On colonial-era maps, the site of today’s Beverly Park is not shown as private property; it is marked only as public land. In the nineteenth century, it was known as Higgins Canyon, named after one of the homesteading families who settled there. But soon enough, unlike the Benedicts of Benedict Canyon, who remained significant figures in Beverly Hills, they and their names effectively disappeared.
One Beverly Hills realtor says the rough canyon they abandoned was “bottom feeder land,” good for little or nothing. But in fact, the Lankershim Estate, a family-owned corporation that bought sixty thousand acres in the southern half of the San Fernando Valley for $115,000 after the Civil War, owned property at the top of Higgins Canyon. And William Augustus Reeder, a onetime Kansas congressman who founded another early real estate dynasty in L.A., and whose descendants are still in the local social register called the Southwest Blue Book (blue for their blood as well as its cover), owned land there, too.
After two thousand acres in Higgins and Benedict Canyons burned in fires in the fall of 1924, Reeder’s son Leland told the Los Angeles Times that neighboring landholders included the pioneer moviemaker Thomas Ince, then the head of United Artists, the film producer Joseph Schenck, and a New York stockbroker, Edward Francis “E. F.” Hutton. Reeder had been buying canyon land above Beverly Hills since 1911. “I didn’t even know that we had property there,” admits Marylee Reeder, Leland’s granddaughter-in-law, who still lives in Beverly Hills. “But everyone had huge parcels in those days.”
In 1925, a subdivision called Beverlyridge opened in the hills between Reeder’s land and some of the earliest Beverly Hills estates to the south; development of the foothills was beginning. Where two decades earlier there had only been homesteaders, now houses sheltering two thousand families dotted the hills between Beverly Hills and Laurel Canyon, which had just been absorbed into the ever-expanding city of Los Angeles.
That year, a paved road through Higgins Canyon was proposed but never came to be, and for a time the city even barred travel on the existing narrow dirt road, less than a mile long. Real estate tourists could still take other routes for shallow glimpses into the surrounding hills, where the variety of residences on display presented “a striking spectacle,” the Los Angeles Times wrote. But even as Edson Benedict’s son Pierce sold off the last piece of his family’s ranch for subdivision in 1932, Higgins Canyon remained undeveloped raw land—visited mostly by rattlesnakes, hikers, firemen battling brush fires, joyriding local teenagers, and, in a famous case in 1933, an eighteen-year-old girl who shot herself after failing to find work as an actress. It would remain undeveloped for half a century.
After that starlet’s suicide, Higgins disappeared from the local public record until 1956, when the president of the Beverly Hills Thrift and Loan, Morton Gimple Rodin, also a developer, won approval from the Los Angeles City Council to build twenty-two single-family houses there. A few years later, Rodin would be accused of bribing a Los Angeles zoning official with a personal financial stake in canyon land to gain approval of building projects. A few years after that, that official would be publicly defended by an L.A. city councilman who had his own interest in canyon land—and ended up losing his job and his reputation as a result. But that’s getting ahead of the story of the land that became Beverly Park.
In their film Chinatown, a fictionalization of the diversion of Owens Valley water to Los Angeles, director Roman Polanski and screenwriter Robert Towne exposed the corrupt base of the edifice of power in Los Angeles. That theft of water by the rich for the rich is only one of many scandals hidden in plain sight in L.A. history. The creation of Beverly Park involved another complex conspiracy. It began in 1957 when James Riddle “Jimmy” Hoffa became the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the giant Chicago-based labor union that had been tied to “Scarface” Al Capone’s mob syndicate since its truckers carted liquor during Prohibition. Organized crime became Hoffa’s business partner, with the fund holding union members’ pensions treated as a piggy bank. Through the Teamsters Central States Southeast and Southwest Areas Pension Funds, gangsters bought into and earned fortunes from seemingly legitimate businesses in Los Angeles and its backyard playground, the nearby gambling town of Las Vegas. If you scratched the surface of L.A. or Vegas, you’d see Chicago, Hoffa, the descendants of Capone, the mob, and its pimps and murderers.
