Overlooking Las Vegas, the mystique–and myths–of Mount Charleston

Posted on by February 21, 2022
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Mount Charleston

Mount Charleston as seen last week from near the Las Vegas Strip

Sitting as it does in the Mojave Desert of southern Nevada, less than 300 miles from Mexico, the immediate Las Vegas area has pretty mild winters, with no snow most years. Except for this: A scan of the mountainous horizon surrounding the Las Vegas Valley shows one–and only one–snow-capped peak easily visible from the Las Vegas Strip. It actually stays white more than half the year well into the warm late spring and is rather noticeable. Tourists wearing T-shirts are amazed as they waddle from casino to casino.

I’m talking about Mount Charleston, or, as it’s officially called, Charleston Peak. Just 30 miles to the northwest, the 11,916-foot-high federally owned pinnacle–nearly two miles above the Strip and the highest point in southern Nevada–is a subject of mystique and myths.

As is so often the case about Las Vegas, both mystique and myths are interesting. Continue reading →

In Las Vegas, more phone calls from a faux charity using different names

Posted on by February 6, 2022
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faux charityBack in October, I wrote about United Women’s Health Alliance PAC. It’s a political action committee based in Washington, D.C., that emotionally solicits money on the phone for causes like females in uniform and health care sounding like it’s a charity–which it isn’t–and spends very little of what it receives on the stated missions. I predicted this PAC, which I call a faux charity, would simply ignore a new Nevada law known as Senate Bill 62 requiring it to first register and file financial statements before approaching would-be donors like me. UWHA-PAC is “betting on the sad track record of Nevada’s two charitable regulators,” I declared at the time.

I’m here to take a bow.

Last week, I received cold-call robocalls at the New To Las Vegas world headquarters from two d/b/a fronts that UHWA-PAC uses nationally, “Emma” speaking for Americans for Female Officers PAC (she’s the one who called in October) and “Simon” from Americans for Female Veterans PAC, a newbie. I use quotes because both were computer-generated voices using the obnoxious practice known as soundboard technology. I’ll get back to those calls in a bit.

More to my immediate point: I went on the listings website of the Nevada Secretary of State to see if UHWA-PAC, Americans for Female Officers PAC or Americans for Female Veterans PAC had registered with the state as the new law requires. Nope.

Then I called the main office in Carson City of the Nevada Secretary of State–one of those two regulators in Nevada–to see if maybe there was a lag in posting online new PAC registrations. Again, no. I was assured that all PAC registrations are immediately put up on the Internet. But the person I spoke with didn’t seem familiar with the new Nevada law requiring prior registration and financial filings for any organization soliciting within the state for causes benefiting, among other categories, law enforcement (female officers), public health (women’s health) and patriotism (female veterans).

I am shocked–NOT! Continue reading →

In Las Vegas, trolling faux cop charity promised not to call again–but quickly did

Posted on by January 30, 2022
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faux cop charity

Fake badge image from website

Just before noon on a recent morning, “Andrew Redlow” cold-called the New To Las Vegas world headquarters pleading for a cash contribution to what he said was United Police Officers Coalition PAC. Of course, I started asking simple questions, like where are you located? He answered that one: Washington, D.C. But another query really stumped him: How old is your organization?

“Andrew” responded with irrelevant answers, essentially continuing his pitch about how the money would help elect people to Congress sympathetic to law enforcement types who are being abused. I repeated my question. “I’m sorry,” “Andrew” said finally. “I can’t answer that kind of question. I’ll add you to our do-not-call list.” He abruptly hung up.

Then, not four hours later, in the afternoon, the phone rang. It was “Andrew Redlow” again, making the identical pitch again for the United Police Officers Coalition PAC. Simply shameless!

I use quotes because “Andrew Redlow” (I’m guessing at the spelling; that’s how it sounded) is not a real person, but a voice generated by a computer using what is known as soundboard technology. Which is not surprising because, as I discovered from a little research between the two calls, United Police Officers Coalition PAC isn’t a real organization, either. It’s simply a sympathetic fundraising name used by another outfit, Constitutional Leadership PAC.

Moreover, I learned Constitutional Leadership PAC is barely a PAC, or political action committee, which is supposed to make contributions to political candidates or causes it approves of. According to its own public filings, since its founding in 2019 (the question “Andrew” couldn’t answer), CLPAC has spent next to nothing on political contributions while spending almost everything raised on other stuff. I call PACs with such glib telephone patters and terrible financial efficiencies faux charities.

I also learned neither CLPAC nor United Police Officers Coalition PAC is approved to solicit in Nevada. A new state law requires fundraisers soliciting money in Nevada for, among other purposes, law enforcement causes to register and make publicly available financial filings.

