The authenticity of the book’s tone makes up for its choppy narrative flow, and one is grateful to Mr. Pileggi for not having fictionalized his material. He teaches us many curious details about the way Las Vegas casinos were run, especially in the pre-credit years when cash, both coin and paper, rained down on the tables and slot machines in such large quantities that it actually had to be added up by being weighed. He teaches us about the art of skimming the take and the even finer art of skimming the skim (…)
What Mr. Pileggi’s interviews ultimately add up to is the story of how the mob was knocked out of the casinos in Las Vegas. The chain of events is too intricate to be reproduced here. Some links were stumbled upon by accident; others were forged by painstaking investigation (…)
“Today in Las Vegas, the men in fedoras who built the city are gone”, Mr. Pileggi concludes. “The gamblers with no last names and suitcases filled with cash are reluctant to show up in the new Las Vegas, for fear of being turned in to the I.R.S. by a 25-year-old hotel school graduate working casino credit on weekends.”
“It should have been so sweet”, one of the old-timers told Mr. Pileggi. “We were given paradise on earth, but we fouled it all up.” — Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times, 1995*