Suge Knight was nothing new.
In 1961, Frank McCulloch, a crusading editor at the Los Angeles Times, pointed out a window of his office to the Santa Monica Mountains in the distance and asked two of his reporters to find out who owned the valuable, undeveloped land there. The next May, the paper began publishing a months-long series of exposés that revealed the extent of the Teamsters’ influence in L.A., just as the United States Department of Justice, then led by Robert F. Kennedy, was impaneling a federal grand jury to investigate the union, the pension fund, and Hoffa. Though the Teamsters boss was only one of sixteen trustees, he exercised control over the fund’s multimillion-dollar investments. Over fifteen months, the series told how the Teamsters had funneled the pension money under their care into, among other things, Southern California real estate. The paper didn’t yet cover it, but one such investment was being made at that very moment in its own backyard—in the same Santa Monica Mountains that had inspired its investigation. The first inkling anyone had of the Teamster-financed plan—and the first suggested development for what would eventually become Beverly Park—was an application in June 1963 to build a private golf course and six thirteen-story apartment buildings at the north end of Beverly Drive, the only road into Higgins Canyon.
The Beverly Hills Country Club was its name, an inside joke tribute to a just-closed nightclub and illegal casino in Newport, Kentucky, that billed itself as the “show place of the Middle West” and featured acts like Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra. Its first incarnation had burned to the ground in 1936 after the owner, a bootlegger’s driver, refused to sell it to one Morris B. “Moe” Dalitz, Al Capone’s Cleveland equivalent. The club was rebuilt and reopened, and it wasn’t long before that same owner agreed to let Dalitz and Co. buy it. They ran it until 1961, when it was shut down by protests of local clergy.
But in the meantime, Dalitz had found greener pastures (green as in money) in Las Vegas. Organized crime families from the Midwest had had interests there since the 1930s, and after World War II, the various mobs—Cleveland, Kansas City, New York, and especially Chicago—began setting up western outposts in Los Angeles; their operations in the neighboring cities intertwined. Tony “the Hat” Cornero, who opened the first casino in Vegas, later ran gambling boats in international waters off the Santa Monica coast, frequented by wealthy Angelenos. Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, a former bootlegger tied to a New York crime family, came to L.A. in 1937, and allied with local crime boss Mickey Cohen to set up a national wire service reporting race results to illegal gaming establishments. Siegel later owned several casinos and finally opened the glamorous Flamingo hotel in Vegas, where a Capone-era mob lawyer, Sidney Korshak, became Siegel’s lawyer, too. Korshak had been sent to Los Angeles in 1945 to become, as his biographer Gus Russo puts it, the primary liaison between the Underworld and the upper world, representing the Chicago Mafia’s interests as it infiltrated West Coast—that is, Los Angeles and Las Vegas—labor unions, hotels, legal gambling, and real estate development. One such operation was the second Beverly Hills Country Club, which was conceived two years after its Midwest namesake died.
By 1950, Dalitz’s Desert Inn group, a casino partnership between the Chicago and Cleveland crime families, had become a favored recipient of Teamster pension fund financing. Bobby Kennedy had been watching all this for years; at the time of Hoffa’s election in ’58, Kennedy was chief counsel to the United States Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, then known as the McClellan committee after its chairman, Arkansas senator John L. McClellan. McClellan also ran the Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management, which called Korshak in for questioning the same day Hoffa took over the Teamsters; Korshak walked away unblemished. The next year, when he bought a modern mansion on Chalon Road in Bel Air that was later sometimes guarded by armed men, the mob’s influence already reached into the highest places in Los Angeles politics, society, and business.
