Comped

Comped is the story of the Las Vegas that existed before the corporations took over - the mob-financed, Rat Pack-glamorous, blood-and-marble city that ran on comps instead of algorithms, on handshakes instead of loyalty cards, on men who remembered your wife's name and men who skimmed millions out of the count room in the same breath. From Bugsy Siegel's doomed vision at the Flamingo to the last dying gasps of the "open city" era, from Sinatra's Copa Room to a car bomb on a Las Vegas street, this is the story of how organized crime built the most improbable hospitality industry in American history - and how it all came apart the night a volcano erupted on the Strip and Wall Street money finally, decisively, won.

This is not a nostalgia piece, and it is not a true-crime indictment. It is both, at once, the way the real thing always was: a city where extraordinary warmth and extraordinary violence grew out of the very same desert soil, and where the price of being remembered was higher than anyone who was ever comped a room ever thought to ask.