The rumor was started by a clicktbait video shared on April 6 by a TikTok account called las_vegas_vibes.

“Plans for new Disney themed Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas!!” the captions announced, complete with “leaked concept artwork” that bore the obvious stamp of AI. The post, which received 98K likes, claimed the $2 billion project was “set to be completed by 2030.”

The Lyin’ King

After being bounced around various accounts on X/Twitter, the ball was then picked up by a popular Disney fan blog on July 27.

“Years ago, The Walt Disney Company heading to Las Vegas would have been a non-starter,” Inside the Magic’s Rick Lye wrote. “Gambling goes against everything that Walt Disney stood for. But that was then, and this is now.”

The only evidence offered by Mr. Lye’s story, however, is that Disney competitor Universal is opening a year-round horror experience in a 20-acre expansion of AREA15 next year, so Disney should want to include Las Vegas in its plans to stay competitive.

Also, in a stretch undertaken to show how zip-a-dee-doo-dah Disney has become with gambling, Mr. Lye cited the $1.5 billion deal that PENN Entertainment signed last October with Disney’s ESPN to use the “ESPN Bet” trademark for its new sports betting company.

The Truth

While there have been rumblings in recent years that MGM is looking to divest itself of Excalibur and Luxor, the casino giant’s Strip properties catering to more budget-conscious travelers, there is not even a shred of a shred of evidence that the Mouse House has ever considered purchasing a casino — much less the Excalibur just because its exterior would require minimal adornment to fit the Disney brand.

Casinos do not fit the Disney brand.

That’s why Disney operates one of the world’s top-ranked cruise lines without them. (On Aug. 10, it announced that it will add five more casino-free ships to its fleet, bringing its total size to 13 by 2031.)

As complete and utter fabrications go, this one even lacks originality. Ever since Excalibur opened in June 1990, nearly everyone viewing the property for the first time has been reminded of a specific Disney landmark.

“The $294 million Excalibur is a combination hotel and theme park,” wrote Millie Ball of the Muskegon Chronicle on July 22, 1990. “It’s an eye-popper for sure, a fanciful place with a hodge-podge of Cinderella castle turrets set between two 28-story towers of 4,032 rooms, and a King Arthur theme in every inch.”

Finally, it would not be irresponsible journalism to point out that Inside the Magic averages 30 million pageviews per month despite, or more likely because of, its imagineering of the truth.

Snopes.com cites it for its false recent claims that Disney is ending the Disney+ streaming service, that it suspended Snow White from its theme parks, and, most blasphemously, that it retired Mickey Mouse.

And this subreddit was created just to keep tabs on all the clickbait stories that Inside the Magic has published since its founder, Ricky Brigante, sold it in 2018.

Look for “Vegas Myths Busted” every Monday on?Casino.org.?Click here?to read previously busted Vegas myths. Got a suggestion for a Vegas myth that needs busting? Email [email protected].

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“Ugly carpets are the results of extensive market research,” claims a website called gamblingsites.org. “Tacky carpets with weird lines and curvy patterns actually keep players awake and focused on what they’re doing.”

The reason there are so many casino myths ripe for this series to bust, other than the general lack of casino website fact-checkers, is simple psychology. Every gambler knows that every casino game is designed to take more money from them, on average, than it gives them. So the brain likes to invent “methods” to outsmart this “trickery,” which it tends to extrapolate to every detail of the casino experience.

One of the first Vegas myths busted by this series was that casinos pump in extra oxygen.

Wait, we’re not even finished with all the casino carpet theories yet …

The carpet is intended to disorient you and make it harder to find the exits,” claims Reddit user LordPraetorian in the r/LasVegas subreddit.

“The busy designs on the carpet are to draw your eyes upward, and the relatively tame ceilings are to draw your eyes downward,” Redditor “oftcenter” disagrees. “These two tactics work in combination to keep your attention in front of you and focused on the gaming amenities.”

“These myths are all absurd,” says Scott Roeben of Casino.org’s very own Vital Vegas blog. “It has never occurred to any casino manager, operations person, or owner I’ve ever spoken with to make an ugly carpet so that people will stay awake, or be disoriented, or look up instead of down.”

The Dirt

Casino carpets are busy because busy designs hide stains and wear and tear, period. They’re cleaned frequently, often more than once a day. But it’s impossible to keep up. And because margins are important to public companies, some put off replacing carpets for as many years as possible.

“Casinos are different than most other businesses because thousands of customers constantly stream through them, every day, and almost all of them are carrying drinks,” Roeben says. “The spills are more frequent and often more colorful. Slushy drinks come in a variety of colors.

“Oh, and there’s also the vomit.”

Roeben knows casino carpets. Few people working in Las Vegas have helped wear down as many as he has. He’s also obsessed with them, discussing them with his casino executive friends and rushing to tweet photos from casino floors whenever he gets wind of an upgrade. His current favorite is the new carpeting at the Fremont Hotel & Casino downtown.

“I thought people wouldn’t care for it, because it’s all over the place with shapes and bright colors, but people love it,” Roeben says. “They’re renovating the entire casino floor with this wild pattern, section by section. People have a soft spot for over-the-top casino carpet designs.”

Another (Actual) Purpose

There’s one more purpose served by casino carpets, according to Roeben. But this one has nothing to do with trickery, either.

“They also reinforce a casino’s brand,” Roeben says, “and it’s a distinctive element of that brand, which is why you won’t see carpeting duplicated between casinos.”

For instance, the Horseshoe carpet (in the rebranded Bally’s) contains literal horseshoes in its pattern.

“That’s the only one I can think of that’s so on the nose,” Roeben says. “In most cases, though, the pattern is just something distinctive to that one casino. It’s usually so distinctive that a lot of people can identify casinos just based on the carpet.”

Such brand recognition isn’t always in a casino’s self-interest. For instance, law enforcement will sometimes release a photo of a crime scene to the media but, as a courtesy to the casino, not identify where the crime occurred.

“They’ll show an isolated photo, maybe with the yellow tape across some carpeting,” Roeben says. “And people on social media will immediately recognize the casino and announce it.

“Carpet nerds are like the forensic scientists of carpeting.”

Look for “Vegas Myths Busted” every Monday on Casino.org.?Click here to read previously busted Vegas myths. Got a suggestion for a Vegas myth that needs busting? Email [email protected].

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In reality, though, the difference between choosing a bottle or a can of Budweiser from your hotel room minibar could be 30 days in jail and a $250 fine — if you consume its contents in public. That’s why it’s not the greatest idea to drink on the streets of Sin City without a quick primer on the strict and weirdly specific laws that govern imbibing in public here.

As always, we’re happy to clear up any misperceptions about Las Vegas that you might have.

Don’t Be a Glass Clown

The bottle of minibar Bud was the wrong choice.

That’s because Section 12.43.025 of the Clark County Code prohibits carrying open glass beverage containers on the Strip or downtown. The law was passed 10 years ago to prevent people from using them as weapons and to cut down on broken glass littering the streets.

And yes, your glass bottle is still considered legally open if you reclose the cap!

Only paper or plastic cups, bottles and containers, or aluminum cans are allowed to be openly partaken of in Las Vegas. Ordering a drink to go from a casino or standalone bar means that it will be served in a plastic cup or container. And, when you’re ready to walk, the bartender will pour your unfinished Mojito from a glass into a street-legal vessel.

And that applies to any beverage, not just the fun ones. Which means that, on the Las Vegas Strip, you can be cited for drinking from a glass bottle of Coca-Cola! (Good luck finding one anymore, though!)

There are specific restrictions pertaining just to alcohol, however…

Dampening Your Spirits

It’s illegal to purchase alcohol from a liquor store, convenience store, or supermarket and then open the container, even if it’s a can, within 1,000 feet of its place of purchase. (This law was meant to discourage drunken loitering in front of liquor stores and 7-11s.)

Drinking alcohol is also illegal within 1,000 feet of a public or private school, place of worship, hospital, recovery facility, or homeless shelter. Since the Strip has none of these places, this list applies only to public drinking downtown, where open container violations carry a maximum fine of $640.

However, it’s also unlawful to drink in a parking lot or a bus stop anywhere in Clark County, and the Strip has plenty of those.

Finally, just like anywhere else in the US, drinking alcohol inside a car is a huge legal no-no, even if the ignition is off, even if you’re just a passenger, and even if that car is the Uber you called.

All over Nevada, this is a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail, a $1,000 fine, and five points added to your driver’s license, with penalties doubling if you’re caught in a work or pedestrian safety zone.

Where you can drink alcohol legally inside a vehicle is in the back of a taxi (as long as the container isn’t glass) or limo or party bus (from any container). You can also drink from any container you like inside a parked or moving RV so long as you’re not the driver when it’s moving.

Look for “Vegas Myths Busted” every Monday on?Casino.org.?Click here?to read previously busted Vegas myths. Got a suggestion for a Vegas myth that needs busting? Email [email protected].

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In one of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitor Authority’s funny new TV commercials, a father informs his son that broccoli is “the only food they have” in Vegas. “Everything is broccoli,” including the ice cream, he tells the grimacing tyke, who elects to stay home instead.

In the ’90s, Las Vegas wanted you to come with your kids. Now, it wants you to leave them at home. That’s because Vegas’ attempt at appealing to families failed miserably, leading to a massive loss of revenue. Right?

Nope.

In 1993, a new MGM Grand opened. (The old one became Bally’s, and now, Horseshoe.) The largest single hotel in the world with 6,852 rooms, MGM was the first resort to top $1 billion in construction costs. It was also the first new Vegas resort to directly target families since Circus Circus opened in 1968.

In addition to a “Wizard of Oz” display featuring prominently inside the casino, MGM built a $100M amusement park on 33 acres out back. Its rides included a roller coaster, log flume, rapids raft, and a simulated film studio backlot boat tour.

Here’s the thing, though: nearly all of the other attractions that debuted during Las Vegas’ supposed family-friendly failure survived and continue to thrive. They include the Circus Circus Adventuredome, New York-New York’s roller coaster, the Big Shot ride atop the Stratosphere, Mandalay Bay’s beach and wave pool, and M&M’s World.

Not So Magical

The only other major example of a kid-friendly attraction to debut in the ’90s and close in the aughts was Caesars Magical Empire, an almost completely forgotten “high-tech, elaborately themed, multichambered wonderland” geared at visitors aged 12 and up. It opened in 1996 and closed in 2002. Though it was three hours long and included dinner, it cost a whopping (for back then) $125 to $200 per person. And frankly, reviews were mixed.

Despite these two closures, Vegas has added new kid-friendly attractions every year of the new millennium. The Stratosphere (now The Strat) debuted three rides (X-Scream, Insanity, and SkyJump) that still keep thrilling on its upper decks, though it removed its High Roller roller-coaster in 2005. It was the world’s highest coaster, but also one of its slowest.

Last year, a 7,000-square-foot video arcade replaced the former sportsbook at Bally’s/Horseshoe. And the immersive, 200K square-foot Area 15 art experience featuring the Virtualis VR game room opened in 2020, and is expanding to feature Universal’s first year-round horror experience not connected to a theme park.

Failure of Failure Evidence

After the MGM Grand amusement park, the most frequently cited evidence for the failure of Las Vegas to appeal to families is the free pirate show once staged five times a night in front of MGM’s Treasure Island.

In 2003, MGM transformed “The Battle for Buccaneer Bay” into “The Sirens of TI,” an MTV-inspired attempt to titillate Gen-Xers that new casino owner Phil Ruffin mercy-killed 10 years later.

The impulse to build more pyramids, Eiffel Towers, and Venetian canals gave way to a desire to appear more luxurious than the next guy.

Ironically, the casino space that previously served as the backstage area for both pirate shows is now rented by Victory Hills Exhibitions for its Marvel Avengers Station attraction, which opened in 2016.

A kids show.

Success by the Numbers

The biggest problem with the family-friendly failure myth is that numbers don’t bear it out. Between 1993 and 1994, Vegas visitation grew from 23.5M to 27.2M. Discounting the recent post-pandemic recovery, this remains the largest single annual percentage uptick in tourism ever.

From 1992 to 1996, the percentage of families visiting Las Vegas rose from 7% to 12%, according to the LVCVA. Today, that number is a whopping 21%.

So, the next time you see a commercial about Vegas’ broccoli ice cream, another way to read that is that Vegas now appeals so strongly to families that casinos now need more adults drinking and swearing at their blackjack tables to even things out.

Look for “Vegas Myths Busted” every Monday on Casino.org.?Click here to read previously busted Vegas myths. Got a suggestion for a Vegas myth that needs busting? Email [email protected].

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The good news is that it’s not good enough. Not nearly — at least, not this week.

The Experiment

For our recent story about what happened to the art from the Silver Slipper, art collector Gary Autry told us that the casino was purchased by Steve Wynn, who knocked it down in 1988.

We just spaced on the exact year. So, instead of looking up the story we wrote, we decided to use this situation as a proving ground for ChatGPT. We asked it when Steve Wynn bought the land on which the Silver Slipper once stood.

We like to do this little thing known in the last millennium as fact-checking. So whatever answer we got, we were going to check it anyway. But we were curious what that answer would be. And we were not let down….

AI not only answered our question incorrectly, it threw in a bonus falsehood. Wynn did not purchase the land in 1989, and he built The Mirage nowhere near the Silver Slipper. The Mirage, which in 2027 will reopen as the second Hard Rock Las Vegas, occupies the former site of the Castaways casino hotel.

Already envisioning the very story you’re reading now, we pointed out to AI its incorrect answer without guiding it to a correct one. We replied “that’s not true” and grabbed some popcorn. Here was AI’s response to that…

Was this a joke? Had AI detected our little experiment and decided to conduct its own retaliatory one on us?

Casino developer Michael Gaughan had nothing to do with either the Silver Slipper or Sahara, which was opened exactly where it stands today, nowhere near the Silver Slipper, back in 1952.

Bot Out of Hell

We could have kept typing “that’s not true” over and over, hoping for ChatGPT to self-destruct like that floating computer that began spouting smoke from its ears on the original “Star Trek.”

But we don’t have the capital to blow up a laptop. And besides, as a human, we had become overwhelmed with frustration and needed to scream at ChatGPT.

ChatGPT handled our anger very calmly and professionally. It replied with a handy timeline containing more inaccuracies. Can you spot them all? Let’s make this a fun game now…

You’re welcome, AI. OK, now here are all the new inaccuracies you just introduced…

1. The STRAT was developed on the site of Vegas World, which was opened by Bob Stupak in 1979, not the Silver Slipper.

2. The Pioneer Hotel and Gambling Hall is located in Laughlin, Nev. It was a sister property to the former Pioneer Club in downtown Las Vegas. Margaret Elardi, who owned both the Frontier and Silver Slipper, also owned both Pioneer casinos but she never built another one, or planned to, on the Strip.

3. There is no Sam Elardi — at least not in the annals of Las Vegas history. We realize this now, of course, though we still have no idea what annals are. But in the moment, we relied solely on our memory, which turned Margaret Elardi into a man named Sam. Nevertheless, you somehow confirmed that this nonexistent Sam Elardi did, in fact, acquire the site of the Silver Slipper. So we count that as your third inaccuracy.

We apologize for our sexist memory. We are only human. What’s your excuse, AI?

At this point, we asked ChatGPT, two more times, what year Steve Wynn acquired the Silver Slipper land. And we got two new incorrect answers. (We can’t make this up!) The first was 1998 and the second was delivered along with this doozy…

Steve Wynn built Wynn Las Vegas across Las Vegas Boulevard from the Silver Slipper — on the site of the old Desert Inn, which he knocked down. And Wynn never took 10 years to build anything in his life — other than one hell of a nightmarish case against himself.

Allegedly.

Artificial Stupidity

We started out asking ChatGPT one simple question. Not only did it provide three wrong answers to that question, four separate times, it padded its wrong answers with seven more utterly false statements about Las Vegas.

And that’s with instantaneous full access to everything that’s ever been posted to the internet.