The parallel investigations by Kennedy and the Los Angeles Times slowed the Teamsters-mob endeavor, but didn’t stop it. Indeed, even as the Times was revealing that $6.7 million in Teamsters pension money had financed Trousdale Estates, an expensive subdivision of the vast Beverly Hills ranch that had once belonged to the oilman Edward Doheny, a front man for one of Trousdale’s developers was heading a group buying up nearby Higgins Canyon for the mob.
In his heyday, I. Irving Davidson, now eighty-nine and ailing, was one of Washington’s best operators, a guy who made things happen, sometimes for not very nice people. Davidson was close to Hoffa, to New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello, and to the American-backed governments, some run by dictators, in Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Israel, Guatemala, Ecuador, and Indonesia. An expediter in the official World War II ammunition program, Davidson later flourished as a government-registered middleman for arms deals, moving guns and jets around the world. But his forte was being a fixer.
Before Davidson got involved in Higgins Canyon, Korshak approached two L.A. developers, Archie Preissman and David May of the May’s department store family, about investing in the land. After a few lunches, they turned him down. Then, the Washington lobbyist entered the negotiations. Another member of the Higgins Canyon group was a fellow associate of Hoffa’s and recipient of Teamster largesse, Hyman Green, later identified by the Times as a “promoter in and out of trouble with Federal authorities but never convicted.” As developers in St. Petersburg, Florida, Green and a brother had just been charged with defrauding the Federal Housing Administration.
Davidson and Green teamed up with two gamblers who were neighbors in Trousdale Estates. They’d co-owned a large plot in Bel Air before they bought 155 acres of Higgins Canyon land on April 19, 1962. Though the name Melba Rice was on the deed, she was fronting for her husband, Emanuel J. “Manny” Rice, a wealthy L.A. “businessman,” who, in a previous incarnation, had been a Scarface-era Chicago bookie. Rice’s partner was Dr. Victor G. Lands, a Los Angeles surgeon. “Manny was the money, Victor was the brains,” says Mona Lands, the girl he’d just married, who was twenty years his junior. He expected her to “stay pregnant and barefoot,” and didn’t tell her anything about his business. But she couldn’t help noticing things.
“He was very well respected,” she says, “but he loved gambling. He loved the excitement of that world. He was fascinated with the dark side.” And she isn’t surprised that he got tangled up with gangsters. “It was his nature,” she says. “He gambled that way. He was always borrowing to buy something and then borrowing against that.”
In 1964, Leonard L. Bursten, a stocky, hard-driving assistant U.S. attorney turned Florida real estate speculator, organized Beverly Ridge Estates Corp. to subdivide Higgins Canyon, financed by a loan of just under $4 million from the Teamsters pension fund. Davidson and Green were behind him, even though a previous Bursten-Teamsters land deal had collapsed; Bursten and Green were suing each other and Bursten was later convicted of tax evasion and disbarred. By then, Hoffa had been convicted, too, in a multimillion-dollar scheme to defraud that pension fund. His troubles had been mounting for several years. In 1962, he was tried for accepting illegal payments from a trucking firm. In 1963, he was charged with bribing jurors in that trial, which ended with a hung jury. A few months later, he and seven associates were charged with conspiracy and mail and wire fraud for obtaining $20 million in loans from the pension fund and siphoning off $1 million for themselves. The next year, Hoffa was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. His influence waned after he went to jail in 1967, appointing an acolyte acting boss in his absence, but he hung on to his job atop the union until 1971. Hoffa finally agreed to step down upon being pardoned by President Richard Nixon, who’d briefly lived in a Trousdale Estates home sold to him at a “celebrity” discount after he returned to California in 1961 on losing his first run for the presidency.
