There never has been anything else like it in the history of Las Vegas, and it turns 60 years old this year. I’m referring to The Green Felt Jungle. That’s the 1963 book by Ed Reid and Ovid Demaris about mob control of America’s growing gambling mecca. TGFJ became a gigantic international best-seller for years, and the subject of public commentary even longer. Besides a title that quickly added a memorable phrase to the lexicon still used as a synonym for Las Vegas, TGFJ thoroughly colored America’s perception of the city as a dangerous place–but maybe an interesting one worth visiting. The book even managed to play an important role in a presidential election, as well as in civic debates around the country, while helping to change public policy in Nevada.
Although all the major characters–and since the 1980s the Mob–are now gone, the 231-page tell-all remains a rip-roaring good read, even if overwritten in places. TGFJ is the only one of a trio of book-length Las Vegas exposés published in the mid-1960s that has stood the test of time. The book even helps to explain Las Vegas’s continuing difficulty with true economic diversification away from gambling and entertainment.
Written by co-authors simultaneously similar and different, TGFJ was full of innuendo and utterly withering intimate descriptions about some of Las Vegas’s most powerful folks. The book was published at a time when defamation laws were far more favorable for plaintiffs than they are now. But TGFJ, its authors and the publisher, Trident Press of New York and later the Pocket Books unit of Simon and Schuster, never faced a single libel suit, for reasons I’ll explain below.
The book is long out of print. But so many millions of copies were published in its heyday, especially a revised paperback edition in 1964 that included 24 pages of photographs and a 27-page addendum detailing all the hell the book’s hard-cover first edition had caused, that it’s easily available today from used book sites for less than $10. Continue reading
