But, then again, the guy’s nickname was Bugsy, right?

So Bugsy built the Flamingo, came in way over budget and got a Mafia pink slip. After the funeral, a couple of other boys built casinos with names like the Sands (not weird), the Oasis (not weird), and the Sahara (confused, but not weird) but that’s where the non-weirdness stopped.

Because people started coming to Las Vegas.

To do what?

Lose money.

It became one of the great American pastimes. Save your money all year to go on vacation and lose the money. People started treating it as if it were some sort of wonderfully guilty pleasure. Yeah, I went to Vegas last week and really lost my shirt. Heh-heh-heh.

The gangsters couldn’t believe it. Here they’d spent all those years of effort and planning on crime and it all suddenly seemed like such a waste. Now all they had to do was build a bunch of hotel rooms, tell people they could stay in them for twenty bucks if they promised to lose five hundred at the tables, and people actually went for it. Yeah, I went to Vegas last week and dropped two grand. But guess what? My room? Twenty bucks. And the buffets…

Mob-organized bank robberies stopped virtually overnight. Why go to all the trouble and danger of robbing a bank when all you had to do was invite the bank to come to Las Vegas? And the beauty of it: it was all perfectly legal.

Anyway, the money kept coming in and the casinos kept going up and the weirdness quotient kept rising.

To the point where you could now walk, as I was doing that Sunday afternoon, from a casino where they have a mock volcanic eruption every two hours, to a pirate ship, to ancient Rome, to a paddle-wheeled steamboat, to a Chinese temple, to a circus where they have acrobats flying around over your head while you’re trying to drop twenty bucks’ worth of quarters into a slot machine while some waitress dressed like a lion tamer offers you free drinks.