Sin City by Harold Robbins Page A

hotel would be made through the back and up a service elevator. The entire top floor of the hotel, the penthouse wing, had been set aside for the unnamed visitor. The elevator had been programmed so a key was necessary before it would assent to the penthouse level. The doors to the two stairwells were locked from within, a violation of the fire code. Two armed guards were posted in the hallway. Two more guards were waiting at the rear of the hotel.
    Even more bizarre requirements had been made. Workers from a medical supply company had sterilized the top floor, including all furnishings. Other workers had sealed holes and cracks that could let in any dust or pests. Heavy black curtains had been put up at all the windows.
    Who the hell is on that train? he wondered. He had some ideas, guesses. He thought nowadays no one but the president had a private train. It wasn’t the president because the hotel would be swarming with Secret Service agents, but it had to be someone just as big. He had a name in mind, a guy who in his own way ran an organization that was not as big as the government, but was a government in and
of itself. Vegas was a mob town: Most of the casinos were indirectly owned or controlled by the Syndicate, and the guy who pulled the financial strings of all the mob “families” was a Palm Beach Jew named Meyer Lansky.
    He wondered if Lansky was on the train. A few years ago he would have guessed that it was Lansky’s boss, Lucky Luciano, the boss of bosses. But after a roller-coaster ride in which Luciano was sent to prison, released for putting a stop to enemy sabotage on the New York docks during World War II after the Normandie was blown up—he was that powerful, running the Syndicate from his prison cell—and deported to Italy, Luciano had died of a heart attack in ’62. Lansky and Luciano had been the financial spiders behind the Vegas casino boom, financing Bugsy Siegel and then having him murdered when his fingers got sticky after he had sent his girlfriend to Switzerland to stash Flamingo construction “overrun” money in a Swiss bank account.
    Lansky was still pulling the mob purse strings, overseeing the finances of not just the usual mob rackets—extortion, dope, prostitution—but controlling a worldwide gambling network built by mob money that included “legal” venues like Vegas, London, and the Carribbean. With Luciano dead, the boss of bosses shifted to Vito Genovese, but he was no more likely to be the man on the train than Luciano—Vito was serving a fifteen-year term in Leavenworth and ran the mob from there.
    As the train’s light got brighter, he thought about the last time he had stood by these same train tracks. It had been about seven years ago, back when Jack Kennedy was on the campaign trail for the presidency. Kennedy rolled into Vegas on a train, made a short speech from the back of the caboose, then stepped down and worked the crowd, shaking hands and kissing babies. He shook hands with Kennedy, sort of, although it was more a brushing of hands than a real grip, but the story grew in the telling. Too bad about Jack, though. That prick Oswald killed him and Ruby gunned Oswald down. Christ, it was like a movie the way things went down. Later Vegas swarmed with feds checking out Ruby’s movements because he’d been in Vegas before the shooting and had a connection with Meyer Lansky and the whole fiasco over the Castro assassination that led to Kennedy getting knocked off.

    They say Robert Kennedy was going to run for president in ’68, but he wouldn’t vote for him despite the fact the guy had balls. Robert Kennedy went after corruption like a retriever to a duck. He’d be bad for business, mob business, and he was too friendly with that Negro leader, Martin Luther King, who was causing so much turmoil in the country.
    The train stopped and three well-dressed men stepped down. They were all clean shaven, clean