FROM “Criswell Predicts,”
Fabulous Las Vegas, July 25, 1970
I predict that a gaping hole created by a meteor hitting the South Pacific will be a major marvel of the New Year! . . . I predict that the old radio show Amos and Andy will return as a TV series next season! . . . I predict that a new way of highway construction will save the taxpayers millions of dollars. . . . I predict that Art Linkletter’s “People Are Funnier Than Ever!” based on his TV interviews will hit the best seller lists. . . . I predict that Canada will soon deport all American boys who sought refuge from the draft but entered the drug market and petty theft. . . . I predict that a new medicine out of Germany will dissolve the fatty tissues in your body in a safe and sane manner! . . . I predict the cast of a very famous daytime soap opera will soon experience a plague that turns their hair purple! I predict many startling innovations for your TV viewing.
In the summer of 1970, no pair of personalities loomed over Las Vegas more than the billionaire archrivals who were battling to buy every square inch of it: Kirk Kerkorian and Howard Hughes.
Kerkorian wasn’t widely known when he made his first big deal in 1962, plowing $960,000 into eighty vacant acres just off Highway 91 in what would eventually be regarded as the greatest land grab in Las Vegas history. But he was wildly ambitious. The son of Armenian parents who had lost all of their land during the Great Depression, he was scarred by a childhood in which they found themselves moving every three months because they could not afford rent. Kerkor—his original first name—made spare change as an amateur boxer in his teens. But it wasn’t until he became obsessed with flying, and took a job paying a thousand dollars a month to ferry pilots for the Royal Canadian Air Force, that he had the means to finance his ambitions. He first bought his own plane and then built a small charter service into a national carrier that he sold in 1968 for an $85 million profit. Using the cash from that sale, he bought a stake in MGM Studios, a Hollywood institution that still had high name recognition and great stars under contract. Then he went to war with Howard Hughes.
Hughes was already on a spending spree in Las Vegas. In four years he’d gobbled up the Desert Inn along with the Castaways and the Frontier, which were across the street, and the Silver Slipper and Dunes. In all, he had a quarter of the beds on the Strip. But Kerkorian had an ingenious idea.
With the land that he bought a half mile east of the Strip, on Paradise Road, he decided to build a lavish resort that tourists could reach on a straight line from McCarran Airport without ever passing all that prime real estate that Hughes assembled on the Strip. As Hughes biographers Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele wrote, “Kerkorian’s publicity angered Hughes. It threatened to overshadow his own bid to become Nevada’s premier gambler, it bruised his fragile ego, and it meant more competition for the tourist dollar.”
But by the time Hughes realized what Kerkorian was up to, it was too late to stop him. Hughes made several ill-fated attempts to convince Kerkorian to scale back his plans, at one point insisting that the underground atomic tests under way in the desert would cause untold damage to a hotel as massive as the International. But it was to no avail. In desperation, Hughes gobbled up the Landmark, an infamous eyesore across the street from the International’s building site. The vacant building had a glass elevator that ran up its narrow spire to a spaceshiplike top that offered a panoramic view of the city, and Hughes reopened it a day before the International was scheduled to open its doors on July 2, 1969, with a gala featuring four hundred celebrity guests. But much to Hughes’s consternation, the International still got all the buzz. Limousines choked Paradise Road for its unveiling and confetti rained down on an inaugural that featured Barbra Streisand. Beaten to the PR punch, Hughes had no choice but to sit back in his darkened room at the Desert Inn and hope with all the malice he could muster that Kerkorian had overplayed his hand.
Since no one had seen Hughes in years, it was easy to call Kerkorian the more glamorous figure. But he really was. He wore his bushy brown hair slicked up and favored turtlenecks and wool jackets. His smile ran the length of his face and his eyes were pools of brown. His salesmanship and self-made story turned him into a golden boy on Wall Street, which had helped him leverage his MGM acquisition. But Kerkorian was burning through cash. Not only had he put $16 million of his own money into his hotel, he was in hock to European investors who were charging him a fortune in daily interest.
Desperate for a new round of financing, Kerkorian went to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a bailout. The agency had helped him in February 1969 when it green-lighted his request to sell 17 percent of his company at $5 a share, netting him a $60 million haul. But now, a year later, its lawyer balked at his request.
