Hit Me!: Fighting the Las Vegas Mob by the Numbers
As head of the audit division of the Nevada Gaming Control Board in the 1970s, Dennis Gomes pursued Mafia connections to Las Vegas’s gambling industry. The 1995 MartinScorsese film Casino . . . drew on Mr. Gromes’s investigation into how Las Vegas mobsters had embezzled more than $20 million from the Stardust Casino.” —New York Times “Gomes . . . became Nevada’s top casino corruption investigator in the 1970s. He later wentto work for the casinos, he told the New York Times in 1995, ‘because I knew the businessfrom the inside out, and, believe it or not, I liked a lot of the people who were in it.’”—Washington Post “Dennis Gomes went from investigating crime among casino managers to joining theindustry’s ranks, becoming . . . a turnaround specialist for troubled gambling venues. . . . He later described himself as a ‘gung-ho, idealistic crime buster.’” —Wall Street Journal “Dennis Gomes will always be remembered as a true ‘only-in-Las Vegas’-type character. . . .He was recruited from the business world to be an agent and division chief at the stateGaming Control Board. It was in that role that he and his team raided mob-controlled Las Vegas casinos.” —Las Vegas Sun “Dennis Gomes . . . began his gaming career as the youngest-ever chief of the Audit Division for the Nevada Gaming Control Board, and he ended it as the co-owner of Resorts Casino and Hotel in Atlantic City, NJ—grabbing headlines from start to finish. As a gaming regulator Gomes uncovered the Stardust skim, the largest casino skim in gaming history. After this bust, Gomes decided to clean up the gaming industry from the inside.”—from The Gaming Hall of Fame’s profile of Dennis Gomes, 2012 Inductee