Finally, we looked up our June article and gave AI all of the correct info. It spewed most of it back to us dutifully…

To be fair to AI, which is something it would never be to us, we don’t think this is all necessarily its fault.

And that’s actually great news for the future of a weekly internet series that busts myths about Las Vegas.

By the way, an hour later, we asked ChatGPT to put the history lesson we taught it into practice, just so we could physically witness the hand we personally had in helping AI eventually replace us.

We asked it, for a fifth time, when Steve Wynn purchased the Silver Slipper lot. Here’s how it replied…

Look for “Vegas Myths Busted” every Monday on Casino.org.?Click here to read previously busted Vegas myths. Got a suggestion for a Vegas myth that needs busting? Email [email protected].

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Sorry, Barry Manilow, you didn’t beat Elvis Presley’s record for consecutive sell-outs at the Westgate in Las Vegas last year. According to a plaque on display at that very casino resort, you still have 200 concerts left to play there.

Just kidding, Barry. The figure on the plaque is a hunka hunka burning crap.

On Sept. 8, 1978, close to the year anniversary of Presley’s death, then-Las Vegas Hilton owner Barron Hilton unveiled a bronze statue of the King, sculpted by Carl Romanelli, as the climax of a Hilton convention called “Always Elvis.”

According to the plaque attached to the statue’s base, Elvis performed a record 837 consecutive sold-out shows at the hotel, which opened as the International, from July 31, 1969, through December 12, 1976.

That number is 201 sold-out performances more than Elvis actually gave.

This could have just resulted from an innocent mistake, of course. Then again, there are other, equally plausible, explanations.

Some suspect that Hilton, who purchased the International from owner Kirk Kerkorian only a year into Elvis’ eight-year residency, inflated the number of concerts Elvis played to cover up egregious fire code violations.

If Elvis had indeed played to 2.5 million people, as the plaque claims, that would have meant the showroom was packed way beyond its reported capacity of 1,150. Even at 837 concerts, that’s 2,986 people per show. But that’s still better than admitting that, at 636 shows, 3,930 people were allowed in at a time.

The Manager Did It

Another possibility is that both the shows and their total audience were exaggerated in number by someone who specialized in exaggerations.

Not only was Col. Tom Parker secretly an illegal immigrant from the Netherlands, which is why he is believed to have never allowed Elvis to tour outside the US, but Elvis’ longtime manager never served as a colonel in any military organization.

If Elvis was the King of Rock n’ Roll, then Parker was the King of BS.

What’s a couple hundred extra shows going to matter when nobody’s going to bother counting them all up, anyway?

Suspicious Mind

Except that someone did bother counting them all up. When Westgate purchased the property, which had been briefly known as the LVH, it sought to play up its historic Elvis connection.

In 2015, the casino resort debuted “Graceland Presents Elvis: The Exhibition, the Show, the Experience,” which even offered guided tours of the facility, including what was left of the King’s former 30th-floor penthouse.

Because the attraction was a joint production with Graceland and Elvis Presley Enterprises, Graceland’s chief archivist, Angie Marchese, took it upon herself to make sure the exhibit got all its facts straight. And the 837 figure just didn’t add up.

Again and again, Marchese manually counted the records of every Elvis performance at the International and Las Vegas Hilton and, again and again, arrived at 636.

Click here to count them yourself.

The record was corrected, but the plaque never was. Its misinformation still gets repeated in social media posts and in articles that source information published before Marchese’s audit set the record straight.

Look for “Vegas Myths Busted” every Monday on?Casino.org. To read previously busted Vegas myths, visit VegasMythsBusted.com. Got a suggestion for a Vegas myth that needs busting? Email [email protected].

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You might think Las Vegas has been this way since the 1960s, and you might think that because it’s all over the internet.

“In the 1950s and 1960s, the city was a popular destination for LGBTQ+ people because it was one of the few places where it was relatively safe for them to be open about their identities,” according to gayety.co.

That’s a beautiful statement — that isn’t true.

But it’s not a surprising statement. Las Vegas has a history of rewriting history to place itself on the right side of it.

All that Rat Pack magic of the 1950s was made before Black people — including Sammy Davis Jr. — were even allowed to enter through the front doors of Las Vegas Strip casinos. (And did you realize that Elvis Presley’s 1956 Las Vegas debut occurred in front of a segregated audience at the New Frontier?)

By the same token, LGBTQ+ people were routinely beaten up, fired from their jobs/livelihoods, and even arrested just for daring to be themselves in public.

Anything Goes in Vegas … Except That

In 1861, Nevada passed a law prohibiting sodomy. Calling nonmissionary-style sex an “infamous crime against nature,” the law specified an automatic prison term of “not less than five years” for any violation.

In case it wasn’t clear just how dehumanizing this ordinance was intended to be against gays, it specified that violations could be committed “with man or beast.”

In a history from which no pride can be taken, Las Vegas police for decades used this law to conduct sting operations entrapping gay men.

First Positive Sign

In 1970, Marge Jacque, an openly lesbian cocktail waitress, quit the Sands to purchase the former Club de Paris.

She transformed it into the first openly gay bar in Las Vegas. Its motto, printed on matchbooks and T-shirts, was “Glitter and Be Gay at Le Café!”

Patrons included Las Vegas performers Liberace, Rip Taylor, and Paul Lynde. And, the bar served as the editorial office for “Gay Notes,” Nevada’s first gay publication.

For a while, at least, it seemed that the tide was beginning to turn.

Until, in August 1978, someone burned Le Café to the ground. The apparent hate crime remains unsolved.

As late as 1992, Jahna Steele, a dancer from the topless show “Crazy Girls” who was voted “Sexiest Showgirl on the Strip” a year earlier, was fired after the tabloid TV show “A Current Affair” outed her as being born John Matheny.

Final Gay Arrest

The last person arrested for breaking the sodomy law, whose name was never publicized, met an undercover agent at a local gym, then invited him into his home.

If you don’t already know, you’re going to cringe when you read when this occurred.

Are you sure you’re ready?…

The year was 1993, and we knew?you weren’t ready.

The jury happened to be deliberating just as the Nevada State Senate repealed the sodomy law on June 16 of that year, so the case was dismissed.

So consider this fact if you ever find yourself wondering why Liberace, Siegfried and Roy, or Sammy Davis Jr. lacked the courage to come out in such a gay-friendly town.

Nope, that last name you read was not a mistake.?In his 2013 memoir, “My Way,” Paul Anka wrote that?Davis frequently “got into bisexuality” with him during their heart-to-hearts.

“He would confide these things to me, how cool it was to be involved with two women, with guys,” Anka wrote.

The only time the Rat Pack icon came close to addressing this publicly was during an interview he granted the men’s porn magazine Genesis for its? February 1977 issue.

“The greatest turn-on I’ve ever experienced was watching a gay film,” Davis told porn star Marilyn Chambers. “I couldn’t deal with it. Maybe it’s my own latent feeling about homosexuality that I can’t deal with. I have this image as a stud, and you can’t be a stud and a homosexual at the same time.”

We bring this up not to out a Las Vegas legend who clearly identified as heterosexual, but to demonstrate the deep fear many people back in the day felt simply about the way they were born, and how much closer that fear hit to where most Americans live than they realize.

In 2002, Las Vegas passed a different kind of gay ordinance — one that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation in employment, housing, or public accommodations. It was one of the first cities in the country to do so.

Yet while Las Vegas has come a long way since the days when it mistreated LGBTQ+ people, it shouldn’t be permitted to whitewash the shamefully long period during which it did.

Look for “Vegas Myths Busted” every Monday on?Casino.org.?Click here to read previously busted Vegas myths. Got a suggestion for a Vegas myth that needs busting? Email [email protected].

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In 2002, hip-hop singer Mary J. Blige sang “Blue Suede Shoes,” a Carl Perkins song popularized by Elvis Presley, during the “Divas Live” special on cable network VH1.

She later told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “I prayed about it because I know Elvis was a racist. But that was just a song VH1 asked me to sing. It meant nothing to me. I didn’t wear an Elvis flag. I didn’t represent Elvis that day.”

In 2021, Grammy-winning producer Quincy Jones told the Hollywood Reporter that he refused to ever work with Presley. Pressed to explain why, the 88-year-old flashed back to his days writing for orchestra leader Tommy Dorsey in the ’50s.

Elvis came in, and Tommy said: ‘I don’t want to play with him,’” Jones recalled. “He was a racist mother******.” Jones then said, “I’m going to shut up now,” returning after a beat to add: “But every time I saw Elvis, he was being coached by Otis Blackwell, telling him how to sing.”

As noted by the Hollywood Reporter, Blackwell told David Letterman on his show in 1987 that he and Presley had never met.

In 1989, Public Enemy recorded what is now the soundtrack to the racist Elvis rallying cry. The rap group’s song “Fight the Power” reaches its emotional pinnacle with Chuck D’s combative lyrics: “Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant s*** to me, you see, straight-up racist, the sucker was, simple and plain.”

Hate Me Tender

Elvis’ cultural appropriation of Black rhythm & blues strikes many people as an act of racism.

Presley, who shares Las Vegas patron sainthood along with the Rat Pack, plundered from Black singers while benefiting dearly from something they could never enjoy: white privilege.

It’s what allowed Elvis to achieve the kind of notoriety and wealth singing Black music that Black singers such as Arthur Crudup, author and original singer of Elvis’ first hit, “That’s All Right, Mama,” were always denied.

Crudup was credited as the composer on Elvis’ 1954 Sun Records single but had to wait until the 1960s before receiving a measly $60K in back royalties for the song that made Elvis a star.

While Elvis didn’t sound and move like a Black singer as a gimmick to earn money — that’s how he naturally sounded and moved — he understood how it gave him a clear runway to success. A white boy performing what was then deemed “race music” gave white teenagers a built-in defense for consuming it. And that’s why he became the king of rock n’ roll.

But was Elvis a racist in any uglier sense of the concept?

Segregated Vegas Residency

It’s highly likely that Elvis played to whites-only crowds during his Las Vegas debut at the New Frontier from April 23 to May 9, 1956. While this assertion can’t be proven beyond all doubt, no account of the engagement has ever noted otherwise.

Not unless Elvis put (integration) into his contract, as Josephine Baker did,” said Claytee White, director of the Oral History Research Center at UNLV Libraries.

Seen through the lens of modern morality, playing to segregated audiences also seems like a racist act. However, in 1956, it wasn’t seen that way. All crowds on the Las Vegas Strip, including those serenaded by Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and Harry Bellafonte, were white. African Americans weren’t allowed to enter showrooms during shows unless they were headed to the stage, and even black headliners were forced to exit the resorts after their sets.

As for why he didn’t insist on integration in his contract, Elvis was still a newcomer to the scene, with little bargaining power. He wasn’t even technically the headliner, but a third-billed “special guest” who sang four songs at the end of each show. Standing up for equality at this point in his career could have ended it.

It’s a moot point anyway, since his domineering manager, Col. Tom Parker, did all the negotiating and would never have entertained such a risky move.

The Racial Slur

In 1957, Elvis was accused of uttering a racist slur that still occasionally gets attributed to him. In April of that year, Sepia, a white-owned sensationalist monthly for Black readers, published a story headlined: “How Negroes Feel About Elvis.”

“Some Negroes are unable to forget that Elvis was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, the hometown of the foremost Dixie race baiter, former Congressman Jon Rankin,” the author wrote. “Others believe a rumored crack by Elvis during a Boston appearance in which he is alleged to have said: ‘The only thing Negroes can do for me is shine my shoes and buy my records.’”

Suppose anything about Quincy Jones’ account of his first encounter with Elvis is to be believed. In that case, this journalistically irresponsible report is most likely what soured Tommy Dorsey, as well as many other musicians of the day, on Elvis.

Aware of Sepia‘s dubious reputation, the Black associate editor of the Black-owned JET magazine sought to investigate whether Elvis ever actually uttered such an inexcusable statement.

“Tracing the rumored racial slur to its source was like running a gopher to earth,” Louie Robinson wrote. “No matter what hole it dived back in, it popped out of another one.”

Some people interviewed by Robinson repeated Sepia‘s claim that Presley had uttered the comment in Boston, a city Elvis had yet to visit at that point.

Others claimed he said it on Edward R. Murrow’s show, on which Elvis had never appeared.

Robinson then asked several Black people who knew Elvis whether they believed he could say such a thing, even in private to another white person. Not a single person did.

“I never said anything like that,” he stated emphatically, “and people who know me know I wouldn’t have said it. A lot of people seem to think I started this business. But rock n’ roll was here a long time before I came along. Nobody can sing that kind of music like colored people.”

Robinson’s investigation not only declared Elvis innocent of the charge, it went as far as stating: “To Elvis, people are people, regardless of race, color, or creed.”

While this should have cleared Elvis of voicing the racist comment once and for all, the charge still survives as an urban legend all these decades later.

“Many whites in the 1950s, including celebrities, had used anti-Black rhetoric,” wrote David Pilgrim, curator of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, in a 2006 statement published on Ferris State University’s website. “It was easy to believe that Presley, the Mississippi-born, once-working class, former truck driver had ungratefully lambasted Blacks.”

But Pilgrim continued, “There is no evidence that it happened … Moreover, there is evidence that Presley donated money to the NAACP and other civil rights organizations; (that) he publicly lauded Black musicians; and (that) he treated the Blacks he encountered with respect.”

Elvis’ Black Roots

Elvis grew up on the Black side of the railroad tracks in the segregated American South. Though none of his schools were integrated, most of his good childhood friends were Black. He learned his Gospel inflections and hip-shaking moves during the “sanctified meetings” he was invited to attend in the all-Black churches of Tupelo, Miss.

In Memphis, the two African-American newspapers, The Memphis World and The Tri-State Defender, hailed Elvis for standing up to society’s rules of exclusion. In the summer of 1956, the World reported, “the rock n’ roll phenomenon cracked Memphis’s segregation laws” by attending the Memphis Fairgrounds amusement park “during what is designated as ‘colored night.’”

A month later, Elvis attended a charity event sponsored by WDIA, Memphis’ Black radio station. Its all-Black roster of performers included B.B. King, who sang Presley’s praises. “What most people don’t know,” King said, “is that this boy is serious about what he’s doing. He’s carried away by it. When I was in Memphis with my band, he used to stand in the wings and watch us perform … He’s been a shot in the arm to the business, and all I can say is, ‘That’s my man!'”

’68 Comeback Special

Probably the best refutation of Presley’s rumored racism is the story of what was supposed to be a ho-hum NBC Christmas special titled “Singer Presents … Elvis,” after the sewing machine company. The special was set to close with Elvis singing the 1943 Bing Crosby standard, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” Both NBC and Col. Parker insisted on it.

But Elvis, who wasn’t a writer — he sang songs written by others — just couldn’t come up with the right words. Luckily, the show’s director, Steve Binder, had a better idea. Instead of talking about brotherhood, Elvis should sing about it. And the vehicle should be more than just a song. It should be a gut-wrenching declaration of racial equality.

Binder shared his idea with the show’s vocal arranger, Earl Brown, who had co-written “In the Shadow of the Moon” for Frank Sinatra. Brown went home that night and pulled an all-nighter with his piano. By 7 a.m., he had written arguably the best song Elvis would ever record.

“If I Can Dream” imagines Dr. King’s vision, where “all my brothers walk hand in hand,” then asks, “why can’t my dream come true … right now?”

Elvis channeled his inner Mississippi revivalist preacher, raising his voice and flailing his arms as if leading a sermon. The song took several takes to nail, not because Elvis was off, but because the band and all-Black backing singers, including Darlene Love, kept choking up at his impassioned performance.?

Chuck D-Escalates

When asked by Newsday in 2002 to back up his charge of Elvis being a “straight-up racist,” Public Enemy frontman Chuck D sounded much more nuanced than he did in his lyrics.

“As a musicologist, and I consider myself one, there was always a great deal of respect for Elvis, especially during his Sun sessions,” Chuck replied. “My whole thing was the one-sidedness, like, Elvis’ icon status in America made it like nobody else counted.

