Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Columnist Jeff German: Las Vegas is the new Neverland

When Mayor Oscar Goodman gave Michael Jackson the key to the city Oct. 25, he said the pop icon embodied the spirit of Las Vegas.

I don't know whether the mayor still believes that now that Jackson is facing multiple counts of child molestation in Santa Barbara, Calif.

Goodman got shy Thursday and had nothing to say about Jackson's troubles.

But Jackson certainly embodies the spirit of the new marketing image of Las Vegas -- that this is a city where anyone, no matter how soiled his reputation, is welcome and where "what happens here, stays here."

Tourism officials have to be ecstatic that Jackson was in Las Vegas as Santa Barbara County authorities raided his Neverland Ranch looking for evidence to corroborate the child molestation charges, and then issued the warrant for his arrest.

I see another marketing slogan in the works, "what happens everywhere else, comes here."

For three days, Las Vegas has been at the heart of the biggest story in the world as reporters and paparazzi staked out the city in search of the elusive king of pop.

Footage of previous Jackson appearances in Las Vegas aired continuously during live cable network coverage of the unfolding drama. His trek to surrender to police in Santa Barbara was carried live, as well as his circus-like return to Las Vegas. It probably was millions of dollars' worth of free advertising, and tourism officials didn't have to pay a dime for it.

I asked my friend Rob Powers of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, the publicly funded agency pushing the new image of the city, whether he thought the Las Vegas tie-in to Jackson's arrest was good for tourism. But, like the mayor, he was being shy and didn't want to offer an opinion.

Powers, however, and his bosses at the LVCVA are well aware that any publicity, good or bad, is good publicity for Las Vegas. That has always been the case. And it's even more so now that we have a marketing strategy that at long last acknowledges that we are Sin City, where anything goes.

Our history is loaded with examples of people with less-than-perfect reputations we've embraced.

People like Moe Dalitz, a mob-connected bootlegger from Cleveland, and Benny Binion, an illegal gambling kingpin from Dallas, helped build this city. And we treated them like pillars of society for their philanthropic contributions.

We made Allen R. Glick our "man of the year" in 1976 while he secretly was fronting for the mob as the owner of the Stardust and Fremont casinos.

Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal wrote a newspaper column and hosted his own television talk show from the Stardust while he secretly was looking out for the mob's interests at the Strip resort.

Heck, we even made the man who defended some of these characters in court our mayor.

In the grand scheme of things, giving the world's most notorious accused child molester a key to the city probably won't be the most embarrassing thing Mayor Goodman has done.

On the contrary, it might earn him a commendation from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.

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