Now the whole world knows about Las Vegas and its scorpions

Posted on by March 8, 2024
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Las Vegas and its scorpions

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 →

Faux cop charity soliciting donations in Las Vegas flouts IRS, Nevada regulators

Posted on by April 23, 2024
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faux cop charitySee 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.

faux cop charityPOSC 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 →

Worthy Las Vegas fallen-cop charity boosts transparency, showing better financial efficiency

Posted on by February 19, 2024
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Las Vegas fallen-cop charityInjured Police Officers Fund, the legitimate Las Vegas-based charity that funnels financial aid to families of fallen cops in southern Nevada, has taken a major step toward transparency and accountability. In its latest public IRS tax return filing, IPOF revealed for the first time the total amount of contributions received on condition the money quickly went to specifically designated officers. As it turns out, that amount dwarfed the total sum listed as being distributed out of general contributions.

The fuller picture had the beneficial impact of significantly improving a key measure of financial efficiency for IPOF, a potential draw for future donors. Moreover, the new data will help distinguish IPOF from the many illegitimate law enforcement-themed organizations that fraudulently–fraudulently, I say!–seek funds from the Nevada public (and elsewhere). Here in Las Vegas, at least, these outfits have been greatly aided by regulators who don’t enforce disclosure and other laws already on the books.

IPOF’s revelation came after several years of hectoring by me from the New To Las Vegas world headquarters about the charity’s seemingly poor financial efficiency in one important measure and a general lack of transparency. IPOF previously had pleaded individual officer privacy in not revealing the total amount of designated contributions or distributions (the numbers are the same). To me–a national journalist who has been writing about charities, their filings and financial efficiencies for decades–a specific section on the IRS tax return mandated disclosure of this very information. I perceived that the donating public was not seeing the entire picture.

Besides posting here about these issues concerning IPOF, I first pressed these matters more than two years in an interview with Chelsea Stuenkel, IPOF’s then-new president and an officer (sergeant then, lieutenant now) with the Nevada Department of Public Safety. It took a little while, but, as she recently wrote me, “We have in fact changed the way we are reporting specific donations this year after our discussion.” Continue reading →

My day in stunning Valley of Fire State Park near Las Vegas during Super Bowl LVIII

Posted on by December 24, 2024
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Valley of Fire State Park

Valley of Fire State Park, Nevada, taken by the author on Sunday, February 11

While the eyes of the U.S. were obsessively focused on Sunday upon a certain football game (and pop singer) in Las Vegas, I chose a different course. The dog and I drove 50 miles north to Valley of Fire State Park. The 70-square-mile preserve sports breathtaking scenery and, just as significantly thanks to surrounding mountains, no cell phone service and an eerie quiet broken only by wind gusts and the occasional call of a bird.

Blessed by a sunny day with temperatures in the mid-50s, we wandered around dramatically bright red Aztec sandstone, sand dunes, limestone formations and other outcroppings in a variety of shapes and sizes, all crammed into a space just 10 miles across. Some features are as much as 150 million years old, formed by the upheavals of Mother Earth, the inundation and receding of flood waters and the weathering of time. There were enough arches and fallen arches to interest any podiatrist. Valley of Fire provides much food for thought about where this planet is headed.

The park also provided a refuge of sorts. My personal reasons for completely avoiding Super Bowl LVIII were philosophical. It was my continuing (and admittedly inconsequential) protest of the terrible record of the National Football League in protecting the long-term health of the players who have helped make all but two of the NFL’s 32 principal owners billionaires. Coupled with Nevada’s own lousy record in health care and the proximity of the game just seven miles from the New To Las Vegas world headquarters, it was imperative I get out of town for the day. (Read my fuller objections by clicking here.)

The contrast between the naturalness of Valley of Fire and the artificial glitz of Las Vegas, with a pyramid-shaped hotel and cheesy scaled-down replicas of the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower, is startling. Valley of Fire is the real deal. Continue reading →

Super Bowl LVIII sponsor NFL and Las Vegas share big health care woes

Posted on by February 10, 2024
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Las Vegas health careNow that Super Bowl LVIII is upon us here in Las Vegas, it’s time to rehash an issue I’ve harped upon. In my view the country’s most popular sporting event and the country’s most popular entertainment town are a perfect fit for this shocking reason: Both offer shameful healthcare to their constituencies, and have for a long time.

Allow me to explain. Since much of this material is drawn from a post early last year, forgive me for sounding like a broken record. But maybe I’m just spoiled. Before becoming New To Las Vegas, I lived around places with terrific health care like Seattle, Los Angeles, Houston and New York. Continue reading →

This week in Nevada: Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas, centennial of world’s first gas-chamber execution

Posted on by February 8, 2024
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first gas-chamber execution

Gee Jon (courtesy Nevada Historical Society) Quarterly)

Most of the U.S. and even much of the world will be fixated this weekend on Las Vegas when Super Bowl LVIII (58 for those not fluent in Roman) is played in Allegiant Stadium between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers. It will be a first for Nevada, which until not too long ago was on the National Football League’s boycott list for moral reasons due to legalized sports betting in the state. Then team owners and Commissioner Roger Goodell realized widespread gambling would greatly increased the value of their franchises and decided they could live with some immorality.

As it happens, this first for Nevada coincides with the 100th anniversary of another big Nevada first raising questions of morality. For it was on February 8, 1924–a century ago tomorrow–that Nevada carried out the world’s very first capital punishment execution by lethal gas. Touted at the time as a humane alternative to electrocution, hanging, firing squad, guillotining, stoning, burning at the stake or whatever, the execution of Gee Jon didn’t go well. A huge story at the time, the botched process brought ridicule and contempt to the Silver State and helped trigger wide debate for decades about how to properly carry out capital punishment.

Gas chambers, in Nevada and some other U.S. jurisdictions, eventual gave way to lethal injections–until some executioners started having problems legally getting the drugs necessary to carry out death sentences. Earlier this month, Alabama carried out the first execution in years using gas, in this case pure nitrogen, depriving condemned killer Kenneth Smith of oxygen and thus life. Witnesses were split on whether it prevented undue suffering to the condemned. Some states are even authorizing firing squads again.

And, amazingly, a still-undecided case that was argued nearly a year ago before the Nevada Supreme Court–the very same panel that greenlighted a different kind of gas a century ago–concerns whether Nevada, which has more than 60 persons on Death Row, can carry out an execution using yet another untested procedure used nowhere else in the world. In this case it would be lethal injection, but employing a mixture of chemicals never before used but which are easier to get. Nevada hasn’t executed anyone since 2006. In December 2022, a court on procedural grounds blocked lame duck Democratic governor Steve Sisolak’s effort to commute all death sentences to life without the possibility of parole.

There are lessons to be learned here, especially whether a thinly populated desert state devoted to minimal government can pull off such a feat. Much of the following account repurposes material previously posted from time to time on this blog since I became New To Las Vegas. Continue reading →