Sin City (32 page)
Authors: Harold Robbins
“This is the royal palace, encased by the Great Wall of China, and mounted on the Great Wall is a Red Dragon roller coaster. It will be the fastest and scariest roller coaster in the world,” I told the fifteen bankers and state and federal officials assembled in my Strip conference room. As I spoke, I pointed out the features on a five-by-five-foot model of Forbidden City.
We were in a fifth-floor conference room of my temporary headquarters, which was an old casino-hotel I had bought next door to where my super casino was being built. I needed a place to train the employees of the new casino, and having a real operation for the staff of thousands, from chefs and dealers to maids and security, worked out great.
When the super casino was finished, I planned to knock the old club down and make it part of the parking lot. A-Ma and I had taken up residence in a suite on the tenth floor of the old building. Like the conference room, the suite overlooked the building project.
There was caviar, goose pate, hundred-dollar bottles of champagne, and thousand-dollar a night “show” girls on hand to sweeten the presentation. I imported the girls from Hong Kong to “entertain” backers and critics of the project. I introduced them as one of the Oriental acts that would play after the casino opened, but never got specific about what their routine would be. Naturally, these particular girls did their best moves in bed.
A hundred yards from where we stood in my temporary headquarters, the actual casino was rising in the desert. I was overbudget, but that was inevitable for a project this size. But I had to keep the bankers onboard and the regulatory people off my back to stay afloat.
“As you might have read, I got the inspiration for the casino's Chinese imperial theme from a visit I made to China with Ms. A-Ma.” I told myself they better have read it; it cost me plenty to have the most
expensive PR agency in the country plant that and a dozen other stories about the project. “I visited Beijing with Ms. A-Ma six months ago when she was filming in the Far East, and I marveled at the artistic beauty of the former imperial complex called the Forbidden City and the summer palace outside the city. I trekked on the Great Wall, the over four-thousand-mile-long fortification the Chinese called
Wanli changcheng,
the Ten Thousand Li Wall. Li is an ancient Chinese measurement like miles and meters.”
expensive PR agency in the country plant that and a dozen other stories about the project. “I visited Beijing with Ms. A-Ma six months ago when she was filming in the Far East, and I marveled at the artistic beauty of the former imperial complex called the Forbidden City and the summer palace outside the city. I trekked on the Great Wall, the over four-thousand-mile-long fortification the Chinese called
Wanli changcheng,
the Ten Thousand Li Wall. Li is an ancient Chinese measurement like miles and meters.”
Hot damn, was I full of culture and knowledge. I almost was tempted to tell them about the Gesar of Ling and the Opium Wars, but reined in my enthusiasm to show off. One thing I learned the hard way in my hustling days, never talk past the closeâwhen you've hooked a sucker and you're reaching for his wallet, you stop selling and shut your mouth because you might say something that quenches the sale.
The casino model showed a tall, central building with pagoda roofs scaled after the imperial palace. The Great Wall, with periodic “forts,” completely wrapped around the building. The elevated red dragon roller coaster used the wall as a track. It was a nice, compact design. When finished, it would be the size of a square blockâManhattan style. Stretching out from the backside of the casino were the carnival games and rides. On each side of the amusement park were parking lots.
The interior was laid out in paintings and smaller structures around the conference room. Exotic Chinese statues, works of art, and animals in a rain forestâlike setting would be scattered throughout the exterior and interior of the casino. There were slot machines in Chinese themes; ceramic elephants; the emperor's terra-cotta army; a zoo with tigers, lions, elephants; the irresistible pandas as well as dragons; Chinese dancers; firecrackers; kites; and lots of lakes and ponds, with real Chinese junks and tough-looking pirates holding tourists for ransom. I wanted it to look authentic.
“Despite a couple of half-hearted previous attempts at a family-oriented casino, Forbidden City will be the first casino where parents can enjoy gambling while their children of all ages can have wholesome entertainment. We'll even have a daycare center for employees and guests.” I beamed with social consciousness. “We have a three-thousand-room hotel, and for those guests who get tired of dumping
their money into the casino, we have a complete retail shopping center they can make deposits at.”
their money into the casino, we have a complete retail shopping center they can make deposits at.”
