There are not many places in the world where a below-average athletic, moderately attractive and largely unglamorous hominid male can feel like George Clooney for five minutes.
In an airport lounge, perhaps, with a capsule of fake espresso in hand. In a pootling rental boat on Lake Garda. Or here in Las Vegas, 3600 South Las Vegas Boulevard, at a roulette table at the Bellagio. With one difference: there is not $20,000 on the green felt. But only 20.
High in Las Vegas: $20 win at the Bellagio
Everything on red. The ball is rolling. It stops on 27. Red. Here I am, on the deep carpet in the casino of the Bellagio, fogged by the sweet scent of the room, beguiled by the grandeur of Italian marble, and I have won 20 dollars. It is this very feeling that Las Vegas has sold with great success for 80 years. The feeling of being a mobster for seconds, a gambler, a winner.
After all: a $20 win at roulette at the Bellagio.
Outside on the Strip, where in normal times millions of people push their way through the neon-lit desert night, there is a sign. "We didn't create sin - we just perfected it." It's the Vegas credo. We didn't invent sin. It's just the way people are. "Give the people what they want", the Mafiosi stated coolly during Prohibition - and earned billions with illegal liquor.
The glittering desert oasis where the Mafia laundered its money has lived for decades on its reputation for wickedness.
Corona hit the city hard. This trip took place before the lockdown. The casinos were closed for weeks. But the self-healing powers of this metropolis are legendary. And of course, it already has plans for the post-pandemic. If any place can shed its skin and reinvent itself, it's Las Vegas.
Classic: A selfie with the Las Vegas Strip in the background.
The glittering desert oasis where the Mafia laundered its money has lived for decades on its reputation for the wicked. It is an absurd place in the middle of nowhere, created by gangsters and inflated into a money machine by billionaires. A place that promises sex, oblivion, escape, senselessness and redemption and fuels the old American dream of second chances.
The social critic Robert Goodman attests his compatriots a "chronic delusion of hope". Las Vegas is their Vatican. A single jackpot - and a new life begins. The outwitting of Providence is an American myth - and Vegas is its tool. A certain blue-eyed expectation of salvation is part of the DNA of the country whose inhabitants hope deep in their hearts to break the bank one day.
Today, the glamorously wicked sin years are celebrated at the Mob Museum, a spectacular experiential house in a former customs building downtown that playfully manages to honour mob culture without glorifying it too much.
The Mob Museum.
Oscar Goodman, once a Mafia lawyer, later mayor of Las Vegas (today his wife Carolyn runs the business), was instrumental in the creation of this visitor magnet. Of course, there is also an electric chair. But at its core, the Mob Museum is a successful information centre about the antiheroes of the Mafia from Lucky Luciano to Meyer Lansky, which not only sells spaghetti spoons and Mafioso aprons with the inscription "Make pasta not war", but also quite gleefully plays with the thesis that the Mafia could have been behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Las Vegas: A history of ups and downs
Vegas has experienced many ups and downs. The old Spanish trading post, barely more than 100 years old, was long before Corona not only America's secret centre of power and an icon of US culture, but above all a billion-dollar hub where the state, gangsters, secret services, banks, Mafiosi and billionaires merged into a dark amalgam of greed and big-money addiction. All of Vegas is a grandly ostentatious game of decadence. 45 million visitors came to the city in 2019.
Oldie, but goldie: the old Las Vegas downtown.
Is gambling dead?
But Las Vegas has a problem, and that problem is much older than Corona: they don't gamble anymore. Not as much anymore, anyway. "Gambling is dead," says one casino employee. As a place of escape for civilisation-weary soldiers of fortune and family men escalating into part-time work, it no longer has a special status. For gambling is now permitted in 48 out of 50 US states. And unlike Asian gambling metropolises like Hong Kong and Macau, Vegas is just table stakes. Macau once called itself "Asia's Las Vegas". In fact, Vegas should have long called itself "America's Macau" to be close to the truth, said Vegas' casino mogul Sheldon Adelson.
The city lives off a reputation like thunder. Its radiance not only reaches proverbially into outer space. But this "overwhelming art product, this brightest star in the neon firmament of postmodernism" - as historian Mike Davis wrote - has to reinvent itself. Again.
The Paris landmark in Las Vegas on the Strip.
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Sport and good food instead of sex and gambling
It was mainly four arguments that attracted a majority of guys to Vegas for 80 years: Gambling, alcohol, sex and the feeling of being a mafioso at any time, if only it weren't for the daily grind. In the future, too, there will be four arguments that attract people to the Nevada desert - but they sound completely different: sports, entertainment, shopping and good food. They know here that sex, gambling and children's plates are hard to reconcile. The old den of iniquity is suddenly supposed to be a family destination? That doesn't go over so easily in people's minds.
