With a rumble and colorful flashes, the last true mob-era casino in Las Vegas, the Tropicana, a landmark hotel and gambling parlor, was reduced to rubble on Wednesday.
It was no accident, the legendary haunt of the Rat Pack and the place James Bond said he heard was “quite comfortable” in 007’s 1971 film Diamonds Are Forever, the Tropicana’s heyday, was intentionally destroyed in an elaborate implosion in the early hours.
The hotel towers tumbled in a celebration that included a fireworks display. It was the first implosion in nearly a decade for a city that loves fresh starts, cleared to make way for a new baseball stadium.
“What Las Vegas has done, in classic Las Vegas style they’ve turned many of these implosions into spectacles,” Geoff Schumacher, historian and vice-president of exhibits and programs at the Mob Museum, told the Associated Press.
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Former casino mogul Steve Wynn changed the way Las Vegas blows up casinos in 1993 with the implosion of the Dunes to make room for the Bellagio. Wynn thought not only to televise the event but created a fantastical story for the implosion that made it look like pirate ships at his other casino across the street were firing at the Dunes.
From then on, Schumacher said, there was a sense in Las Vegas that destruction at that magnitude was worth witnessing. “Sin City” hasn’t blown up a casino on the Las Vegas Strip since 2016, when the final tower of the Riviera was leveled for a convention center expansion.
That will leave only the Flamingo from the city’s mob era on the Strip. But, Schumacher said, the Flamingo’s original structures are long gone. The casino was completely rebuilt in the 1990s.
The Tropicana, the third-oldest casino on the Strip, closed in April after welcoming guests for 67 years, and its past under the control of the mob has long cemented its place in city lore.
Behind the scenes of the casino’s grand opening in 1957, the Tropicana had ties to organized crime, largely through the reputed mobster Frank Costello. He was shot in the head in New York weeks after the Tropicana’s debut and survived but the police found a piece of paper in his coat pocket with the Tropicana’s exact earnings figure, revealing the mob’s stake in the casino.
By the 1970s, federal authorities investigating mobsters in Kansas City charged more than a dozen operatives with conspiring to skim $2m in gambling revenue from Las Vegas casinos, including the Tropicana. Charges connected to the Tropicana alone resulted in five convictions.
There were no public viewing areas for the controlled implosion, but fans of the Tropicana did have a chance in April to bid farewell to the vintage Vegas relic.
“Old Vegas, it’s going,” Joe Zappulla, a teary-eyed New Jersey resident, said at the time as he exited the casino, shortly before the locks went on the doors.
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