In Las Vegas, how about a perp pool on when the first Trump pardonee gets re-arrested?

Posted on by October 21, 2025
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perp pool

Jimmy Hoffa (via Wikipedia)

See the many updates at end of post

A half-century ago, I was part of a ghoulish office pool started in the Philadelphia bureau of the Associated Press, where I worked at the time. On what day of the week would Jimmy Hoffa’s body be found? He was the convicted, mobbed-up ex-Teamsters Union president who suddenly vanished after leaving a Detroit-area restaurant in 1975. His disappearance quickly became a national sensation. It was widely believed–then and now–Hoffa was done in at the behest of one of his supposed organized crime cronies.

Six of us hacks each pitched in $5.00 (about $30 in today’s dollars). I chose Saturday.

As it turned out, Hoffa’s remains were never found. He’s still missing. So no one won the office pool (except my supervisor, who didn’t return the wagers even though there was no “winner”). Hoffa was legally declared dead in 1982, although the case officially is still open.

The Hoffa bet popped into my mind amid the big news last night that newly re-inaugurated President Donald J. Trump pardoned or commuted nearly 1,600 rioters who had a hand in storming the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021. Those receiving his grace included several convicted of seditious conspiracy.

Since I’m now New to Las Vegas, let’s start a new pool. In what month going forward will the first of these releasees be re-arrested on charges of committing another criminal act of some kind? In my view, with such a large universe of suddenly emboldened suspected hooligans for whom law and order has proven to be an elusive concept, it’s certain to happen. Just a matter of when.
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The Nevada angle in Charlie Chaplin’s big scandal

Posted on by January 10, 2025
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Charlie Chaplin's big scandalSince becoming New to Las Vegas, I have been amazed at the ability of places in Nevada to pop up in big stories focused elsewhere, often as a precursor. Remember the Watergate scandal triggered in 1972 when henchmen working for President Richard M. Nixon broke into Democratic Party offices in Washington, D.C.? By some accounts, it, had its origins in a bribe Nixon had taken from reclusive tycoon Howard Hughes, then living in a Las Vegas hotel.

There’s still a video on the Internet of Donald J. Trump partying in Las Vegas in 2013 with Russians and some hangers-on. One of them later wrote an infamous email promising Russian government dirt on Hillary Clinton. The matter became a focus of that Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigation begun four years later into purported Trump-Russian ties in the 2016 presidential election, which Trump won.

A New York City judge today is formally pronouncing a sentence on Trump after a jury last year convicted him on 34 felony counts of covering up a $130,000 hush money payoff made there in 2016 to stop porn actress Stormy Daniels from chatting up a one-night stand she said she had had with The Donald in 2016. The venue of the liaison? Why, Nevada, of course, specifically the Edgewood Tahoe Golf Course in Stateline, Nev., near Reno. In a 2018 interview with Anderson Cooper on “60 Minutes,” Daniels said she was subsequently threatened in a Las Vegas parking lot by an unknown man to “forget the story.”

It is with this backdrop that I write about a book to be published next month concerning a controversial Hollywood episode during World War II in the life of the legendary actor and director Charlie Chaplin (1887-1977) that has an interesting Nevada angle. The work is When Charlie Met Joan: The Tragedy of the Chaplin Trials and the Failings of American Law (University of Michigan Press).
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Las Vegas predictions for 2025

Posted on by December 21, 2024
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Las Vegas predictionsTwo of my Las Vegas predictions for 2024 from last December actually came true. This is amazing since the list was intended as satirical social commentary.

I’ll detail the pair at the end. But again I note that clearly labeled satire is protected free speech under the First Amendment, thanks to a unanimous 1988 U.S. Supreme Court decision involving Larry Flynt and Jerry Falwell.

So from the New to Las Vegas world headquarters, here I go again for 2025.

–President Donald J. Trump suggests at a press conference that the Hoover Dam should be renamed for himself because “I don’t like losers.” Continue reading →

Las Vegas exhibition really suggests Old Spanish Trail was much ado about nothing

Posted on by January 26, 2025
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Old Spanish Trail

Old Spanish Trail (via National Park Service)

Las Vegas likes to play up a Western history it really doesn’t have. The place is simply too new. The city was only created in 1905, hundreds of years after Boston, New York and Philadelphia. At the turn of the century five years earlier, the U.S. Census reported the population of all of the Las Vegas area was all of 18. Cowboys, Indians, cattle and other trappings of the traditional Old West were in short supply.

It took Las Vegas 30 years to even start Helldorado Days, an annual celebration of its supposed Wild West culture. When Nevada legalized gambling in 1931, enterprising casino operators latched onto Western imagery as a tourist draw. This still persists, helped by such annual events as the National Finals Rodeo, the nation’s largest, and the occasional cowboy sign illuminated in neon.

Las Vegas’s latest effort to claim historic frontier honors opened on Friday at the Nevada State Museum, Las Vegas. It’s an exhibition entitled “The Old Spanish Trail: Connecting a Network of Paths.” The show focuses on the OST, a meandering 19th Century trade route running 2,700 miles over several routings from Santa Fe., N.M., to Los Angeles that went through the future Las Vegas. In posted signage, the museum asserts the OST was “a conduit for revolutionary change throughout the vast, arid expanse we call the American Southwest” that “has earned its historic legacy.”

Over the weekend I toured the exhibit, which is to run for six months. I saw no evidence of that “revolutionary change” or “historic legacy.” What I did see was mainly–nothing. Continue reading →

In Las Vegas, unique Nevada ballot law saves another Democratic U.S. Senate incumbent

Posted on by November 11, 2024
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None of These Candidates

Nevada ballot, 2024

It didn’t do Kamala Harris a lick of good. But for the second straight biennial election, Nevada’s unique, half-century-old law giving voters the explicit option to defiantly choose “None of These Candidates” has saved the bacon of a Democratic U.S. Senate incumbent.

Five days after the November 5 election, they’re still counting votes in the thinly populated Silver State. Still, nearly complete returns compiled by the Nevada Secretary of state’s Office show that despite Donald J. Trump’s solid presidential victory in Nevada (and the country), Democrat Jacky Rosen is winning her second six-year term in the Senate by 21,202 votes (out of 1,419,550 counted) over Republican challenger Sam Brown. But “None of These Candidates” is polling 41,638–nearly double Rosen’s margin.

It is widely believed by political experts that Nevada’s NOTC line overwhelming draws Republican voters rather than Democratic voters in partisan races. The GOP certainly believes that, which is why the party some years back challenged NOTC in court (unsuccessfully). Indeed, attracting unhappy Republicans was the somewhat-hidden intention of Democratic lawmakers who in 1975 enacted the measure into law. Helping give NOTC additional force: another Nevada law prohibiting write-in candidates. Continue reading →