How Howard Hughes Bought Las Vegas From Under The Mafia’s Feet

The billionaire recluse pulled off quite the coup in Sin City.

He arrived by train under the cover of darkness in November 1966. As for when he left, no one’s entirely sure, such was the ghostly manner in which he was spirited about the place. Whatever the exact date, in between arriving in and leaving Las Vegas, Howard Robard Hughes Jr transformed the jewel in the Nevada desert from ‘Sin City’ into ‘America’s Playground’.

Of course, he had the financial resources to pull off so substantial a coup. But in reclaiming the town from the clutches of the Mob and in utterly reshaping its image as a destination for holidaymakers, Hughes pulled off a feat that’s all the more remarkable given the physically and mentally chaotic state he was in at the time.

Like his eccentricities, Hughes’s early life as a business, aviation and cinematic maven is perfectly encapsulated in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator. To limit ourselves to the Howard of the Vegas years is to turn down the opportunity to retell any number of great anecdotes about his high living and womanising. By the early 1970s, the handsome playboy of old had been replaced by an increasingly batty pensioner.