Las Vegas: Where Streets Are Paved With Gold?

It was often said in Nevada -- and would be frequently repeated over the
decades to come -- that if the legal casinos took a toll in gambling addiction,
lost jobs, broken families, suicides, crime to pay debts, and other misery, at
least Las Vegas sent those agonies back out of state, home with the suckers
who suffered them. But in fact the town shared in the plague. The sum of the
oppression, violence, and abuse was for many a sad little society. "Las Vegas
has many bitter people living in it," Turner wrote at the end of the decade.
"This city has more trash peddlers per capita than any other city three times
its size," wrote a former resident, "more broken homes, more prostitutes, and
more so-called common law marriages than any city five times its size."
According to FBI data that the state's newspapers often neglected to publish
or buried on an inside page, Nevada now had the highest crime and suicide
rates in the nation, with Las Vegas employing three times as many police as
any other city its size, and dealing with record-breaking crime rates in bad
checks and burglary, as well as liquor consumption more than 200 percent
above the national aveerage.

"The Money and The Power," by Sally Denton and Roger Morris,
Page 146