KVIG Informative

A Utah-trained banker who agreed to lend money to an industry mainstream banks wouldn’t touch didn’t just keep one casino afloat. The credit he extended helped build the financial case for a change in state law that let Nevada’s casino industry trade mob money for public capital — the same structure that still finances the Strip today.

Bank of Las Vegas opened on Jan. 18, 1954, capitalized at $250,000, according to Nevada Public Radio’s “Nevada Yesterdays” segment on E. Parry Thomas by historian Michael Green. The bank was opened by a company controlled by Walter Cosgriff, head of a Salt Lake City-based banking network, and its directors included Nate Mack, according to Green’s account. Nate Mack’s son, Jerome “Jerry” Mack, a UCLA graduate who had returned to Las Vegas, also went to work at the bank, Green reported, and the UNLV Libraries Jewish Heritage Project’s profile of Jerome D. Mack separately credits Mack and his father with founding the institution that year.

E. Parry Thomas, raised in Ogden, Utah, had served in World War II and earned a banking and finance degree from the University of Utah before working for Continental Bank in Salt Lake City, itself part of Cosgriff’s banking network, according to Green’s account. Thomas arrived in Las Vegas more than a year after Bank of Las Vegas opened, taking a position as vice president and cashier, Green reported. David G. Schwartz, director of UNLV’s Center for Gaming Research, has written that Thomas took control of the bank around 1955, when Clark County had roughly 50,000 residents.

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Mainstream banks nationally were wary of lending to Nevada’s casino industry over its ties to organized-crime figures and the stigma attached to legalized gambling, according to UNLV’s Lee Business School, which inducted Thomas into its Business Hall of Fame. The school’s biography of Thomas credits him with the bank’s first casino loan: $750,000 in 1955 to help finance an expansion of the Sahara. Green’s account separately describes Thomas extending a loan to the Sahara for an expansion soon after his arrival, without naming a figure. Schwartz has written that the bank’s willingness to lend helped the young Strip survive a downturn that same year, and that Thomas went on to help arrange financing that kept resorts including the Riviera, the Frontier, the Dunes and the Thunderbird operating through difficult stretches.

Thomas became the bank’s president in 1961, according to UNLV’s Lee Business School biography of him. The same biography credits him with arranging loans from the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund at a time when few conventional lenders would accept gaming collateral, and with championing Nevada’s Corporate Gaming Acts of 1967 and 1969 — the laws that, for the first time, let publicly traded corporations own and operate Nevada casinos without subjecting every individual shareholder to the background checks the state required of private owners.

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In 1969, Bank of Las Vegas merged with Thomas’s own Reno-based Valley Bank to form Valley Bank of Nevada, according to UNLV’s Lee Business School biography of Jerome D. Mack and the UNLV Libraries Jewish Heritage Project’s profile of Mack. Valley Bank of Nevada was sold to Bank of America in 1992, the Jewish Heritage Project states, and UNLV’s biography of Thomas says the acquiring bank continued lending to the gaming industry afterward.

Nevada’s casino industry no longer depends on a handful of Utah-trained bankers willing to take a chance on it. The corporate-ownership law Thomas pushed through in 1967 and 1969 is the same legal foundation that now lets publicly traded companies and mainstream capital markets finance and own the Strip outright. The names on the loans have changed. The door he opened hasn’t closed.