, loan sharking, narcotics, labor racketeering, and other such unlawful activities" exists; then
             2.Determine whether the activity is a "a highly organized, disciplined association"; then
             3.Determine whether the individual in question is a member of this association, and if he or she has committed an unlawful activity, that activity (it need not be one of the listed activities) is ipso facto an organized crime (Chin et al. 23).
             One of the focal points of organized crime during the first half of the 20th century was Las Vegas, Nevada. In reality, Las Vegas should not even exist according to modern city planning standards. "There was no real reason to even build a town where Las Vegas now stands, much less any justification for it to thrive. The landscape lacked the natural resources - water, to name just one - usually considered necessary to sustain life. So, like any desert bloom, Las Vegas developed other ways to attract the living things necessary to sustain life" (Cox 43). The "other ways" turned out to be what many people really wanted, but were unable to find in their home towns -- gambling.
             According to Littlejohn (1999), "When the mayor of Los Angeles decided to crack down on illegal casinos in 1938, Guy McAfee moved to Las Vegas and began operating legal casinos there" (244). The domination of Las Vegas casinos and hotels by the organized-crime syndicates based in cities throughout the U.S. can be traced to the arrival in 1941 of Benjamin 'Bugsy' Siegel, a front man for a Chicago gang that used millions of dollars of organized-crime capital to complete and run the glamorous new Flamingo Hotel (Littlejohn 244). In their book, The Grit beneath the Glitter: Tales from the Real Las Vegas, Davis and Rothman (2002) report that, "Meyer Lansky's mob henchman Bugsy Siegel launched the second capital regime in Las Vegas in 1946. Lansky and his associates had had an eye on...