LV's Family Image???

[union_...@my-deja.com]

This place can't lose for winning.
Just when Las Vegas needs it most, along comes a really sleazy murder
trial.
For years now, America has been told that Las Vegas has changed. Gone
are
the days of Sin City -- or so the city's promoters have attempted to
tell
the world. Today's Las Vegas is a place of fine restaurants, great art,
interesting things for children to do. ...
All of which is, to a large degree, true.
Which is why the alleged murder of Ted Binion is, in a backhanded way,
just
the sort of publicity Las Vegas needs right now. Because the new Las
Vegas
that is endlessly bragged about -- the elegant restaurants, the
expensive
paintings, the family atmosphere -- is a little boring. You can get a
well-cooked piece of fish anywhere; you don't need to fly to Nevada to
look
at an oil portrait.
Sin City may be the reputation that Las Vegas has been trying to get
away
from -- but it was the Sin City reputation that made Las Vegas in the
first
place.
And last week, as the Ted Binion murder trial began, the old Las Vegas
reared its ugly head again. It's the kind of ugliness that only certain
people would ever find attractive -- and those are precisely the kinds
of
people who made Las Vegas so big. Roller coasters and themed
restaurants?
You can go to Disney World for that. For what is about to transpire in
a Las
Vegas courtroom over the next few months, you can only come here.
And, as painful as all of this may be for the family of the late Mr.
Binion,
it is destined to be -- no other way to say this -- good for business
in Las
Vegas. It will be a daily reminder to the outside world that Las Vegas
may
now be wearing respectable clothes and a friendly smile -- but it's
still
Las Vegas. Open 24 hours.
Ted Binion, 55, was found dead in his Las Vegas home on Sept. 17, 1998.
His
girlfriend, Sandra Murphy, a former topless dancer whom Binion
reportedly
met at a strip club, called emergency personnel to the house. Binion,
dressed only in an unbuttoned shirt and his underwear, appeared to have
died
of a drug overdose. He was a known longtime heroin user; heroin
paraphernalia, and an empty bottle of a prescription sedative, were
found
near his body.
Binion's father was the late Benny Binion, who founded Binion's
Horseshoe, a
downtown Las Vegas casino. Ted Binion ran the place until May of 1997
when
his gaming license was suspended by the Nevada Gaming Commission
because of
Binion's drug use and reported ties to organized crime figures.
So when Binion was found dead in 1998, many people were not surprised.
They
thought he had overdosed.
But within 48 hours, a man named Rick Tabish was arrested while
attempting
to dig up more than $6 million in silver that Binion had hidden in an
underground vault. And soon enough, police determined that Tabish had a
girlfriend with an interesting identity -- Sandra Murphy, the topless
dancer
who had lived with Binion before Binion's demise.
Now Murphy, 28, and Tabish, 35, are standing trial on charges they
murdered
Binion. Clark County District Atty. Stewart Bell alleges that Murphy and
Tabish forced Binion to ingest large quantities of heroin and Xanax,
then
suffocated him.
So the murder trial that is beginning here is set against a backdrop of
a
troubled casino man who was the son of a Las Vegas gambling legend; his
topless-dancer girlfriend; her boyfriend; the attempted theft of buried
silver (buried silver!); and quotes like these:
>From Louis Palazzo, Tabish's defense attorney: "This case is garbage,
and it
belongs in the toilet."
>From Oscar Goodman, who at the time he uttered these words was Sandra
Murphy's attorney (he has since become mayor of Las Vegas): "She is
like a
wounded caribou being chased by a pack of hungry wolves."
>From James Brown, an attorney for Binion, recalling what Binion told
him the
day before he was found dead: "He said, `Take Sandy out of the will, if
she
doesn't kill me tonight. If I'm dead, you'll know what happened.'"
In addition, the case has allowed reporters to write sentences like this
one, which appeared in the Las Vegas Review-Journal:
"Ted Binion was an associate of mobster Herbert `Fat Herbie'
Blitzstein, who
was found shot to death in his Las Vegas home Jan. 7, 1997, the victim
of
what authorities claim was an organized-crime hit."
Bad publicity for a town? Terrible for tourism? Jerrold Schaffer

Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.

[Spencerdogg]

Don't forget to mention the sleazy mouth foaming union lawyers
liars that fill the town and this newsgroup. Just ask the Venetian
security force that you Foam over.