“That's what worries us most,” an investment banker from New York said. “There's a lot of doubt that you can fill a three-thousand-room hotel in Vegas. That's a convention hotel scale, not a tourist venue.”
“Nobody's done it because no one's tried it,” I said, smiling to dull the sharp edge I was accused of using on idiots. “People said Bugsy Siegel was wrong when he wanted to put a two-hundred-room hotel on the Strip, that Walt Disney was crazy because no one would bring their kids thousands of miles to see Mickey and Donald, when the Mexicans started putting high-rise hotels along a sandbar called Cancún. Hey, come on, people, the fact that it's never been done only means that we'll make more money than anyone else ever did.”
“You give people something they want, and they'll come,” Betsy Meyers, my PR person said.
“What about all of the cost overrunsâ”
“You know, you get what you pay for. I've been criticizedâ”
“Zack, you've bought a solid-gold throne that once belonged to an emperor, a treasure that the Chinese government says was stolen during the Japanese invasion of China. And you've hauled in real Chinese junks, acquired a private passenger jet, and literally bought a zoo to rob their pandasâ”
“Yeah, and I've got some five-thousand-square-foot VIP suites with Italian marble and gold fixtures. Every one knows what the Great Wall is, but did you know that some parts of it were built with such perfection that a single inch was a day's labor for several men? That's part of the perfection that will make Forbidden City the most talked about casino in the world.”
“Wasn't that what got Bugsy Siegel a bullet in his eye?” a banker from Chicago asked. “Perfectionism?”
“Is that a hint about what you people are going to do to me if we're not in the black pretty soon?” I asked.
I was pretty proud of the way I had spent tens of millions of dollars to get real antiques and fixtures. My looting of Oriental art and antiquities had been compared to the rape of European works done by William Randolph Hearst nearly a century ago.
Betsy slipped beside me. “You're starting to show your irritation.
Back away while I work the room. You're like a man with a chip on his shoulder who's been threading a sewing machineâwhile the machine's running.”
Back away while I work the room. You're like a man with a chip on his shoulder who's been threading a sewing machineâwhile the machine's running.”
Bill Peel, managing partner of Vegas's biggest law firm, the one I hired to represent the project, edged up to me.
“Those Oriental babes and the booze should do more to grease your relationship with the male bankers than your dog-and-pony show.”
“I wish someone would grease my relationship with the governor. He refused to attend.”
“He had a church meeting to attend. But I gave him your invitation for golf, dinner, and an overnight at your country club home. He's a funny guy, you know: the governor of the most corrupt state in the nation, if you don't count New Jersey as part of America, and the man acts like he's one of the Puritan fathers.”
“If you ask me, he acts like a guy who hasn't gotten laid enough. Men get real mean when they've been horny for so long their dicks have shriveled.”
“I wouldn't blame him,” Peel whispered, “his wife makes Phyllis Diller look like a beauty queen. Not to change the subject, but have you given thought about the finance committee the bankers are asking for?”
“Yes and no. Yes I've given it thought and no they're not going to get it. They want to control the purse strings and choke me with them. Committees don't do things; they're designed not to make decisions until everything goes to hell. Haven't you heard that a giraffe is a horse made by a committee?”
“Wasn't that a camel?”
“Whatever it is, I'm not letting them turn Forbidden City into sushi. No committee.”
“They're threateningâ”
“Fuck their threats. I'm in so deep into their pocketbooks that they have to keep me afloat. It's bad enough I have to fight the unions, the building contractors, architects, engineers, inspectorsâJesus Christ, every day I have to wade in and punch it outâ”
“I wish you'd make more of your fights verbal and less physical. That guy you hit and threw down a flight of stairs last week is hollering lawsuit.”
“Let him. He was trying to extort money from me, telling me I'd have âunion troubles' if I didn't pay him off.”
