If there was one thing I tool away from this book is that Mob rule was bad for business. The lords of Vegas hurt their own products by massive skimming of profits, poor accounting procedures, and the need to lay out huge sums of money to stay in business and out of jail, both in the form of attorney fees and bribes to every greedy government minion, from the local councilman to US Congressmen and FBI agents; they didn't have to bribe J Edgar Hoover, just show him a picture of his boyfriend in a compromising situation. It was not until the Mob was pushed out of Vegas, when the owners became millionaires and corporations with good practices that the casinos finally broke out of their forty-five-year death spiral; the casinos still go through the cycles of boom and bust, but now they are the result of economic pressures and nor gang warfare.