It Didn’t Stay Here: Detroit nonprofit CFO spent stolen funds on Las Vegas

Posted on by April 24, 2025
Reply
It Didn't Stay Here

William A. Smith (courtesy Detroit Riverfront Conservancy)

See update at end of story

In 2021, William A. Smith, a nonprofit chief financial officer from Detroit, blew more than $100,000 on a personal two-day trip to Las Vegas. The private jet alone cost $94,000. In that short period Smith charged nearly $14,000 at Drai’s Beach Club and Night Club on the roof of the luxury Cromwell Las Vegas hotel-casino, where he stayed.

How do I even know these numbers, and why do I care? Detailed court filings, my friends. Smith pleaded guilty last year to embezzling an astonishing $44 million over 12 years from the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy.The agency has been redeveloping the 5½-mile-long Detroit River waterfront facing Canada with public and private money. Smith is to be sentenced April 24 in Detroit federal court on wire fraud and money laundering counts. The feds are asking District Judge Susan DeClercq for a sentence of 18 years in prison and restitution of $44.3 million, mostly to the nonprofit.

So Smith, 52, becomes the newest candidate for my long-running list, It Didn’t Stay Here. The roster consists of folks in trouble elsewhere for something that happened in that bug light of mischief called Las Vegas (here, the spending of funds stolen from someplace else). The list is a pointed refutation of “What Happens Here, Stays Here,” the famous marketing slogan the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority used for many years. You can see a list of the nominees nearby.

In Smith’s case the Sin City piece, entirely funded from that stash, is pretty small beer. But it’s a concoction far-away prosecutors historically have been powerless to resist in drafting such criminal court filings for public, ah, consumption.
Continue reading →

Move over, Las Vegas: Trump is funding his own mob museum–mob-style

Posted on by September 5, 2025
Reply

The Mob Museum, Las Vegas

Everyone knows the line. “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse,” the powerful mob boss Don Vito Corleone (played by Marlon Brando) says in the celebrated 1972 movie “The Godfather” about intimidating a Hollywood studio executive. Soon, the executive finds the severed head of his prized race horse next to him in bed, and acquiesces.

I’ve been thinking about those scenes as I read multiple news accounts about how President Donald J. Trump is raising money for a future presidential library/museum. His m.o.: Using clearly flimsy lawsuits, his new power from gaining a second term and implied threats to extract large cash settlements from large media companies, and perhaps others, for his future baby.

You see, the New to Las Vegas world headquarters is just a few miles from the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement. The 13-year-old edifice in downtown Las Vegas is better known simply as the Mob Museum. I’ve toured the facility, which has terrific exhibits. In my view some of the material therein has described activities not all that far off from what Trump has been doing. His choice of fundraising tools is extortion, racketeering, or at least, in my view, something pretty close to that.

Any honest accounting in a museum of Trump’s full life would have to include the fact that our 45th and 47th president is a convicted felon (a status that even Don Corleone cleverly avoided in the movie and the underlying book of the same name by Mario Puzo), a prodigious liar and a cheat. Over the years Trump has done business with organized crime while speaking favorably of mobsters. “I have met on occasion a few of those people,” he told David Letterman in 2013. “They happen to be very nice people.”

So Trump might become the first person I know of to help fund what amounts to a personal monument using mob-like shakedown techniques. Continue reading →

In Las Vegas, a last hurrah for the brain surgeon who lived in his own ‘hoarders’ museum

Posted on by February 6, 2026
Reply
Lonnie Hammargren

People wait to get into the Lonnie Hammargren yard sale

See update at end of story

Once again, there were long lines today outside the Las Vegas compound of Lonnie Hammargren. He was the late Las Vegas brain surgeon and Nevada lieutenant governor far better known nationally in his later years as a hoarder extraordinaire. Hammargren lived among his relics of un-curated collected junk and once a year opened his three-house spread to gawking visitors, museum-style.

Hammargren died in 2023 at age 85. The occasion today was the start of what was billed as a downsizing three-day “yard sale” of some of his, ah, heirlooms.

Walking the dog, I watched the line stretch around the corner as folks waited patiently in sunny, pleasant weather for as long as 30 minutes to gain access to the event, which was promoted mainly on Vegas-area websites. I saw a few people leave with unremarkable knick knacks–an old Monopoly set, office desk baskets, undistinguished wall hangings. Visitors were told there would be a later formal auction for some of the more notable items, perhaps including a Batmobile replica parked outside the compound for years.

But most attendees I saw exited the grounds empty-handed, a few just shaking their heads. “It was just stuff,” one woman wearing a Vegas Golden Knights sweatshirt told me.

To really understand what was going on, it’s necessary to know something about Hammargren. I wrote an obituary in this space shortly after his death. With very slight modifications, it’s reprinted below.

Continue reading →

After my query, Las Vegas fallen-cop charity amends public tax return, boosting transparency

Posted on by February 24, 2025
Reply

Las Vegas fallen-cop charityThe Injured Police Officers Fund, which raises and provides money to families of Las Vegas-area cops injured or even killed in the line of the duty, is the real deal. This honest organization really sails above the rest in a sea of local law enforcement fundraising money shenanigans.

This ocean includes former Las Vegas councilwoman Michele Fiore. She’s scheduled to be sentenced next month following a federal-court fraud conviction for diverting to personal use money she raised for a fallen-officer monument. One of her marks–first revealed here–included an unknowing Joe Lombardo, then the Clark County Sheriff and now the governor.

This ocean includes Thomas Kovach. He has pleaded not guilty to charges he secretly siphoned off money raised by the Metropolitan Police Department Foundation, which he ran, to another nonprofit paying him a nice salary.

This ocean includes a school of national faux charity political action committees that sport law enforcement names but spend almost no money raised on their stated missions. They also regularly solicit Las Vegas residents on the telephone in blatant violation of a 2021 state law requiring pre-registration and filings, with the main regulator, the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office, essentially doing very little regulating but completely escaping accountability (except from me).

The 43-year-old IPOF does absolutely none of this bad stuff. And to its credit it just filed an amended public federal tax return after the New to Las Vegas world headquarters–that’s me, folks–pointed out that some required data was left out of its original filing. The new information explains a little more clearly what money passes through IPOF and how it is spent. In my view, the original omission amounted to nothing more than a little sloppiness. Continue reading →