It Didn’t Stay Here: a civil lawsuit in Delaware for alleged sexual abuse in Las Vegas

Delaware’s famous Court of Chancery, now 234 years old, usually hears staid civil business dispute cases turning on dry, complicated, sleep-inducing contract language and mind-numbing lawyering. But every once in a while, a case pops up like Los Angeles City Employees’ Retirement System, on behalf of eXp World Holdings Inc. v. Glenn Sanford, Randall Miles, Dan Cahir, Jason Gesing, Eugene Frederick and James Bramble. 

The shocking claim: To enhance their personal wealth, leaders of the parent company of eXp Realty, a big publicly traded real estate brokerage incorporated in Delaware, largely turned a blind eye to allegations some of their biggest agents sexually assaulted fellow agents in Las Vegas and other cities. A judge’s recent ruling in Wilmington will allow the case to proceed.

Of course, most everything, especially liability, is being denied. But in a big way the eXp 6, as I might call the half-dozen defendants, still become the newest candidates for my long-running list, It Didn’t Stay Here. The criterion is simple: people in trouble elsewhere for something that happened in Las Vegas. The list is my New to Las Vegas rebuttal to “What Happens Here, Stays Here,” for many years the famous marketing slogan of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. You can see a list of the nominees nearby. A lawsuit like this is definitely trouble. Continue reading

Far from Las Vegas, founding father Thomas Paine’s legacy in a town where he did nothing 250 years ago

Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine

Our nation’s semiquincentennial year has kicked off with the 250th anniversary this week of the publication of “Common Sense” by Thomas Paine (1737-1809). He’s the English philosopher and revolutionary who came to America in late 1774 and published his famous work barely a year later. His best-selling manifesto for freedom was so persuasive and fiery the Second Continental Congress borrowed large chunks of its logic when fashioning the Declaration of Independence just a few months later on July 4, 1776.

I’ll leave it to the historians and the scholars to ponder the continuing significance of Paine and his literary output. Admittedly, there’s no Las Vegas hook for this, but I am sometimes known to ponder matters far and wide. So I’m going to take another look at New Rochelle, N.Y., a leafy New York City suburb where I have relatives and have frequently visited long before becoming New To Las Vegas. They live just a block from one of the strangest and most bogus shrines to political action in America that I know of–strange and bogus mainly because nothing political ever happened there.

Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine Cottage Museum, New Rochelle, N.Y.

I am referring to what is now called the Thomas Paine Cottage Museum. The rather nondescript structure is perhaps the last tangible vestige of Paine. Why am I so down on this tribute to a man listed among the country’s Founding Fathers? Here are some reasons. Continue reading

Fresh questions about Las Vegas’s fallen-cop charity

Las Vegas fallen-cop charitySince becoming New to Las Vegas a decade ago, I’ve taken an annual look at the Injured Police Officers Fund. That’s the home-grown 44-year-old Las Vegas fallen-cop tax-exempt nonprofit that raises and provides money to families of Southern Nevada cops injured or killed in the line of the duty. Especially when there is a police fatality, the Las Vegas news media often identifies IPOF as the official conduit for designated donations from public-spirited residents to grieving families.

To me, a national journalist who has written about charities and fundraising for decades, IPOF has stood out in sharp contrast to the morass of national faux charity political action committees sporting law enforcement names with shadowy non-police managers who essentially pocketed all the donations from cold-calling clueless donors. These outfits trolled incessantly for donor cash but spent virtually no money raised on their stated missions. You can read about many of them on this blog by clicking here or typing “faux charity” into the nearby search box. I think IPOF occupies a higher ground in this swamp, and overall does decent work, partly because it is cop-run on a volunteer basis, and not very pushy in its fundraising.

But although a million-dollar annual enterprise operating in the public interest, IPOF simply has not lived up to the promise of its relatively new president, Alexander Cuevas, a North Las Vegas police officer, to continue expanding transparency on how it functions. A recent IPOF move to shield its financial disclosures to the Nevada public, its hard-to-find most recent federal tax return, for 2024, and the organization’s own website raise some uncomfortable questions that the charity so far has declined to address in the seven weeks since I first started propounded them, despite gentle follow-up requests.

So I’ll detail my issues here. Continue reading

Las Vegas predictions for 2026

A record four of my 13 Las Vegas predictions for 2025 made last December came true during the year (sort of, anyway). This is truly astonishing given my list was mainly intended as satirical social commentary.

I’ll detail the four at the end this post. But, dear reader, before you sue, please remember that clearly labeled satire like this, particularly about future events, is protected free speech under the First Amendment. This is thanks to a unanimous 1988 U.S. Supreme Court decision involving the unlikely duo of Larry Flynt and Jerry Falwell, as well as the long-standing common-law notion that predictions are nothing more than non-actionable opinion.

So straight from the New to Las Vegas world headquarters, here I go again for 2026 with another baker’s dozen. Continue reading