century it’s been a federal criminal act to operate aircraft without proper permissions.

Which brings me to one Arnold Gerald Leto III. He was just sentenced in Los Angeles federal court to hard time after pleading guilty to piloting aircraft without the correct license. Since I am New To Las Vegas, you probably know where I’m going with this. One of those flights, in a Falcon 10 turbojet like the one pictured nearby, was to the bright lights of Sin City.

So Leto gets a nomination to my list, It Didn’t Stay Here. It’s devoted to examples of people getting in trouble elsewhere for something that happened in Las Vegas. It’s a counter-argument, of course, to that catchy pleasure-seeking marketing slogan of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, “What Happens Here, Stays Here.” Continue reading →

It Didn’t Stay Here: Prison for NY pet pound staff who spent stolen funds in Las Vegas

Posted on by May 24, 2017
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It Didn't Stay HereLike pet shelter organizations everywhere, the Central New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals seeks homes for unwanted four-legged creatures and raises public awareness about abuse and neglect.

But the CNYSPCA in Syracuse is unusual in one big respect. Paul Morgan, its former executive director, and Taylor Gilkey, an ex-staffer identified as his on-and-off girl friend, recently were sent to prison for embezzling more than $800,000 to pay for, among other things, gambling junkets to Las Vegas. That’s money that could have helped a lot of dogs and cats.

Morgan and Gilkey are hereby nominated to my new list, It Didn’t Stay Here. These are people who get into trouble elsewhere for something that happened in that bug light called Las Vegas. My list is a tongue-in-cheek rebuttal of that famous Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority slogan, “What Happens Here, Stays Here.” The names of all nominees can be found elsewhere on this page along with, by clicking on their names, their sad stories. Continue reading →

I had to file a public record request for my Las Vegas water usage

Posted on by May 18, 2017
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Las Vegas water recordsAs a journalist for nearly a half-century, I literally have filed hundreds of freedom of information act/public records requests to get documents from government agencies. In cases decades apart and quite separate, I got the secret testimonies to the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission of Apple CEO Steve Jobs and later-to-be-fugitive-financier Robert Vesco.

I obtained proof of Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover’s jealousy about all the attention the 1960s TV show “The Untouchables” gave to rival lawman Eliot Ness, and how the agency monitored the personal life of secretly gay actor Rock Hudson. I showed the odd FBI surveillance of the artist Georgia O’Keeffe (whose name was misspelled in agency reports every single time), the poet John Ciardi and sports editor Lester Rodney of the Communist Party daily newspaper the Daily Worker. I even used disclosure laws to get dog-attack records from the U.S. Postal Service (along with an apology for illegally not providing them faster).

But no request I ever filed was quite as strange as the one I made recently after becoming New To Las Vegas. I was forced to draft and send a formal plea under the Nevada Public Records Act to get my own water records.

I am not making this up. Read on. Continue reading →