The reason may have had to do with two investigations that were suddenly raising questions about Kerkorian’s ties to organized crime.
In the first case, the SEC was taking a fresh look at his 1967 purchase of the Flamingo Hotel. He’d bought the Flamingo to raid its staff for the International. But the government’s attorneys wanted to know whether he had also purposely hid the secret ownership stake that Meyer Lansky kept after Bugsy Siegel was shot dead. Just as damaging were a pair of tapes from 1962 that suddenly fell into the hands of a New York legislative committee. In the first, Kerkorian could be heard offering to travel from California to New York to deliver $20,300 to Charlie “The Blade” Tourine, the same gangster who the FBI believed had his hooks in Ash Resnick. (According to Resnick’s FBI dossier, he introduced Kerkorian to Tourine in Miami, and helped Tourine take many of Kerkorian’s biggest bets.) In the second tape, Tourine was overheard calling Kerkorian “a real nice guy.”
The fallout was devastating. Kerkorian released a statement through his attorney denying that he had ever “knowingly been associated with any member of a criminal organization.” But when the SEC decided to delay his second public offering, the price of his International Leisure company stock went into a free fall.
Did Hughes have anything to do with the twin investigations? He certainly had enough influence in the Nixon administration to reach into the SEC. And unearthing a long-lost tape was just his style. But whether he engineered the setback or simply had a healthy case of schadenfreude, the result was the same. He watched Kerkorian scramble to unload his beloved International.
The nation’s brand-name hoteliers didn’t stay away from the Strip strictly because they were concerned about their pristine images. They stayed away because of a law that required each stockholder in a company to undergo a thorough background check by the Nevada Gaming Control Board. The law was meant to deter investments by organized crime, but it also deterred the major hotel chains from investing in Las Vegas, because it wasn’t practical for them to subject their stockholders to the Nevada rule. With Kerkorian on the ropes, Governor Paul Laxalt removed that requirement.
Suddenly free to negotiate, the biggest names in the business swept in with bailout offers for Kerkorian. Hyatt was the first, but Hilton was the most aggressive, and in mid-July, Barron Hilton announced that he had bought 37.5 percent of the International with a second round of 12.5 percent to follow, for $45 million in cash.
Kerkorian’s lawyer tried to play down the sale by saying it was simply a way for his client to “get a partner on the reservations side of the business.” Still, it was hard not to see the sale as a clear victory for Hughes, who’d dispensed with an archrival.*
It was also another sign of a tonal shift in the city. The Vietnam War was tearing America apart. But with Hughes and now the Hiltons in charge, Las Vegas was slipping back in time. One only had to read the reviews in the Sun by its entertainment columnist, Ralph Pearl, to realize how nostalgic the city was becoming. Raving about a show by the fifty-eight-year-old comedian Danny Thomas, Pearl wrote, “The young breed of so called café performer entering the saloon circuit these days could learn many lessons watching this masterful hook nose mesmerize the losers, boozers and lovers as he played the actor, the clown, the friendly neighbor next door.”
There was also little tolerance for edgy, countercultural humor, as the comedian George Carlin found out. The Frontier had always been the kind of place where you could take the wife for a steak and scotch. But on a Wednesday night in September, the crowd was horrified to hear a profanity-laced tirade from the comedian, who was promptly fired for his routine about the seven dirty words you couldn’t say on TV.
All of this might have played into Sonny’s hands if he’d been willing to be the lovable, nostalgic figure that hoteliers like the Hiltons wanted—more like his friend, Joe Louis. But just the opposite was true. Without a new fight on the horizon, or a reason to rein himself in, Sonny was freely indulging his appetites and grievances while overestimating how safe he would be in this safe haven of retro values.
—
To turn on the television in the summer of 1970 was to hear everyone shouting over everyone else. The ground troops that Richard Nixon sent into Cambodia were shouting over exploding shrapnel. Congress was shouting at the president. And the president was shouting at the nation’s college students to end their protests over a bloody seven-day period in which thousands of U.S. ground troops were sent into Cambodia and a hundred bombers were unleashed over the skies of North Vietnam. In a somber twenty-two-minute address to the nation that spring, the president swore that he needed to draft another 150,000 soldiers to accommodate the invasion of Cambodia.
