The Stardust Hotel came to life with the help of organized crime money, it grew up and in the 1970s again was intertwined with organized crime money and associates that almost brought the hotel down. It's a lively story of underworld figures and redemption. This is the brief history of the Stardust, the hotel that promised the galaxy under its roof.

Tony Cornero was a familiar figure in Las Vegas. He and his brother had come to town in the 1930s after gambling had been re-legalized. They had started the Meadows Club (now the Loews at Fremont and Boulder Highway come together) where locals could dine and gamble. When a fire destroyed the Club (amid rumors that the City Fire Department didn't respond because it was in the County and outside city limits), Cornero returned to Southern California where off-shore gambling was legal. He had owned the S.S. Lux and though raided many times by the Coast Guard, he was making a profit until he lost the boat in on-board, 24 hour crap game.

He bounced around Mexico and South America, trying his hand at gambling down there. But, according to authors Heidi Knapp Rinella and Mike Weatherford, that only lasted until he opened a door one morning and was greeted by four shots to the stomach. He decided to return to Los Angeles. Off-shore gambling was no longer allowed in Southern California but that didn't stop Cornero. He launched the S.S. Rex, a converted Navy minelayer. The floating casino did not last long as the Coast Guard seized it as a menace to navigation. Cornero decided to go where gambling was legal. He returned to Las Vegas and took over the casino in the Hotel Apache on Fremont Street. He rechristened the casino the S.S. Rex.

But like many of the visionaries of his day, Cornero dreamed big, of a carpet joint on the burgeoning Las Vegas Strip that didn't cater to the highrollers or the sophisticated but the little guy, the regular joes who were loading up their Chevy's and taking the family on vacation.

The Stardust took shape in his mind before he really had it all planned out. He bought 40 acres on the Strip in 1953. It cost him $650,000 and was between the El Rancho Vegas and the Last Frontier. He envisioned a hotel with a 1,000 rooms. But Cornero was not the best of businessmen. He soon found himself running short. Desperate to raise funds, he tried a unique approach. He sold shares in the project without bothering to work with the Securities and Exchange Commission. He raised over $6 million from investors all around the country.

He began building his dream resort, which he promised would be the "biggest and most luxurious in the world." (Don't they all say that?). He dreamed of a resort that would cost $5 dollars a night and give gamblers $5 dollars for gambling. He thought it would make him a fortune. He would call his resort the "Starlight" and envisioned it having its own train stop as the UP trains headed into downtown Las Vegas. "Astronomical luxury at down to earth prices" was to be the motto.

By the time the SEC caught up with him, according to Rinella and Weatherford, thousands of investors were bilked out of their money. He was forced to stop selling stock outside of Nevada.

Then there was the problem of getting a gaming license. The Nevada Tax Board investigated Cornero and discovered that he had been convicted during Prohibition of rum-running. Add to that his troubles with SEC and he didn't stand a chance in the era of Kefauver hearings of getting licensed. Rather than continue to try, Cornero approached another well-known local gamer, Milton "Farmer" Page. Page owned the popular Pioneer Club on Fremont Street and had an interest in the Boulder Club as well.

But a license wouldn't do any good if Cornero couldn't finish building the resort. He approached Moe Dalitz at the Desert Inn and via Dalitz, Meyer Lansky.

They were looking to expand in Las Vegas and the three men made a tentative agreement for Dalitz and his group (with Lansky, as always, the silent partner) to lease the casino once the resort was completed. As the building continued, money kept going into a vacuum. Before he knew it, Cornero was into Dalitz and "the boys" for $4 million.

An inveterate gambler, he thought he could win himself out of the hole and have enough money to complete construction and open his resort on schedule. He went over to the Desert Inn to play his favorite game, craps. While playing the game, Cornero apparently had a massive heart attack and died. He was whisked off the casino floor and taken to an executive's office. The police weren't called for another two hours and stories persist that the only way the sheriff's office found out was when reporters called to get a quote. The coroner ruled that Cornero died "before he hit the ground" but controversy swirled around the death when it was discovered that a Los Angeles mortuary had been notified before the Sheriff's Office.

