Columnist Martin Kuz: Locals take attack on Goodman in stride

Martin Kuz

Thursday, Aug. 19, 1999 | 9:52 a.m.

Martin Kuz is a reporter for the Las Vegas Sun.

Cover your ears, boys and girls. Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman has something to tell you. And it's vewy, vewy scary.

Goodman, the subject of a withering profile in the Aug. 16 issue of the weekly literary magazine the New Yorker, admitted in the article that he is "keeping a list of those who were never for me, who spoke out against me as though I were the Antichrist. It's not a long list, but it's a list. And I don't care how long it takes, but I will get them."

Ooooh! A politician who keeps a list of enemies -- it's enough to make you hide under the covers. Or, in the case of New Yorker staff writer Connie Bruck, to portray Goodman as somehow different from every other elected official on the planet.

Displaying a childlike naivete, Bruck follows up the mob attorney-turned-mayor's revelation by asking if he doesn't sound a little too much like one of his former clients.

"Well," Goodman replies, "why let your enemies survive?"

Mommy!

That second furnace blast of honesty no doubt gave Bruck nightmares. But so far, anyway, adults have reacted with far less horror to Goodman's comments.

"It doesn't bother me," said Sharon Hamilton, an avowed Goodman supporter. "This is Las Vegas. We are different than most cities, so we have a mayor that's different."

Hamilton, 30, who works at a Las Vegas thrift store, shrugged off Bruck's assault on Goodman, noting that she writes for a magazine based in New York -- hardly a mob-free zone.

"I mean, New York -- like they're better than us? C'mon," Hamilton said. "She just needed someone to pick on. But I don't think it's going to hurt him."

No, it probably won't. Still, Bruck tries like a furrowed-brow second grader to color inside the lines of the caricature she's drawn, one that depicts Goodman as an amoral scoundrel no better than his ex-clients.

The article's first sentence introduces Goodman as "the veteran Mob attorney." The last paragraph has Goodman claiming that the only person who enjoyed his work as much as he likes being mayor was Nicodemo Scarfo, a crime boss he represented. As Scarfo pumped hot lead into his victims, Goodman recalls, he reportedly exclaimed, "I love it! I love it!"

Between her heavy-handed opening and oh-my-heavens conclusion, Bruck recounts Goodman's dealings with an all-star roster of Mafia figures. She accurately traces how his professional ties to Scarfo, Meyer Lansky and Tony Spilotro, among others, evolved to the point where some of his clients attended his daughter's bat mitzvah.

Bruck also provides insight into the intimidating, sometimes rabid anti-government persona Goodman unleashed in court -- and elsewhere, if he didn't like you. And she debunks Goodman's shrewd campaign gambit of passing off his life's work -- that would be, um, defending contract killers -- as his humble way of upholding the Constitution.

All of this is fair game, of course. It's also fairly boring, in that we've heard many of the stories before from no less an authority than Goodman, who has never thought to cloak his colorful past or muzzle his iridescent rhetoric.

In that vein, let's assume the obvious -- that Bruck's audience is the world-at-large, not us desert rubes who had the audacity to vault a "veteran Mob attorney" into the city's highest office. She still misses the point. Badly. It's precisely because political newcomer Goodman winks at his image that he won the mayor's race last fall, crushing then-City Councilman Arnie Adamsen, a lifelong -- and lifeless -- policy geek.

"I like his outspokenness," Barry Morrison said. The 56-year-old truck driver voted for Goodman, fully aware of the anecdotes that Bruck holds up as proof that the local electorate must've gone mad. "What's the big deal? He was doing his job (as a lawyer)."

True, Goodman's remark about his adversaries -- "Well, why let your enemies survive?" -- probably won't become the city's next tourism slogan, although one never knows with R&R Partners. But the comment begs for context.

First, Bruck tailed Goodman for weeks, a span during which she likely became familiar with his benign off-the-cuff riffing and tendency to slip Mafia-tinged terms like "whacked" into polite conversation. Yet she lets the comment stand naked, giving the impression that hanging on a wall in Goodman's office is a large case that's marked "To activate goon, break glass."

More to the point, every self-respecting politician has "enemies." Take former Mayor Jan Laverty Jones. She effectively helped to "whack" Adamsen as mayor pro tem in 1997 in a power play that solidified her dominance of the council -- and stirred little debate. Apparently, there's less controversy when your last job was hawking cars.

If Goodman strikes the casual observer as the cartoon mayor of a cartoon city, there remains -- at least for now -- an undeniable old-Vegas romanticism to his presence at City Hall. And if his dropping of mob names threw an outsider like Bruck, Bernard Artstein, a 71-year-old retiree who voted for Goodman, relishes the mayor's candor.

"The things he says (in the article), it sounds more like he's enjoying what he's doing," Artstein said. "He just wanted the job and he wanted to do what people elected him to do."

What Goodman definitely didn't want was for a national magazine to make mention of his "hawk nose and beady eyes." Too bad he can't send Bruck to her room for lipping off.