
Originally Posted by
aslan
Isn't that what I said? What he did was legal, but immoral.
Au contrair! These are casinos, not churches!!
Temples of Chance! 
Bugsy Siegel's dream and demise, the Flamingo, the lurid birth of modern Las Vegas itself, was barely 15 years old, and the casino business was still very much the sovereign domain of men who best understood and best served the needs of vast, illimitable suckerdom.
Such men today are for the most part gone or receding into the shadows, and the casino business is now the domain of corporate America. In 1989, not long before he died, Benny Binion, who had been convicted of murder early in his career, bragged to a Texas newspaper reporter: "I'm still able to do my own killings." Donald Trump, licensed by the New Jersey Casino Control Commission in the decade of Binion's death, represented the new regime, a spoiled, chalk-striped punk who, as Johnston says, "grew up riding through New York's outer boroughs in his mother's Rolls-Royce." "Temples of Chance" takes us from the days of immensely lucrative dumps such as Binion's Horseshoe to the grotesque fiasco of the Taj Mahal Casino Resort, the bankrupt plastic cathedral of kitsch erected by Trump as a monument to, as it turned out, his own purblind pomposity and folly.
Casino gambling is now a socially acceptable, all-American pastime, and Las Vegas and Atlantic City have become Disneyworlds of venality. In the 1980s, Las Vegas, in a national television advertising campaign, began promoting its new, improved sucker's racket as "The American Way to Play." (As Johnston points out, Sig Rogich, the Strip publicity agent who concocted that phrase, later was hired as an image-maker during George Bush's 1988 presidential campaign and subsequent presidency.)
Part theme park, part mall, part Lourdes--just stand amid the slot machines and watch the endless caravan of old ladies in wheelchairs rolling themselves faithfully, desperately toward redemption--the gaming industry of the Merv Griffins and the Trumps and the junk-bond kings and the bold-suspendered yuppie accountants is testament to the power of America's lust for mediocrity. It is sin made bland, a pastel dream world in which the hoi polloi might catch a whiff of Robin Leach's cologne or a glimpse of Frank Sinatra Jr.'s gleaming ring.
Beneath the patina of this sucker-friendly dream world, however, the cold-blooded nature of the racket has grown ever more calculated, by means of computerized odds-stacking, subtle psychological lures expertly devised to attract and evoke compulsive behavior in the addictive (and the just plain dumb), and a variety of other methods introduced by the graduate-schooled, spreadsheet-spewing minions of the new order.
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