Las Vegas is more than a gambling backdrop in the book: it is both a promised destination for Teamsters-financed casino construction and a center of organized-crime power, where a dispute over suspected theft could end in torture and murder. The city connects the ambitions built on pension-fund money with the violence used to police the criminal networks surrounding it.

Casino Investment and Pension-Fund Loans

The Teamsters pension fund became a source of loans to La Cosa Nostra, functioning, in the book’s account, like a private bank for a national criminal syndicate. Teamsters-funded construction ventures in Las Vegas and Havana made the fund’s lending capacity concrete: casinos offered mob-connected entrepreneurs a way to turn access to union capital into gambling businesses. Borrowers were brought in through crime bosses, who charged customers 10 percent of a loan and split that percentage with Jimmy Hoffa for approving loans off the books. The arrangement tied Las Vegas development to a broader system of political access, private profit, and pension money.

That expansion was still open-ended when Jimmy Hoffa disappeared in 1975. The book notes that Atlantic City was then about to legalize gambling, suggesting how much further the casino economy—and the opportunities attached to it—might grow. Las Vegas thus stands within a developing geography of gambling investment rather than as an isolated market.

Casino Power and Enforced Rules

The city also appears through the career and murder of Gus Greenbaum. After Bugsy Siegel was murdered, Greenbaum succeeded him as head of the Flamingo Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. By the time Greenbaum was killed, he headed Sam Giancana’s Riviera Hotel and Casino there. Giancana suspected him of stealing and ordered Greenbaum and his wife tortured and killed in their Phoenix home in December 1958. The murder reached beyond Las Vegas: the book presents it as a warning to those working in Giancana’s criminal empire to follow its rules.

The City in a National Campaign

Las Vegas’s casino world sits within the book’s wider account of federal efforts to confront organized crime. As attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy targeted gangsters, expanded the use of informants and wiretapping, and pursued offenders through the power of the federal government. The narrative places that campaign alongside the criminal networks and casino interests connected to Las Vegas, while noting that Jimmy Hoffa continued to evade the net. The city’s significance lies in this convergence: investment promised growth, but the money and businesses were entangled with a system sustained by secrecy, influence, and sanctioned violence.