Backstory: Making the deal

By Michael Green

To understand some of the responses to the agreement between Nevada Power and the Southern Nevada Water Authority, you might want to know about Shady Harry and the guy in Moe Dalitz's office.

For those unfamiliar with the issue, Knappster has been on top of it for months. The power and water folks feuded over everything imaginable. County Commission Chairman Rory Reid recently did a lot to bring them together, although details remain to be completed.

For this Reid has received much praise--and unlikely criticism from unlikely quarters. Three Water Authority board members who weren't in the loop feel they should have been. County Commissioner Lynette Boggs McDonald and North Las Vegas Councilwoman Shari Buck complained that they had to learn about the agreement from the media. Mayor Oscar Goodman pointed out that as elected officials they are the responsible parties, and after hearing for several years that he should hate Nevada Power, now he's supposed to love it?

Their displeasure is amusing. True, as board members, they shouldn't find out what's going on when they turn on the news, open the paper or get a reporter's call. But knowing how each of them hates publicity, one suspects they wouldn't be complaining if they were announcing the deal.

Thus the reference to Shady Harry, who's no relation to Rory Reid. It's the nickname of old Nevada political operative Jack Conlon. He spent many years as Sen. Howard Cannon's invisible hand and waged many a war. Shady Harry used to say, "If you're not in the deal, knock it."

Yet their point is endemic to Las Vegas history. If that history tells us anything, it's that most of what matters to us goes on out of public view. As Woody Allen said, "The Mafia spends very little for office supplies." We have no memos explaining the details of Bugsy Siegel's death or why Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal could run the Stardust hotel-casino with the title of entertainment director.

But the problem, if you want to call it that, wasn't and isn't limited to organized crime. Once upon a time, before County Commission meetings, the board would gather in a room for coffee. They would discuss the day's agenda. Why, they sometimes lobbied one another. The public wasn't invited.

Today, City Council members, county commissioners and state legislators close their office doors and talk. They recuse themselves when family, close friends or those involved with them in business come before them--from Goodman's attorney son Ross to when Boggs McDonald served as a Station Casinos director. Even if they are only interested spectators, their friends and enemies undeniably are conscious of them.

Even then, things happen behind closed doors, which brings us to the guy in Dalitz's office. Before--and, some say, even after--coming to Las Vegas, Dalitz was involved in organized crime. While here, he built the Desert Inn, Showboat and Stardust, shopping centers, country clubs and housing tracts. He was a philanthropist, mostly anonymously.

He also was a leader among the Strip casino operators. In 1960, they still didn't allow African-Americans to patronize their establishments. Local NAACP president James McMillan found this disturbing and threatened a boycott unless Las Vegas was desegregated in 30 days. Eventually, almost all the operators agreed to the famous, unwritten Moulin Rouge Agreement, where McMillan, Mayor Oran Gragson, Sun publisher Hank Greenspun and others sat around a table and agreed to do the right thing.

Not to denigrate the role of those figures, but McMillan recalled that after meetings with Gragson and others, not much had happened, except that he was receiving death threats. Then he spoke with West Las Vegas casino owner Oscar Crozier, who knew the folks on the Strip. Crozier talked with them, then called McMillan. "He told me that what I had to do was call the Desert Inn and ask for Mr. Taylor, who was running the place for Moe Dalitz at that time," McMillan said. He did as told and Taylor said, "It's been settled. We have accepted your terms." If the word came from the Desert Inn, it meant Dalitz was at the center of it.

McMillan didn't deny the good intentions or importance of those who met at the Moulin Rouge. But, he said, "all of their rhetoric didn't mean anything: they didn't own the hotels; they didn't own the gaming joints; they didn't own the restaurants. This thing was settled by Oscar Crozier and a handful of powerful hotel owners, and politicians played almost no role in it."

Now that's McMillan's version. Understandably, others might differ. No one questions that Gragson, Greenspun, Gov. Grant Sawyer and other civil rights leaders, white and black, believed in the cause and did a lot of good. But while most of what the public isn't supposed to know is exactly what it should know and needs to know, sometimes it can help to let people who know what they're doing operate under the radar.

Nevada Power and the Water Authority aren't dealing with civil rights, but Hubert Humphrey once said it was time "to get out of the shadow of states' rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights." He was correct. But sometimes the sunshine first requires some work in the shadows.