The New Year continues with its Wednesday columns of my illustrious past and the FLAT RABBIT PRESS.
Welcome back, pal.
I previously tantalized you with a promise to talk about Bugsy Siegel and Howard Hughes. Due to space and time constraints, I'll have to limit it to Bugsy for this column and to talk about Howard in the next. Don't worry about Howard…. He's way, way up there in the belly of a Spruce Goose someplace, pacing back and forth in his tennis shoes and without a dime in his pocket.
For now, let's just discuss bugs. There are some desert bugs that don't crawl out every season. It's a fact that some varieties require an absolutely perfect environment to hatch. One species of gnat lays its eggs in the summer sands and disappears, sometimes for decades, until things are "just right."
Back in the mid-'80's, 1984 if memory serves me correctly, it was a particularly wet winter in the desert, followed by some of the prettiest desert blooms I've ever seen. It was also the year of the desert gnat. One night, all hell broke loose in Vegas; the town was totally packed with fight fans. I think Hearns and Leonard might have been going toe-to-toe at Caesar's Palace.
Well, the damned gnats hatched. Attracted by the lights, they headed straight for Vegas and got sucked into all of the major strip hotel and casino air conditioning systems in the middle of the night. Billions of them, and I do mean billions, made their way into hotel rooms, luxury suites and "eye-in-the-sky" crawl spaces. The next day, floating gnat carcasses were literally two inches deep in ice buckets and there was one helluva lot of ticked off customers.
Vegas also has what they call water bugs. I think that they're a cross between a cockroach and a beetle. They're black, and squatty, and big, and they just love to munch on gnat carcasses. Sure enough, water bug herds exploded in population. They seemed to be most at-home in the security crawl spaces above casino floors. In fact, the Chief of Security at the Landmark opened up the crawl space there and shined his flashlight in; the bugs were so thick that it reminded me of a giant, black carpet waving in a breeze. Yuck!
Casino ceilings have many places where such bugs can crawl out, such as light fixtures and air conditioning vents. One night, there was a blonde bombshell playing roulette. I mean, she was a 38-26-36, 5'10" movie star stuffed into a size 5 dress. Yeah, things were poking out everywhere. Well, just like half of the casino execs in the joint were doing, I was watching her gamble when a black bug fell out of the ceiling and onto the roulette wheel. The dealer, in one sweeping and poetic motion, snatched a tissue from a nearby box, reached into the wheel and extracted the bug. I think we were the only ones who caught that action, that dealer was so cool.
The next bug, however, landed in a slightly different and more provocative spot. The blonde was leaning over the table and placing her bets when all of the sudden…. Kerplunk! Straight down the bodice of her dress and deep into her cleavage it went. Ooooo, baby! I haven't seen a body twist and turn like that since Earl Campbell played on Super Bowl Sunday! Oooo! She made a whole new meaning for the words, "Fox Trot!" Even Fred Astaire couldn't have kept up with her.
Which, of course, brings me to Bugsy.
Vegas has always been like a big carny game for adults. You've got the hucksters, the shucksters, and the barkers, all with their big come-ons. It's one publicity stunt after another in that town and one particular night at the Flamingo was no different. There they were, Flamingo President Burton Cohen and supreme huckster Geraldo Rivera, about to open up what was being touted as Bugsy Siegel's secret floor safe. Was there really a million bucks stashed in there? And, I was watching that malarkey on national TV. Oh, mercy me!
A friend of mine, Fran Sunblade, had been the Food and Beverage Auditor at the Flamingo when I worked there way back in my tender youth. One day, he'd invited me into his office, which was one of several cubicles stretched down a hallway near the executive offices. "Get down on the floor and pull that carpet back," Fran told me. And there it was... what would one day become the central point of a national television circus... Bugsy Siegel's floor safe. The area where Fran had his office used to be Bugsy's office suite.
"Who in Hell was Bugsy Siegel?" I'd asked Fran. I really wasn't kidding, but I guess he THOUGHT that I was kidding, because he almost fell off of his chair and doubled over in laughter.
The lid was unlocked and, upon further inspection, I discovered that it was empty. Well, if you've been reading my columns to any extent, you know by now what my next move was. I had Fran hand me a blank piece of paper, upon which I wrote, "What in the hell are you looking in here for?" I signed it, "Bugsy," dropped it into the safe, and put the lid back on.
Several years later, Burton and Geraldo both hyped and re-hyped the night they would open Bugsy's safe at the Flamingo. You certainly must know that I was salivating over that. I could just picture Geraldo reaching deep, deep into the safe and extracting my note on national television. Well, dammit, you know that the real joke was on me because, there was nothing in there. They really didn’t have to crack the safe open, either; the combination was broken and there was no way you could lock the cover. So, maybe they'd already read my note before the show. Or, maybe, Fran had played a joke on someone and forgotten to put the note back in. Who knows? Only The Shadow knows. What a disappointment that night was to me; I’ve never been the same since.
As for Howard Hughes? Yeah, I collected $1,500 from him, back in 1974 when I was collecting "written off" gambling debts. If you really want to hear that story, my friend, yer gonna have to read the next issue, 'cause I'm out of space this time.
As I sit here and polish off this column, my eyes settle on the picture hanging there on the wall. You know the picture; it's the one of me with Mike Tyson. Yeah, the one with his arm around my shoulders. The one taken in the Crown Room at the Las Vegas Hilton the night before Tyson won his first major fight. I didn't tell you about that story? Well, pal, it's coming your way in a FLAT RABBIT PRESS, soon. And yes, I still have both of my ear lobes. See ya! I'll bet you thought Mike got one ear lobe and my ex-wife got the other one, didn't you?
See ya next week pal.
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