Over the next two years, Hughes bought several more hotels in Las Vegas. The eighth floor became his center of operations, and the ninth floor was his residence. So Hughes did what any billionaire would do: he bought the hotel. Eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes checked into the Desert Inn and refused to leave. The legendary hotels that were built during the city’s first great boom - the Sahara, Sands, Desert Inn, Riviera, Dunes, Tropicana, Stardust, and others - were inseparably tied to the underworld.Ī turn of events began in 1966. It would undergo not one but two significant transformations in coming years.Įver since 1931, when gambling was again legalized in the state of Nevada, organized crime had been deeply involved in whatever happened in Las Vegas. In the decades that followed, two men, in quite different ways, would be catalysts for sweeping revisions in the story of Las Vegas. And it seemed that Vegas had grown up, become comfortable in its own skin, adopted its own persona, and wasn’t about to change.īut Vegas of the ’50s and ’60s was just a first iteration.

The Strip was populated by hotels that many could name, although relatively few people had actually been there. After all, anyone, at any time, could go to Vegas and strike it rich. Las Vegas, a city barely 50 years old by the mid-1950s, lived in the national consciousness as a place of possibilities.