Vegas is the brightest city on earth - but just a four-hour drive away is the darkest night sky on earth.
But they are pros at turning a crisis into an opportunity. The financial disaster of 2008 had already hit the city hard. 60,000 houses stood empty. 1000 homeless people still live in the catacombs of the metropolis, in the sewage pipes on the outskirts of the city, where the Mojave Desert moves a few inches closer every day.
Las Vegas: A place of stark contrasts
Vegas is the brightest city on earth - but only four hours away by car lies the darkest night sky on earth. It is a place of stark contrasts - and thus a perfect mirror of the USA. "Las Vegas, more than any other American city, embodies a mixture of unquenchable longing and unwavering optimism," writes Sally Denton in her Vegas classic, The Money and the Power.
"How do we get the next generation to come to Vegas?" asks Steve Hill. He's the head of the tourism board. A powerful man. "We need to broaden our offerings." Later this year, the huge Meow Wolf arts entertainment centre is scheduled to open, an experience park for all the senses. In January, the Los Angeles-based Oakland Raiders NFL football team moved into its new home at the brand new, $1.8 billion, 65,000-seat Allegiant Stadium - and renamed itself the Las Vegas Raiders. A new mega resort called Worlds Resort, designed to appeal primarily to Asian clientele, is scheduled to open in summer 2021.
The fairgrounds on Elvis Presley Boulevard are being expanded. Elon Musk's drilling company, The Boring Company, is building a tunnel system for autonomous driving cars that will transport visitors like remote-controlled taxis for a few dollars.
Hill, as a shrewd salesman, knows which buttons to push. "If you go to an NFL game in Detroit, it's cold, you drive an hour and a half there and back. And that's it," he says. "In Vegas, you can do whatever you want before and after." Was Vegas also booming before Corona because more people need a getaway during the Trump years? "I think so," Hill says. "They're fleeing the false information that's coming at them. They're bombarded with data and communication. Getting away from that for a few days is important. It refreshes the brain - and it gives you a different view of the world."
Nevada was booming - then came Corona
All of Nevada was booming. Corona didn't kill all those plans, just delayed them. Other city projects include the Madison Square Garden Sphere Arena with 18,000 movable, programmable cinema seats, the new Caesars Forum with the two largest ballrooms in the US, and the new Circa Resort & Casino.
"Thirty years ago, we were selling a scarce commodity," Hill says. "Today, we sell goosebumps. And we provide an important social effect: come back down, relax, enjoy the time." Hill also knows: Las Vegas was recently in danger of becoming an interchangeable foam-party-and-rollercoaster resort, a "one trick pony" for silver surfers full of squeaky carpets, divas in career autumn, sweet perfume and "heart attack grills" with monster burgers. This has to change in order to increase the international appeal. Only just under one in ten visitors is not from the USA.
Bellagio: Hotel has more rooms than the town in Italy has inhabitants
The legacy of the pioneering mobster years in Las Vegas is a who-dare-win attitude, with business and politics pulling in the same direction. In the past, this buddy system of short runs was corrupt to the core. Today, it allows for quick decisions. Until deep into the nineties, hardly anyone asked about the legality and money flows of this sugar-coated replica of the world with Roman palace, medieval castle, Eiffel Tower and pyramid, from the top of which a 40-billion-candela laser beam slices the sky. The Sphinx in front of the Luxor Hotel is bigger than the original Sphinx in Giza, Egypt.
One of the most snapped hotels by Instagram users: the Bellagio in Las Vegas.
And the Bellagio, site of my $20 triumph, has 3933 more rooms than the Italian town of Bellagio has inhabitants. Today, this strange city, which "has never resented a man's past" (Alan Richman in "Lost Vegas"), is no longer ruled by party-loving Mafiosi, but by morally strict billionaire corporations and hedge funds like Blackstone.
Henderson, the "Booze District"
The legal heirs of Prohibition now work in Henderson, a small suburb. There, in the fledgling Booze District, distilleries and breweries like Bad Beat Brewery (which imports its hops for pilsner from Bavaria) brew craft beer and fine spirits. Among them is the Las Vegas Distillery, founded by Hungarian George Racz, which distils gin, vodka, rum, all kinds of liqueurs and whisky, often spiked with coriander, cinnamon, lavender, ginger or juniper. The bestseller is Granma's Apple Pie Moonshine with cinnamon and apple.
At the Las Vegas Winery, where a style-conscious professor in a white coat with six pens in his breast pocket watches over the goods like a Dr. Emmett Brown of alcohol, celebrities like Bon Jovi are allowed to tip together Zinfandel, Shiraz or Cabernet at will and design a "personal" 200-litre barrel. Due to the lack of an established wine culture, people like to rely on the cult of celebrity as a substitute, although Bon Jovi has not yet distinguished himself as a wine connoisseur.
