Photo Courtesy of Las Vegas News Bureau.īy 1945, with the El Rancho and Last Frontier (at the site of the former Pair-O-Dice) hotel-casinos operating along the highway, McAfee announced he was ready to build his dream property, along with investor Buck Blaine. In 1941 he sold the 91 Club and purchased, on Fremont, the Pioneer casino as well as Cornero’s SS Rex Club casino, and built a modern, tropical-themed bar, the Mandalay Room. His wife June recalled years later that he jokingly called the almost-barren highway the “Strip,” after the Sunset Strip, believing, correctly, that other casinos eventually would locate there.īut he also invested in downtown, buying a two-story building on Fremont Street. In 1939, he bought the small Pair-O-Dice casino and auto park on Highway 91 outside Las Vegas. McAfee soon left town for Vegas with his wife, the sexy movie actress June Brewster (they would divorce in 1941). Things were fine for the syndicate until 1938, when city voters overwhelmingly recalled syndicate-friendly Mayor Frank Shaw and voted in Superior Court Judge Fletcher Bowron as a reform mayor to put a stop to the pervasive vice rackets. For years, along with gambling, McAfee had his hands in the city’s brothel racket. After marrying a brothel madam, he quit the force to make more cash as one of the criminals, joining the ranks of Los Angeles’ top crime syndicate.īy 1931, after the death of Mob boss Charles Crawford, McAfee led the syndicate peopled by the likes of City Hall power broker Kent Kane Parrot, bookmaker Ezekiel Caress, nightclub manager Milton “Farmer” Page, slot and pinball machine runner Robert Gans, and gambling ship operator Tony Cornero. In the 1920s during Prohibition, while serving as captain of the vice squad, he took hush payments from bootleggers.

Born in Kansas in 1888, he joined the Los Angeles Police force in his twenties. In the 1930s, he owned the Clover Club, a nightclub and illegal casino on Sunset Boulevard – the “Sunset Strip.” The Clover Club was popular with the Hollywood set.

The Flamingo would debut on December 26.įew in Las Vegas knew or cared about how McAfee earned his way to Las Vegas from Los Angeles. Meanwhile, McAfee’s old associates from Los Angeles, Billy Wilkerson and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, were constructing what would become a more famous casino, the Flamingo, several miles to the south on Highway 91 – latest known as the Las Vegas Strip. Located on downtown’s Fremont Street, the Golden Nugget was the largest gambling house in town. McAfee, 58, had spent more than $1 million to open the Golden Nugget casino on August 30. Photo Courtesy of Las Vegas News Bureau.īy the late summer of 1946, Guy McAfee was the best-known big shot in Las Vegas.

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