Las Vegas

The Syndicate

The Fremont Hotel was financed through a loan from Jimmy Hoffa and tied to Meyer Lansky, whose lieutenant, the Las Vegas gambler Edward Levinson, joined a 1963 lawsuit against Bobby Baker.¹ Robert Maheu, who had known Johnny Roselli through Las Vegas gambling circles, recruited him for the CIA's plots against Fidel Castro in September 1960. When Maheu's men were arrested for a wiretap in Las Vegas, done as a favor to Sam Giancana, the agency's director of security, Sheffield Edwards, asked that the prosecution be dropped; a CIA memorandum records, "At our request, prosecution was dropped." The case was the occasion for the briefing Edwards and the general counsel, Lawrence Houston, gave Attorney General Robert Kennedy on the operation on May 7, 1962.²³

Remote Viewing

Pat Price, the retired Burbank police commissioner whom Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ of Stanford Research Institute considered their most productive subject, died of a heart attack in Las Vegas on July 14, 1975.⁴ The real estate developer Robert Bigelow, born in Las Vegas in 1944, later held, through Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, a Defense Intelligence Agency contract to study anomalous phenomena.⁵

Trials and Plots

The former Special Forces officer Bo Gritz, indicted in May 1987 for using a false passport in the name of Patrick Richard Clark, told the court at his arraignment in Las Vegas that he had "proper authorization" for his travels, and was acquitted; the contractor Patrick Moriarty was subpoenaed to testify for him.¹

In about September 2019 Joshua Caleb Sutter, a paid FBI informant, organized the 2019 AWD Nuclear Congress of Atomwaffen Division in Las Vegas, with FBI-provided funds covering members' travel and lodging; James Mason, author of Siege, made his first documented appearance with the group there.⁶ On August 8, 2019, the FBI's Las Vegas Joint Terrorism Task Force arrested Conor Climo, who had been in contact with the Feuerkrieg Division since late 2017 and had planned to firebomb a Las Vegas synagogue and attack an LGBTQ bar; he was sentenced to two years in November 2020.⁷ On January 1, 2025, the active-duty soldier Matthew Livelsberger detonated a Tesla Cybertruck loaded with fireworks and fuel outside the Trump International Hotel on the Strip, in the Cybertruck Trump Hotel Bombing.⁸