On New Year’s Eve of 1969, the casinos along the Strip pulled out all their stops to welcome in the new decade. For $19.70 per person, you could see Duke Ellington and his orchestra at Caesars for “the most fabulous new year’s party in town.” Not to be outdone, the Frontier featured Diana Ross in her farewell gig with the Supremes, and the Flamingo ran two all-nighters: Sonny & Cher performing twice in the main showroom—once at dinner and again at 2:15 a.m.—and a no-cover, dusk-to-dawn party downstairs in the Casino Theater with the Platters. Pearl Bailey was at the International, bringing her Broadway version of Hello, Dolly! to its main showroom, while Bobby Vinton and Don Rickles were at the Sahara and Shecky Greene was at the Riviera.
Las Vegas had never run so smoothly or so profitably. The Sun newspaper was so impressed with the way the casinos were vacuuming up tourist dollars, it boldly predicted that the cozy days of mob control were fading and a new era of corporate gaming was at hand. “Depending on who you talk to,” the paper observed, “the corporations, with their businesslike efficiency, are either a black eye for the state or the salvation of Nevada gambling.”
Frank Sinatra was the first one, really, to plant the idea of Vegas as a magnet for stardom. He reached the desert city in his prime, his golden voice a thing to worship up close. But the expectations of audiences were changing. In 1969, Elvis landed in a Convair jet to take care of business and proceeded to become the biggest nostalgia act along a Strip full of replicas. Now Las Vegas had become a place where you could earn top dollar on an edifice of familiarity. All you had to do was brush off the old act and play to people who didn’t see you the first time around because they were busy raising the kids and putting food on the table.
One of the shrewdest judges of show business heat around, Merv Griffin, was bringing his CBS talk show to the Circus Maximus at Caesars and inviting the top names from each marquee as guests for a weeklong series he called “The Wonders of Vegas.” Merv raved about the audiences and the resorts, but the twenty-eight-year-old pop star Paul Anka sounded an odd, discordant note. It had been a quarter century since Bugsy Siegel opened the Flamingo Hotel on Route 91 and changed the course of Vegas by ditching the old western pioneer motifs for glamour. In the years since, the mob’s money had built a luminous strip of playgrounds where the rich and infamous mingled, starting with the Thunderbird (1948), followed by the Desert Inn (1950), the Sands (1952), and the Riviera (1955).
Anka was just a kid when the last of them opened, but looking back, he’d write: “It was not uncommon to see Dean, Sinatra, and Sammy taking over from the dealers and handing out cards to the guests, visiting stars from L.A., high rollers, and so on. There weren’t tourists in Vegas in those days the way there are today—it was an exclusive, elite group of people and the gaming areas were small.”
By 1970 all that had started to change. Turning to Griffin’s show audience, Anka said, “You know, Merv, it’s not so glamorous anymore. It’s getting very mechanical. As a matter in fact, all the excitement is disappearing.”
Money, however, was gushing up from the desert. In January 1970, gaming revenues were up a robust 21 percent over the year before, to $44.9 million, and construction spending was rising fourfold. Much of that was due to the billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, who’d just opened the largest resort on the Strip—the 1,568-room high-rise International Hotel.
Everything about the thirty-four-floor mega-resort was gloriously overstated. On the top, Kerkorian created a glass-enclosed rooftop bar, the Crown Room, where “you couldn’t be any higher.” On the bottom he had a 350,000-gallon pool that was the largest in Nevada. A brochure for the hotel featured stylish couples living in the lap of this newly imagined luxury. “You never know whether you’re going to sleep in Paris, or Rome, or Hong Kong,” it boasted, because each floor was done up in a different continental decor. Handling the luggage were valets dressed as French gendarmes.
