KVIG Informative

Nevada’s gambling regulators don’t just police cheating at the tables — they decide who is allowed to own a casino at all. The two-agency system that makes that call was built specifically to screen organized crime out of the business, and seven decades later it is still the gate every ownership change in the state has to pass through, including a licensing review now underway over three of the oldest casinos on the California line.

Nevada legalized wide-open gambling in 1931, but for nearly a quarter-century afterward the state ran almost no background screening on who could hold a casino license, according to a Nevada State Archives description of its Gaming Control Board records collection. The 1955 Legislature created the Gaming Control Board to change that, establishing it inside the Nevada Tax Commission as the state’s first dedicated enforcement and investigative unit for gambling, the Archives states.

The Nevada Gaming Control Act, passed March 30, 1959, restructured that system again. The law removed the Tax Commission from gaming oversight entirely and created the Nevada Gaming Commission, positioning the Gaming Control Board as the new commission’s audit, investigative and administrative arm, according to the Archives.

Donate

Donate

Two agencies, one gate

The division of labor set up in 1959 still governs how Nevada licenses gaming today. The Gaming Control Board is made up of three full-time members appointed by the governor to four-year terms, and it investigates applicants and makes recommendations; the Nevada Gaming Commission holds the final vote on whether a license is granted, according to the Nevada Gaming Control Board’s own account of its current structure.

That structure was in use again on June 25, 2026, when a special meeting agenda brought three Herbst family gaming trusts before Nevada’s regulators seeking nonrestricted gaming licenses for Buffalo Bill’s Resort & Casino, Primm Valley Resort & Casino and Whiskey Pete’s Hotel & Casino, according to the Nevada Gaming Commission’s and Nevada Gaming Control Board’s own published agendas for that meeting. The EJH Gaming Trust, the TDH Gaming Trust and the Timothy P. Herbst Gaming Trust each sought a one-third membership interest in the entities holding the three Primm properties, the agendas show.

Donate

Donate

The same June 2026 agenda also listed JETT Gaming LLC, operating as Terrible’s Gaming at Primm Center, seeking a separate restricted gaming license, according to the published meeting materials. Each application required the standard nonrestricted-license review: licensure as a gaming manufacturer and distributor, and approval to receive a share of race book and sports pool revenue generated by a separate wagering operator on site, the agenda states.

Seventy years on, the machinery built to keep organized crime out of Nevada casinos hasn’t gone anywhere — it just keeps processing different names. Every time a casino changes hands in this state, from a Strip mega-resort to a roadside stop at the California line, it still has to clear the same two-agency gate lawmakers built in 1955 and rebuilt in 1959.