Bob Is Great

If you want to understand Las Vegas history, you must get to know Moe Dalitz.

Consider that no mean feat, as Dalitz died in 1989 and in life was a private man. Dalitz gave few in-depth interviews in his lifetime, but much was written about him.

Las Vegas history is filled with characters who lived double lives. The life of Moe Dalitz is perhaps the best example of a gambling man existing in sunshine and in shadow.

His story might have been penned by Horatio Alger had he written scripts for "The Untouchables."

Early in his life, Dalitz was a bootlegger and racketeer mentioned in the same breath as Meyer Lansky and Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel. In Cleveland, one longtime member of law enforcement would tell the Kefauver Commission, "Ruthless beatings, unsolved murders and shakedowns, threats and bribery came to this community as a result of gangsters' rise to power." Dalitz was considered part of that rise.

Given the nation's fascination with organized crime, fueled in no small part by Hollywood and blood-soaked banner headlines during Prohibition's many whiskey wars, early in his life Dalitz reached something akin to a celebrity status as a runner of rum and operator of roadhouse gambling parlors from Cleveland to Newport, Ky. If Dalitz never achieved Lansky's moniker of "financial genius of organized crime," it was not because he was less successful.

Unlike Lansky, whose inability to shake off early-won infamy forced him into the shadows throughout his life, Dalitz made the improbable transition from underworld figure to legitimate citizen. If local police detectives and FBI men suspected Dalitz of wrongdoing during his latter years, they dared not whisper such criticism without ample evidence. By the time Dalitz reached his prime, his financial empire and formidable string of businesses were legitimate.

It didn't start out that way.

Morris Barney Dalitz was born Dec. 24, 1899, in Boston. The son of a laundry operator, Barney, Moe grew up at his father's side. The family moved to Michigan when Moe was still a child, and his father opened Varsity Laundry in Ann Arbor, which served University of Michigan students. Although he would become known first as an illegal liquor and gambling racketeer, Moe was a successful laundry operator throughout most of his life. It was a labor action associated with his laundry business that introduced Moe Dalitz to Jimmy Hoffa, future president of the Teamsters union, the labor organization that one day would be responsible for lending Nevada gamblers the millions it would take to build the first wave of casino resorts in Las Vegas. Dalitz was attempting to keep his laundries from organizing and, according to author James Neff, at one point hired Mafia thugs to make his point.

Once he became associated with mob muscle, a door opened and Dalitz gravitated toward the lucrative and dangerous Prohibition-era liquor trade. All the while he took profits and invested them in legitimate businesses