KVIG Informative

The Desert Inn opened on the Strip in 1950 with Wilbur Clark’s name on the marquee and Moe Dalitz’s money behind the tables, the same hidden-ownership pattern that Nevada’s modern gaming licensing rules were eventually built to catch.

Wilbur Clark had already run two Las Vegas gambling operations before he broke ground on the Desert Inn, according to a biographical note in the Wilbur and Toni Clark Papers held by UNLV Special Collections and Archives. Clark bought a majority share of the El Rancho Vegas in 1945, and in 1946 he sold that interest along with his stake in the downtown Monte Carlo Club, using the proceeds to start building the Desert Inn, the finding aid states.

Construction costs outran Clark’s money. Midway through the project in 1949, Clark could not get financing from conventional lenders and turned to a group of Cleveland gambling operators led by Moe Dalitz, according to UNLV gaming historian David G. Schwartz’s history of American gambling, "Roll the Bones." Schwartz writes that the group had grown out of Cleveland’s Mayfield Road Gang and included Ruby Kolod, Morris Kleinman and Sam Tucker alongside Dalitz.

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In exchange for more than $1.3 million in capital, the Cleveland group took a 74% ownership stake in the casino, according to Schwartz. The Desert Inn opened April 24, 1950, according to the UNLV finding aid.

By the time the doors opened, Dalitz was running the operation, though Clark’s name remained the public face of the resort, Schwartz writes. The Desert Inn opened with 300 guest rooms and a third-floor lounge called the Skyroom, and Dalitz’s manager, Allard Roen, helped steer the property’s early growth, according to Schwartz. Clark went on to become the public host most associated with the Desert Inn, and with Las Vegas tourism generally, in the years that followed.

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The arrangement behind the Desert Inn’s opening, a visible, licensed frontman paired with an undisclosed majority owner from an organized gambling network, is exactly the structure Nevada’s state gaming regulators were created to expose. The licensing and ownership-disclosure rules the state’s Gaming Control Board built up over the decades that followed still require casino owners to show their full ownership stakes before Nevada issues a license, the same information Clark’s marquee never had to carry in 1950.