LV crime rates on steady decline

Keith Paul

Saturday, Dec. 9, 2000 | 2:05 a.m.

For a city that loves to play the odds, the advantage is now firmly in the favor of Las Vegans -- as far as avoiding crime.

A popular view among longtime residents is that Las Vegas was safer when the mob ran the casinos and put the word out that it was a "closed city" -- meaning that no mob-sanctioned killings were allowed. Mobsters wanted to keep the gaming money flowing, and they didn't want the attention that high-profile slayings generate.

The reality is that residents were more than twice as likely to be crime victims in 1980, when the Mafia still had its hand in the casino industry, than in 1999, when gaming was said to be mob-free. The drop in the crime rate plunged even as the population tripled to well over 1 million people.

In 1980 the rate was 10,743 crimes per 100,000 people, and by 1999 the rate was 4,591 crimes per 100,000, according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report, which uses statistics provided by Metro Police. The report takes into account murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny and auto theft.

Sometimes it's hard to find someone who has lived in Las Vegas for 20 years to reminisce about the good old days. But Sgt. Rory Tuggle was a new street cop in 1980 and remembers the early '80s as a time of crime and violence.

"I remember my third day on the job hiding behind a patrol car being shot at," said Tuggle, now a sergeant in the Southeast Area Command's community-oriented policing unit. "It was one bad guy after another back then. We were a smaller town, and the bad guys didn't blend in as much."

The revisionist history may have been that the mob, led by Chicago lieutenant Tony "The Ant" Spilotro, kept the city safe. In reality, mobsters probably kept the trouble only out of their casinos. There, too, is speculation that the official crime numbers, high as they were, may not have reflected the true picture of the city's criminal activity in that decade.

"I would think that most of what the mob did wouldn't show up in the UCR statistics," said Alfred Blumstein, director of the National Consortium on Violence Research and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "The mob has an interest in keeping things quiet."

Tuggle remembers handling more burglaries outside of casinos in 1980 than today. The FBI report shows 14,526 reported burglaries in 1980 and 10,130 burglaries reported in 1999. The population went from about 385,000 to 1.04 million in Metro's jurisdiction during that time.

There were actually more crimes overall in 1999 -- 47,828 -- than in 1980 -- 41,405. Because fewer people lived in the area two decades ago, the odds of being a victim were higher.

Mob decline

The Las Vegas area started growing in the 1980s by tens of thousands a people a year, and the crime rate started to fall. Meanwhile, the FBI and other federal agencies waged an increasingly successful war on the mob in Las Vegas and other cities, highlighted by the arrest in 1981 of Spilotro's Hole in the Wall gang while it was breaking into Bertha's Home Furnishings on East Sahara Avenue.

Spilotro was arrested in 1983 on charges of skimming money from the Stardust hotel-casino. His 1986 trial ended in a mistrial. Six months later he returned to Chicago. His and his brother Michael's bodies were found beaten to death in an Indiana cornfield shortly thereafter.

The mob casinos gradually were bought out by corporate America. Huge megaresorts were built, leading to more jobs, more people with sunnier economic prospects and fewer reasons to commit a crime.

The theories for Las Vegas' decline in crime rate vary.

Sheriff Jerry Keller gives credit to the "men and women of Metro, who put it on the line every day" and to the community. Unlike many metropolitan police chiefs who shy away from taking any credit when crime numbers go down for fear of taking blame when they go up, Keller says Metro's relationship with the community led to the dropping rate.

"We can only be more successful as we build a trust with the public," Keller said. "We know it's a national trend (of a shrinking crime rate), but we work every day using new programs and community policing and building good relationships with neighborhood residents and business owners."

When asked who would be to blame if the crime rate starts going up -- as the murder rate in several major cities has this year -- Keller simply says, "Me."

"It means that I'm not listening anymore and am not doing what I am suppose to be doing," he said.

Of course, he noted, "All of our programs and all the statistics that show crime is on the way down mean nothing to someone whose home was burglarized or is the victim of a violent crime."

Others say the reason for the drop isn't just law enforcement.

Prison time

Longtime prosecutor Bill Koot says the falling crime rate can be attributed to more people spending longer sentences in prison.

"It was terrible in the '80s. After the Vietnam War, the country did swing way over to become a little more compassionate to the offender," Koot said. "As a prosecutor, it was a nightmare."

Koot also points to the economics of Las Vegas. As the area continued to grow and prosper, more people moved to town and were able to find jobs.

Koot laughs at the notion the city was safer when the mob was in town.

"Yeah, maybe no one screwed with (Benny) Binion, but that had nothing to do with street crime," he said. Binion, who owned the Horseshoe hotel-casino, maintained a reputation as a tough guy and was said to be connected to organized crime.

Tuggle said the economic prosperity of the area likely had a positive effect on the crime rate, but "while the crime is way down, weird is way up."

The nature of crimes in the 1980s was more cut and dried, Tuggle said. Now crimes are more sensational, such as the 1999 multiple killings in a local supermarket by Zane Floyd or the 1997 rape and murder of 7-year-old Sherrice Iverson in a Primm hotel-casino restroom.

Other rising crimes were rare or did not exist in 1980, such as identity theft and Internet crimes.

Randy Sheldon, a criminal justice professor at UNLV, said Las Vegas is unlike any other place in the country.

"The drop in crime (from 1980 to 1999) is not easily explained," Sheldon said, noting the tremendous rise in population that accompanied it.

"I guess you could ask all kinds of experts and get different answers," he said. "This really escapes a rational explanation."

After studying the declines, Sheldon, asked to come up with his own explanation, said simply, "I don't know."

In a town that loves the odds even though they are always stacked against the players, sometimes not knowing why is better.

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