But none of that stopped the planning for the Beverly Hills Country Club in Higgins Canyon. Neither did angry neighbors, who made their feelings known at the first hearing on the proposed development in October 1964. By then, the plans had changed. The apartment buildings had been abandoned, replaced by expensive single-family homes surrounding the golf course, and the developers had reinforced their ranks, adding four lawyers as directors of the company, superstar golf course designer Robert Trent Jones, and Dean Martin, a patient of Dr. Lands who’d performed at the first Beverly Hills Country Club, as the development’s celebrity face. Robert E. Petersen, publisher of Hot Rod, Motor Trend, and Teen magazines, was named the club’s president. Lands was named a director of the golf club, along with Martin and his Rat Pack pal, Frank Sinatra.
Martin, then at the peak of his career with his own TV show, headlined the press conference announcing the 70-par golf course with an unprecedented twenty-two holes—there would be four duplicate par-3 holes to speed play on the course. “The best way for a golf-crazy Italian street-singer to become President of a country club is to start one of his own,” Martin wrote to potential members. “The first nine is now being played by a foursome of bulldozers in a beautiful, exclusive mountain rimmed area just five minutes from the heart of Beverly Hills and almost in my own back yard.”
The cost of the course was projected at a mind-boggling $15 million ($95.5 million in 2010 dollars) due to the need to raise the valley floor four hundred feet with 10 million cubic yards of soil, about a third of the total excavated for the Panama Canal. The planners promised a moving sidewalk between a Spanish clubhouse and the first hole. It was all going to be paid for by six hundred equity members (“white, Negro, Catholic, Jew, Italian … people from every walk of life,” Martin promised) who would pay $25,000 apiece for the privilege, presumably to repay the Teamsters fund which, by June 1967, had made two more loans of an additional $4,772,500.
The proposed course—which Martin said would open in 1969—became a national news story. But the two Los Angeles Times investigative reporters, Gene Blake and Jack Tobin, who’d made the Teamsters their beat, didn’t write about it; in fact, the last story to carry their shared byline had run in January 1963. Their investigation was squelched by members of the Chandler family, who owned the newspaper and had a spider’s web of business interests spread all over the region.
It continued to be a good story, though. Shortly after Dean Martin announced the country club, Victor Lands was arrested, one of six men indicted in a conspiracy to cheat card players at the Friars Club in Beverly Hills, a private watering hole for show business and wealthy types. Peepholes had been drilled in the ceiling of its card room, and a spy would watch games and signal confederates playing below. Among the victims were Zeppo Marx of the Marx Brothers, the comedian Phil Silvers, who played television’s Sergeant Bilko, and Harry Karl, a wealthy shoe manufacturer who was married at the time to actress Debbie Reynolds and had sold his last home in Bel Air to a friend—the ubiquitous Sidney Korshak.
Lands and his codefendants all pled innocent. Lands’s role in the scam remains unclear. He’d chaired the Friars’ house committee when it approved the installation of the cheating devices, which were disguised as burglar alarms, and had often played cards at the club, but had sometimes lost money himself. While his five codefendants were eventually found guilty of committing forty-nine felonies, Lands cut a deal, pled guilty to a single count of filing a false tax return (for the same year in which the Higgins Canyon property was assembled), and was fined $5,000 and sentenced to a mere ten days. It later emerged that he’d secretly taped one of his codefendants on behalf of the government. “He was trying to save his life,” says Mona Lands. “Most of those guys deserved to be gotten.”
Before Lands went to jail, he’d argued with Manny Rice, who wanted to sell the Higgins Canyon property. “Victor wanted to develop it,” says Mona Lands. “So Manny sued him right after he went to jail. It was nasty. He got him while the guy was down” and Lands “gave up the property.”
Though none of the developers knew it, the death of the Beverly Hills Country Club was preordained. A year before its opening was announced, the developers had decided that they needed a new four-lane road to their club, not only for access, but also because they needed that 10 million cubic yards of soil to fill the valley, which would be theirs for free if they could induce the L.A. City Council to lop off the top of the ridge to build the road for them. Leading the charge to approve the road was the canyon’s city councilman, James B. Potter Jr., who warned that if the road wasn’t built, those six hundred golfers and their friends would clog the narrow hillside streets. It would cost $154,000 to acquire the right of way, but Beverly Ridge Estates had offered to pay more than $2 million toward the cost of planning and preparing the road if it was approved. It was an offer the city found nearly irresistible, but again, angry neighbors disagreed.