In the halls of Congress, members of Nixon’s own party were horrified at the way he’d doubled the size of the conflict overnight. “Unbelievable” was how Oregon senator Mark Hatfield put it. “Ghastly,” added his Republican colleague from New York, Charles Goodell.
With widespread protests breaking out across the country, Nixon decided to double down on the domestic crime-fighting initiative that his advisors were pushing. In a playbook called “Prognosis for the 1972 Election,” they argued that to win a second term while conducting an unpopular war, Nixon would need to single-handedly prosecute “the most massive effort to control crime in the nation’s history.”
His advisors had already coalesced around the idea of a domestic drug war as the centerpiece of that policy. The question was how to wage it. Drugs were traditionally the province of local police, but Nixon needed something federal, something that he could control. And he found exactly what he was looking for in a tiny agency that for most of its existence had been lampooned as bumbling and ineffective.
The Bureau of Narcotics was formed in the early 1900s to regulate doctors who used opium to treat addicts. Even though it was made famous by the 1947 movie T-Men, it veered between scandal—officers were arrested from time to time for taking bribes—and irrelevance. As recently as 1968, it had just 330 agents working around the country in mostly administrative jobs, which put it on the far fringes of the action.
Congress tried to help the agency by merging it with the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control, a tiny offshoot of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare that monitored doctors and pharmacists who overprescribed pills. But the newly named Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) had no deep networks of sources, experienced undercover agents, or the wherewithal to mount extended operations.
Ironically, that was what made it perfect for Nixon. He could reinvent the office from the ground up and, most important, make it answer to him. It would be his tool and his legacy, and he signed a memo that ensured it would have all the clout it needed. Any other agency that had a hand in drug enforcement would have to back off. The BNDD would have the singular responsibility of investigating narco-trafficking around the world. To fulfill his mandate, Nixon gave the agency a 50 percent budget increase and sent it out to hire some real shit kickers.
All of which was how John Sutton came to work for the federal government.
—
At the age of thirty, Sutton was already a legend on the streets of Compton, California. A towering man with a fifty-seven-inch chest, the former Marine came to the police force after earning a criminal justice degree from Cal State, and from the moment he was hired he tried to be the sharpest-dressed, best-armed, meanest cop on the force.
Because his muscular frame pinched against the fabric of his uniform, Sutton desperately tried to get out of it and into street clothes from the moment he arrived. He lobbied his precinct captain for more dangerous work until he eventually was rewarded with an assignment to join a task force that was looking into a gun-running ring. Thrilled to finally be doing what he considered important work, he bought a tan leather jacket with wide lapels and a brimmed hat that he moved around until he found the perfect way to tilt it to one side. On the night of his first big undercover assignment, Sutton drove a Ford LTD with a trunk full of hundred-dollar bills to a vacant lot on the far side of town to meet two suspects. He expected his heart to be beating out of his chest, but he found himself strangely calm as the hoods opened their car’s trunk to reveal a cache of machine guns. With backup sharpshooters hidden on rooftops, Sutton bought a dozen of the automatic weapons for $10,000. In that moment the idea that he could be shot to death if something went wrong didn’t occur to him at all.
His performance that day led to a second assignment, involving a local methamphetamine lab with ties to the Mexican cartels. This time, instead of a midnight meet alone, the plan was for him to join a group of agents to go into the lab with their guns hot. “I was used to seeing the way they did it on TV,” Sutton told me. “On TV the cops were always running into someplace with their guns drawn, yelling, ‘Freeze, motherfucker, federal agent! If you move we’ll blow your goddamn head off!’” But, as he learned that night, any agent who had to talk that much was already halfway to dead. The feds he was with launched the raid by throwing a blinding stun grenade into the lab, nearly ripping its roof off as they broke down the door. By the time the drug dealers squeezed the blinding light out of their eyes, they were already in cuffs.
In late 1969, with the BNDD ramping up its hiring, Sutton sent a résumé to the agency and within a few weeks found himself being interviewed in its Los Angeles field office. The job paid only $10,000, but that was still more than the median income, and as long as gas stayed at thirty-five cents and you could buy a new home for $29,000, it was plenty. On the basis of his work in Compton, Sutton was hired that fall to join the bureau, which already included Bill Alden, the special agent who’d helped pull off the arrest of Earl Cage in Vegas and was present when Sonny got set free.