My heroes came from someone else,” Chuck continued. “My heroes came before him. My heroes were probably his heroes. As far as Elvis being The King, I couldn’t buy that.”

Ironically, Elvis himself would have agreed with this. In 1969, when a reporter referred to him as the “king of rock n’ roll” during a press conference following the opening night of his Las Vegas residency at the International Hotel, Elvis rejected the title, as he always did.

Instead, he called attention to the presence in the room of his friend Fats Domino, its rightful holder in his mind.

A Final Reckoning

Did Elvis Presley play to segregated crowds back when they were the only crowds available on the Las Vegas Strip? Most likely, he did.

And yet, the Rolling Stones are rarely, if ever, accused of racism. So why is Elvis?

“Presley took the swinging jump and the playful (sometimes mischievous) sexuality of rhythm and blues music into mainstream American living rooms,” Pilgrim wrote. “While talented Black entertainers labored in smaller venues, sometimes in relative obscurity, Presley became a wealthy and famous international star. So, some Blacks resented his success (and him).”

Does Elvis deserve to be branded a racist just because he allowed a racist system to make him a star at a time when it was the only system available to him?

There are many ways to answer that, depending on one’s perspective. But a straight-up yes is difficult to justify.

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For decades, businessmen are believed to have awoken in ice-filled Las Vegas hotel bathtubs, remembering that drink they were fixed the night before by the illegal sex worker they asked up to their room.

That’s when, the story goes, they notice a note left on a nearby counter. It reads: “Your kidney has been removed. Seek immediate medical attention.”

Renal 911!

While cavorting with an illegal sex worker gets the occasional tipsy tourist “trick-rolled” for his Rolex and other valuables, none of those valuables ever includes a vital organ. Not one case of illegal kidney harvesting has been documented in Las Vegas or elsewhere in the US.

As originally told, the businessman was visiting New York when the kidney-snatchers struck.

The myth went mainstream when newspapers picked up on it. Though the story was only retold by columnists attempting to debunk it, what stuck with most readers was the myth, not the debunking.

“It has a classic structure, dealing with already existing myths about dangerous New York and dovetailing into the much-publicized need for transplant organs,” read a March 31, 1991 column from Wisconsin State-Journal reporter George Hesselberg.

Anatomy of a Myth

Around 1996, the myth picked up its more believability-enhancing details — the ice-filled bathtub and the note on the bathroom counter. Initially, the victim woke up on the plain old floor of his hotel with no note. (Just because you’re a kidney thief doesn’t mean you have to be rude!)

The setting also switched from New York to Las Vegas. We suspect that’s because it dovetails better with Sin City’s roots in organized crime, as well as the known lengths that Strip casino resorts go to prevent information about crimes and deaths on their premises from leaking to the media.

“We get about a dozen inquiries a year about it,” Clark County Coroner Ron Flud told the Las Vegas Sun about the myth back in 1996.

As usual, pop culture didn’t help the cause of truth any. TV portrayed kidney thefts on a 1991 episode of “Law & Order” and a 2006 episode of “Las Vegas,” and the movies included scenes in “The Harvest” (1993) and “Urban Legend” (1998).

By 2001, the myth was so widespread that the National Kidney Foundation asked anyone claiming to have had a kidney stolen in the US to contact them for help in documenting a case.

In 23 years, according to the organization, no one has.

We Kidney You Not

Though no documented cases have occurred in the US, and the scenarios differ markedly, kidney theft is reportedly a thing elsewhere in the world.

According to a 2008 report in Britain’s The Guardian, seven people were arrested in the Indian city of Gurgaon that January for luring 600 laborers to an underground medical clinic over the course of a decade.

The brokers promised the laborers jobs, then either duped or forced them into donating a kidney to wealthy clients who needed one in the US, UK, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and Greece.

Five people were convicted in the black-market ring. According to a March 2013 report in the Hindustan Times, the scheme’s leaders, Dr. Amit Kumar and Dr. Upender Dublesh, both received seven years each of “rigorous” imprisonment.

Art Caplan, co-chairman of the United Nations task force on organ trafficking, estimated that about a quarter of all kidneys transplanted internationally in 2011 appeared to have been trafficked.

Again, though, no documented case of case of kidney theft has ever occurred in the US.

That is, not until the morning you wake up in an ice-filled Las Vegas hotel bathtub with a note on the counter.

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All major resorts on the Las Vegas Strip now charge resort fees, even those, like Planet Hollywood, that once proudly advertised not doing so. According to a growing chorus of consumer advocacy websites, paying these fees is unnecessary because they’re illegal.

“You do not legally have to pay any hotel resort fee,” claims killresortfees.com. Resort fees violate Nevada’s Deceptive Trade Practices Law, the website proclaims, so you may refuse to pay them at check-in.

Tell the manager you already paid the published rate for the room and all necessary taxes,” killresortfees.com advises, encouraging you to stand your ground.

Is this good advice? Only if you don’t mind running a serious risk of having your reservation canceled, being charged a cancellation fee, and getting escorted out of the hotel by security.

Moreover, many hotels won’t even allow you to raise a stink about resort fees at check-in. Unless you specifically remember to inquire about hidden charges, they will only be revealed after you check out and your credit card has already been billed for them.

Hidden in Plain Site

The first resort fees went unnoticed because only a few dollars per night were charged by only a few hotels 25 years ago.

Now, according to a Nerd Wallet analysis of more than 100 hotels around the US in January 2023, they average $42.41 per night or about 11% of the overall cost of a hotel stay.

Only four hotels on the Las Vegas Strip don’t charge them: Travelodge by Wyndham Center Strip, StripViewSuites at Jockey Club, Hilton Garden Inn Las Vegas Strip South, and Best Western Plus Casino Royale.

To check if a hotel charges a resort fee and how much, visit resortfeechecker.com.

Why Resort Fees Exist

According to hotels, they’re a convenience for their guests, who demand only one price for a bundle of amenities rather than be billed separately for things like Wi-Fi, gym access, and local phone calls.

Because all travelers still use the hotel phone to make local calls.

The real reason resort fees exist is the introduction of online travel agencies (OTAs) in 1996. The first resort fees were rolled out one year later, allowing hotels to compete on Expedia, Travelocity, and Booking.com.

Now that 41% of all booking comes through OTAs versus 29% via hotel websites and 29% through travel agents, according to hospitality.net, the cost of not appearing on the first page of OTA results has increased, too.

And resort fees provide other economic benefits. Hotels pay commissions to OTAs for every room booked — commissions based only on room rates, not separate fees. Additionally, resort fees contribute to revenue per available room, an important performance indicator. And according to the analyst firm OTA Insight, resort fees offer tax advantages.

But the biggest incentive for hotel corporations to continue charging resort fees is because it’s a revenue stream their stockholders have grown accustomed to. According to Consumer Reports, US hotels collected a whopping $2.9B in resort fees in 2018, triple their 2004 take.

Not Illegal … Yet

You can certainly challenge resort fees, for instance, by filing a dispute with your credit card company or a complaint with your state’s attorney general. But even if you can (somehow) waive them, you’ll still need to pay them first.

By the way, you shouldn’t take advice from avoidincometax.com, either. (Yes, it’s a real website.)

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No, cybercriminals didn’t gain access to a computer that sent 1.2 million of gallons of water gushing out of one of Las Vegas’ most recognizable water features. And no, the Bellagio fountains aren’t next on their list.

The following Monday, TI resort officials released a statement explaining what happened.

“Siren’s Cove is scheduled for its annual maintenance, which cleans and maintains all the pipes in the fountain,” it read. “This process will take about four to six weeks.”

Viral Vegas

Years ago, shutting down a popular Strip feature for some mundane reason could be accomplished without press releases needing to be issued.

However, the Strip is now roamed, on the daily, by dozens of vloggers competing to create Las Vegas content. Many have grown dependent on its virality for their livelihoods.

When you combine this overcrowded field with the corporate inclination toward concealing minor closures — or anything else seen as not shining the most positive light possible on their properties — misconceptions can spread rapidly.

That’s where we come in.

By the way, as of this writing, the original post remains up and no Vegas vlogger has shared Treasure Island’s explanation for why the lagoon was drained.

What Really Attacked Siren’s Cove

A drained Siren’s Cove isn’t anything close to the big deal it would have been 20 or 30 years ago. The two pirate ships currently in drydock just serve as atmosphere these days — decorations to admire while scarfing down a Se?or Frog’s quesadilla.

But from 1993 through 2013, they did battle as part of two spectacular free pirate shows. The second one, “Sirens of TI,” smoked the space with pyrotechnics and sexily clad female dancers four times a night starting in 2003.

That show was sunk by Phil Ruffin, who purchased Treasure Island from MGM Mirage for $775 million in 2009.

Ruffin no longer wanted to foot the reported $5 million a year it cost to stage a show that generated no income. And he saved even more money by converting a third of the space formerly used by the production to retail and restaurants.

The first pirate show, “The Battle of Buccaneer Bay,” was christened in 1993 by Treasure Island founder Steve Wynn, a much bigger proponent of free public entertainment than Ruffin or any of today’s other Strip resort operators. (Yes, we’re looking at you, Hard Rock International, for replacing Wynn’s Mirage volcano with a giant Hard Rock guitar hotel.)

Wynn’s Bellagio fountains could indeed be the next target on someone’s list. (That’s could be. We know exactly how myths can start and want no part of that.) But the fountains, which have been reported to cost upwards of $3.65 million to operate annually, are much more likely to be taken out by corporate cost-cutting than hackers.

If you were unfortunate enough to stay in Las Vegas during the MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment cyberattacks last September, you would have noticed all the water features continuing to function throughout the chaos.

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The internet has made modern folk heroes of real-estate holdouts who stand up for what’s right in the face of corporate might. One of the most famous is Edith Macefield of Seattle, the little old lady who refused to sell her family’s 108-year-old farmhouse to developers, forcing them to construct their commercial building around it. (If that story sounds familiar but you don’t know why, it inspired the 2009 Pixar movie Up.)

Las Vegas has a David-and-Goliath story just like that.

“During the development of The Mirage in the late 1980s, the Villa de Flores owner refused to sell the property to developer Steve Wynn,” according to historiclasvegasproject.com.

Only, like hundreds of other stories told about Las Vegas, this one isn’t exactly true.

Landlord Locked

The 6/10ths-of-a-parcel lot at 3601 Vegas Plaza Drive, first purchased by Blake Ruth in 1964, was sold to Mike Flores and his parents for around $500K in 1974, according to Clark County records. The new owners built the 36 dwellings on the lot that still stand today.

That’s no longer the case with the neighborhood surrounding the Villa Del Flores.

In October 1986, casino mogul Steve Wynn purchased the Castaways casino for $50 million and started buying up the land surrounding it.

A year later, he began building The Mirage, whose $630 million price tag made it the most expensive resort ever. Wynn hadn’t purchased all the surrounding land, however. And by the time he sought to build his $430 million Treasure Island in The Mirage’s former parking lot in 1991, it was clear that the Villa De Flores stood smack in the way of his vision.

But here’s the thing: Flores always wanted to sell his property to Wynn.

I feel like [General George] Custer, I’ve been here so long,” he told KTNV-TV/Las Vegas in 1993. “I just wanted to retire and fade into the sunset. I’m still here. So please, Steve Wynn, buy the place … Please, I’m desperate.”

And the reason he was so desperate by then was because of his own greed. While the myth would have you believe that Flores, like Edith Macefield of Seattle, won his battle, the truth is that he decided to play hardball with someone very out of his league, and lost.

Very hard.

Real-life Pirate Battle

Seeing the property as his lottery ticket, Flores demanded $6 million from Wynn, which was unreasonably high. At the time, the total assessed value of the land and buildings was only $291,870, according to county records.

Wynn refused to be extorted but countered with a still-generous $2 million. And if you’re wondering why the two men couldn’t just meet in the middle at $4 million, it’s because they were both very stubborn.

In fact, after Flores rejected Wynn’s offer, the casino mogul focused his energy on ways to retaliate against Flores — at least, according to Flores.

Wynn may or may not have encouraged Clark County to schedule roadwork in a manner that cut off all traffic in and out of Villa De Flores, as Flores claimed. But he very purposefully situated something across the street from the apartment building that made tempers, among other things, explode.

In 1999, one of the tanks went up in flames. Miraculously, none of the apartment residents was injured in the blast or ensuing fire. It was ruled accidental, though Flores called it an “accident waiting to happen.”

“Steve Wynn is to the good-neighbor policy what Jeffrey Dahmer is to dining etiquette,” Flores said around that time, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Spite Hotel

In 1997, Flores fired the next salvo in what had become a real-life pirate battle. He decided to auction off the land beneath his property to the highest bidder.

Flores figured that the threat of situating an even wealthier, more avowed Wynn enemy between his own two mega-resorts would finally force Wynn to come close to or meet his $6 million demand.

But Flores’ plan backfired. Only three entities registered for the auction:? ?

1. A shopping center developer named Martin Cable, who started the bidding at $1 million and never went higher;
2. Imperial Palace owner Ralph Engelstad, who, six years earlier, had purchased 20% of the Villa De Flores for $1 million; and
3. A representative of The Mirage, who didn’t place a single bid.

Flores ended up outbidding Engelstad for his own building at $3.5 million, becoming its sole owner.

Wynn returned fire with a lawsuit claiming that the proposed hotel was too big and would violate several building codes.

“He sued me, he sued my parents, he sued my architect, he sued the county commissioners,” Flores told KSNV at the time. “I think he sued my cat and my mother-in-law.”

Goliath Moves On

Flores never got to build his spite hotel, and by 2000, Wynn lost interest in making life miserable for him. That’s because he had already sold The Mirage and Treasure Island for $4.4 billion to the company that became today’s MGM Resorts.

Wynn used his windfall to buy the Desert Inn for $270 million, knock that down, and build the $2.7 billion Wynn Las Vegas — once again, the most expensive resort ever — in its place.

Flores finally sold the Villa De Flores in 2004, but not to MGM. He got $3.8 million from real-estate investor Kevin Golshan of LA.

Three years later, Golshan flipped it for just north of Flores’ original dream price: $6.5 million. The buyer was Henderson, Nev. resident Ray Koroghli, who today still owns the property.??

Neither the tribe nor Koroghli returned Casino.org’s emails and voicemails asking about their plans for the secret apartment complex.

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“It’s so hot in Vegas,” the post claimed, “the Wynn pineapple lit on fire.” The video received 700K additional views when it was shared by the X/Twitter news feed, Las Vegas Locally.

To be clear, palm trees can’t spontaneously combust from exposure to 115-120°F air. (Nor can actual pineapples.) But facts aren’t known for their virality on X/Twitter.

“I guess if the tree was dry enough the sun’s just going to do its job and cook it to death,” commented @DioDiablo702.

@MrVasireddi knew better, theorizing it was “caused by a nearby building window reflecting sunlight onto it.”

There was also @nogeese’s extremely alternative explanation: “That was the burning bush telling them they are all sinning in modern day Sodom and Gomorra!” (sic)

Liar Liar Palms on Fire!

Palm trees are highly flammable. Called “nature’s tiki torches,” they’re loaded with combustible oil and shaped like giant candlesticks.

While heat from the sun can cause their fronds to dry out, making them more likely to burn, an external ignition source — a spark, flame, or lightning strike — is still required for that to happen.

In July 2017, several social media users shared videos and images of a palm tree burning in Kuwait, claiming that it also spontaneously combusted.

Those posts claimed the temperature there reached 143.6°F, though temperatures actually hovered around 122°F in Kuwait that month and the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth was 134°F, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

It turns out, the tree shown burning in those photos and videos was struck by lightning, according to Snopes.com, and it didn’t even happen in Kuwait.

Burning Question

Casino.org contacted the Clark County Fire Department (CCFD) where a spokesperson confirmed that an engine did respond to “a small fire at that date” at the Encore Beach Club.

The cause of the fire, however, was “a small firework” in the tree — probably installed and set off by a DJ as part of their set.

