The Skim: How Vegas Casinos Stole from the Government for Thirty Years

They called it the skim, and everyone in the industry knew about it.

From the nineteen fifties through the early nineteen eighties, organized crime families from Chicago, Kansas City, New York, and Cleveland systematically removed untaxed cash from the counting rooms of Las Vegas casinos before the money could be officially tallied. The casinos involved over the years included the Stardust, the Fremont, the Tropicana, and others. The counting room was where currency from slot machines and gaming tables was collected and counted for tax and regulatory purposes. Cash that left the room before counting was cash that did not officially exist. It went into bags, into cars, and eventually into the hands of organized crime leadership in cities the tourists had never thought about when they sat down at a blackjack table.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation documented the operation through wiretaps and informants during the nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties, an effort known as Operation Strawman. The transcripts revealed not just the mechanics of the skim but the organizational structure behind it: how the families divided the proceeds, who made decisions, and how the Las Vegas casino managers who participated were expected to maintain a face of ordinary business operations while removing illegal cash.

The nineteen eighty-five convictions that resulted from the investigation were among the most significant organized crime prosecutions in American history. The same story, the same wiretaps, the same characters, became the source material for Martin Scorsese's Casino a decade later.

Nevada gaming regulators, in the official account, either did not know or did not look. Which of those two explanations is accurate is a question the public record leaves open.

The building you are looking at, the former federal courthouse where Senator Estes Kefauver first publicly documented organized crime's role in Las Vegas in nineteen fifty, is now the Mob Museum. The hearings that happened inside it and the investigation that came three decades later are connected chapters in the same long story.