“The road got us involved,” recalls Betty Decter, who still lives at the top of Beverly Drive just below the ridge where it was to be built. Decter and her husband, Gerald, who were partners in a mannequin-manufacturing business and dedicated conservationists, became obsessed with stopping the road. They allied with the Beverly Hills city government, which feared a new road to the valley would be an open invitation for invasion, “ruining our fine neighborhood,” as one official put it, and organized a neighborhood association. Its membership grew when the grading operation caused a flood that saw hundreds of homeowners evacuated.
The neighbors appeared en masse at the first public hearing on the road. “Out of two hundred families here, one hundred fifty went,” says Decter. “We didn’t even know where city hall was before that.” Aside from representing the canyon district and sitting on the city council’s Public Works Committee, Potter was the son of a state senator. “He was very arrogant,” Decter says. “ ‘Why are you trying to tell me my job?’ We didn’t know you’re not supposed to ask questions. That made us want to look into it.” A week later, the developers tried to simultaneously outflank and co-opt them. The Los Angeles Times ran an article claiming that 3.5 million cubic yards of dirt had already been moved for the 7,000-yard course, and that former White House press secretary Pierre Salinger, actors Tony Curtis, James Garner, and Kirk Douglas, and director Mervyn LeRoy had signed on as founding members. And Jerry Decter got a letter from the Beverly Hills Country Club, asking if he’d like to play in a new PGA tournament, the Dean Martin Golf Party, to be held at the club once it opened in fall 1969.
Despite the opposition, Potter’s committee soon endorsed the road and a few months later, the council followed suit. Instead of giving up, the Decters redoubled their effort. Meantime, three hills were leveled, the valley between was filled in, the grading was nearly completed, and seeding for the fairways was set to begin. Only then did the Decters uncover the Teamsters-mob connection.
“Willie the Icepick?” Jerry said to Betty one day. “What are we doing?”
“We were terrified,” says Betty. “Jerry would start his car in the morning expecting it to blow up. But we were loudmouths. We told everyone what we’d found.” They hoped that would give them some protection.
By summer 1968, the cost of the project had soared nearly 50 percent to $23 million—making the BHCC the world’s most expensive golf course—and both Dean Martin and Robert Petersen had quit the project. Clearly, there was trouble in paradise, yet Potter and the city persisted, even as the Teamsters financing was revealed and more legal challenges were filed by both Beverly Hills and neighbors. One found his water lines suddenly cut. Another had a 200-foot ridge on his property bulldozed into the valley. “They didn’t care, they did what they wanted,” says Robert Dewhirst, who still lives in Beverly Hills. When Dewhirst called in a deputy sheriff, Beverly Ridge workers menaced him with a bulldozer. Dewhirst offered to sell the land, but was spurned, so he filed for an injunction; finally, “the Teamsters” bought the tiny strip of land. “I’ve always wondered if it was legal,” Dewhirst adds, “because the guy who signed the papers was in jail at the time.”
In 1969, the Decters and Co. (a group that had expanded to include seventeen separate canyon homeowners’ associations) began to get traction. They suggested that Councilman Potter had conflicts of interest: His sister and a member of his staff had both worked for the developers. Potter was then running for Congress; he would shortly lose the Republican primary. Then, the state attorney general opened an investigation into those charges of conflict as well as malfeasance and bribery of public officials by Beverly Ridge, and it emerged that months earlier, at the end of 1968, the Central States Pension Fund had sued Bursten and colleagues for foreclosure on their loans, alleging they’d received no interest or principal repayments, and that in response, Beverly Ridge had declared bankruptcy. Adding to the confusion, Teamsters’ lawyers claimed that Bursten had filed that action for bankruptcy protection on his own, without authorization by his board of directors (i.e., the real landowners, Davidson and Green). Nonetheless, Los Angeles kept pushing for its road, even as more city officials came under scrutiny.