Kerkorian spared no expense when it came to the entertainment, either. In the two-thousand-seat Showroom Internationale, a venue so majestic it took two kitchens to service, Elvis was playing twice a day, at six o’clock and midnight, and enjoying himself immensely. Still trim and square-jawed, his glint undimmed, he was on a pace to make $5 million for 1970, a staggering sum, and one he obliquely joked from the stage of the International was due to the Strip’s new big-money bosses. Midway through his hourlong set, which included “Don’t Cry Daddy,” “Hound Dog,” “Love Me Tender,” “Kentucky Rain,” “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” “In the Ghetto,” and “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” he’d quip: “I’d like to get the guy who owns this hotel, that Kerkorian guy, in a craps game with Howard Hughes.” Then he’d rip into a killer version of “Suspicious Minds.”
Sonny Liston’s name wasn’t on any of the billboards outside the curved glass building. But he was part of the scenery just the same. In March 1966, Kerkorian gave the ex-champ a sweet deal on a nice little split-level with pool beside the Stardust Country Club, the same place where Debbie Reynolds once lived. Some said Sonny got a break on the $70,000 price tag as a payment for taking a dive in his second fight with Ali and making Kerkorian a lot of money. But hell, everyone had a theory about that fight. If it was fixed, it was the lousiest deal anyone had ever taken in boxing. A police report written long ago described a young Liston punching a man in the mouth and rifling through his pockets for six dollars. For all the distance he’d traveled, he was still fighting for chump change.
Still, Sonny loved Vegas, and the feeling was mutual. On April 5 of 1966, he drove his sleek new Cadillac convertible to the Clark County Sheriff’s Office to announce that Las Vegas had a new resident. A clerk handed him something called a Convicted Persons Questionnaire, which every felon had to fill out, and he listed his height as six-foot-one, his weight as 220 pounds, and his occupation as a professional boxer. He also filled in the space that required him to note that he had been convicted of robbery in St. Louis sixteen years earlier and spent two and a half years in Missouri State Prison. And that was it, the end of the old Sonny and the beginning of the new one.
Every celebrity needs a hotel, and when Kerkorian’s International opened in July of 1969, Sonny found a spot in the keno room and made it his base, showing up in shiny silver pants, polished black leather shoes, narrow sunglasses, and a black turtleneck that stretched against his massive chest. When fans came up to him while he was playing five-dollar blackjack and staring into his drink, he’d hand them cards with his name pre-signed on them so he wouldn’t have to make eye contact.
But every so often a manager or a dealer would send someone over whom he would make eye contact with. At the bar, or in the bathroom, or in a leather chair in the lounge, the former heavyweight champion would unfurl his gigantic hand and inside would be cocaine.
Why was a world-renowned figure selling drugs? Everyone sold something in Vegas. But Sonny wouldn’t even call what he was doing drug dealing. The real big mob guys came into town with hundreds of pounds of cocaine for the high rollers. Sonny was way, way downstream from that. His clientele was gym rats and hotel workers. Nonetheless, Sonny was involved deeply enough in the street scene to get caught up in a federal drug raid that nearly led to his being shot.
On February 19, 1969, Sonny’s four title fights were well behind him and fans were paying to see a pale facsimile of the greatest jab in history. He hadn’t been in the ring in four months—since he’d made a train wreck out of Amos “Big Train” Lincoln, a dubious heavyweight who was in a career free fall, at the Civic Center in Baltimore. And he wasn’t due to fight again for another month, when he was scheduled to have a rematch against a soft-punching Cincinnatian named Billy Joiner. On that night, he told Geraldine that he was going out and he didn’t know when he’d be back. He made his way in a pickup truck across the railroad tracks in Bonanza, to a place the cops pitilessly called Nigger Town.
His destination was a squat ranch home with a waist-high fence around it on the run-down corner of Duke Avenue and Castle Street that belonged to Earl Cage, a beautician who owned a salon, Earl’s Beauty Cage. A roundish man with a pencil mustache and hair that was slicked back, Cage was no one’s idea of a movie star, but he had a way with women—especially other men’s wives. He’d massage hair relaxer onto their heads and while they were under his saucer-shaped dryers draw the blinds down over his door.
