Jon Ralston, upon reading a 160-page report on deals made between Bill Walters and Las Vegas, has to wonder …

Sunday, Oct. 8, 2006 | 7:43 a.m.

Like a tableau of juice displayed in all its ignominious glory, the attorney general's report on 10 years of behavior by a Walters Group subsidiary known as the city of Las Vegas should be preserved as a historical document.

I have referred to developer/gambler Bill Walters as the eighth councilman. And after reading this 160-page report on deals he made with the city, I owe him an apology. That was an insult.

If history is as it is described in the report, for more than a decade the city was a government for Bill Walters, by Bill Walters and of Bill Walters.

The Public Purpose Doctrine, which essentially says that government should be for the good of the community, was subverted to become the Bill Walters Purpose Doctrine. Through various council iterations, three city managers and many staffers, all of whom are described in the report as either invertebrates or complicit in following this doctrine, Walters was able to hold sway by infiltrating the government with unmatched guile and determination.

"A very smart wily fox" was how his friend, former lawyer and barely veiled City Hall advocate, Mayor Oscar Goodman, described Walters to Metro. That, too, may be giving Walters short shrift.

But, in the end, this story is less about Walters than about the city and how it does business. Some of this has been written before, some of this has been previously documented. But the overpowering synthesis of the city's behavior, complete with altered environmental reports and suppressed legal advice, is, as Attorney General George Chanos put it, "an indisputable picture that you can avoid the truth by sleight of hand for only so long."

Chanos added that anyone who tries to knock down the report would be hit by a "tsunami" because of the wealth of evidence therein. You can try to kill the messengers here - Chanos, deputy city attorneys, brave city staffers who came forward. But you cannot kill this story, which is about to take on new and bigger life.

Chanos may be a lame duck, but he appears determined to pursue the report's contents with vigor. If Goodman follows through with his promise to once again propose the lifting of a deed restriction on a Walters golf course so the developer can build homes next to a treatment plant, Chanos will take the city to court. Almost a year ago Goodman led the council to give Walters the price he wanted - $7.2 million for land valued at seven or eight times that and could require tens of millions of dollars in odor remediation if Walters were allowed to build homes.

But that action was rescinded when Metro alleged crimes had been committed when the city dealt with Walters in the 1990s and leased and then sold him the land (with the deed restriction that it only be used for a golf course). The attorney general then stepped in.

Maybe it took an out-of-state firm, Senn Meulemans from San Francisco, and a former Washoe County district attorney, Cal Dunlap, to lift the veil covering what could ultimately turn out to be a conspiracy to defraud the public.

At the very least, Chanos believes, the city violated the Public Purpose Doctrine - and what's worse was warned by its attorneys it was doing so.

The cumulative effect of the report is devastating. Repeated memos from city attorneys that contain the line "does not confer a benefit to the city" about deals with Walters. A meeting with staffers last year long before the council vote, taped by a city employee, in which Walters "kept saying, 'we don't know why we are here - this deal is done.' "

And Thomas Green, deputy city attorney, encapsulating what he saw as Walters having carte blanche at City Hall, wrote in June of last year: "This group is never satisfied - if they could get the property for free, they would still want additional consideration for their trouble in having to deal with us."

That comment, like the power of juice, is priceless.

Lots of folks are going to have to answer lots of questions - Chanos says he already has 250 and unlike the law firm, the attorney general has subpoena power and he's not afraid to use it. The history of juice in Las Vegas is about to enter a new chapter.

But somehow, I don't think the end is near.