Sam Reese had little love for Feds. Very few had come to be his friends across the years. They were useful in their place — for running operations interstate and such — but they were chiefly skilled at getting underfoot and making simple cases complicated. They assumed an elitist attitude that made them stand aloof from other law-enforcement personnel — and many working cops suspected them of undermining local efforts in pursuit of broader, secret goals.

Sam Reese had put in more than twenty years with metro, rising through the ranks to reach command grade long before its merger with the Clark County Sheriff's Department. He remembered all the federal sound and fury under Kennedy — the wiretaps and surveillance, bugs in offices and counting rooms — all of it leading to a handful of indictments that were bargained down to nothing when they came to trial. When push came to shove the boys from Justice seemed to make their best moves in the headlines, leaking "confidential" information, making allegations, spreading notso-subtle innuendos.

They must have spent a century of high-priced man-hours chasing leads and fattening their files without approaching a solution to the problem. And Reese admitted that there was a problem. No frigging doubt about it. The syndicate was nothing new in Vegas.

Hell, the Siegel-Lansky mob had started everything in '46, and even after Benny bit the big one, there were others standing by to cut themselves a piece of pie. You did not need a microscope to find the Mob in Vegas — but finding them was one thing; getting rid of them was something else again.

Ironically, the greatest blow against the Vegas Mob had been delivered not by any law enforcement agency, but by a single dedicated man.