“Next time send him to me.”
I let Peel intercept a guest who wanted reassurance about the project while I floated to the back wall with a drink. Betsy's remark about me threading a sewing machine that was running was right on the nose. That's how I felt since the project started. When I wasn't moving fast enough to thread the machine, I was stamping out fires with my bare feet. Deep down I had a sense of panic I had to keep smothered. Sometimes I'd wake up in the middle of the night and think, Christ, what a fool I was, to think that I could really pull this thing off, to go from a street kid running a Glitter Gulch grind joint to the biggest casino in the world. I realized I had some of Betty's fatalism in meâtrying for the jackpot but knowing I'd never really get it. I had never realized that deep down I had some of that attitude. I had to fight it; I was running with wolves and if you showed any weakness, they turned and devoured you.
Watching Betsy and Peel work the room, I started to relax a little until a piece of ugly memory from my past strolled overâCharles Ricketts, the dump-truck deputy DA at the Kupka proceeding, who was now in charge of investigations for the state gaming control board. He was thrown out of the district attorney's office a few years after he dumped Betty's case because he blew a murder case. He was so bad at doing his job, he let a guy who chopped up his girlfriend's body and put her in a trash bag in the trunk of his car go free. Ricketts couldn't make it in private practice as a lawyer, even with a rich father-in-law, and ended up with the state job because his wife's father got elected to the state legislature.
I hadn't seen him since he sent me off to juvie after dumping my mother's case, but I was occasionally reminded of his existence in the local papers, though the only thing I wanted to read about him was his obituary.
Ricketts contacted me for an investigative interview after I applied for my gaming license for the super casino. I met with him in my attorney's office and let my attorney do all the talking. Last thing I wanted now was to talk to the guy, but Peel was too far across the room for me to shout for him to run interference. I had to be nice to
the weasel because my gaming permit was hanging in the balanceâbut only on the surface. I knew he would try to tube me.
the weasel because my gaming permit was hanging in the balanceâbut only on the surface. I knew he would try to tube me.
“Good to see you again, Zack.”
“How ya been, Charles?”
“Fine, fine. We didn't get to talk about it last time, but did you know that that guy Kupka, the one who killed your mother, dropped out of sight some years ago?”
“No kidding.”
“Yeah, must be ten, fifteen years ago, about the time I left the DA's office. Hell of a coincidence, you working at Halliday's, but Kupka had been last seen at Halliday's and probably headed back for his hotel room on the Strip, but never showed up. I heard he was drunk when he left Halliday's. My theory is that he grabbed a cab and the guy took him out into the desert and robbed and murdered him. But I was gone from the DA's office when he disappeared and no one asked for my opinion.”
“Really.” I hid my feeling behind a blank face and a glass of Jack Coke I rubbed my lower lip with to keep from sneering at the guy.
“You were working for Halliday's, weren't you, when Kupka disappeared?”
“I don't know, Charles. When exactly did the guy take a powder?”
“I'll have to check on the exact date. You know, of course, that I'm in charge of the investigation into your licensing application for the casino. I have to tell you, Zack, I have some real doubt about the viability of your financing.”
“Ms. A-Ma has no criminal record. Period.”
He shook his head. “The people she's associated with sound like the Chinese version of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted. I am afraid this application may need serious alteration before it will be approved.”
I had two major hurdles to jump. The FBI investigation and the state gaming board investigation. I had spread “campaign contributions” to every state, congressional, and senatorial member who could apply juice. Only twenty percent of the total package for the casino came through A-Ma and Mr. Wan's other sources, and not a dime of that had dirt on it. And if it did, it was buried so deep in international corporate transactions that it would take years to uncover it. My problem was that Mr. Wan was in the state's black book as prohibited from
entering a Nevada casino. The gaming board had the authority to proscribe anyone who even breathed close to someone in the black book.
entering a Nevada casino. The gaming board had the authority to proscribe anyone who even breathed close to someone in the black book.
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