On Tuesday morning, September 1, 1970, with the weather forecast calling for an afternoon high of 105 degrees, the polls opened for the residents of Clark County to vote in primary elections. In predicting that 70 percent of the county’s 87,778 registered voters would cast their ballots, the Sun noted, “The issue which has drawn the most fire and public interest appears to be the quality of law enforcement in Clark County.”
Recently released statistics from the FBI’s annual crime report that showed Nevada had the third-highest overall crime rate in the nation. When it came to property crimes, only California, with 3,642 per 100,000 residents, exceeded Nevada’s average. The news wasn’t much better with respect to murder, rape, and manslaughter. Nevada was a bloody ninth in the nation. (Four decades later, it would be up to second.)
President Nixon was so afraid of losing control of a state that he carried by only 12,590 votes in 1968 that he sent his vice president, Spiro Agnew, to headline a GOP fund-raiser at the Sahara Hotel for 1,500 tuxedoed guests who paid $100 each. Agnew came to blame drugs for Nevada’s problems and he wasted no time taking aim at the liberals, who he accused of creating a “psychedelic Tin Pan Alley.”
In what must have seemed like a particularly effective generational reference, the vice president cited the Beatles song “With a Little Help from My Friends” and its lyrics—“I get by with a little help from my friends, I get high with a little help from my friends.” Leaning into his microphone, he told his audience that he’d learned on good authority the “friends” in the lyrics referred to “Mary Jane,” “Benny,” and “Speed.”
The man who popularized the phrase “nattering nabobs of negativism” went on to attack the “pornographic peddling producers [who are] still succumbing to the temptation of the sensational, and playing right into the hands of the drug culture.” Then, nailing the line he’d been sent by Nixon to deliver, Agnew pounded his fist and concluded the only way to turn back the tide was by voting Republican. “That is how the drug culture will be defeated. That is how the character of the American people, in its dignity and fierce individuality, will triumph again!”
(Agnew didn’t mention William Campbell, a parking lot attendant who was running for sheriff against John Sleeper and Ralph Lamb on the single issue of legalizing marijuana. With the election just days away, a grand jury indicted Campbell for dealing thirteen kilos, leading to a surreal scene in which sheriff’s deputies showed up at his home to serve an arrest warrant and found him holding a shotgun and threatening to kill the men he’d hoped to lead.)
Crooks are practical people, and Red Rodney and Earl Cage—even Ash Resnick, whose gambling activities remained the subject of a continuing investigation by the FBI—all understood that this was a good time to lay low. Drugs and gambling had become third-rail issues and no one wanted to be electrified by them. Their hope was that, once the election passed, things would return to normal.
But at the moment nothing was normal on the campaign trail. John Sleeper was hitting Sheriff Lamb at every turn, ratcheting up his accusations that Clark County’s deputies were taking protection money to let dealers roam free. In a debate a few days earlier, he’d stared into the camera and darkly warned that Las Vegas couldn’t survive four more years of Ralph Lamb’s corrupt brand of cowboy justice.* Behind the scenes, however, the Sleeper campaign was in the process of self-destructing. When it came time for the candidate to prove his charges, he showed up in front of a grand jury strangely empty-handed.
“I remember testifying for one of the officers he accused, a good man,” Dick Robinson, the Vegas station chief for the BNDD, told me. “I don’t know what it was, but Sleeper just seemed to hate other cops.” By the same token, he didn’t seem to be shy about using his office to benefit himself. When a casino executive refused to give Sleeper a campaign contribution, he mysteriously found himself the subject of a raid by city narcs who hauled away his customers on marijuana and prostitution charges. On the eve of the primary, the Sun’s widely read political columnist Paul Price warned his readers that Sleeper was “not personally, professionally or emotionally qualified to be Sheriff of Clark County.”
The one ace that Sleeper felt he still had up his sleeve, however, was the city’s African-American community. A survey done for Time magazine showed that the rhetoric of groups like the Black Panther Party was catching on. A Harris survey found that “two out of every three white people in the United States feel that the ‘Black Panthers are a serious menace to the country.’” Yet fully a quarter of the 1,255 African-Americas who were surveyed called the group’s philosophy “the same as mine.” Among black teenagers that number skyrocketed to 43 percent. So it was not surprising that the biggest racial flashpoint in Las Vegas was in the city’s schools.
The largest and most diverse of Clark County’s seven high schools was Rancho High. On the far north side of the city, it drew its students from a cross section of working-class neighborhoods that included blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans. (A small reservation was carved out nearby.) These were the children of the cooks and janitors and mechanics who kept the Strip running and who lived under a hierarchal kind of harmony. As a student from the class of 1971 would recall in a documentary about the riots by the Las Vegas filmmaker Stan Armstrong: “The word ‘nigger’ really wasn’t in my opinion . . . a racial term. It was just what a black person was.” Added another: “I was prejudiced for a long time. But I was never a racist.”