Besides selling hair straightening, Cage sold cocaine and heroin out of his back room. The samples he gave his clients were probably responsible for most of the sexual attention he received, but he also did a healthy business trafficking in felony weight, and that was what kept Sonny stocked in blow. On this night, a half-dozen people were inside the house when Sonny joined them and disappeared into a din of music. He missed the two cars filled with cops that pulled up to the corner.
Bill Alden, an agent for the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, was behind the wheel of one of the cars. Alden had a photo of Cage and a layout of the home, and as he pulled to the curb he felt inside his vest for the arrest warrant that would let him break the door down. Once the two local cops who were trailing him parked their unmarked car and made their way to the back door, he made his way to the front. What happened next happened fast. He pounded on the door and yelled, “Police! You have ten seconds to open up.” Having no faith that anyone would listen, he kicked the door off its hinges before he made it to five.
The interior had a small hallway that led to the living room on the left and two bedrooms on the right. Alden swept into one of the bedrooms, where he found Cage sitting on his bed, smoking dope with another man. The heroin dealer was surprised but apparently not too surprised, because he didn’t resist. He stood calmly and allowed Alden to cuff him. This is going to be an easy night’s work, the agent thought.
At that very moment, Alden heard a commotion in the next room and the partner he’d brought along yell, “Keep your hands up. Don’t move. I told you to put your hands over your head!”
Uh-oh. That was never good.
Making sure his prisoners were securely cuffed, Alden rushed into the next room to see Sonny advancing on his partner.
“I was a big boxing fan,” Alden told me in his first-ever interview about the raid, whose details were conveniently left out of any police report and never made the newspapers. “I remember sitting in my car with my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, and listening to the Liston–Patterson fight in 1962. I’d followed Sonny Liston through his whole career and there he was, standing right in front of me in a gray sweatshirt, giving me the same stare I’d seen so many times in photographs.”
With Sonny refusing to back down, Alden had the sickening feeling that he might have to shoot the former heavyweight champion of the world. Just then, the two LVPD cops stormed through the back door and positioned themselves in front of Alden and his partner, blocking them from shooting as one approached Sonny and slowly said, “Okay . . . now . . . Sonny . . . Everybody’s friends here. . . . Let’s . . . just . . . cool . . . it.”
“Friends here”? Alden thought. What the hell did that mean? “I don’t know if he was under the influence, but he definitely didn’t look like he wanted to be our friend,” Alden told me. “If it went one step further, I would have shot him where he was standing.”
Yet to his surprise, Sonny relented. He let the officer take him by the arm and guide him out the back door to his pickup truck, while Cage and everyone else in his house were cuffed. “We’ll take care of him from here,” the LVPD officer told Alden.
The reason Alden would remember the night in such detail was that it didn’t end there. While Alden and his colleagues cuffed their suspects and brought them to federal courthouse to be arraigned, Sonny hurtled down Las Vegas Boulevard in his pickup, heading straight to a bar he knew on the north side.
A Las Vegas patrolman named Max Huggins happened by as Sonny parked in a no-parking zone and stumbled out. Huggins told me, “There was this kid from the PD, maybe five-foot-nine, not even 170 pounds. And he stopped Liston when he was drunk. He asked Sonny for his driver’s license and Sonny took a swing at him and missed. The kid knocked him back, knocked him cold. A bunch of people rushed out of the bars when they heard the commotion. ‘Hey, look, that’s Sonny Liston.’ That kind of thing. Sonny got arrested. But I’ll tell you what, it went away fast.” This is what was reported the next day:
SONNY LISTON POSTS BOND IN LAS VEGAS
Las Vegas, Nev. Feb. 20, 1969. [Reuters] Sonny Liston, former heavyweight boxing champion, today posted bond after being charged with driving under the influence of alcohol in northern Las Vegas last night. Liston, who was arrested while driving a pickup truck, will appear in court later this month.
Except that the case never went to court. In fact, the entire night seems to have been wiped clean. In later years, as Alden rose to one of the top jobs in the Drug Enforcement Administration, he’d remember thinking that Sonny must have had a guardian angel in the Las Vegas Police Department. “Why was he the only one let go?” Alden asked. “It didn’t make any sense.”