Finally, I learned CLPAC is mentioned in a pending federal-court civil lawsuit in Pennsylvania alleging violations of federal law in connection with telemarketing for faux charities. Except that the lawsuit repeatedly uses the phrase “scam PACs.” And as it turns out, the lead defendant, who owns a number of companies involved in such fundraising, lives in Las Vegas.

Interested? Come join me for the ride. Continue reading →

What’s buried here, stays here: the few famous graves of Las Vegas (Part 3)

Posted on by January 23, 2022
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famous Las Vegas graves

Moe Dalitz memorial, Palm Memorial Cemetery, Las Vegas

Welcome to Part 3 of my occasional series about the few famous graves of Las Vegas and why they are here. Part 1 dealt with athletes: boxer Sonny Liston, baseball pitcher Bo Belinsky and tennis star Pancho Gonzales. Part 2 concerned two prominent entertainers: movie star Tony Curtis and TV star Redd Foxx.

The conceit of this series is simple for someone like me who is New To Las Vegas. The populous Las Vegas area is the final resting spot of a very small number of individuals, probably no more than a score, whose fame could be described as enduring and widespread beyond the local area. This is possibly attributable to Las Vegas’s relative youth as a city–just 115 years old–not long enough for a lot of famous people to be buried here. But it’s also possible that for the longest time, lots of locally prominent individuals, or their next-of-kin, preferred that Las Vegas not be their forever home.

Perhaps surprisingly, this seems to be especially true of one notable sector of Las Vegas’s storied past: organized crime, those associated with organized crime, and other ne’er-do-wells. It is generally agreed Las Vegas would not be the gambling and entertainment powerhouse it has become without the help starting 75 years ago of a coterie of wrong-side-of-the-law folks, generally from East Coast and Midwest-based organized crime families, and their hangers-on, plus free-lancers. With the assistance of a little muscle, the mobsters saw a chance to rake off substantial tax-free profits from casino gambling–the now-legendary “skim.” The ploy lasted for a half-century.

In researching this post, I assembled a list of about 50 individuals historically connected with Las Vegas identified as being prominent in organized crime; associated a bit too closely with mobsters, often as fronts or even girlfriends; or infamous for their reputations. Maybe 40 ended up putting down their, uh, permanent roots elsewhere. No more than 10 of the 50 are buried in Las Vegas, and of this group, perhaps four have achieved a certain amount of continuing fame.

So this article, part of a continuing series, is as much about who’s not buried here. Continue reading →

Las Vegas hospital co-founded by casino skim mobster loses appeal of big Medicare overbilling claim

Posted on by January 13, 2022
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casino skim

Hospital co-founder

A premier Las Vegas hospital co-founded by a mobster who helped run the infamous casino skim to avoid federal taxes has essentially lost its initial appeal of audit findings it overbilled Medicare by nearly $20 million in just a two-year period.

“The appeal decision is unfavorable,” an independent review contractor for the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services wrote bluntly on the first page of the 83-page decision on the plea by Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center. Plus this stinger near the end: Sunrise “either knew or could reasonably be expected to know that the item or service would not be covered.” The decision lowered the total overpayment that Sunrise is on the hook for from $23.6 million in the original audit to $19.7 million. But it further said Sunrise couldn’t hit up the patients for any of the disallowed overbilled amount.

Even at $19.7 million, the overbilling amounted to 8% of the $245 million amount Sunrise billed the feds for Medicare in the audit period, 2017 to 2018. This is serious coin.

But it’s a fraction of the estimated 75% rake-off at the height of the casino skim starting in the 1940s, by which organized crime with hidden interests grabbed casino house winnings before counting profits, committing massive tax evasion. One of the leading figures in that endeavor was Morris Barney “Moe” Dalitz (1899-1989), an organized crime character who moved from the Midwest to Las Vegas in the 1940s. He eventually got control of several long-gone hotbeds of the skim, including Wilbur Clarke’s Desert Inn and the Stardust Resort and Casino. (The Stardust became a model for the mob-skimming casino in the 1998 movie Casino, starring Robert De Niro and Sharon Stone.) Dalitz’s life is the subject of a 2009 biography by Michael Newton whose title says it all: Mr. Mob: The Life and Crimes of Moe Dalitz.

In 1958, Dalitz was one of three co-founders of Sunrise Hospital, just a mile east of the Las Vegas Strip on East Desert Inn Rd. Neither his name nor his key role in starting the hospital comes up in a search of the facility’s extensive website. Originally a nonprofit, Sunrise is now owned by HCA Healthcare, the giant for-profit national health care provider with a long history of overbilling problems. Continue reading →