“Crews put water on the tree and it was promptly extinguished,” CCFD said in an email.

Nevertheless, news teams from both KTLA in Los Angeles and WSVN-TV in Miami left comments on Twitter/X, asking @KMart for permission to show the video on their newscasts.

By the way, traffic lights don’t melt in Las Vegas heat,?either.

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According to a pervasive Las Vegas myth, the mouth of the old MGM Grand lion served as the casino hotel’s entrance. Even the Pulitzer Prize-winning Las Vegas Sun described the original MGM Grand entrance in March 2001 as “A huge lion head with its wide-open mouth serving as the doorway.” As you can see from the photo below, this just wasn’t true.

The lion’s mouth myth is more explainable than most this series has busted. That’s because it was actually circulated by the hotel’s corporate owners, then repeated over the ensuing decades by journalists who didn’t bother fact-checking. MGM Grand CEO Terry Lanni, who took over in 1995 when the casino hotel was two years old, frequently cited the lion’s-mouth entrance as a prime example of the failure of corporations to give proper consideration to cultural sensitivities.

It has been widely reported that many Chinese gamblers believe that traveling anywhere through a representation of a lion’s mouth invites bad luck — not nearly as much bad luck as traveling through an actual lion’s mouth, presumably. But enough.

It wasn’t literally true (that they entered through the lion’s mouth),” former MGM Mirage executive spokesperson Alan Feldman told Casino.org. “But many customers believed it to have the same negative vibes, and refused to use that entrance.”

In 2014, Casino.org’s own Scott Roeben published a “Vital Vegas” blog listing eight fascinating Chinese gambling superstitions that Las Vegas casinos heed to try to please their high rollers from China. These superstitions explain why, for instance, both the Rio and Encore casino hotels are entirely missing floors 40-49. The number 4 is considered unlucky because it sounds like the Chinese and Japanese words for death.

Lion in Wait

Lanni replaced the lion with the current one in 1998. It was sculpted by Snellen Maurice Johnson, a convicted con man who changed the course of his life by becoming an artist.

Reportedly the second-largest bronze statue in the world – after a Hong Kong Buddha that stands 90 feet — Johnson’s gold bronze-polished lion stands 45 feet tall, weighs 50 tons, and sits atop a 25-foot pedestal.

Oh, and its name isn’t Leo. Leo was the name of the original MGM Grand lion, after the one who roars at the start of all MGM films. (There were actually 11 different movie Leos, and the original one was named Slats, but let’s stick to busting one lion myth at a time.)

Today’s MGM Grand lion is called, simply, Grand Lion.

In addition to switching lions, Lanni ditched the MGM Grand’s original Wizard of Oz-themed area and amusement park, replaced several restaurants, and built the Mansion, a group of 29 individually designed Mediterranean-themed residences.

Feldman did state another reason the original MGM Grand lion had to go, by the way — one based on a more indisputable fact.

“It was also ugly,” he said.

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Some conspiracy theorists believe that the monumental Apollo 11 Moon landing was filmed on a Hollywood movie soundstage by director Stanley Kubrick while others believe that all six Moon landings were staged in the desert.

Like timeshare salespeople on the Strip, this one never seems to go away.

One video currently circulating on X/Twitter claims to show a hub of tourist activity for the frighteningly gullible near Las Vegas.

It’s a spot, the post claims, where many believe the hoax was perpetrated because a hill in the background happens to resemble one in a moon landing photo from Apollo 17.

Another recent video purports to feature scenes of the faked moon landing filmed in the Nevada desert and recently released by WikiLeaks.

“Explain this, defenders,” announces the X/Twitter account @truthscant in a post linking to the video.

In fact, thousands of recent social media posts, YouTube videos, and Reddit threads recycle this and other old conspiracy theories for new audiences, keeping them in the cultural conversation.

Most posit previously (and thoroughly) answered questions such as how the famous American flag planted by astronaut Neil Armstrong could ripple in the wind when the moon has no atmosphere, why the sky had no stars, and who the hell took the photo of Armstrong descending the ladder to become the first human on the moon.

Not Over the Moon

The people behind the disinformation, including FOX TV, which in 2001 produced and aired a “documentary” called “Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?” refuse to let facts of any kind stand in their way.

These facts include the recollections of the astronauts and 400K scientists and engineers who toiled to make Apollo 11 happen, the moon rocks the astronauts brought back to Earth, and the high-def photos taken in 2011 by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter of the footprints and flags left by all six Apollo missions on the Moon.

By the way, you have to hand it to NASA for going as far in covering up its staged Moon landings as planting fake evidence of them on the Moon itself!

As Armstrong himself wrote in 2007: “It would have been harder to fake it than to do it.”

Apollo 11 Crew Was in the Vegas Desert

Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins did leave their footprints in the desert 100 miles northwest of Vegas. But that’s only because they visited the Nevada Test Site (now known as the Nevada National Security Site) as part of their training for the Apollo 11 mission.

During their three-day visit in February 1965, they practiced observing and collecting rocks from the lunar surface, discerning volcanic features from impact craters, and safely circumnavigating the rims of those craters.

Incidentally, the flag’s “ripples” were caused when Armstrong and Aldrin bent its frame while digging it into the ground. The camera’s exposure wasn’t long enough to capture faint starlight. And the photo of Armstrong descending the ladder was a still from a video taken by a camera mounted on the descent module. It was activated by a cord pulled by Armstrong.

Oh, and WikiLeaks never released any faked moon-landing footage. The majority of the aforementioned video was taken from a behind-the-scenes look at “Capricorn One.”

Then again, of course, we would claim all this. We’re secret government agents!

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A popular myth has resurfaced since the LINQ Hotel replaced the Imperial Palace on the Las Vegas Strip in 2014 — that the latter was shaped like a swastika because its builder-owner was a Nazi sympathizer.

Oh, the Nazi sympathizer part was true, though Ralph Engelstad denied it, and it was never proven by any government entity. But that’s only because the hotelier agreed to pay $1.5 million to the Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB) in 1989 — then its second-highest fine ever — for “damaging Nevada’s image by glorifying Hitler and the Third Reich.”

Engelstad also agreed to nine restrictions on his gaming license to avoid a full-blown inquiry that could have resulted in its revocation.

The Hitler bashes were thrown in Engelstad’s “war room,” a secret, 3,000 square-foot Imperial Palace lair decorated with Nazi memorabilia, murals of Hitler, and a painting of Engelstad dressed in full Nazi uniform. Oh yeah, and, according to the Times, the parties were staffed by bartenders in T-shirts reading “Adolf Hitler: European tour 1939-45.”

Engelstad claimed his interest in Hitler was purely historical and that the festivities were just “theme” parties to boost employee morale. The gaming authority didn’t see it that way. According to the Times, their investigation also turned up a printing plate used to make hundreds of bumper stickers bearing the words “Hitler Was Right.”

According to a never-retracted 2005 article on Deadspin.com, one guest of the 1988 Hitler celebration claimed that Engelstad “forced some Jewish employees to come against their wishes. He wanted one Jew to cut the cake, but the person ducked out. Ralph ran around trying to find him.”

Myth Understanding

The myth of the swastika-shaped Imperial Palace, which, frankly, never seemed so outlandish, considering what happened inside the building, pretty much ended with the advent of Google Earth in 2005.

While the casino hotel had swastika-like angles, aerial shots clearly showed no distinct resemblance to a swastika or any other known symbol.

But the myth has resurfaced since the Imperial Palace was imploded, and that’s another myth because it wasn’t imploded. It was supposed to be, but then the Great Recession hit, and Harrah’s (now Caesars), the debt-plagued company that purchased the hotel from the Engelstad family in 2005, opted to build the LINQ over the bones of the Imperial Palace instead.

So, when viewed from above, the current hotel retains the former hotel’s exact, non-swastika shape today.

Taking the Good with the Bad

Engelstad did a lot of good for Las Vegas. He built up the Imperial Palace, originally the Flamingo Capri, from 650 to 2,700 rooms, and reopened it in 1979. He also co-developed the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. He donated generously to charity. His contributions included $104 million to build a hockey arena at his alma mater, the University of North Dakota.

And he was never convicted of a crime, or even brought up on charges, in connection with the scandal.

Engelstad later denounced Hitler and apologized to the Jewish Federation of Las Vegas for his “error in judgment.” He called the parties he threw for his employees on Hitler’s birthday “stupid, insensitive, and held in bad taste.”

Engelstad died of cancer in 2002. Two arenas, the one at his alma mater in Grand Forks, ND, and a second in Thief River Falls, Minn., still bear his name.

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This goal supposedly gets accomplished by keeping the weather station’s temperature sensor in the shade instead of how most of those walking around Las Vegas experience the weather — in the blazing sun.

“Lies and misinformation,” insisted YouTube user @taylorlto806. “It’s ridiculous … The weather DOES and HAS exceeded 120 most summers, but it is no longer announced due to tourism.”

Weathering Heights

Yes, the temperature gauges at Harry Reid are kept in the shade. However, that’s true of all NWS weather stations.

“Historically, all temperatures are measured in the shade to be consistent, as the amount of solar radiation a location gets differs in different areas even when the temperature is the same,” NWS meteorologist Daniel Berc told Casino.org.

He added: “All official National Weather Service thermometers are kept in white, vented enclosures to reflect the sunlight. The shade, vents, and reflective paint allow the air to circulate freely so the thermometer can accurately measure the air temperature.”

The first one began taking observations on Jan. 1, 1937, at Nellis Air Force Base. That was back when it was known as the Western Air Express Airfield and the NWS was called the US Weather Bureau.

That station was moved to Las Vegas’ civilian airport, then known as Alamo Field, on Dec. 18, 1948, two days before it was renamed to honor Senator Pat McCarran. The station was installed outside the Weather Bureau’s office at Alamo, with its sensors measuring the air at about five feet off the ground.

On Sept. 1, 1995, the weather service replaced this station with an automated weather station located a bit east of what is now the middle of the airfield — again, about five feet off the ground. Because it was automated, it no longer needed to be manually read. So NWS abandoned its airport office for its current one on Dean Martin Drive.

That weather station needed to be moved due to the construction and expansion of a new taxiway. So, since April 19, 2007, the official NWS Las Vegas weather station has operated, once again, with its sensors about five feet off the ground in the southwest corner of the airport

Of course, as any Las Vegas resident knows, the eastern side of Las Vegas, around Boulder Highway, tends to get hotter than the rest of the valley because it sits at a lower elevation. And occasional amateur readings of above 120°F may have given this myth some legs.

“While we do not have any official climate sites there, readings of 120°F or above would certainly be plausible, however rare,” Berc said.

Why Always at Airports?

Official weather stations are usually located at airports, Berc explained, because “weather is so important to the aviation community.” (Both North Las Vegas and Henderson, Nev. have airport NWS weather stations recording and reporting their official temperatures, too.)

This would distinguish those pilots of yesteryear from today’s conspiracy theorists, who get their information from social media, fake news sites, and misinformed friends and family members.

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Kourtney Kardashian has said she was “hot slob kabob” drunk when she married her fiancé, Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker, at Las Vegas’ One Love Wedding Chapel on April 3. The reality TV star had little to no recall of her happy day, including when she hit the floor in tequila-fueled hysterics after their Elvis-impersonating minister repeatedly called her by her sister Khloe’s name.

This brings to mind a Vegas myth with legs — that waking up accidentally married after a drunken night on the Strip is common. (Warning to fans of “The Hangover”: reading any further may suck the believability out of Ed Helms marrying a kindly hooker after Zach Galifianakis accidentally roofied him.)

“Las Vegas has, for decades, been touted as the marriage capital of the world because of how quick and easy it is to obtain a marriage license,” said Rachel Tygret, an associate attorney specializing in family law at Michaelson Law in Las Vegas. “There’s no blood test required and no waiting period before using that license to get married.”

But marriage licenses aren’t available at wedding chapels, so couples must first travel to a Clark County Marriage License Bureau branch.

The one downtown, open 365 days a year from 8 a.m. to midnight, is the closest to most of the chapels.

There, hopeful celebrants must wait, with proper ID and a bank card good for $102, in a line that’s usually sizeable enough to take the buzz off most alcohol highs and the “quick” out of the “quickie wedding” stereotype.

The Sobering Truth

In the eyes of the law, the license is the marriage contract, not the ceremony. So being deemed sober enough to enter a contract at this time is all that matters.

If, once in front of the clerk, one of the applicants appears to be so intoxicated that they are unable to provide the basic information needed to get the marriage license, the clerk can, and must, by bureau policy, refuse to issue the license,” Tygret said.

So, accidental drunken Vegas weddings probably aren’t as much of a thing as “The Hangover” would have you believe. Or “Friends.” Or “My Name is Earl.” Or “That ’70s Show.” Or “Bones.” Or “What Happens in Vegas.”

A Void of Drunken Annulments

Nevada law allows either party to apply to annul a marriage performed in Las Vegas based entirely on a lack of sobriety. Tygret has annulled a great many Las Vegas marriages, and none were for that reason.

I even did one because one of the parties was still married to two other people,” she said.

Drunken Vegas weddings still happen all the time because there’s alcohol around, and it’s Vegas. But they rarely involve blotto tourists who happen to walk by a chapel and decide, why not?

Many wedding chapels in Las Vegas won’t even perform a wedding ceremony if one of the parties is judged to be too drunk,” Tygret said.

Kourtney and Travis’ Vegas wedding was a “pretend” ceremony. Offered by many chapels, this option allows clients to experience the real thing without the legal sting. So, no Clark County marriage license was required or obtained.

The couple had two more weddings after that, anyway. One of them must have involved a marriage license signed while neither of them was a hot slob kabob.

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The year is important to the eatery’s mystique since it lays claim to having been popular with the Rat Pack in its heyday. The Golden Steer has booths available that it named after Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and Joey Bishop. And it claims they correspond to the booths where the members of The Summit (as they referred to themselves at the time, never the Rat Pack) actually dined.

However, thanks to some phenomenal sleuthing by the Facebook Page Vintage Las Vegas, we now know that the strip mall where the steakhouse resides — originally called the Lucky Shopping Center — didn’t even open until late 1960.

And it did so without the Golden Steer.

Steering You Wrong

The Golden Steer didn’t exist until January 1962. Before that, from 1960-61, its current storefront was occupied by a kosher restaurant called Valentino’s. And no other steakhouse called Golden Steer ever operated elsewhere in Las Vegas.

Apparently, Valentino’s was even responsible for some of the atmosphere that the Steer takes credit for.

“Seven full months were utilized in bringing about what people have said is one of the most beautiful rooms in all of Las Vegas,” read a Nov. 10, 1960 story on the opening of Valentino’s in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which described the décor as “copper chandeliers, oak walls, wrought iron furniture … solid oak doors, and window frames against a background of exquisite colored rock.”

The Golden Steer’s January 1962 opening date was confirmed in the comments below Vintage Las Vegas’ Facebook post by one Alexandra Roe, granddaughter of Rex Littleton, who co-founded the steakhouse with his partner, Chuck Hensley.

It was also confirmed (again, thanks to Vintage Las Vegas’ research) by a reference to the “recently opened Golden Steer Restaurant” in a Review-Journal article published on Jan. 10, 1962.

According to Vintage Las Vegas, the Golden Steer adopted its 1958 pedigree in time for a 1998 Valentine’s Day party that celebrated its supposed 40th anniversary. At the time, the steakhouse was owned by Joe Kludjian, who died in 2006.

Other Claims Steaked

This four-year correction doesn’t necessarily invalidate the Golden Steer’s Rat Pack claims. But it does cast some doubt.

The official story, as related by tastingtable.com, is that Davis introduced Sinatra and Martin to the establishment “because it was one of the only restaurants where the singers could hang out before showtime — at least before The Sands (and the rest of the Strip) were desegregated.”

However, the Strip was desegregated on March 25, 1960, which we now know was two full years before the Golden Steer opened.

