It was just after 4 p.m. on a recent weekday and Oscar Goodman, the mob lawyer turned Las Vegas mayor turned civic cheerleader, was drinking perhaps his first Hizzoner of the day.
The drink — made with Bombay Sapphire gin, more Bombay Sapphire gin and a slice of jalapeño pepper, served in a tall martini glass — isn’t just Mr. Goodman’s favorite social lubricant. It’s a tribute to a faded version of Las Vegas that it spent decades celebrating and trying to keep alive.
After a sip of the obscure elixir, Mr. Goodman settled into a booth at Oscar’s Steakhouse, an upscale restaurant in downtown Las Vegas, where he is paid to lend his name and build his reputation by representing gangsters such as Meyer Lansky and Tony Spilotro, staring. under the FBI and appears as himself in films such as ‘Casino’. He still plays the role well. Mr. Goodman, 84, has no problem clearing up unfamiliar views on everything from graffiti and gambling to prostitution and the plight of the homeless.
However, Mr. Goodman is more than just a “Vegas only” relic. During his 12 years as mayor beginning in 1999, he also helped strengthen the city’s battered downtown, long ago overshadowed by the Strip a few miles south. However, one thing he was unable to do while in office was convince America’s biggest sports leagues to put a team in Sin City. As he did, the leagues could not be convinced that the city’s gambling connections did not pose a threat to the integrity of their games.
That stigma disappeared in 2018 when the Supreme Court overturned a federal law that banned sports betting outside of Nevada. The floodgates have opened and even the National Football League, which had pushed Mr. Goodman harder, now calls Las Vegas home. The Raiders began playing here in 2020, and since then the city has hosted the Pro Bowl and the league draft.
On February 11, the crowning achievement will come when Super Bowl LVIII between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers takes place in Las Vegas.
Mr. Goodman regrets not being in office for the arrival of professional sports, including the National Hockey League’s Golden Knights in 2017 and last year’s announcement that Major League Baseball had given permission for the Oakland Athletics to move to the city. But he’s excited to see his wife, Carolyn, who succeeded him in office and remains mayor of Las Vegas, attend the ribbon cutting.
“You want to succeed in everything you try,” Mr. Goodman said of his efforts. “But look, I’m a realist. I didn’t make it, but I was very lucky that my wife was able to do what I couldn’t.”
What Mr. Goodman did was tell anyone who would listen that the leagues were sanctimonious charlatans. Professional sports, he said, have benefited from gambling because fans are more interested in the games when they have money in them. He told league commissioners concerned about the influence of gambling on players and coaches that Las Vegas was the safest place to gamble because casinos and sports books were heavily regulated.
“It was a joke,” Mr. Goodman said of the leagues’ resistance in the city.
He didn’t stumble into sports by accident. On his own account, he’ll bet on anything that moves, including, obviously, cockroaches. Before ordering his drink, he told a guest that he had bet on the two underdogs — the Chiefs and the Detroit Lions — to cover the spread in the NFL’s conference championship games. (He won both bets.) Then Jonathan Jossel, who runs the Plaza Hotel, home of Oscar’s Steakhouse, stopped by to give Mr. Goodman $150 in cash, his share of the winning fantasy football team their.
“I can’t risk owing this man a penny,” joked Mr. Jossel.
Bathed in neon from the signs outside the restaurant, Mr. Goodman said he recognized how the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ Runnin’ Rebels united the city when they were one of the top men’s basketball teams in the late 1980s and at the beginning. 1990s. He felt that Las Vegas needed professional sports teams not to stimulate the economy – as many mayors claim when they try to get taxpayers to subsidize stadiums for teams – but to create excitement and a signal that Las Vegas was a city world class.
“The truth is, he really has a vision,” Carolyn Goodman said of her husband’s push to lure a team. “I know part of him was selfish because he loves sports and of course he loves to play. The way he supported our love in college was by playing poker.”
Mr. Goodman, unafraid to use the word “haka” while mayor and, in a nod to a particularly memorable scene from “The Godfather,” still keeps a plastic horse head on his desk, was a rare lawmaker willing to call the rigid opposition of leagues in sports gambling. He would point out, correctly, that some team owners were once bookies and that billions of dollars were wagered on games.
“You have this hypocrisy, and Goodman certainly captured it,” said John L. Smith, a longtime Nevada journalist and author of “Of Rats and Men: Oscar Goodman’s Life From Mob Mouthpiece to Mayor of Las Vegas.”
“He has a certain anarchy about him,” added Mr Smith. “He sees this and wants to break it up.”
Mr. Goodman trolled the leagues with his flamboyant style. He sat courtside at basketball games with a showgirl on each arm. He publicly blamed the NFL commissioner at the time, Paul Tagliabue, after he banned Las Vegas from advertising on television during the Super Bowl in 2003. Mr. Goodman dropped out of Major League Baseball’s winter meetings with girls and a glass martini, embracing former Los Angeles Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda and other baseball luminaries and telling reporters that Las Vegas was ready for a team.
The leagues were not impressed. Mr. Goodman recalled how in 1999 he visited the NBA’s offices in New York and was told by David Stern, who was the commissioner, that Las Vegas would only have a basketball team over his dead body.
“Basically, like everything else in my life, we ended up in a fight,” Mr Goodman said. “I said, ‘You want to know something, Commissioner: Before I was mayor, I represented notorious mobsters, and I could arrange this.’
All of those phenomena feel like ancient history now, as gambling commercials air on television during game broadcasts, fans place bets using mobile apps and Las Vegas prepares to host the most prestigious sporting event in the country.
As the first husband of Las Vegas, Mr. Goodman could easily sit in a luxury box at Allegiant Stadium, where the Super Bowl will be played. But after years of battling the majors, he’s not interested in fighting the move with the same people who armed him. Instead, he’ll be watching in his living room with his family and an ample supply of Bombay Sapphire gin.
If Raiders owner “Mark Davis called me and said, ‘Please sit with me,’ I wouldn’t go,” Mr. Goodman said. “I like being at home with my wife and the kids come over. I’m the happiest guy in the world. I get drunk and watch 44 players on the field at once. I mean, it’s my favorite day of the year.”