In the end, the aim is to establish Vegas as a gourmet destination. This applies all the more to the clever culinary "Lip Smacking Foodie Tours" by Donald Contursi. On guided, always newly designed tours through four of the 4200 restaurants in Las Vegas, he delivers his guests a cross-section of uncomplicated high-end Las Vegas cuisine with a feeling that is a luxury in this juggernaut: Neighbourliness. "The City is like a proliferating mushroom, growing wild," Contursi says. "What we want to create is community. That's not easy here."
Las Vegas beyond the Strip: kayak tour on the Colorado River
Out into nature: kayak tour on the Colorado River.
"Las Vegas is good at coming out of crises stronger," says Seth Levitt, organiser of canoe tours and other water sports on the Colorado River. We glide through the cool water, Nevada lies on the left bank, Arizona on the right. Dead silence. Only the gentle splash of the paddles. It is the opposite of Las Vegas. The hot city is far away, it is a magical place. Because there is also something to discover beyond the Strip. Or as Steve Hill says: "We don't force anyone to leave the Strip. But we offer it."
This surprisingly green Nevada can be found among yucca palms and Joshua trees at Spring Mountain Ranch, once owned by Howard Hughes, the eccentric billionaire, aviation pioneer and major investor in Las Vegas. This enchanted oasis lies 30 minutes outside the city gates between bizarre rock formations in all shades of red in Red Rock Canyon National Park. Its history reflects global history: for centuries the ranch was a dusty resting place for travellers, then the love nest of a Hollywood radio star, in between owned by Vera Krupp, actress and part-time wife of German industrialist Alfred Krupp. Today, tourists enjoy the pleasant coolness.
A few kilometres further on, it's time for mountain biking. Biking? In the desert? At almost 30 degrees? As a proportionally over-represented couch European? Isn't that like swimming through the English Channel just after the seahorse? But the fast-paced ten-kilometre trip is almost all downhill, including through the tunnel that was blown up for the construction of the Hoover Dam. A wild ride with lots of wind and a great view.
It's just a place to try things out. "The need to leave everyday life and politics behind has definitely increased in the Trump years," says Arlene Bordinhao of hotel multinational MGM in the golden charm of Mandalay Bay Resort. "People come because they want to escape the madness and be someone else for three days - that's the goal."
Downtown Las Vegas is still ruled by trash
Las Vegas does a lot to satisfy that goal. But especially in Downtown, the old Vegas, trash still rules. Colourful cocktails flow from washing machine-like mixing drums. The much-vaunted "flair of old Vegas" is not a well-kept historically charming nostalgia festival, but a rather broken-down carnival. Showgirls dressed as policewomen poke men with batons and murmur "Sir, you're guilty." This isn't premium entertainment. This is a trash carnival without irony or the legendary Western American larger-than-life thinking.
View of two hotels on the Las Vegas Strip: New York and MGM.
But then there are those moments of uniqueness again. Above me, the rotor blades of a helicopter are spinning. Hotel California", the Eagles' hit, is playing on the headphones. The helicopter flies from Boulder City 1000 metres above the desert floor to the Grand Canyon in 30 minutes. "It's my first flight, too," jokes pilot Michael Haidegger from Austria. From the air, the Colorado River, Lake Mead and the concrete masses of the Hoover Dam, which supplies the region with energy, can be seen. Wild mustangs gallop across the plain.
A highlight: the helicopter flight at the Grand Canyon.
Then the helicopter lands at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. This stone monument is an earth-historical bestseller. The only natural wonder that can be seen from space. It is a sublime moment. Until Haidegger cautiously asks for the return flight. Back to the roaring city, to the neon-coloured heart of madness.
Info for your Las Vegas trip
Entry: Due to the coronavirus, travel to the USA is only possible for US citizens, green card holders, family members of US citizens, diplomats or employees of international organisations until further notice (as of 16 September). At last count, there were two direct flights a week from Frankfurt to Las Vegas (McCarran International Airport) with Condor and numerous other combinations.
Accommodation in Downtown Las Vegas:Plaza Hotel & Casino, Address: 1 Main Street, Las Vegas, Nevada 89101, USA
Mafia History:The Mob Museum with large exhibition about the Mafia past of Las Vegas, Shop and Underground Speakeasy & Distillery, Address: 300 Stewart Avenue, Las Vegas, Nevada 89101, USA
Kayak tours on the Colorado River: Blazin' Paddles, Address: 18000 US-93, Boulder City, Nevada 89005, USA
Nature and history: Spring Mountain Ranch State Park, Address: 6375 NV-159, Blue Diamond, Nevada 89004, USA