That summer, the road was shelved when more of the truth emerged. It turned out that Bursten’s offer years before to pay for the road had come with secret strings attached: He’d asked that the city’s Board of Public Works not only buy and give Beverly Ridge sixteen acres of land owned by its Department of Water and Power, but grade the tract as well. Potter and a friend of his, who worked as a lobbyist for Bursten, kept pushing the plan even though it was a bonanza for Bursten, who was legally obligated to pay for an access road. For two years, Water and Power officials were kept in the dark about the proposed giveaway. They only found out when Betty Decter started asking pointed questions at a city council hearing.
In fall 1969, Councilman Potter’s bank records were subpoenaed; a superior court judge blocked a similar move to examine Beverly Ridge records. A few days later, that judge was arrested for assault with intent to commit murder after stabbing his wife. Subsequently found not guilty by reason of insanity, he was sent to a state hospital for observation and electric shock therapy. Released the next year, he was briefly committed again in 1973, and finally returned to practicing law in 1980, all the while blaming the stabbing on a topical drug he’d been taking for skin cancer.
Beverly Ridge stayed in the headlines and Potter’s troubles mounted. A grand jury was convened, a joint federal-state task force was formed to look into the development in Higgins Canyon, and the trickle of information turned into a torrent. It finally emerged that Bursten was only a front man, as were Petersen, Dean Martin, and another early Beverly Ridge officer, realtor Sammy Hess, best known for dating Frank Sinatra’s teen-aged daughter, Tina.
Most of the canyon land still belonged to Irving Davidson and Hyman Green. And mob ties and corruption were everywhere. The Teamsters fund’s financial advisor, the son of a Capone-era mobster, owned stock in Beverly Ridge and would later die in a mob-style execution. The PR man for Beverly Ridge had served nine months for obstruction of justice for juror intimidation at Jimmy Hoffa’s trial. Beverly Ridge had loaned thousands of dollars to Potter, his sister, a local congressman, and a county tax assessor, and had regularly entertained L.A. mayor Sam Yorty and his staff. The finances of the company were, as one report put it, “a bewildering mass of promissory notes and trust deeds.” Adding an almost-comic dimension, the well-wired Washington columnist Jack Anderson speculated that the Teamsters were actually behind this scandalous publicity, hoping it would let them squeeze out Bursten et al. and replace them with “insiders” the union could more easily control.
Two months later that suggestion seemed to be confirmed when the Teamsters fund sued Beverly Ridge for fraud, alleging that it had been shocked … shocked … to discover that its money had been used to bribe politicians. And ultimately, the pension fund did end up the only winner in the affair. Bursten, Davidson, and Green all pleaded guilty to fraud and in 1972, the Teamsters bought their land in a public foreclosure sale. But there were still twists to come in the tale of the land that would finally become Beverly Park.
Potter was kicked out of office in 1971. Found guilty of perjury, the county commissioner went to jail for six months. Sentenced to fifteen years in prison, Bursten first underwent ninety days of psychiatric observation. But then, his sentence was abruptly altered to fifteen years probation, with the judge citing “very serious” (nonpsychiatric) medical issues as the cause of his reversal. A telephone call to the U.S. attorney pleading for leniency, made by Murray Chotiner, Jimmy Hoffa’s lawyer and a longtime political aide to then president Nixon, went unmentioned. Despite his alleged life-threatening heart condition, Bursten lived another fourteen years.
