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Tales of Vegas Past: A Day that will never return

By Gregory Crosby

When I was 16 years old, a junior at Valley High School, I found myself on the staff of the school's newspaper, Thor's Hammer, in part because of a still mysterious and barely articulated desire to be a writer. I don't recall doing a whole lot of stories; a typical experience was interviewing the dour soccer coach, writing up in warts-and-all fashion his unconcealed disdain for his team's "laziness," then having to whitewash the story because our adviser insisted "we can't run a story where the coach calls his own players losers!"

But I did manage to write a funny op-ed piece wherein the governor and other state officials were forced to go back to school and discover the many inadequacies of public education (a subject in which naturally I had plenty of experience). My advisor entered that piece in the Review-Journal's annual high school journalism awards in the "columnist" category, even though I wasn't a regular columnist. The day came, and several dozen high school journalists sat in a conference room in UNLV's student union, enjoying a rubber chicken dinner as plaques for achievement were handed out. When my name was called as having won first place as "Best High School Columnist, 1984," I experienced for the first and last time the vertiginous disbelief that award ceremonies induce. But what mattered to me, far beyond winning, was the person who judged that piece the best of the crop, the person who shook my hand an gave me the only award from high school I've kept. That person was Ned Day.

Ned Day was my local hero. He embodied for me the persona of the crusading journalist, the tough guy who kept a fifth of whiskey in his desk drawer and wasn't afraid of anybody, particularly the mob. Remember the mob? The Jewish gamblers, Italian strongmen, bland and inoffensive frontmen who danced in and out of the casinos on the Strip, merrily skimming profits and dodging the slings and arrows of the occasionally outraged Gaming Control agents? Ned Day, as investigative journalist for KLAS Channel 8, documented their dance as it came to its slow and bloody end in the early '80s. His documentary, The Mob on the Run, created out of segments originally broadcast on Channel 8 Eyewitness News, revealed the Chicago and New York mobs' struggles for power and influence over Las Vegas casinos, the depth of their involvement with public officials, their slow and sorry end as federal prosecutors, newly empowered with RICO statutes, ended their stranglehold on numerous properties.

Ned Day chased the mob with tenacity, playing the part of investigative journalist to the hilt; even wearing a trenchcoat in his filmed intros to each segment, walking the Strip or standing in the shadows of the Foley Federal Building like a character out of Chandler. It was TV news, after all, but it was TV news with a semblance of real journalism, a rare commodity then in local TV news, a nearly extinct commodity today. It's hard to imagine segments like Day's airing today, segments that clearly trace the corruption of officials and developers the way Day chronicled the mob-controlled Teamster's pension loans that built Caesars Palace and the Aladdin, the rise and fall of frontman Allan Glick (who went from being Las Vegas' "Man of the Year" in 1975 to having his gaming license revoked in 1979), the brief career of Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal at the Stardust (later the basis of the book and film Casino), and the nasty and brutish life of the Chicago mob's Vegas enforcer, Tony "The Ant" Spilotro.

Ned Day went after them all, and took it as a point of pride when someone firebombed his car in 1986, escaping unscathed just as Rosenthal had from his fiery Cadillac in front of Tony Roma's three years before. As George Knapp, Day's best friend and colleague at KLAS, put it, "Ned's happiest day was when the mob blew up his car!" Day's defiance of Spilotro and his ilk in his Review-Journal column made him an obvious target for mob revenge. So it was more than tragic when the word came that Day, while on vacation, snorkeling in Hawaii, had died of a heart attack at age 42 on Sept. 3, 1987 (incidentally, my 20th birthday). It was suspicious. Officials found the hard-living Day to have had an enlarged heart and diseased arteries, but Knapp went to Hawaii and investigated anyway, and to this day is still unsure whether Day's death was natural or somehow induced.

It would be a perfect end to Day's career: the mob scattered from the field, but reaching out to settle one last score. Either way, Day was gone, and his like, the scrappy, fearless reporter with a touch of Damon Runyan, will not be seen again in this town, so changed from 20 years ago. But he remains an inspiration. Though I didn't become a journalist until years later, and then an arts and features writer rather than a hard news guy, the moment Day validated my meager efforts was the moment I knew I could be a professional writer, one who could bear witness the way Day did, one who could someday write about Las Vegas, its people and history. "The price of the future is to never forget the past," intoned Day at the end of his documentary. I remember, Ned. Thank you.