Las Vegas – Oscar Goodman slips into a red-sequined Liberace gown, glances approvingly at himself in the dressing room’s oversize mirror, then turns to a local reporter to take a few questions.
The subject is a recent meeting with hospital administrators, and the mayor of Las Vegas handles them deftly.
In 10 minutes, Goodman will step onto a brightly lit stage on opening night of a gay burlesque club in the cause of his political obsession: the revival of downtown Las Vegas.
As a drag queen named Coco helps Goodman with his hat – a 3-foot feathered number that says “MAYOR” across the front – Goodman grimaces. The hat is digging into his right ear.
“Beauty is pain, Mayor,” his assistant, Elena Perez, reminds him. “Beauty is pain.”
Welcome to Las Vegas politics – Oscar Goodman style.
He’s a former mob lawyer. He often arrives at public events with an Elvis impersonator and showgirls as a calling card. He once told a fourth-grade class that the one thing he’d want on a desert island is a bottle of gin.
But Goodman’s tenure as mayor of Las Vegas, which has little in common with the glitzy Strip of billion-dollar casinos and Hollywood-caliber stars just outside the city limits, is driven by a full-throttle push to remake the frayed-at-the-edges heart of Sin City.
Condominium towers are rising faster than stacks of poker chips. There is a nascent arts district. And, if Goodman has his way, a research hospital, a performing arts center and pro sports will follow.
To his supporters – and they are legion – Goodman is giving Las Vegas a chance to rise above its image as the capital of gambling and showgirls on its way to becoming a first-class American city.
To his detractors, he’s a shameless publicity hound who callously romanticizes his own past and has yet to deliver on the city’s future.
“People don’t come here from the Midwest to go to an AA meeting,” Goodman, 66, says unabashedly. “If I were a dull person, I wouldn’t have been able to accomplish what I have.”
While more than 37 million visitors a year are drawn to the glitz of the Strip, buying up Gucci and losing $5 billion a year in bets, Goodman’s city is “the other Las Vegas.” Of the 1.6 million people in the metro area, only about a third live within the city limits, which is far poorer than surrounding suburbs.
Famous before his first election in 1999 as a hard-nosed defense lawyer, Goodman made millions defending mobsters in the heyday of their control here. His clients included Tony “The Ant” Spilotro, who allegedly stuck the head of a victim in a vise to crush his skull before showing up dead himself in a cornfield in 1986.
As he tries to rebuild Las Vegas, Goodman is also re- creating himself, say his foes. From a strident critic of the FBI and prosecutors, he has become a happy-go-lucky politician. He has morphed from mob lawyer to urban revivalist.
“He took every raunchy, no- good thief, murderer and extortionist that lived and defended them with glee,” says Rick Baken, a former undercover FBI agent in Las Vegas and an old Goodman adversary.
The former agent describes Goodman as a born showman who uses the same tricks on Las Vegas voters that he applied in the courtroom to get off his clients. Goodman is “the poster child of being able to rationalize immorality,” Baken says.
For many of the mayor’s longtime observers, it’s the perfect Las Vegas morality tale. If a city built by the mob can remake itself into the country’s No. 1 tourist destination, why can’t a former mob lawyer remake himself into a jocular politician who can lead the city to its future?
It’s a political formula unlikely to work anyplace else on Earth, but here it has paid off in spades. When he ran for re- election in 2003, Goodman was swept back into office with 86 percent of the vote, a city record.
“It’s a different kind of city that way. The things that would be held against you in any other town, we revel in it here,” says Jim Ferrence, a consultant who helped run Goodman’s first campaign. “The match is perfect. You can’t explain it better than that.”
Horse head, bottle of gin
It’s 10:30 a.m. on a Tuesday, and Goodman is already well into his day in his 10th-floor city hall office, the severed head of a puppet horse on his couch and an unopened bottle of gin on his desk.
Already, he has met with a book author, a developer pushing an ambitious museum for the city’s new arts district and a 2006 gubernatorial hopeful worried that Goodman has yet to rule out a run himself.
“I tell them all the same thing: If someone shows me a poll that says I lose and they win, I’ll hold a press conference today and say I’m never going to run,” he says coyly of his statewide ambitions.
At 11:28 a.m., Goodman picks up his cellphone for what he calls “the important business of the day.”
“I’ll take San Francisco plus 30 and the Rockies for 60 plus one. Also, give me Atlanta,” Goodman says, running his finger down a slip of paper plucked from his pocket.
It’s a daily ritual. He bets $200 on each game. Enough to make it interesting, he says, but never enough to hurt.