To be fair, the lack of any photos of any Rat Pack members dining here doesn’t prove that they didn’t. Restaurant managers would never have allowed anyone to carry a professional camera with a flashbulb into the establishment, or risk upsetting their celebrity clientele by requesting that they pose for official photos.

And The Summit did perform together at the Sands until at least 1963, with every member continuing to perform on the Strip separately, and often in pairings, for the rest of that swinging decade.

But the Golden Steer’s assertion, published on its website, that Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio? — the most famous celebrity couple in the world in the 1950s — dined there frequently, “always nestled together and enjoying her favorite libation, chilled champagne,” is malarkey.

Monroe divorced the baseball great in October 1954, eight years before the Golden Steer opened. And though Joltin’ Joe did re-enter Monroe’s life after she divorced her third husband, Arthur Miller, in 1961 — even reportedly proposing to her again — they kept their briefly rekindled relationship way on the downlow. They would never have risked making international headlines by dining together in public.

The four-year correction also doesn’t change the Golden Steer’s status as the oldest steakhouse in Las Vegas.

But that’s only because it never was and never claimed to be. The Golden Steer only claims to be the oldest continually operating one.

However, we did our own sleuthing and discovered that the Golden Steer doesn’t have much of a claim on even that title.

What About Bob?

The oldest steakhouse in Las Vegas is Bob Taylor’s Original Ranch House, which still stands where it has for 69 years at 6250 Rio Vista St.

In September 1955, Taylor and his wife, Ila, opened their restaurant in part of the living quarters of what was then their skeet-shooting ranch.

It was at the insistence of Bob’s guests, who raved about the steak dinners he expertly barbecued for them at the end of every day’s shoot.

Taylor would man the grill while drinking whiskey and spitting ice onto the hot coals.

Celebrities including Elvis Presley and Sinatra himself reportedly made what was then the 20-minute drive out of town for the unique experience. (The skeet-shooting scene in the 1964 Presley film “Viva Las Vegas” was filmed at the ranch, with none other than Taylor blasting the clay targets off-camera.)

Taylor lived until March 2010, one day short of his 88th birthday. But he didn’t hold onto his steakhouse. In 1983, he sold it to Bob Ratner, about whom very little information is published on the internet.

Ratner operated the restaurant until August 1997, when a two-year road construction project nearby reportedly slashed his business from an average of 250 people a night to 50.

A month later, Ratner sold the shuttered steakhouse to its current owner, Jeffrey Special. According to the Las Vegas Sun, Special opened it right back up in October 1997 with a former business partner.

So Bob Taylor’s Original Ranch House, Las Vegas’ oldest steakhouse by seven years, was closed for only about 90 days.

Most restaurant renovations take longer than that.

So no, we don’t think the Steer can rightly claim to be even the oldest continually operating steakhouse in Las Vegas, any more than it can claim to have opened four years before it actually did.

Multiple messages left for Michael Signorelli, who has owned the Golden Steer since 2001, were not returned before this story was published.

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When the Fontainebleau opens to the public at midnight on Thursday, many gamblers, probably wearing their lucky sweaters, will beeline for the nearest free Megabucks slot machine. Once seated, they’ll pull on its arm because of an urban legend that’s pulled on their legs for 34 years.

Elmer Sherwin was the retired 76-year-old WWII veteran who turned $100 into a $4.6M Megabucks jackpot at The Mirage on Nov. 22, 1989. That was the famous casino resort’s opening night, and it explains the origin of one of the most enduring Las Vegas gambling myths, which says Megabucks jackpots are more likely to hit on a casino’s opening night.

That’s because it’s beneficial to the casino, since the eyes of the world are already on their property.

Seven months after The Mirage opened, you couldn’t get near the Megabucks machines during the Excalibur’s opening weekend. And the story’s been the same during every subsequent Vegas casino opening.

’Bucks Naked

Megabucks was created in March 1986 by slot manufacturer International Game Technology (IGT) as a way to win back some of the business Nevada casinos was losing to state lotteries, which promised mega-million jackpots.

It was the world’s first wide-area linked-progressive slot machine system.

Whenever someone takes a Megabucks spin, a small portion of the bet is placed into a jackpot that anyone, at any machine, can win at any time. The longer the interval between jackpots, the higher the amount.

Mega Bull****

Casinos have zero control over which three Megabucks symbols click into place on a slot machine. That’s determined by a random number generator.

Because that sequence is generated entirely at random, each of the approximately 750 Megabucks machines in Nevada’s 136 networked casinos has the same odds of hitting the jackpot.

Every. Single. Time.

And though those odds have never been public information, they are certainly long.

But science, technology, and logic aren’t things that deter Megabucks believers. Most will tell you there’s more to it than that. And the evidence most will point to is, once again, Elmer Sherwin.

Sixteen years after hitting his nearly impossibly unlikely Megabucks jackpot at The Mirage, Sherwin hit another one, at age 92, at the Cannery Casino in downtown Las Vegas.

That’s like getting struck by lightning while sitting on your living room couch without a cloud in the sky,” Anthony Lucas, a professor of casino management at UNLV, told Casino.org last year when we busted another Megabucks myth.

Sherwin used the extra $21.1M to travel the world in the year he had left.

Oh, and it wasn’t the Cannery’s opening night. They had already been operating for two years.

Extra Proof that Logic Wins

Since Sherwin’s Mirage jackpot, 46 more casinos have opened in Las Vegas. The Fontainebleau will be the 47th. So far, not a single one has produced a Megabucks jackpot on its opening night.

But try explaining that to anyone beelining for a Megabucks slot at midnight on Thursday in their lucky sweaters.

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Posts about the reflective triangular column, which stood 10 feet tall, elicited some fairly predictable comments.

Aliens,” wrote Facebook user Ted Milano. “It marks a portal location to another dimension.”

“Definitely a portal,” Letty Encinas agreed. “I recorded weird objects in the sky … at dusk … I have videos.”

“Alien or other planetary beings navigation device,” added Clint Gammell.

Where to Even Start?

The first misconception about the new monolith — which police removed four days after they were alerted about it, citing “public safety and environmental concerns” — is that it was new.

According to Monolith Tracker. an online community established to map the appearances of unexplained slabs, it was first spotted just before Christmas 2020 — a fact confirmed by this YouTube video.

That places it squarely in the period that future archeologists might rightly refer to as Peak Monolith Frenzy.

A week later, a second pillar appeared in the Romanian city of Piatra Nemat. A week after that, one occupied the top of Pine Mountain in Atascadero, Calif.

Then a fourth turned up smack in the middle of the Fremont Street Experience in downtown Las Vegas. For several reasons, this remains the most suspect of all the as-yet-unsolved monolith “mysteries,” which are all completely suspect to begin with:

1.? It was the first, and still one of only a handful, to appear in an urban setting. (Another famously appeared outside Grandpa Joe’s Candy Shop in Pittsburgh. And even though shop owner Chris Beers fessed up immediately to fabricating that one himself, the story still went viral and made the shop world-famous for a minute and a half.)

2.? The photo run by news outlets of this monolith was snapped and distributed by the Fremont Street Experience’s PR team.

3.? It resembled a mirror column from Old Navy.

Since 2020, 244 metallic or mirrored slabs have been found around the globe, according to Monolith Tracker, all apparently without anyone noticing who put them there.

Though the pace eventually slowed, and the public eventually lost interest, the monoliths never stopped appearing, or, as in the case of the latest one, being discovered.

This March, one was found by construction worker Craig Muir while out for his regular hike in Powys, Wales.

Muir posted a TikTok video documenting his discovery, which he claimed had never been there before. He noted that it stood atop a 2,000-foot bluff with no roads, tire tracks, or footprints surrounding it that could possibly explain any human connection.

A Space Fraud-essy

As it appeared in the beginning of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “the monolith” was a teaching device designed by an extremely advanced extraterrestrial civilization.

Its purpose was to guide nascent humankind through the development of tools, weaponry, and the other evolutionary steps leading eventually to space flight.

By the way, monoliths by definition are made of stone, as the movie monolith appeared to be, though prop designers used much lighter Plexiglas to simulate it.

Being metallic, as all of them found since 2020 have been, makes them technically not monoliths at all. (Just saying.)

Bitter Pillar

In December 2020, a since-deleted video was posted to YouTube by a group of four Moab slackliners claiming responsibility for removing the Utah monolith. It showed them dismantling it to see what it was made of. The team eventually turned it over to the federal Bureau of Land Management, which still reportedly possesses it.

It turns out, its materials were disappointingly Earth-based. In fact, all of the monoliths examined so far were constructed of common metals, wood and/or polymethyl methacrylate. That’s the acrylic, branded as Perspex, used to manufacture shatter-proof mirrors.

A majority of scientists do think that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe.

And some unexplained something has certainly been effing with the US Navy, which officially released footage of their encounters with seemingly faster-than-possible craft in 2004, 2014, 2015, and 2019.

But whatever the objects in those Navy videos were, it is beyond unlikely that they were constructed by unthinkably advanced beings who also happen to reconstruct icons from classic 1960s science fiction, incorrectly, out of materials for sale at Walmart.

Ringside Deceit

The monolith in Atascadero, Calif. ended up being built by Wade McKenzie and Travis Kenney, local metal artists.

They told the New York Times that they were inspired to create their 400 lb. structure, consisting of a steel frame coated in a stainless steel skin, by reading about the first two.

And when you think about it using the analytical part of your brain — that is, not the part that avoids walking near black cats and under ladders — human artists had to have created every monolith.

They have the materials, the talent, and by far the greatest motive.

Artists sacrifice a lifetime of creature comforts and, frequently, their own mental and physical well-being, to pursue their dreams.

Of the very few artists who will ever achieve worldwide fame, most won’t until after their death renders their life’s work a limited collection.

During Peak Monolith Frenzy, however, almost any plank propped up in a remote locale could have gotten an unknown artist’s work seen by millions via the news.

Hell, it got Wade and Travis in the New York Times!

Lowering Our Bar

This is the 100th Vegas myth we’ve examined for this exclusive Casino.org series.

For each of the previous 99, we presented ironclad proof before declaring it busted. But for this one, since it’s impossible to demonstrate that every single metal column of unknown origin isn’t the work of space aliens, we must shift the burden of proof to the true believers.

It’s on them to prove that extraterrestrials built even one of these not-even-monoliths. It’s not on science to prove that their theory doesn’t apply to every shiny object in the desert.

To quote the aphorism coined by science communicator Carl Sagan in his 1979 book, “Boca’s Brain,” “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

Actually, that’s also a myth. That sentence first appeared in a 1975 “Parapsychology Review” article by skeptic Marcello Truzzi as “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.”

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But it’s a dry 115 degrees ….

Because dry, hot air evaporates sweat, which is how the human body cools itself, most summertime visitors to Las Vegas come assuming that dry heat is safer than the humid kind found in Florida.

This is, of course, a myth, or you wouldn’t be reading about it here.

“Both are equally dangerous,” Daliah Wachs, a Las Vegas doctor of family medicine and host of her own radio show, told Casino.org. “But dry heat may give you the impression you are cooler than you really are, which means you might not move to a cooler area as quickly as you would in humid heat.”

And, because sweat evaporates quicker in dry heat, according to Wachs, “you have the potential to dehydrate faster in dry heat.”

This is especially true if you drink alcohol, as so many poolside Las Vegas tourists do.

Alcohol further dehydrates you and inhibits your ability to sense that you are in trouble,” Wachs said.

Whenever it’s hotter outside your body than inside, your body works hard to keep the temperature inside lower. It produces more sweat and opens blood vessels near the skin to keep your internal temperature from rising.

But if the liquid lost through sweat isn’t replaced, this can lead to the first level of heat illness.

Heat Exhaustion

This can cause cramps and nausea, according to Wachs. You may also look pale and clammy, and your heart rate could increase to try to compensate for the fluid lost to sweating. You may also become dizzy, weak, and even faint.

“You should immediately head indoors, lie down, elevate your feet, and get sips of fluid,” Wachs said.

Applying cool, wet cloths to your underarms and body is also a good idea, “and contact medical authorities if symptoms continue or worsen.”

Heat Stroke

If your body overheats beyond its upper-temperature limit — 106 degrees Fahrenheit — this is heat stroke. This condition can denature your body’s proteins, causing internal organs to swell and nerve impulses to stop functioning. This greatly increases your risk of a heart attack.

After heat stroke, there are no more advanced stages of heat illness before seeing your dead grandmother at the end of a long tunnel of light.

Heat stroke is a medical emergency and can be fatal,” Wachs said.

Symptoms include difficulty breathing, seizures, fever, and loss of consciousness. And losing consciousness means you can’t drink fluids, which is your only hope of recovery.

“If you have heat stroke, 911 must be called immediately,” Wachs said.

Depending on how hot the air is and how dehydrated you were when you entered it, heat stroke can occur in a matter of just a few minutes.

For the week ending July 22, heat-related hospitalizations this year in Nevada, Arizona, and California were 51% above the average level since 2018.

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It’s not too difficult to figure out who started this myth and why. According to an old menu at Gordon Ramsay Pub & Grill at Caesars Palace: “If you think the guy sitting at the end of the bar looks a lot like Gordon, well, it just might be.”

Booking the Cooks

Caesars Entertainment wants you to think you can meet or see Ramsay by dining at one of the six Las Vegas restaurants they operate for him — so much so that the casino company requires him to visit each one at least once a year, for at least 24 consecutive hours.

During each visit, Ramsay is contractually obligated to allow himself to be photographed as though his being there is a perfectly normal occurrence and not just a requirement for him to earn his $340K annual name-licensing fee per restaurant, along with 5%-6% of Caesars’ gross profits from it.

This suggests what we all kind of know intuitively — that once someone earns millions from TV shows and passive licensing deals, they don’t want to have to cook your Crispy Skin Salmon over a hot stove after you arrive famished from seeing Mat Franco’s 7 p.m. show at the LINQ.

Celebrity chefs may sometimes help design the menus at their Las Vegas restaurants — that’s both may and sometimes. But they never cook in them. Doing so may actually be illegal if they don’t possess a Nevada health card.

Instead, they rely on their hotel partners’ food and beverage departments to manage the restaurants.

How We Know For Sure

We only know about Caesars’ deal with Ramsay because it was among the financial relationships exposed by the Wall Street Journal during the company’s 2016 bankruptcy proceedings.

We assume that Caesars, and other casino companies, have similar deals with Guy Fieri, José Andrés, Guy Savoy, Giada De Laurentis, Michael Mina, and David Chang, though those deals have never been made public.

The only time celebrity chefs can be counted on to be at their restaurants is for their grand openings.

Unfortunately, that’s one of the only times?you?can’t be because those are invite-only affairs open exclusively to celebrities and other casino VIPs.

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The city of Las Vegas is the first large city in the country to be served exclusively by renewable energy. Since this announcement was made by Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman on Dec. 12, 2016, it’s created a major misconception about where the Strip gets its power.

First of all, Mayor Goodman was referring only to the city government of Las Vegas, not to its casinos or other private businesses, nor its nearly 200K residential dwellings. More importantly, no part of the Las Vegas Strip lies within the city of Las Vegas, as we explained in an earlier installment of this series.

So while it’s awesome that all 140 public buildings — as well as all the streetlights, city parks, community centers, and fire stations — in the city of Las Vegas proper are powered by a mix of solar and hydroelectric energy, this accomplishment has nothing whatsoever to do with where the Strip gets the energy to power its famous bright lights.

The Good News

Strip resort companies are doing their part to reduce the amount of fossil fuels they burn.

Even before the 323K-panel Mega Solar Array, MGM’s Mandalay Bay was already generating up to 25% of its power from 26K solar panels installed on its roof. According to MGM, its goal is to run on 100% renewable energy sources by 2023.

Similarly, 100K square feet of the Wynn Las Vegas roof is covered with operating solar panels. And, in 2020, the company opened a 160-acre solar power plant that it said generates up to 75% of its peak Las Vegas power.

Caesars Entertainment doesn’t own solar arrays on its property or elsewhere in Las Vegas. However, the Strip’s second-largest resort owner reportedly purchases solar energy on the open market and has officially committed to reducing carbon emissions by 30% by 2025 and 95% by 2050.

