Being Oscar (30 page)

I had to go back to the hotel where we were staying and collect his belongings—his clothes, his shaving gear, some family photos, even an extra set of false teeth that he had on his night-stand. Those are the kinds of things the public doesn’t know anything about. They see the headline and hear the prosecutor describing this Mafia figure. To me, Chris was a kind and funny old man. I’m picking up his false teeth in his hotel room so that I can give them to his family, and the thought that he’s some kind of racketeer is the furthest thing from my mind.

Chris eventually got sentenced to six years in that case. He never made it home. He died in prison in January 2001. I was the mayor by that point and I took some criticism for it, but I went to his funeral. He was a friend. It was the right thing to do.

It was the same way with Charlie Panarella. I had represented him in a number of cases, and you couldn’t find a more thankful client. The feds, of course, had a different view of him. His reputation in the underworld was steeped in violence. It was said that he once forced one of his victims to eat his own testicles before he killed him.

That piece of underworld folklore took on added meaning when The Moose and Big Chris gave me a plaque with two steel balls mounted on it. I hung that plaque over the door in my law office. It was a daily reminder of what they thought of me, and what I needed to battle the federal government.

Once I was elected, of course, I had to be more circumspect about gifts and favors. In the political world, the concept of influence peddling can quickly turn into a criminal offense. I was always conscious of that.

I had been in office for a few weeks when I was running late for an appointment. I pulled my car out of the neighborhood, the Scotch Eighties, where we live. The way the roads are set up, I wasn’t able to make a left-hand turn. But I was late and there wasn’t anyone coming the other way, so I made what I still believe to this day was a U-turn, not a left turn.

Seconds later, I heard a siren and saw a police motorcycle in my rearview mirror. I pulled over.

The officer walked up to the car. I rolled down my window. He recognized me.

“Oh, my God,” he said.

“No, just the mayor,” I replied.

He wasn’t sure what he should do, but I told him to just write me a ticket. I paid my fine and spent five hours in traffic school
for some remedial driver’s ed. I was the mayor, and if anything, I had to bend over backwards to follow the rules. If I had been practicing law, I probably would have either tried to talk my way out of a ticket or tried to get the ticket fixed once it was issued.

That’s one way my approach to things changed after I was elected.

Another thing I had to adjust to was the “celebrity” of the job. I’ve always enjoyed the spotlight; there’s great ego gratification that comes with being center stage. I had that as a criminal defense attorney representing high-profile clients in high-profile cases. And I had it again as mayor of a great city. But there also can be petty aggravations that as an elected official you just can’t dismiss or ignore.

During my tenure, a couple of gadflies tried to raise ethics questions about the way I did business. I don’t want to bore you with all the details here, but one issue had to do with my son Ross’s involvement in a start-up company called iPolitix. I encouraged some people to touch base with him at a cocktail party. I got nothing out of it, but the issue got traction in the media, as they say, and I had to defend myself before the city’s Ethics Commission. I won on every issue but one, and had originally intended to let it go at that. But Carolyn, whose advice I almost always follow, said I had to challenge the one negative ruling.

“The only things we leave our children are their educations and their good names,” she said.

I appealed the one negative ruling and won a reversal in state court. Then the Ethics Commission, much to my surprise, appealed that decision to the Nevada Supreme Court. I had to hire lawyers to represent me through all of this, and we eventually prevailed.

Carolyn was right, of course. She usually is.

There was another situation, however, where I needed no encouragement to legally defend myself. I was just beginning my
second term in office when James McManus, a professional poker player, wrote a book that included anecdotal stories about Las Vegas.

In one chapter, he wrote that local “lore” had it that I was sitting at a table with Benny Binion and Jimmy Chagra in the Horse Shoe Casino when the assassination of Judge Wood was planned. Now, I’m a man of some principle, but I also have a tough skin. I was used to less than flattering things being written about me.

The mob could afford to hire the best lawyers in the country and they chose me, so I wore the badge “mob lawyer” with honor. But this McManus had crossed the line; what he wrote was not only untrue, but it was libelous. I can’t think of anything more damaging you could say about an individual.

I don’t know what he or his publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, thought they were doing or how they thought couching this nonsense as “lore” would protect them. There was no truth whatsoever to the allegation.

I went bonkers when I read it and contacted Tony Glassman, a friend and lawyer. He represented me, and we had the situation rectified in ten days. They put a full-page retraction and apology to me in the Book Review section of the Sunday
New York Times
. They also agreed that the lines would be eliminated from any further editions of the book, and I received a big check.

I thought it was absolutely cavalier that someone thought they could just throw that kind of gossip out there and think they could get away with it. My reputation as a mob lawyer was one thing, but my integrity and my good name are another matter.

These were the kind of things I had to deal with after becoming mayor. Looking back on it now, I wouldn’t have done anything differently. Some people try to call attention to themselves by challenging and criticizing in the public forum. I was an easy target in that respect, and I guess the gadflies also benefited from the fact that I didn’t suffer fools gladly.

There was a situation at a city council meeting where one of these attention-seekers referred to the showgirls that I traveled around with during promotions as “bimbos.” These women worked hard at what they did, and the city benefited from the attention that their presence generated. They were a symbol of Las Vegas. So when this idiot took a public shot at them, I had to say something.