When he first ran for mayor, Goodman was seen by his critics as a stalwart of the past in a city that badly wanted to move forward.
His election was opposed by some of the major gambling and tourism interests. The former head of the FBI in the city penned an opinion piece explaining that Goodman’s election would set the city back decades.
Goodman played down his history and played up his charm.
Casting himself as a family man (he has been married to his college sweetheart for 43 years), Goodman turned criticism of his crime associations on its head: He had became so wealthy defending the mob, he told voters, he wasn’t interested in any more money. He wanted to work for them.
He won his first election with 65 percent of the vote.
Since taking office, the mayor has become what his critics least expected – a tireless promoter of Las Vegas’ future.
Overlooking a downtown that hasn’t sparkled since Rat Pack days, Goodman ticks off the things he believes Las Vegas needs to take its place in the top tier of the country’s cities – a performing arts center, a pro sports stadium, a major research hospital. An urban core where people both live and work.
Though on paper Goodman has few powers not shared by the city’s six other council members (Las Vegas has a “weak mayor” form of government), he does have a podium.
He has cajoled developers and helped negotiate land deals. In his push for pro baseball (a spot for the stadium is already reserved), he showed up in Anaheim, Calif., where the Angels play, with showgirls and an Elvis impersonator.
Even his critics concede that it has worked, though several give part of the credit to the national real estate boom. Before he took office, no sizable building had been built downtown in 25 years. Now, there are more than 40 high-rise condo projects at some stage of development, including one 90 stories high.
His biggest success may have been the negotiated sale to the city of 61 acres of old railroad yard on the downtown’s western edge.
Though still mostly an empty lot, the space will soon hold a new city hall, an Alzheimer’s research center designed by Frank Gehry and tens of thousands of square feet in new residential condominiums.
The rest, Goodman says with utter confidence, will come – including a professional stadium for whichever team and whatever sport takes up the mayor’s invitation to make Las Vegas home.
“A little trigger and these things can take off,” says Jon Jerde, a veteran Las Vegas developer. “If a guy like the mayor puts his money on the old downtown, it might really go there.”
“They call us”
By 3:30 p.m., Goodman has returned from a meeting tussling with local hospital administrators who oppose his plan to bring in a new research hospital from Pittsburgh.
At 4:10 p.m., he sits down with Garcia, his assistant. Earlier that morning, she fielded a call from a Hollywood producer who wants to build a reality TV show around Goodman. It’s the fourth time the mayor has been approached.
“There aren’t a lot of cities like Las Vegas, and there aren’t a lot of mayors like Oscar,” she says. “They call us. We don’t call them.”
Sitting with the mayor, she runs down Goodman’s media requests for the day: USA Today wants a quote about Andre Agassi, a Las Vegas resident. A producer at Sirius, the satellite radio network, wants to talk about a weekly radio show Goodman would host. A Washington Post reporter would like a drink with the mayor when he’s in Washington during an upcoming trip.
Goodman’s trip to the nation’s capital concerns one of his dreams – a mob museum. He wants to put it in the old Las Vegas federal courthouse where he argued his first case.
Goodman says he became one of the mob’s key lawyers in Las Vegas almost by accident.
He got his first case through a referral by a low-level casino dealer. Not long after getting the relative of a mob boss off on a car-theft charge, he won a case involving a well- connected bookmaker and one of the first FBI uses of a wiretap.
His client was a minor player, and he won on a technicality, but it was enough to cement his reputation in the right circles, the mayor says.
Now, he jokes about “his baseball-bat days” and throwing critics from his 10th-story window. But he also calls his former clients “polite and always grateful,” and he quips that “I didn’t know I was representing the mob until I watched the movie ‘Casino,”‘ the 1995 Martin Scorsese film in which Goodman played himself.
Goodman is rewriting history, says Hugh Jackson, who runs a political website called the Las Vegas Gleaner.
“Running this town used to be government-by-violence: You crossed the wrong people, and you got pushed out. Now all that is being minimized as some kind of ‘colorful past,”‘ Jackson says.
Still, it’s the future that keeps Goodman busy these days.
As the sun sets outside and Goodman prepares to go onstage at the gay burlesque show, his red sequin gown flowing behind him, he’s back to his favorite themes – his city, its energy and its future.
One of Goodman’s favorite lines is that he’s the city’s alter ego, and it’s hard to find anyone here – supporter or critic – willing to argue.
“The city is booming. Every second, something great is happening,” Goodman says, as the curtains part and he steps forward. “We’re living the dream.”
Staff writer Michael Riley can be reached at 303-820-1614 or mriley@denverpost.com.