In 2019, Las Vegas Sands announced that the Venetian and the Sands Expo and Convention Center had procured enough renewable energy certificates from Nevada Energy to cover 100% of their energy use. In 2022, Las Vegas Sands sold those properties to Apollo Global Management, Inc. affiliates and VICI Properties, Inc.

The Bad News

So far, all this conservation hasn’t added up to much.

Nevada’s headed in the right direction for sure. In 2021, more solar capacity was installed in the state than in any previous year, and Nevada ranked sixth in the nation in total solar capacity and generation.

It’s just that 67 more percentage points are required before the Las Vegas Strip running on 100% renewable energy is true.

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The photo was posted on June 6 by the Facebook group Sin City Las Vegas Locals, where it earned 33,000 likes and 2,500 comments.

Here are some of those comments:

A Facebook page called Let’s Explain, which categorizes itself as a science and tech authority, stepped in to resolve exactly what happened.

Except that modern traffic light enclosures aren’t made of plastic. In Las Vegas and everywhere else in the US, they’re made of aluminum alloys designed to resist an average temperature of 600°F.

The hottest temperature ever recorded in Las Vegas was 117°F. It was set on July 24, 1942 and tied four times, most recently on July 10, 2021. Direct sun does heat dark-colored objects to higher temperatures than the surrounding air, but never even remotely close to six times hotter.

Also, that explanation doesn’t cover how — even if this somehow could have resulted from air temperature and/or direct sunlight — one side of the traffic light melted while the other side didn’t.

Shedding Light

The traffic light shown in the photo isn’t from Las Vegas. It melted in Italy due to the heat from a scooter that burst into flames beneath it on July 25, 2022, according to Italy’s Open Online.

The fire occurred at the intersection of Viale Regina Margherita and Via Bergamo in Milan.

We know because Instagram user Simone Lunghi posted a video of himself posing with the damaged light four days later.

In defense of Sin City Las Vegas Locals, it never directly claimed that the traffic light in the photo melted from the Las Vegas heat. The group’s caption merely read “Vegas Summer has arrived,” punctuated by a sun emoji.

We’ve warned you, dozens and dozens of times, not to believe everything you see on the internet, kids. But we’re secretly glad that you never listen, since that leaves plenty more Vegas myths for us to bust every week.

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The “world’s tallest thermometer” in Baker, Calif., is a liar.

It’s not that there’s a taller thermometer somewhere in the world robbed of its rightful title. It’s that the spectacle that towers over the Mad Greek Café, a dozen gas stations, and everything else in the Mojave Desert town two-thirds of the drive up Interstate 15 from LA to Vegas isn’t a working thermometer.

It’s just a three-sided digital sign that displays the temperature measured by a thermometer that is real — but much, much smaller — located somewhere inside of it.

And, as far as freestanding digital signs go, the “world’s tallest thermometer” doesn’t even make the Top 10. The current record holder, located 94 miles north of Baker in Las Vegas, is nearly three times its size. And before the MSG Sphere’s 366-foot tall LED outer skin was switched on, the record holder was the Aria sign — also in Las Vegas — at twice the size of Baker’s digital sign.

Bun Warmer

In 1956, Willis Herron became a co-owner of the Bun Boy on Baker Boulevard. According to its roadside sign, this restaurant was the “home of the best fresh strawberry pie & butter thin pancakes.”

A kitchen blaze burned the Bun Boy down in 1990. While Herron rebuilt it with insurance money, he sought to add something more memorable for the public to associate it with than offensive jokes about its name.

At the time, Baker was known to the outside world for only two things — being a rest stop and being hot as blazes. So Herron threw in with the latter and paid YESCO $700K to do its thing.

The Salt Lake City-based Young Electric Sign Co. built Vegas Vic and owns and operates the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign.

After it was built, but before it was switched on, Herron’s sign was snapped in two by 70 mph winds that also trashed a gift shop below it. It was rebuilt and 125 cubic yards of concrete were poured into its steel core as reinforcement. Opening day was Oct. 9, 1992.

Under the Weather

Eight years later, an ailing Herron sold his thermometer — along with his Bun Boy and an associated motel — to a Burger King franchisee. Five years after that, the franchisee sold them to a local businessman named Matt Pike. Pike turned the Bun Boy into a Bob’s Big Boy and, in 2012, switched off the fake giant thermometer to save on its very real giant electric bill: $8K a month.

Yet saddened tourists still stopped to take photos of the darkened sign. So Herron’s widow vowed to buy it back.

After Barbara died in 2022, ownership of the sign passed to her children.

Bonus Tall Tale

Because the temperature in Death Valley was never expected to top 134 degrees Fahrenheit, that’s supposedly the highest temperature the sign is capable of displaying.

Nope. This is also a myth because the sign can go up to 139 degrees.

“The digital readout is set up to go up by 10-degree increments between the balls,” LaRae Harguess, one of the Herron children, told Casino.org. “The highest ball is 130, so 139 is the highest it will go, since there isn’t a 140 ball.”

Could a new computer program be written to accommodate even higher temperatures caused by global warming?

“Not without changing everything,” Harguess said.

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Wilkerson, publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, bought the land where the Flamingo would be built, named the casino resort, and even started its construction in 1945. But he soon ran out of money due to his costly weakness.

And guess who was nice enough to be there to lend it to him?

That’s Because the Mob Was Already Here

Bugsy first came to town in 1940, to invest in the Northern Club downtown, looking for a piece of the race wire market.

Five years later, he and his partner, Moe Sedway, launched their own race wire, called TransAmerica, through which they ran the horse-betting at the Frontier, the Las Vegas Club, El Cortez, and other Las Vegas casinos.

Race wire services kept illegal bookies — and casinos in Nevada, which had just legalized off-track betting — informed of horse racing entries, odds, pay-off prices, and, of course, results.

The precious information was rushed out over a network of telegraph wires.

Not subscribing to a race wire made your gambling operation vulnerable to a practice called post-betting, in which gamblers with better information than you could place bets on horses after they already won.

Siegel and Sedway then moved into other types of gambling and took over the entire floor of El Cortez, running it for their boss, East Coast gangster Meyer Lansky, all before setting their sites on a Flamingo takeover in 1946.

Original Gangsters

In actuality, the mob’s arrival in Sin City predated Bugsy’s arrival by almost a decade.

One prime example was Maurice H. “Goldie” Goldsworth, a rising player in the illegal LA gambling racket who was lured to Las Vegas by the promise of an untapped legal market.

Before Governor Fred Balzar signed Assembly Bill 98 into law on March 19, 1931, Las Vegas hadn’t had legal gambling since Nevada outlawed it in 1910.

Anxious to exploit the new revenue stream for her recently opened nightclub, but having no experience with gambling, Alice “Ma” Morris sought the help of a gambling expert.

And who were the experts in illegal vices back then? Mobsters like Goldie.

In exchange for an undocumented cut of the profits, Goldie applied for a modest gambling license — for a blackjack table and three slot machines — and on April 1, 1931, the Red Rooster became the first licensed casino on the future Las Vegas Strip.

Despite the wildly inaccurate 1991 movie “Bugsy,” a whopping four casinos and two full-fledged resorts beat the Flamingo to Highway 91, as the main road from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles was known in 1946.

The Red Rooster also became the first casino on the Las Vegas Strip to lose its gaming license, because serving alcohol was another thing that was, surprisingly, against the law at the time. It would remain so across the US until the repeal of Prohibition on Dec. 5, 1933.

On May 18, 1931, the feds arrested Ma and her husband, who were found guilty, granted probation, and fined $500.

Goldie wasn’t arrested during the raid, but when he applied to renew the Red Rooster’s gaming license on July 7, 1931, it was denied due to the liquor violation.

Goldie’s Gangland Goring

Mob historians don’t agree on Goldsworth’s mob bona fides. However, the LA police were convinced of them. At least the ones who investigated his murder were.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Goldsworth, 52, was beaten to death by a hammer in the back seat of his car on Oct. 16, 1958, and then stuffed in its trunk. The LA coroner called the gunshot wounds on his head “only superficial.”

Police found a white handkerchief, half a pack of cigarettes, and some flecks of paint on Goldsworth’s bloody body. Also, his pockets were turned out, indicating a search for something.

“There is no doubt about it,” LA Police Chief William H. Parker told the Associated Press at the time. “This is a mafia job.”

Killer Confesses

Police obtained a confession from one Clifford Rue, the owner of an LA credit business.

Rue, 34, admitted to murdering Goldsworth, but said he did it to steal back $4,200 Goldie had just coaxed from him, at gunpoint, to settle a personal gambling debt.

Rue said he wrapped the body in some paint drop cloths, threw it in the trunk of his victim’s hard-top convertible, and drove the vehicle into the desert for a secret burial.

Instead, Rue said, he got lost and abandoned the car on a dead-end street.

Rue was convicted of second-degree murder and began an undocumented prison sentence on Feb. 27, 1959.

Why someone so young would throw most of his life away for what today would still only amount to $45 grand has led to speculation that perhaps Rue was a mafia hitman.

But whether or not Rue was in the mafia doesn’t help determine whether his victim was.

This is a good place to point out that the reporter of the AP story on Goldsworth’s murder told his readers that Goldsworth was someone who “reportedly represented a midwestern bookmaking syndicate.”

Only a connected figure like that could have easily set up a new Las Vegas casino like the Red Rooster. And police in St. Louis, Goldsworth’s hometown, were told by his own brothers that he was associated with one Sid Wyman.

Wyman, also from St. Louis, was the part-owner of the Flamingo to whom Meyer Lansky sent a telegram from Miami on June 21, 1947 — one day after Bugsy Siegel’s assassination.

“Sid,” it read, “Ben Siegel found dead in Beverly Hills … effective immediately, change all locks in casino cage. No money transactions or markers over $1,000.00 until I arrive tomorrow evening. Business as usual with rest of staff.”

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Travel, real estate, and legal websites frequently attempt to generate more traffic than they deserve by publishing lists of “surprising facts” about the cities where they do business. One of them repeated often about Las Vegas is that it boasts “15,000 miles of neon.”

This isn’t a surprising fact, just another Las Vegas myth.

It’s not that there’s some known Las Vegas neon distance that differs appreciably from this estimate. Any approximation of how much glass-encased neon tubing twists its way through the Strip and downtown — if somehow straightened out and laid end to end — was pulled directly from someone’s butt.

This isn’t just us saying this. It’s one of the world’s foremost neon experts.

“It would be nearly impossible to accurately obtain that figure,” Emily Fellmer, collections manager at the Neon Museum, told Casino.org. “We don’t even have a count of how many linear feet of neon we currently have functioning in the Boneyard.”

A consensus isn’t always even possible about the neon employed in a single Las Vegas building. For example, one source stated that eight miles of neon were added to Binion’s Horseshoe during a 1961 renovation, according to Fellmer. A second source quoted the number as six miles and a third as four.

Myth Interpretation

Ground Zero for the miles-of-neon myth appears to be a May 2, 2000 article about Las Vegas Boulevard published in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Although the Strip is three miles long, there are more than 15,000 miles of neon tubing blazing on all the casinos lining the road,” the reporter wrote without citing a source.

This estimate got picked up by a Dec. 20, 2001, article in the Nevada Appeal and has never really gone away. On Sept. 14, 2023, even the Las Vegas Visitors and Convention Authority tweeted it out:

When asked where the LVCVA got this info, a spokesperson e-mailed Casino.org: “Let me do some digging,” and never followed up.

Chasin’ That Neon Rainbow

Even if there were some accurate way of measuring miles of neon simply by observing signs and structural trim when that R-J article ran 23 years ago — and there’s definitely not — its original estimate has since been rendered obsolete by the replacement of much of that neon with cheaper, more environmentally friendly LED lighting.

By the way, here’s a surprising fact: all neon distance is expressed as 15,000 of something.

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It’s no wonder hundreds of people a year still call Caesars Palace directly, hoping to rent this pop-cultural Valhalla without paying some third-party website’s commission.

Those people end up saving themselves from a scam. And that’s because the Hangover Suite never existed.

The wolfpack’s luxurious accommodations were really a Burbank soundstage. Production designer Bill Brzeski and his crew designed the suite and built it on Stage 15 at Warner Bros.’ Studios, the same stage where the “Ocean’s Eleven” remake was filmed.

Some sources claim the soundstage was modeled after two of the resort’s Forum Tower suites, one of which served as a location for the 1988 movie Rain Man. However, interior photos of the Rain Man Suite aren’t even a remotely close match for the digs shown in The Hangover.?

Speaking of Rain Man, The Hangover’s homage to Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise’s escalator ride down to the casino floor was not filmed at Caesars Palace, either. Nor were its gambling scenes. All were filmed at the Riviera, which was demolished in 2016.

So why didn’t The Hangover shoot in a real Caesars Palace suite, like Rain Man did?

“Because no hotel wants their property destroyed by live animals,” Danette Tull, production and communications manager for the Nevada Film Office, told Casino.org.

Were we really dumb enough to need that explained to us? Well yes, but you wondered it, too!

What Was Shot at Caesars

All of The Hangover’s scenes at the valet and registration desk were shot on location.

So were the scenes featuring the hallway and elevator lobby near the fictitious suite, site of the so-called “wolfpack walk.” These were shot on the 24th floor of the Augustus Tower.

Another famous Hangover scene filmed at Caesars Palace was the rooftop J?germeister/Rohypnol toast that kicks off the gang’s mind-boggling night. It was shot atop the Forum Tower.

However, this scene is not advisable to try to recreate, since the roof is off-limits to guests, and security is extremely wise to Hangover fans ignoring the posted signs.

Sneaking onto the roof could end up getting you a lifetime ban from all Caesars properties, as well as a tour of Las Vegas’ actual jail — not the L.A. police headquarters that stood in for it in The Hangover.

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A bunch of guys famous for spotting counterfeit reproductions are the manufacturers of a colossal one themselves.

Up to 5,000 tourists a day have visited the Gold & Silver Pawn Shop, downtown at 713 Las Vegas Blvd., since the History Channel’s “Pawn Stars” reality series began in 2009.

Many clutch family heirlooms and dreams of appearing on TV as a customer, or at least of catching a glimpse of stars Corey Harrison, Rick Harrison, or Austin Lee “Chumlee” Russell. (Richard “Old Man” Harrison died in 2018.)

But neither happens for 99.999% of them. And that’s because no members of the show’s cast work at the pawn shop anymore.

Before we continue, a big tip of our hat to Casino.org’s own Vital Vegas blogger Scott Roeben, who busted this myth back in 2013. Yet it persists because the hit reality show refuses to be honest about its reality.

Gone Stars

What “Pawn Stars” never mentions on the show is that it shoots on a secret set. A replica of the store, only smaller, it’s hidden inside the second floor of the same building and is inaccessible to the public.

Producers shot the show in the real shop during its first season. But once the series caught fire, swarming crowds of autograph- and selfie-seekers made it impossible to continue doing that.

A separate studio also allows the real pawn shop to continue reaping a profit without interruption. Though, as Roeben pointed out in his story, the gift shop does much more reaping than the pawn shop.

How You Can Get on ‘Pawn Stars’

It is possible to become one of a teeny, tiny number of people allowed to enter the “Pawn Stars” set.

A few extras will get pulled from the shop to take place in the tapings. However, the extras, who are instructed never to look at the cast, will only get to appear in the background. And the dates of the tapings are a closely guarded secret.

The coveted customer roles are all cast in advance and no one is selected to audition for them from the real shop. Ever. Auditions are prearranged and there’s a protocol of pretense for the lucky few to follow if they pass.

For instance, the final prices are set in advance.

All of that bargaining you see on the show is acting, and the “customers” are instructed how to act by producers before each scene.

Also, if you ever wondered how the Pawn Stars seem to know the historical significance, and value, of every item they assess, it’s because they’re not assessing anything.

They’ve been briefed about the items in advance.

So you didn’t realize that show business was fake until you read this article?