Once he entered the bureau’s training academy, a whole new world opened up for Sutton. The thirty-year-old trained in hand-to-hand combat, shooting high-powered firearms, and discreetly following cars at a distance. But what really excited him were the latest technological gizmos that the feds were using. There were parabolic microphones that picked up suspects’ conversations from miles away, and infrared video. There was also his favorite, a covert automated tracking system, a shoe box‒size device that fit in a vehicle’s car and allowed the feds to track it by radar.
When he finally arrived in the BNDD’s Los Angeles office on Olympic Boulevard and Figueroa Street, Sutton could feel the energy. The floor was divided into rows of cubicles that hummed with the sound of computers paid for by the new budget increases and a hundred agents with badges dangling from their belts. Some were coming off undercover shifts in bell-bottoms and paisley shirts, while others were dressed like bikers and yet others seemed most comfortable in their government-issue gray. They all had the esprit de corps of a group that was about to start something big and for a high purpose that went all the way up to the White House. Drinking in the energy, Sutton felt at home for the first time in his police career.
In July of 1970, after just a few months on the job, Sutton already had a dozen cases and was eager to pick up more. He was particularly eager when his supervisor dropped a file on his desk that was referred from the BNDD’s satellite office in Las Vegas. The file was about Sonny Liston.
After Alden’s brush with the boxer more than a year earlier, the BNDD’s office quietly opened its own investigation and, according to the intelligence packet, learned he was moving cocaine and quite possibly heroin out of the keno room in the International. The file was labeled “Significant Target of Opportunity.” Looking at his calendar, Sutton decided to schedule a trip toward the end of the summer, when the desert wasn’t so hot. In the meantime he’d study up on his subject.
—
After the Wepner fight, Sonny got a call from a friend in Arizona. “I need you back,” Mike Parkhurst said. “We need to finish our movie.”
Among the strange people that Sonny Liston collected, Mike Parkhurst was one of the strangest. He wasn’t even thirty and already he’d made a small fortune publishing Overdrive, a magazine that featured scantily clad women posing on top of big rigs.
Parkhurst fancied himself the Hugh Hefner of the trucking set. He worked in an old Hollywood estate that had been overrun by hippie squatters and turned it into a luxury bed-and-breakfast for long haulers. In a spasm of optimism, he added a swimming pool, Tahitian bar, theater, game room, library, and formal dining room. He even hired a chef who’d once worked for Elizabeth Taylor. But to really build an empire, the budding mogul decided that he needed a film division, too. So he sat down to write a movie about Nazis and truckers and went to New York to sell it.
The financiers who met Parkhurst at Paramount Studios had trouble sharing his certainty that big-riggers would turn out for a low-budget movie about Nazis, and politely thanked him for his time. That might have been the end of it except that, as he was walking the city to clear his head, Parkhurst found himself on Forty-second Street in Times Square, looking up at something that he instantly realized was the answer to his problem. It was a marquee for a new movie, Head, that featured the Monkees. In big black letters, it read: “Featuring: Sonny Liston.”*
The idea struck him like a bolt.
Sonny Liston! Of course! He’s just who I need to sell my movie about truckers and Nazis!
“It took me a while to track him down,” Parkhurst told me years later. “But I finally got him on the line and he agreed to meet me at a hotel in Century City for breakfast.” The young mogul patiently explained his idea for the movie over eggs and coffee, and while Sonny didn’t exactly understand all the exigencies of the plot, he smiled. After all, not only was Parkhurst willing to give him six thousand dollars just for signing on to the project, he opened up his roadhouse to let Sonny train. What could be better?
The mansion gave Sonny a place to crash in Los Angeles away from Geraldine. If he wanted a hooker, Parkhurst got him a hooker. If he wanted a meal late at night, Liz Taylor’s cook was happy to whip it up. There was sex and drugs and rock and roll around and then there was Sonny, somehow seamlessly blending right into the mix.
In the summer of 1969, when Parkhurst finally pulled together enough money to start shooting in the Arizona desert, the whole thing seemed like a vacation. One night Sonny got into a fight over a woman that turned into a bar brawl when a regular broke a beer bottle over his head and opened such a gash that Parkhurst was sure it would delay filming. To his amazement, it was barely noticeable a couple of days later. “I’d never seen anyone heal that fast,” he’d say.