In that atmosphere, something as simple as a walk to school became a test of wills. The dividing line was the bridge that ran over the Union Pacific Railroad tracks on Owens Avenue. “We called it Vegas Village Hill,” says Armstrong, who graduated from Rancho in 1972. “A lot of times when you’d cross on the way to school, you were subject to white kids throwing rocks at you and calling you the N-word.”
On the morning of May 20, word started to spread through the hallways that there was going to be a war at the snack bar that afternoon. Somehow no one in the school’s administration learned about the plan until more than three hundred students showed up to face off against one another. It didn’t matter who threw the first punch. They all knew what they were there for and got down to it fast. At three minutes past one, the school was a scene of flying fists, pipes, and weapons that had been hidden for just such a purpose. With the riots of the prior fall still fresh in everyone’s mind, a call went out for all available cops to come to the scene. A half hour after the first punch was thrown, seventy members of the North Las Vegas PD, the Sheriff’s Department, and the Highway Patrol showed up in riot gear and toting water cannons to literally cool the students down.
Had things ended there, with the cops hosing them into small clusters, the episode might not have been viewed as an example of excessive force. But it didn’t end there. While eight teens were brought to the hospital, one with a fractured jaw, white students were given court appearance tickets and sent home on their own. The blacks, by contrast, were manhandled onto school buses and those who resisted were sprayed with Mace and shoved into seats while they begged for medical help that never arrived.
When angry parents demanded an explanation, the North Las Vegas chief of police insisted that using Mace was more humane than clubs or nightsticks. But it was hard to counter the black-owned Las Vegas Voice when it argued, “The community must have assurances that our law enforcement officers will not get mace happy.”
The next morning, a cordon of police surrounded the school, giving it the same feel as college campuses that were being riven by protests over the Vietnam War. In a show of defiance, several dozen students made their way to the school’s library, where they staged a sit-in and refused the principal’s order to go to class. As described by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, “Some were reported singing and banging books around.” Eventually, the cops got fifty of them on a bus and dropped them off at Juvenile Hall, where they were all booked on loitering charges.
It was not a promising way to begin a summer that promised to be full of racial tension and strife. As the months wore on, the Voice kept its readers apprised of the racial progress being made elsewhere. In July, California’s supreme court allowed a black truck driver, Manuel Alcorn, to sue his bosses for calling him a “nigger,” ruling that:
The term may once have been common usage, along with other racial characterizations as “Wop,” “Chink,” “Jap,” “bohunk” and “shanty Irish.” But [it] has become particularly abusive and insulting in light of recent developments in the civil rights movement as it pertains to the American Negro.
Still, change was slow. A Harris survey from the same period found that “on nearly every count a clear majority of white people simply have no contact on any level with Negroes.” At most, 32 percent reported having contact with blacks where they worked. Even more eye opening, 88 percent said they had “no black friends they see socially or no black neighbors.”
Once the Review-Journal drilled down into its high schools, it found the divisions were even more alarming. “Whites try to impress on us that we’re second class citizens,” one African-American girl told the paper. “They tell us, ‘You can come to work and school, but then you go back to your own part of the city.’” Another remarked, “I’ve heard comments from Mormon students like, ‘I’m not supposed to talk to you because we’re taught that blacks don’t exist.’”
It was little wonder, then, that the election for sheriff dominated the talk in African-American barbershops and church pews. The problem for Sleeper was that for every poster he hammered into a yard, Ralph Lamb had thousands of dollars to spend on television ads. For every VFW hall that he visited to warn about corruption in the sheriff’s ranks, Lamb had a black-tie event where attendees could laud his stellar record on crime. Most important, the sheriff had the power of incumbency to show off the long arm of his law. With the election barely a week away, he hauled in a pair of fugitives who were wanted for bludgeoning to death a motel owner in a grisly crime five years earlier.
The message was clear: Las Vegas was Ralph Lamb’s town, and if he wanted you, there was nowhere to hide. That’s one reason why Sonny would have kept his drug dealing confined to the Westside. Since it was under the control of the friendlier Las Vegas PD, he had the freedom to do pretty much what he wanted there. Almost anywhere else would have been in Lamb’s jurisdiction, which was something he would have wanted to avoid. In fact, if Sonny needed an example of how petulant Lamb could be, he only had to watch what was happening to the one celebrity who should have been truly untouchable.
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As the Labor Day 1970 weekend neared, the marquees along the Strip filled up with the biggest names in entertainment. Dionne Warwick was at the Sands. The Supremes and George Carlin were at the Frontier. Ike & Tina Turner were playing with Redd Foxx in the International’s theater, while Elvis was finishing his marathon run in the showroom. Joan Rivers was at the Riviera.
But no name was bigger than Frank. After the dissolution of the Rat Pack in 1966, Sinatra released Sinatra at the Sands, with Count Basie and His Orchestra, to reviews that were lavish. The owners of the resort were so thrilled that they gave him a house account for a gambling habit that often saw him lose tens of thousands on blackjack. The party at the Sands ended in 1967 when Howard Hughes arrived in town and bought the hotel. Hughes was bitter at Sinatra for stealing away the actress Ava Gardner and eager to settle an old score, and he capped Sinatra’s house account at a measly $3,000. Paul Anka was at the singer’s side when he learned about the move. He recalled Sinatra “yelling and screaming right in the middle of the casino” as he stood on top of a craps table. When he wouldn’t calm down, Carl Cohen, the hotel’s vice president and a former boxer, punched him in the mouth.