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Failing to see the truth in the above statement is what’s known as the gambler’s fallacy.

Streaks of Nature

The perception of streaks in random events is a function of how our brains are evolutionarily hard-wired. We see patterns everywhere, even where none exist.

Of course, the cost of falsely confusing the wind for a tiger on the plains was relatively low, especially compared to the opposite!

And that’s why, as biologists Kevin Foster and Hanna Kokko explained in their 2008 paper, “The Evolution of Superstitious Behavior,” human evolution favors “strategies that make many incorrect causal associations in order to establish those that are essential for survival and reproduction.”

The Price of Being Wrong

Incorrect causal associations are considerably more costly to make on the Las Vegas Strip,? however, which is precisely why it is lined with so many expensive buildings. And, casino operators aren’t above exploiting flaws in human reasoning to finance additional expensive buildings.

Case in point: the digital displays on roulette tables of recent winning numbers and colors. These encourage players to mistakenly perceive and take advantage of patterns that don’t really exist.

Some fancier and more brazen displays even show “hot” and “cold” numbers.

No matter how many times a number or color has come up before, its chances of coming up again are always the same.

“As the saying goes, patterns like that happen only in the rear-view mirror,” Anthony Curtis, gambling expert and publisher of the Las Vegas Advisor, told Casino.org. “You can only look back and see what they did. Hence, there’s no associated strategy you can use to predict them.”

The gambler’s fallacy also applies to patterns in our own winning and losing.

Though we have all experienced streaks of good luck that continue in the face of impossible odds, or nights when every bet we place seems cursed, neither experience ever really happened to us — at least not in the way it seemed to.

“Streaks — good and bad — will happen due to the nature of probability, but you can’t predict them,” Curtis said. “Players want to believe they can get ‘hot’ and harness that, but they never get hot. They experience normal fluctuation in results and that’s not something that can be harnessed.”

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Flashing a crisp Andrew Jackson to the front desk clerk at the Riviera might have worked for your dad in 1995, but it probably won’t get you a room upgrade in 2023 Las Vegas.

Oh wait, but your best friend told you it worked for him just last week? That’s only how he may have perceived the situation.

When guests ask if there’s an upgrade available, there are three possible answers a front-desk agent can give:

1. I’m sorry, but we’re all booked up.
2. Yes, and it will only cost $X extra per night.
3. Yes, and we can offer that at no extra charge.

Walking up to the long shiny desk with a $20 bill out, as your dad did in 1995, or even handing it over neatly folded between the credit card and ID you are required to show — known as “the $20 sandwich” — will seldom result in the coveted answer No. 3.

Why it Probably Won’t Work

That’s because, in 2023 Las Vegas, every front-desk transaction is recorded on video. And, though the rules differ from hotel to hotel, it’s generally frowned upon for front-desk agents to distribute perks according to which guests bribe them.

However, suppose you are fortunate enough to get answer No. 3, then you liberate Mr. Jackson from your wallet after your room upgrade is promised. In that case, that would be considered a perfectly acceptable tip for the clerk to accept.

It also means that the $20 trick didn’t really work?since you were free to be a jerk and stiff the agent and still get the upgrade.

“You aren’t paying for an upgrade, you’re thanking the front desk clerk for helping make the most of your visit,” explains Scott Roeben, founder of Casino.org’s own Vital Vegas blog. “The reality is that a clerk will help if they can — usually based upon directives from higher-ups — gratuity or not.

“The service will still be provided because Vegas is a service town.”

When the $20 Trick Might Still?Work

Front-desk agents might accept a flashed $20 if they have low risk aversion or don’t aspire to a career in hospitality. The trick can also still work if the hotel generally looks the other way and/or never monitors the employee videos unless something patently illegal occurs.

But there is no accurate way to know this information in advance.

However, according to Roeben, it’s now the $40 trick anyway “because $40 is the new $20, just as $5 is the new $1 for comped drinks.”

Why It Won’t Work Much Longer

About 75% of hotels now offer self-check-in kiosks, according to the automation trade publication Kiosk Marketplace. Much like airline and rental-car kiosks, guests can use their ID to pull up their reservations. After they pay with a credit or debit card, the kiosk spits out their room key.

What can’t be accomplished at a kiosk is the $20/$40 trick. The machine will offer paid upgrades or, if enough higher-priced rooms are vacant and the customer has surpassed a predetermined threshold of loyalty points, offer one for free.

When faced with the alternative of a 45-minute line to speak to an agent who also may or may not grant a free upgrade, kiosks have become the preferred check-in choice, especially for young (read: future) Vegas visitors.

What to Expect Next

This trend will likely continue until kiosks replace the job of front-desk agents entirely. Most likely, a single employee will be left, who — much like at the supermarket self-check-out line — staffs the area only to solve customer problems with the machines.

Their biggest is the monthly lease payments most Vegas resorts must pay their corporate property owners. And there’s no eliminating that cost.

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The complete collapse of the Hoover Dam, a scenario that’s highly unlikely even in the event of a big earthquake or terrorist attack, wouldn’t flood the Strip or any other part of Las Vegas.

That’s according to every real expert ever questioned about this horrific scenario.

And that’s because Las Vegas isn’t downstream (south) of the dam. It’s 35 miles northwest, as the crow flies. It’s also 800 feet higher in elevation than the top of the Hoover Dam.

Still, it wouldn’t be a good day for countless other reasons.

Hell of High Water

Though Lake Mead is only about 34% full now, 34% of its maximum capacity (9.3 trillion gallons) translates into more than 3 trillion gallons of water suddenly gushing downstream at once.

That’s enough to submerge 10 million acres of land (basically, the state of New Jersey) to a depth of one foot — but only if the deluge spread out evenly in all directions.

Instead, gravity would pull the water southward, along the natural shape of the Colorado, where it would hew to the very same canyon walls that it carved out over millions of years.

This would make the deadly wave much taller (perhaps over 100 feet) and deadlier.

This wall of water would destroy, and then submerge, Laughlin, Nev., Bullhead City, Lake Havasu City, and Yuma, Ariz., and much of? California’s Imperial Valley, before eventually emptying into the Gulf of California at the base of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula.

Basically, a collapsed Hoover Dam would flood all the communities that the Colorado used to flood regularly, which is what the dam was constructed to prevent in the first place.

Tens of thousands of lives would likely be lost, along with 2 million acres of cropland, though all those farms would be useless without their future allotment of Colorado River water to irrigate them anyway.

Finally, a collapsed Hoover Dam would devastate the habitats and populations of fish and other wildlife that have adapted to depend on Lake Mead and its controlled river flow, and could even trigger landslides and earthquakes.

Last Vegas

Though Las Vegas wouldn’t flood due to the collapse of the Hoover Dam, its days would still be numbered because of it. And that’s because the region currently gets 90% of its water from Lake Mead, which a collapsed Hoover Dam of course, would empty.

Let’s all hope this exercise continues to remain a hypothetical one.

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Frank Sinatra was certainly a driving force in the progress toward equality in Las Vegas. But contrary to a popular myth, the singer didn’t end the shameful legacy of segregation on the Strip. It took political action to do that.

Around 1955, Sinatra refused to perform with the Rat Pack at the Sands unless the casino hotel allowed group member Sammy Davis Jr. to also stay there. In response, Davis was given his own suite.

At about the same time, Sinatra noticed that another of his friends, Nat King Cole, always ate by himself in the Sands’ dressing room, never with the other performers in the main dining room. When he was told why, Sinatra invited Cole to dine with him the following evening, making the “Unforgettable” singer the first person of color ever to eat in the Sands’ Garden Room.

Dozens of books and articles about Sinatra have repeated these two stories. They may be apocryphal, but let’s give Sinatra the benefit of the doubt. He was a white megastar who promoted civil rights at a time when few whites, especially rich and famous ones, acknowledged the plight of people of color.

Sinatra and the Rat Pack headlined a 1961 benefit at New York’s Carnegie Hall for Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and he frequently addressed the evils of segregation during his concerts.

“As long as most white men think of a Negro first and a man second, we’re in trouble,” Sinatra wrote in an essay in the July 1958 edition of Ebony magazine. “I don’t know why we can’t grow up.”

The Injustice

Before 1960, people of color couldn’t stay, gamble, or dine in any Las Vegas casino hotels. This was true even of greatly admired Black headliners like Davis and Cole. They had to slip in through stage and kitchen doors to perform and leave the same way after taking their bows.

African-American Las Vegas tourists had to book rooms at boarding houses on the Westside, the historic Black community five miles northwest of the Strip. The most renowned was run by entrepreneur Genevieve Harrison, whose Harrison House is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Ol’ Blue Eyes bravely stood up against these policies. But did he really put an end to them?

Sinatra seemed to think so.

“It changed, it absolutely all changed,” he said in an interview conducted near the end of his life and included as a bonus track on a 2006 box set. “I did make some demands on some people and said, ‘Listen, if they all have to live on the other side of town, then you don’t need me, you just don’t need me.’ And I think a few other entertainers began to pick up on that, too, and they hollered, too.

“But I guess I was the biggest mouth in the town.”

What Sinatra was unaware of was the extent to which he was patronized by casino managers of the day. Because of his great fame and power, and his famously bad temper, he was habitually placated. Whatever he hollered for during his tirades was almost always granted … while he was around.

Whenever Sinatra, or other headline performers with the clout to demand integration, weren’t around, the old policies almost always returned.

At the time, Las Vegas catered to so many wealthy bigots from the Jim Crow South, it was referred to as the “Mississippi of the West” by Sarann Knight-Preddy, who in 1950 became Nevada’s first casino owner of color (not in Las Vegas but in rural Hawthorne, Nev.)

Though Las Vegas casino owners may not have shared the backwards views of many of their customers, they thought it bad for business to risk offending their sensibilities.

What Really? Desegregated Vegas

On March 26, 1960, casino representatives and government leaders met with James B. McMillan, president of the NAACP’s Las Vegas chapter, in the coffee shop of the shuttered Moulin Rouge casino hotel to hash out an end to segregation on the Strip.

McMillian chose this location because the Moulin Rouge opened in May 1955 as the first desegregated casino hotel in Las Vegas. Though it wasn’t on the Strip and closed only six months later, the Moulin Rouge was the first casino where people of color could gamble or work front-of-house jobs.

At this historic summit, which became known as the Moulin Rouge Agreement, the casino reps reluctantly agreed to allow African-Americans to patronize their establishments and hold public-facing positions in them. This landmark decision eventually led to bans on real estate redlining and discrimination in all employment and business licensing.

And what convinced the casinos to cave?

Fear, plain and simple. The Moulin Rouge Agreement occurred one day before a giant civil rights march McMillan had scheduled on the Strip to protest segregation there.

And that would have been bad for business.

“The black community fought for and won the basic human right of using public accommodations, not an entertainer who was able to get his friend a room for a few nights,” Claytee White, director of the Oral Research Center at UNLV, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2015.

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The “Crazy Girls” statue was the most photographed statue in Las Vegas. It was rubbed for good luck so often, its subjects’ exposed bottoms were buffed to a high sheen.

And, like most icons of Las Vegas, the statue came with its own myth for us to bust.

“The performers for Crazy Girls, including transgender showgirl Jahna Steele, are immortalized with a bronze sculpture,” reads one stock photography website.

Before we continue, a hat tip to Vital Vegas blogger Scott Roeben, who did an excellent job of busting this myth in 2021. Alas, it lives on. As Mark Twain once said, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”

That’s also a myth, by the way. He never said that. And his real name was Samuel Clemens.

A Crazy Story

“Crazy Girls” opened in 1987 at the Riviera, where it played for 28 years. In the beginning, singer/dancer Steele was its breakout star. In a 1991 newspaper contest, she was voted Las Vegas’ “Sexiest Showgirl on the Strip” by readers who had no idea she was born John Matheny.

In her early 20s, Steele had gender reassignment surgery in her hometown of San Antonio, Texas. In 1992, that was a much bigger deal than it would be today. So, when the tabloid TV show “A Current Affair” discovered Steele’s secret and broadcast it to America, it became a national scandal.

“She was a super nice, sweet person,” her former castmate, Angela Sampras-Stabile, told Casino.org. “Full of life and really talented as well.”

Nevertheless, “Crazy Girls” producer Norbert Aleman caved to the homophobic fallout from fans of what The Advocate labeled at the time the “uber-straight” show.

He fired her.

Butt No, She’s Not in the Statue

The idea for the statue began with a photo shoot for an ad campaign that took place in 1994, two years after Steele got canned.

During the shoot, with photographer Greg Rider, dancers Sampras-Stabile and Shellee Renee suggested that they turn their backsides to face the camera.

“No Ifs, Ands or …,” read the ad copy written below the photo on billboards and atop taxis.

But couldn’t the statue have been based on an old photo that did include Steele?

Bonus Busting

No, because the statue — completed by New Mexico artist Michael Conine to commemorate the show’s 10th anniversary — wasn’t sculpted using the photo as a reference. In fact, it wasn’t sculpted at all. It was made using body molds.

“They put baby oil all over us, then cotton, then whatever the mold was made out of,” Sampras-Stabile told us. “We had to stand completely still until it dried. One of the girls actually fainted and broke the mold, and we had to start all over.”

The End

Though Planet Hollywood saved the show, and the statue, from the oblivion awaiting the Riviera, the reprieve was only temporary.

Six years later, the casino resort’s owner decided to shutter the show and place the “Crazy Girls” statue in indefinite storage, where it remains today.

Caesars Entertainment told Casino.org that it has no current plans to display it again.

By the way, if you don’t know what became of Jahna Steele and you’re not in the mood to be sad, stop reading now.

Stung by her dismissal and lack of subsequent opportunities as a showgirl, Steele returned to school, taking computer classes and getting certified in nonprofit management. She worked for a while for United Blood Services, but missed the allure of show business.

In 2004, Steele returned to the Riviera to host the World’s Most Beautiful Transsexual Contest, in which 35 contestants competed. That earned her a starring role in a Showtime documentary about the pageant, “Trantasia.”

In 2008, Steele began hosting Aleman’s “An Evening at La Cage” drag show at the Riviera, after its former host, Frank Marino, struck out on his own with “Divas Las Vegas” at the Imperial Palace.

That same year, Steele died at age 49. According to the Clark County Coroner’s office, it was an “accidental overdose of drugs, including cocaine and morphine.”

“I don’t think she was done with life,” Marino told The Advocate at the time. “I think she was done with the pain of life.”

We warned you to stop reading.

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Yes, that billboard truck pulling up alongside your car on the Las Vegas Strip reads, “Girls Direct to You!” And yes, those dudes on the corner are handing out cards featuring photos of scantily clad women and a phone number to call.

But no, prostitution isn’t legal in Las Vegas.

Prostitution has been unofficially illegal in Las Vegas since its red-light districts were shut down in the ’40s and ’50s. Officially, prostitution in Clark County (Vegas, basically) was outlawed by the Nevada legislature in 1971. Nonbrothel prostitution, such as streetwalking and the outcall services implied by the billboard trucks, has been against the law everywhere in the state since 1987.

A number of people believe Las Vegas allows prostitution because it seems to be happening openly,” Michael Green, associate professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas told Casino.org. “It’s also something that people tend to think would be logical in Las Vegas. Anything goes here. So why not prostitution?”

A national headline last week illustrates pop culture’s role in perpetuating this myth. “Vegas Sex Worker Offering VIP Deal to Raiders,” claimed TMZ. The sex worker who made the offer, Arial Ganja, works at the Chicken Ranch in Nye County, an hour’s drive west of the Strip, which explains why she threw in a free limo ride as part of her deal.

What About the Billboard Trucks and Hooker Cards?

It’s perfectly legal for an escort to accept money to come to a stranger’s hotel room for a reason that’s unspecified. It’s also legal to advertise this service. In fact, it used to take up more than 100 pages of the telephone directory.

What a paid escort chooses to do once they get to your room may be legal or illegal. But it’s nothing the police can do anything about if no one calls them,” Green said.