Another night, the actor Chuck Napier went out with Sonny, looking for a whorehouse. They were having trouble finding one until Sonny ordered Napier to pull up beside a gang of toughs, grabbed the biggest one, and announced, “I’m lookin’ for pussy and you gonna show me where to find it.” The next morning Napier pointed to Sonny in front of Parkhurst and said, “Going out with that guy’s an adventure.”
That first stretch of filming lasted until Parkhurst ran out of money, at which point he dispersed the cast, vowing to get more. By the summer of 1970 he had enough to get the job done.
After the Wepner fight, Sonny welcomed any kind of a paycheck, and the new scenes didn’t require a lot of memorization. Parkhurst cast his daughter as a little girl who was eating an ice cream cone at a road stop when a bunch of rowdy bikers pulled up and frightened her. In perhaps one of the worst action scenes ever filmed, Sonny grabbed her with one hand and pulled a rider to the ground as the others roared past, cursing at him. Parkhurst thought the scene was over when his daughter recited the line “Do you want any ice cream?” But Sonny broke up the set by erupting in laughter.
It was said over and over again that Sonny loved children. Oftentimes it was said to mask an insult, as when someone suggested that he had a child’s mind. But that robbed him of the one part of himself that he held dear: the part that sent him to orphanages and hospital wards when no one was looking, or that inspired him to show up to a kid’s home with a swing set and a smile. Part of that may have been prompted by guilt over the way he treated Geraldine’s two daughters when they first got married. Sonny at least initially tried to be chivalrous and claim Arletha and Eleanor for his own. But he was never the father they needed, and by the time the girls were in their teens they concluded that it was better to live outside their stepfather’s shadow than be smothered by it.
As a result of all that, Geraldine accepted Daniel, whose mother may have spent as little as a night with Sonny, into her home; she desperately wanted to try to start a family one last time. In his own way, Sonny wanted to try, too, and on the day that she visited the set with Daniel he decided to do something special. When one of the actors suggested that he take his family to see a bullfight, Sonny brightened. He’d never been to one before. The actor, Roger Galloway, knew the manager of a ring in Nogales, Mexico, and offered to drive them. They all piled into his car for the ninety-minute drive across the border.
Once they arrived, Galloway introduced Sonny to the manager, who was astonished to be standing in the presence of the world-famous former heavyweight champion of the world. “Anything for you, my friend, anything,” he said as he led the visitors to his president’s box.
Before the group could settle in, the manager was announcing them to a standing ovation and the first matador was kneeling before Sonny in full regalia, extending his cape in a sign of deep veneration. When the bullfight began, Sonny kept Daniel on his lap, pointing out what was happening so the boy would understand why the bull was being stabbed. Afterward, the matador approached his box again, this time with the ear of the bull, and Sonny found himself choking up. He was at his most natural in public when he was angry, or at the very least resentful. Senator Estes Kefauver. J. Edgar Hoover. Ali. They’d all used Sonny to make a point, to justify their worldviews. And Sonny made it easy by not having a worldview to throw back at them. Jack Johnson was defined by his era’s Jim Crow mentality. Joe Louis was propelled by World War II. Muhammad Ali turned his moment into a movement. All that Sonny had was his reputation as a thug who stumbled into a championship and didn’t know what to do with it once he got it.
He couldn’t defend himself with speeches because he hated public speaking. And he couldn’t charm his way through the tough spots because he couldn’t be charming, at least in front of large groups. (Get him alone with a cocktail waitress and you saw a different Sonny.) The easiest and most natural reaction was for him to become surly and suspicious. You could debate nature and nurture. But it was what it was.
Except now it wasn’t. Here, in the most unlikely of places—a Mexican bullring, with his wife beside him and his son sitting on his lap—there were no critics. Just men with a deep respect for what he’d accomplished. They all knew that sometimes you get the bull and sometimes the bull gets you. And for an afternoon they could let Sonny forget about politics, about Muhammad Ali, and about the feds who wouldn’t let Sonny forget his earlier mistakes.
After the bullfight was over, he lingered for an hour, doing something he never did: signing autographs and shaking hands. He was thrilled that Daniel could see him like this, and Geraldine stood back proudly. Finally, when he was done, he climbed back into Galloway’s car for the ride back to Tucson. Stretching his long arms around Geraldine, he looked out at the passing view and said, “This was a good day.”