After that, Sinatra moved across the street to Caesars and he’d been playing there every year since. The hotel’s staff hated him. In particular, they couldn’t get over an incident where he held out one of his feet to trip a busboy and then flicked a hundred-dollar casino chip at the kid for laughs while trays were splattered all over the floor. The management, however, was thrilled to have the biggest name in town and gave him a deal that was commensurate. Unlike Elvis, who needed amphetamines to get through two shows a night every night,* Sinatra had to perform only twice on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Otherwise, he performed a single show at 10:30 p.m. with a day off on Sunday. The casino’s management rolled out an ad for him that read, “When the man sings, he is ten feet tall. He is a pure thoroughbred . . .”
Four days into his 1970 run, however, Sinatra managed to find trouble again. After he’d finished the second of his Saturday shows, he was at the baccarat table when he tried raising the stakes on an already high-stakes game. The owners of Caesars weren’t as stingy as those at the Sands, but they still had their limits, and the casino’s manager, Sanford “Sandy” Waterman, went out to explain that they couldn’t stake Sinatra another $16,000.
Small details vary, but most witnesses agreed that Sinatra hurled a handful of chips at the sixty-six-year-old and the two got into a tussle. Waterman slammed a door on Sinatra’s arm, leading Sinatra to pry it loose and coldcock him with his good arm. With bystanders trying to pull them apart, Waterman took out a .38 and pointed it at Sinatra. Lunging for Waterman’s throat, Sinatra shouted something like “I hope you like that gun because you may have to eat it.” Twenty-four hours later, he was leaving town with the parting advice “Better wake Vic Damone.”
The city’s district attorney, George Franklin, was quick to absolve Waterman. “My reports indicate he still had finger marks on his throat from where Sinatra grabbed him,” the DA told the press. “There seems to be reasonable grounds for making the assumption that Sinatra was the aggressor all the way.” When reached for comment at his home in Los Angeles, Sinatra played the victim. “If the public officials who seek newspaper exposure by harassing me and other entertainers don’t get off my back,” he said, “it is of little moment to me if I ever play Las Vegas again.”
But Sinatra underestimated Lamb’s single-mindedness. In a muscular move, the cowboy sheriff ordered Sinatra back to town to give a statement in the matter. He also warned that if Sinatra wanted to play on the Strip again, he’d have to apply for a work card just like the Beatles. “If he gives me any trouble,” Lamb threw in, “he’s going to jail.”
Yes, Las Vegas was Ralph Lamb’s town.
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On primary day, fewer than one-third of the expected voters showed up to hand their sheriff reelection with a commanding 5,338-vote margin out of 18,756 votes cast.* Lamb was gracious, calling the win “a tremendous vote of confidence, not only for me personally but also for my officers.” But if the results suggested anything, it was that the residents of Las Vegas liked having a father figure who knew how to keep the party from getting too out of hand.
John Sleeper, meanwhile, was noticeably silent. He returned to his day-shift detective desk at the police department without any of his usual bravado. He’d gambled and lost, and if Las Vegas had been Sicily, he would have been expected to go home and slice his own wrists. But since it wasn’t, the smart move would have been for him to take some time off to reassess his career. After all, he’d gone from commanding a battalion of swashbuckling undercover officers to a desk job with uncertain prospects.
Instead, Sleeper doubled down in a move that was both dangerous and foolhardy. Marshaling all of the claims he couldn’t prove during the campaign, he wrote a long letter to the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., demanding that the feds launch a full-scale investigation into Lamb’s political machine. An article that appeared in the Sun reported:
Police Lt. John Sleeper lost his bid for sheriff of Clark County but apparently he is still trying to make his voice heard. He wrote a letter shortly after the election to the federal task force on crime in Washington. His letter was referred to the L.A. office, where last week he was contacted by a member of this task force. Reportedly, Sleeper’s letter tells the task force about wrongdoings by both police officers and deputies. And about a political machine that caused his defeat in the September primary election.
It’s worth pausing again to consider how much paranoia was raging through a very small world. Thanks to Sleeper, a federal task force was looking into whether Lamb and his officers took payoffs to let heroin dealers off the hook. In the meantime the city’s district attorney was conducting a separate investigation into whether Sleeper had perjured himself before a grand jury that jettisoned his claims. Apart from that, John Sutton, the federal drug agent, was working on city and county turf without telling the sheriff or police chief, because he didn’t know whom he could trust. And the FBI was crawling all over the Strip, listening to those six hundred wiretaps and looking to make cases.
If you were a crook, this was bad for business. It was hard to figure out who to pay off and who to stay away from. But it was even more dangerous for informants who had to choose sides. It was a bad time . . . a really bad time . . . to get careless.