If you happen across an actual brothel in Las Vegas, be assured that it’s neither legal nor a place you want to find yourself. In August 2022, two people were arrested and charged with running just such a brothel near the Las Vegas Strip. Close to 200 men had been observed by police entering their house in a residential neighborhood and exiting after less than an hour.

Brothels like this one, which advertised its services on Craigslist, are more likely to be associated with sex trafficking, kidnapping, drug dealing, and other unsafe crimes simply because the operation is, by definition, a criminal one.

Nevada’s Complicated Relationship with Hookers

In the 19th century, Nevada’s main draw wasn’t gambling or Cirque du Soleil, but gold and silver mines. The influx of diggers hoping to strike it rich resulted in three men for each woman. Brothels offered the illusion of evening up that number. Early in the 20th century, every other state in the union passed laws prohibiting businesses that force women and girls into prostitution.

But Nevada, where brothels were more culturally entrenched, did something unusual. It left the matter up to its counties and cities to decide.

“This reflects Nevada’s sometimes misbegotten libertarianism — live and let live,” Green said. “Its leaders decided to allow what other states would not. For example, in 1897, only Nevada would allow prizefighting, and both gambling and prostitution went merrily on.”

Finally, in the 1970s, some Nevada counties with long-regulated prostitution began officially legalizing brothels. Storey County was the first, sanctioning Joe Conforte’s Mustang Ranch in 1971.

Currently, 20 legal brothels operate in the 10 Nevada counties that allow them, according to the Nevada Brothel List site. That’s down from a peak of 35 brothels in the early ‘80s.

Vegas-Adjacent Prostitution

In addition to the Chicken Ranch, Sheri’s Ranch is also located an hour’s drive from the Strip in Nye County. Nye’s only other currently operating legal brothel, the Alien Cathouse, is 90 minutes northwest in Amargosa Valley.

The sex workers at Nevada’s legal brothels operate like independent contractors renting out space at hair salons or day spas. They pay licensing fees to the state and taxes on their income. Sex workers also pay for their own weekly STD tests and sex worker registration cards, which vary in price by county.

They get to negotiate their prices with clients, usually somewhere between $100-$1,000 per “menu” item, and they’re expected to kick half back to the brothel to cover rent, food, utilities, and other operating costs.

Why is Prostitution Illegal in Las Vegas?

That’s a funny question to ask, isn’t it? No one ever asks why brothels are illegal in Detroit or Wichita.

Fresh from his victory in Storey County, Joe Conforte ran smack into a wall he didn’t expect to hit when he tried securing a license to open a brothel in Clark County in 1971. Instead of getting a license, Conforte got prostitution outlawed. His request triggered county officials to convince state legislators to remove the choice of legal brothels from any county with more than 200K residents. (Back then, this meant Clark County.) Now, the law specifies 700K. Again, Clark County, but now also Washoe County, where Reno is located.

At the time of the 1971 prostitution law, the state had just instituted the Corporate Gaming Act to try to attract publicly traded companies and rid itself of organized crime,” Green said. “And, as the famous Las Vegan Andre Agassi once said, image is everything. But I think, on social issues, Las Vegas has become less libertarian with population growth.”

“We are much more conservative than most people realize.”

Click here to read about Block 16, Las Vegas’ only official red-light district. Look for “Vegas Myths Busted” every Friday on Casino.org.?Click here?to read previously busted Vegas myths. Got a suggestion for a Vegas myth that needs busting? Email [email protected].

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Except that this never happened.

According to the website latherland.com, when the Caesars Palace restaurant, which books out months in advance, didn’t have a table to offer them, another couple generously offered theirs in exchange for Swift’s autograph. Then the most famous couple in America used it to get “sloppy drunk” and “treat the place like it was the living room of her Manhattan penthouse.”

Gordon Ramsay himself — summoned from his Caesars suite by the flustered ma?tre de — yelled obscenities at the most famous couple in America while kicking them to the curb.

I’d Lie

As far as we can tell, neither Swift nor Kelce has ever been to Hell’s Kitchen. It was Travis’ mom, Donna, who celebrated her son’s Super Bowl win there.

“Thanks @gordongram for an excellent visit to @hellskitchen,” she wrote on Instagram. She never got to meet Ramsay, though — perhaps because she wasn’t drunk or rowdy enough.

Latherland.com is another in a growing number of “satire news” sites that poop out an incessant stream of digital diarrhea crafted for maximum social-media shareability without a hint of the humor, sarcasm, or occasional genius of The Onion.

It’s owned by Christopher Blair, a Portland, Maine resident described by BBC News?as?“the godfather of fake news.”

Blair excuses his “profession” by claiming that his sites, which also include the Dunning-Kruger Times, have an important lesson to teach their misinformed readers.

That lesson?is that you should always read a website’s “About Us” page before passing along its information. If anyone bothered reading Latherland’s, they would see its admitted dedication to “parody, satire, and tomfoolery.”

Sadly, most social media users read nothing more than a headline before sharing a story that grabs their attention — a fact of which Blair is well aware since it pays his bills.

The comments included: “Some role model!” from Jeri Moore Liebengood, “Good job Chef!” from Gloria Valadez-Stephenson, and “Wow … very telling!” from Karen Bock Hoffman.

The story spread wildly enough for the news service Reuters to deem it worthy of debunking in its “Fact Check” series.

Fake News’ Real Harm

Back when the Weekly World News existed as a tabloid at supermarket checkout stands, it was fun to buy a copy to chuckle at stories such as “I was Bigfoot’s Love Slave,” “3,000-Year-Old Mummy Has Baby Boy” and “Five U.S. Senators are Space Aliens.”

Yet “satire news” sites rarely if ever make claims outlandish enough to register as satire. That’s because they exist not to entertain people, but purely to trick them into believing lies. And this is not difficult, since social media algorithms don’t currently distinguish between true and false stories.

To those 39%, the source of a shared story is rarely ever checked or even important. And Christopher Blair’s stories do nothing to change this scary fact. They only add to America’s increasing mistrust of legitimate media, and to Blair’s bank account.

“As for the morality, what the fuck ever,” Blair wrote on the Dunning-Kruger Times’ “About Us” page. “I own a bunch of stuff, I’ve been building it for years, it makes me a nice living. Don’t like it? I don’t care.”

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Nevada’s US Senator Key Pittman died a few days before the November 1940 reelection that he was favored to win in a landslide. But his body was preserved in a bathtub full of ice so his seat could remain Democratic. Or so the story goes.

This was the second busted myth of this series bolstered by authors Ed Reid and Ovid Demaris in “The Green Felt Jungle.” Their 1963 New York Times bestseller was the first book to expose the secret criminal ownership behind most of the Las Vegas Strip casino resorts, but it got a ton of its facts wrong.

In their 1995 book, “A Short History of Reno,” authors Barbara and Myrick Land traced the myth of the frozen senator to a casual remark made by one of his aides, who allegedly told a reporter that the reason the senator made so few personal appearances in the last days of the campaign was because his staff was “keeping him on ice.”

Senator Steve-O

Pittman, a tall and lean upstanding Southern gentleman who retained the drawl of his Mississippi upbringing, rose to president pro tempore of the US Senate and chairman of its prestigious foreign relations committee during the first and second administrations of President Franklin Roosevelt. Several pieces of legislation bear the senator’s name, including the Pittman Act of 1918 and the Pittman-Robertson Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act of 1937.

But what really defined Pittman’s life and career was his alcoholism.

Pittman’s reason for attending the conference was to promote the cause of silver, the cornerstone of Nevada’s pre-tourism mining economy. He took this directive a smidge too far, judging by a report of what occurred after a fellow American delegate dared to challenge Pittman’s opinion that silver be remonetized. Pittman pulled a gun on the poor guy and chased him through the hallways of Claridge’s.

The Chilling Truth

Having become accustomed to concocting cover stories for his drinking, Pittman’s aides told rightfully inquiring reporters on Election Day 1940 that the senator wasn’t around because he was hospitalized with exhaustion. The 68-year-old was really hospitalized for a severe heart attack he suffered on November 4 at the Riverside Hotel in Reno.

“He had come back to Nevada to campaign and was drinking a lot,” Michael Green, a UNLV history professor, told Casino.org. “At one point before the election, he wasn’t feeling well, was drinking heavily, and he suffered a heart attack.”

Despite its debunking by more than a dozen reliable internet history blogs, and despite the true story being only slightly less shady than the myth, conspiracy theorists refuse to disbelieve the tale of Nevada’s reelected “Senator on ice.”

“Nevadans did not elect a dead man to the Senate, but they did elect a dying man, with no chance of surviving, and whose condition was being kept a secret,” Green said. “The facts are interesting enough without any legends.”

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Actually, make that two myths, because Vickie wasn’t installed atop a strip club, as is almost universally claimed. Glitter Gulch became a strip club in 1991, but poor innocent Vickie had nothing whatsoever to do with that.

When she went up back in September 1980, Glitter Gulch was a casino. And her name was always Vickie, because owner Bob Stupak envisioned his casino’s rooftop draw as a female counterpart to Vegas Vic.

Vic — installed in 1951, back when his arm still waved and he yelled “Howdy Podner!” at passersby — generated more business and publicity for the Pioneer Club than Stupak believed the low-frills casino deserved.

Stupak hired Charles Barnard, of Ad Art in Stockton, Calif., to design Vickie.

In a 2017 interview with the Stockton Record, Barnard recalled being told by the casino mogul: “I’d like to put up a cowgirl sign.” Instead of waving hi like Vegas Vic, Barnard instructed him, “I’d like to have her kicking.”

Barnard originally envisioned a pin-up girl drawn by George Petty. The animator’s titillating “Petty Girls” were a popular decoration on the nosecones of WWII warplanes.

However, Barnard told the newspaper, since securing the rights would have taken too long, “I just sat down and I started drawing a cowgirl seated on a big gold chunk.”

Barnard admitted that Vickie wasn’t modeled on his wife, Ellie, whose only comment to her husband about his neon cowgirl was that “I went overboard on the bosom.”

Less than a year after he opened it, Stupak sold Glitter Gulch to Herb Pastor, founder of the neighboring Golden Goose Casino. It was Pastor who, in 1991, combined the two locations into a strip joint he called the Girls of Glitter Gulch.

Pastor kept Vickie up top, but by then, she no longer kicked. In fact, that mechanism broke about six months after the sign was installed, but Stupak wasn’t about to give his main attraction any sick leave.

Myth Understanding

Confusion about the neon cowgirl’s identity began in 1981, when Pastor opened another new casino next door to the Glitter Gulch.

Sassy Sally’s — which occupied the same space as the Silver Palace (1956-64), Carousel (1965-74), Gambler’s Hall of Fame (1974-76), and Sundance West (1976-1980) — had a bigger and brighter sign than the Glitter Gulch’s. And there was a female name already in it. (Sassy Sally was what Pastor’s children called their favorite babysitter.)

So, tourists commonly mistook Vickie for Sally.

A 2017 press release about Vegas Vickie’s removal misstated the common misnomer as fact, which resulted in many legit publications following suit.

The sign was “originally dubbed Sassy Sally, after the casino where she rode high over Fremont Street,” reads the story in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which adds that “later, Sally underwent a name change to Vegas Vickie, reflecting her 1994 ‘marriage’ to neighboring neon cowboy Vegas Vic.”

Yahoo.com, ?RoadsideAmerica.com, and Travelandleisure.com all also either cut-and-pasted the erroneous press release or assumed that a Las Vegas newspaper would know enough not to print myths about its own city’s history.

As of this writing, none of the articles has been corrected.

What Sign Are You?

At least everyone got the marriage part correct. Vic and Vickie were “wed” in a publicity stunt to celebrate the creation of the Fremont Street Experience in 1994.

Actually, they were married twice.

“I had no idea they were already married,” Jeff Victor, former president of the Fremont Experience, told Casino.org. “So I came up with what I thought would be a fun and original idea.”

Sometime between 2005 and 2007, Victor recalled, he sent an officiant up in a scissor lift between them and pronounced them statue and wife. Again.

In 2017, Vickie was removed by downtown casino mogul Derek Stevens, so he could demolish the Girls of Glitter Gulch, Mermaids, La Bayou, and the Las Vegas Club to build his Circa casino resort where they all once stood.

Vickie had some work done — please don’t tell her we told you! — by the YESCO sign company, and now resides in Circa’s lobby, by a cocktail lounge named in her honor.

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There was never a show in Las Vegas in which Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop, and/or Peter Lawford performed as the Rat Pack.

That’s because Sinatra despised the nickname. In fact, when he, Martin, and Davis announced a reunion tour in 1987, Sinatra looked ready to serve up a knuckle sandwich to a reporter who mentioned “Rat Pack” in his presence. Sinatra’s ol’ blue eyes turned red as he referred to it as “that stupid phrase.”

Whenever only one member of The Summit was booked to perform at the Sands, others would often turn up for an impromptu collaboration. Marquees began to read “DEAN MARTIN, MAYBE FRANK, MAYBE SAMMY.”

But they never read “The Rat Pack.” Not once.

A Scar is Born

The Rat Pack originally referred to the group of Hollywood cronies encircling movie star Humphrey Bogart in the late ’40s. Sinatra happened to be in that group, along with Judy Garland, her husband Sid Luft, talent agent Swifty Lazar, composer Jimmy Van Heusen, and A-list actors David Niven, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, and Cary Grant.

Honorary members included Errol Flynn, Robert Mitchum, Nat King Cole, Mickey Rooney, Cesar Romero, Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, Angie Dickinson, Shirley MacLaine, and pretty much anyone who regularly hung out at the Holmby Hills mansion Bogart shared with his wife, Lauren Bacall.

According to most accounts, it was Bacall who forever branded the group when a few members returned home disheveled from a drunken Las Vegas weekend and she said, “You look like a goddamn pack of rats.”

Sinatra never loved the name, but he went along when the others formed a drinking club based on it. The Rat Pack had its own coat of arms (a rat gnawing on a human hand) and its own motto (“Never rat on a rat”). Its members even assigned themselves titles: Sinatra was Pack Master, Bacall was Den Mother, and Garland was Vice President.

Though Bogie’s chosen title was Head of PR, he was the club’s undisputed leader. After he died of esophageal cancer in 1957, Sinatra replaced him, not only as the club’s leader, but also as Bacall’s main squeeze. They got engaged a year later, but Sinatra broke it off when Lazar leaked word of their planned nuptials to the press.

By 1959, Sinatra, who made a point of avoiding Bacall for the rest of his life, was hanging with an all-new bunch of pals. Whenever he got together with singers Martin and Davis, comedian Bishop, and actor Lawford, either socially or on a stage, tunes were sung and insults flung. (One of Sinatra’s favorites was saying Martin was so tan because “he found a bar with a skylight.”)

Other than Lawford, all had entertained up and down the Strip by themselves: Sinatra at the Desert Inn with Bishop as his opening act, Davis at the Last Frontier, and Martin with Jerry Lewis at the Flamingo. Once their contracts all expired, they converged together at the Summit at the Sands.

By 1960, The Summit had reached the summit of cool. While filming “Ocean’s 11,” they managed to perform two shows at the Sands every evening. In the film’s final scene, the characters they play walk past the Sands marquee listing their actual names.

Myth Understood

The misperception that Frank and company endorsed the Rat Pack name comes from a conglomeration of factors. The most significant is the more than 60 years of entertainment headlines that screamed it from tabloid front pages.

An assist also goes to albums such as “The Rat Pack Live at the Sands,” a 1963 live recording that wasn’t released until 2002, long after all its members were dead and Sinatra could no longer smack the executive at Capitol Records who titled it.

Cover bands and shows, particularly the still-performing Rat Pack is Back, founded by former ’70s teen icon David Cassidy in 1999, further confused the matter.

And finally, in 2015, a bronze plaque was placed at the Venetian cementing the disliked moniker for the ages. It salutes “The Rat Pack” on the spot where their famous 1960 photo was taken in front of the Sands marquee — a marquee that never once read, “The Rat Pack.”

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