Howard Hughes Buys Las Vegas

Thanksgiving night, nineteen sixty-six. A blacked-out private train arrives in Las Vegas, and its most famous passenger is carried on a stretcher to the penthouse of the Desert Inn. Howard Hughes has not been seen in public in years. He will not be seen again.

Hughes had made his fortune in aviation, film, and defense contracting. By nineteen sixty-six he was one of the wealthiest men in the United States and one of the most hidden, communicating through intermediaries, living in darkness behind drawn curtains, writing notes in a handwriting that aides described as increasingly erratic. He had come to Las Vegas, his associates said, for privacy. What he did with it was buy the city.

Within two years, Hughes had purchased the Desert Inn, the Sands, the Castaways, the Frontier, the Silver Slipper, and the Landmark, spending approximately three hundred million dollars in under two years. He never left his penthouse to look at any of them. He communicated with his casino managers through memos. He kept the curtains closed.

The purchases mattered for reasons that had nothing to do with Hughes personally. Nevada gaming regulators had been trying for years to replace mob-connected casino ownership with corporate ownership that could survive public scrutiny and federal oversight. Hughes, despite his eccentricities or perhaps because of them, was exactly the kind of owner they preferred: no prior organized crime convictions, a legitimate paper trail, and no interest in the counting room for reasons other than profit. His buying spree accelerated a transition that the regulators welcomed.

Hughes left Las Vegas in nineteen seventy, as quietly as he had arrived. The Desert Inn site where he spent four years without once walking outside is now Wynn Las Vegas.