“Look, buddy,” I told him. “You can say whatever you want about me, but don’t malign those ladies. Okay? Now sit down. I’ve had it with you.”

He wouldn’t let it go, and eventually I had him ejected from the council meeting.

There were a few other ethics issues and occasionally there were whispering campaigns and snide comments about the awarding of city contracts, the allegation being that I had favored someone who I knew or who had done something for me.

At one point I tried to make my position clear, although I’m not sure any of my political opponents cared about what I said or what the real issue was.

“I want to do business with people that I know, rather than people that I don’t know,” I said during one news conference, explaining that when everything else was equal in terms of a bid or a contract, I’d favor someone with whom I’d had a relationship. “If you know somebody and they’re honorable and you have done business with them before, they get the best of it.”

That wasn’t exactly a revolutionary statement. It was, I thought, a frank description of the way government and politics have always worked.

There was a mayor back in my old hometown of Philadelphia, John Street, who said pretty much the same thing when he was challenged about non-bid contracts and businesses that the city awarded to his friends and political associates.

I may be paraphrasing here, but in essence, Mayor Street said, “Who would you expect me to favor, my enemies?”

Street was an aggressive mayor who rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. The FBI, in fact, planted a bug in his office, but the investigation never went anywhere. I don’t know that much about him or his politics, but in my opinion, he will always be highly rated.

A few years after I was in office, I got a call one night from my cousin Paul Brazina back in Philadelphia. My mother had been rushed to the hospital and was on a gurney in the hospital hallway waiting for a room. Thank God the medical problem didn’t turn out to be that serious, but at the time we had no way of knowing. I told Paul I’d be on the next plane to Philadelphia. I also called Mayor Street. I had been to a Conference of Mayors meeting and had a list of the home numbers of all the mayors in the country. It was two o’clock in the morning my time, which meant I was calling him at 5
A
.
M
.

He picked up the phone and couldn’t have been more helpful. I told him of my plight, and he said not to worry. He would take care of it. When I arrived at the Philadelphia airport that rainy day, there was a police escort waiting for me. I was driven to the hospital with the sirens wailing and the lights flashing.

When I got there, my mother was in a private room and was being treated like the Queen of England. As I said, Mayor Street had quite a few critics during his two terms in office, but with me he’s always going to be aces. When you’re an elected official, you don’t forget your friends. And you don’t forget those who go out of their way to help you. John Street went above and beyond.

You also don’t forget those who fail to deliver what they’ve promised. In those instances, I found it especially rewarding to succeed in spite of them.

I was still obsessed with the idea of revitalizing downtown, particularly the area east of the railroad tracks, and even after Wynn, Gaughan, and some other early supporters backed away, I pushed forward. The city’s inner core is separated by railroad tracks. The west side was basically an old railroad yard that had sat fallow for more than a quarter of a century. The east side had Fremont Street and what was left of a financial district. It had no energy and it bred lethargy.

Part of my thought process was preserving the city’s history. Las Vegas hadn’t done much of that; implosion was the first thought when it came to redevelopment. Blow up the old buildings and put up new ones. That’s how we lost classic casino-hotels like the Dunes, the Stardust, the Sands, the Hacienda, the Landmark, and the Desert Inn. When I took office, the old post office and courthouse building, where I had tried my first federal case, were sitting empty down the street from City Hall. It was a great old structure, and I didn’t want to see it go. I figured it could be a cornerstone for the downtown revitalization, and eventually it was.

But first I had to build my river. Las Vegas is in the middle of the world’s driest desert, so you don’t need to tell people how important water is. But water is also symbolic; it’s nurturing, replenishing, and a source of life and of energy. I decided the way to get life back to the downtown area was to build a river, so I got the city engineers involved.

There was a vacant piece of city-owned land between Fourth Street and Las Vegas Boulevard near the new federal courthouse and an abandoned former elementary school that had been a police substation. That was where I wanted my river, and the engineers made it happen. Now, “river” may be a bit of an exaggeration.
“Man-made rivulet” is probably more accurate. The water is re-circulated, cascading along a culvert that is about three feet wide. But the area along both banks has been cleaned up, and there are plants and trees and benches where people can sit and relax, eat their lunch, read the paper. A plaque on an adjoining wall calls it “Oscar’s River.” I wanted it to be a place that had life. What I had in mind for the old police substation and the area around it was to convert it into an agora. The ancient Greeks used to have open spaces in the middle of the city that would serve as meeting places for citizens. I pictured Plato and Socrates meeting and talking with people, debating, philosophizing.

They were more than just places; they were a way of life, a way to communicate, to interact. The great European cities have something similar with their piazzas. I think people who live in cities hunger for that kind of connection. You just have to provide them with the opportunity. My river and the agora were steps in that direction.

The Greeks surrounded their agoras with public buildings, temples and commercial enterprises, shops and stores. Go to Vegas today, and I think you’ll appreciate what I’m talking about. The old courthouse, which I got the federal government to sell to the city for a dollar, is now the Mob Museum. Actually it’s called the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement. Talk about taking heat: the pundits came out in full force when I began promoting the idea. “What’s Goodman doing, building a monument to himself?” they asked. “He’s glorifying his old killer clients.”