Davidson did even better; sentenced to only a year’s probation after cooperating with the prosecution, he continued his career in “public relations” until serious illness intervened. “Someone once said he had a knack for making coincidences happen,” says his daughter Lynne, now a senior advisor at the U.S. Department of State. “He always knew who to call. He certainly knew very colorful people. But he would adamantly deny that he ever crossed the line.”
In 1974, the Teamsters sold Beverly Ridge to Allen R. Glick for $7 million, all of which it provided in a loan to their buyer at half the prevailing bank rate of interest, with no repayment scheduled for a decade, and the final payment due in twenty-five years. The reason for this cushy arrangement? Glick was a Teamsters insider, installed because he would be more malleable than Bursten had been. A Vietnam veteran, lawyer, and residential housing developer in San Diego, the thirty-one-year-old Glick was tied in with another wise guy, a relative of a Capone-era gunman who’d introduced him to pension fund officials, who financed his purchase of the Stardust and Fremont hotel-casinos in Vegas. Seemingly overnight, Glick was a star who fancied himself the next Howard Hughes—the only person who owned more casinos there.
Glick was a “straight-arrow naïf,” in the words of Mafia expert Nicholas Pileggi, who told his story in the book Casino (Glick is called Philip Green in the Martin Scorsese movie). He’d become the property of the crime boss of Milwaukee, a trustee of the Teamsters’ pension fund, installed in Vegas to ensure that the mob’s skim—the illegal diversion of cash bet in the casinos, a steady source of income for La Cosa Nostra since the 1940s—flowed unimpeded. “The money was handed over to special couriers who made regular trips,” Pileggi wrote, “between Vegas and Chicago, where it was distributed to Milwaukee, Cleveland, Kansas City …” It was a perfect illustration of how pension fund loans were used for criminal purposes.
A mere few months later the pension fund handed Glick its poison plum—Beverly Ridge. Unfortunately for Glick, his fortunes promptly took a turn for the worse. A Vegas casino he owned filed for bankruptcy, and he was sued by its creditors. Soon he was under investigation by the Los Angeles–based Organized Crime Task Force. Simultaneously, the Nevada Gaming Commission was investigating the man who actually ran the Stardust for the mob, Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal (aka “Ace” Rothstein, played by Robert De Niro in the Scorsese movie). Next, the Labor Department piled on, asking whether the Teamster loans to Glick violated a brand-new pension reform law implemented to curb abuses like those that had already plagued Beverly Ridge. Then, Nevada charged Glick with failing to report loans to his casinos.
Finally, Glick’s name surfaced in the investigation of the gangland-style execution of Tamara Rand, a fifty-four-year-old San Diego businesswoman whose safe deposit box was stuffed with $400,000 in crisp new currency. A former consultant to one of Glick’s companies, she’d sued him a year before her death after he allegedly refused to give her 5 percent of his gambling shares in return for more than a million dollars she’d loaned him. Rand had just won the right to subpoena corporate documents regarding the pension fund loan and had been killed just after she had an argument with Glick. Pileggi reported that Rand’s murder was ordered by Glick’s Milwaukee mob boss in order to protect the skim.
Though he was simultaneously fighting Clark County’s district attorney, the Justice Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the IRS, which was seeking back taxes and civil fraud penalties, Glick would hang on in Vegas—and in Beverly Ridge, now renamed Beverly Summit—for a few more years. However, the problems took their toll, and in 1978, a professional manager hired by the government to manage Teamsters assets foreclosed on Beverly Summit, and soon Glick was nudged out of Vegas, too. Ironically, that manager had once worked for the family that created neighboring Holmby Hills almost six decades earlier.
Granted immunity by several grand juries in return for testimony against his Milwaukee mob boss and a dozen other organized crime figures charged with skimming millions from his casinos, “Glick was a devastating witness,” Pileggi writes, “precise and incapable of being ruffled.” The guilty pleas and verdicts that resulted effectively ended the mob’s rule of Las Vegas. Allen Glick then made himself scarce, maintaining to this day he’d been an innocent ensnared.