Mills angry with portrayal in book

Friday, March 30, 2001 | 4:38 a.m.

Lamond Mills isn't pleased with the way the authors of a new book on Las Vegas portray his tenure as Nevada's U.S. attorney in the early 1980s.

Sally Denton and Roger Morris, in "The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and its Hold on America," describe Mills as a pawn of the Nevada establishment bent on curtailing the investigative activities of a hard-charging FBI boss.

The authors, as a result of interviews with the FBI boss, Joseph Yablonsky, assert that the Reagan administration let Nevada Sen. Paul Laxalt, a Reagan friend, handpick Mills for the U.S. attorney's position to put heat on Yablonsky.

"After promising to do what he could to reduce the FBI's role in Nevada ..." the authors write, "the new U.S. attorney was sworn-in in June 1983, and immediately launched an investigation of Yablonsky for eating a complimentary meal at the MGM Grand and other minor violations of civil service ethics."

Mills, however, said the authors got their facts wrong.

"That's the goofiest thing I've ever heard," he said, pointing to several errors in the book about his term in office. "It's unadulterated nonsense."

Mills said he became U.S. attorney in April 1981, not June 1983, during a natural transition with the incoming Reagan administration. The previous top federal prosecutor in Nevada, B. Mahlon Brown III, had been appointed by President Jimmy Carter and knew his days in office were numbered with a Republican in the White House.

And contrary to what Denton and Morris write, Mills said, his office worked hand-in-hand with Yablonsky going after crooked politicians.

"We prosecuted all of Yablonsky's political corruption cases," Mills said. "We went after the system and shook it from head to toe. We hit the ground running."

The political cases stemmed from a Yablonsky-planned sting, dubbed "Operation Yobo," which resulted in the indictments of key elected officials, including former state Sen. Floyd Lamb, D-Las Vegas, one of the most powerful politicians in Nevada at the time. Lamb ultimately was convicted.

Mills also said he had no control over the Organized Crime Strike Force, which was coordinating the massive investigation into the mob's influence on the Strip, and could not have stopped the probe even if he wanted to. At the time, the strike force answered directly to the Justice Department's criminal division in Washington, he said.

And it was the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility in Washington, not Mills, that investigated Yablonsky for taking the MGM comp, the former U.S. attorney added.

Mills, now a criminal defense lawyer, praised Yablonsky for his knowledge of undercover operations. But he said he soured on Yablonsky when the FBI chief "crossed the line" and started interfering in local political races.

"Everybody here was a crook to him," Mills said. "He was losing his objectivity.

"His skills and techniques were diluted by this grandiose importance of himself and this idea that everybody was a crook. It took away what we were trying to do. We were trying to prosecute people who broke the federal law."

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