The hotel was only 70% complete. Labor disputes brought construction to a halt at a time when work crews were at a premium with the Riviera, Royal Nevada and Dunes all near completion and the Hacienda and the Tropicana just beginning. Cornero's death jeopardized the hotel getting finished. Another $3 million was needed to complete the vision. Construction halted for two years while the courts and investors tried to find a workable solution.

William Boyd remembers, as a young man, "driving by it half-built" and wondering if it would be completed. Finally, as so often happens when the chips are down, an angel, of sorts, appeared on the horizon. Jake "The Barber" Factor, a wealthy Chicagoan and brother to Hollywood make-up guru Max Factor, and his wife, Rella, offered to buy the ailing hotel. Factor was rumored to have once been linked with Al Capone. The Factors bought out the 3,000 investors, paid off the creditors and resumed construction by investing $10 million to fund the finishing of the hotel. Of that $10 million, according to author Jeff Burbank, "$3 million came from Chicago mobsters such as Sam Giancana and United Hotels, the front group for Dalitz and Lansky."

United Holdings would lease the casino and run the gaming operations.

But before it could open, there were problems that had to be worked out. Alan Hess believes that the hotel was initially designed by an engineer or contractor without an overall image or vision. Unlike the Desert Inn and other hotels, it didn't have a unifying roof or an elegant entry. It did not have a porte cochere.

The structure was tilt-up concrete walls covered with wood roofs, a method favored by industrial buildings and warehouses. The garden-style rooms were post-tensioned concrete slab structures which was also favored by industrial buildings. The engineer of the motel wings was T.Y. Lin. Thomas Turner, an engineer with the local architectural firm, Jack Miller Associates, remembers that no one was in clear command during the building of the hotel.

The planners hadn't thought through the plans. Functional problems became apparent as construction moved slowly. The completed casino did not include "the attic" for surveillance purposes (the catwalks with the 'eye in the sky'). Jack Miller Associates designed the kitchen, restaurant, upstairs ballrooms and the Aku-Aku restaurant which was a separate tiki-style A-frame Polynesian themed eatery that would become legendary among visitors and locals alike.

The Showroom stage had to be revamped to include three hydraulic lifts, a truck dock, a rain curtain, a waterfall, a thrust stage which swept out into the audience and a tilt-up half-inch plate-glass floor that reflected the aquacade of dancers and swimmers in a pool below the stage. It was large enough to re-enact the sinking of the Titanic which show producer extraordinaire Donn Arden planned to do.

Dalitz hired Jac Lessman for the interior design of the hotel. Lessman had done the interiors at the Desert Inn. Saturday Review writer Horace Sutton recalled "It was the biggest thing I have ever seen and I include the Jama Mosque at Delhi... The cavernous lobby is a wild jamboree of games of chance and those taking a chance on them." The casino was the first thing you saw upon entering. All other functions, check-in, restaurants, shopping, showrooms and pools all spun off from the center.

At 16,500 square feet the casino was the largest in the State and likely the country as well. The owners bought up the shuttered Royal Nevada which had not survived the mid-1950s slump that had curtailed business. The Royal Nevada was slightly remodeled to become convention facilities and its garden-style rooms were incorporated into the Stardust. A half circle was added to the Royal Nevada's roofline but according to Alan Hess, the fountain of neon tubing marking the entrance was saved.

There was only place to go in town for the signage that was needed to promote the Stardust. Young Electric Sign Company had recently designed and erected the beautiful Mint Hotel signage which was quickly becoming a landmark downtown. Elegant, optimistic and pushing neon into the heavens, it took visitor's breaths away when they first saw it. They had encased the Golden Nugget in flicker bulbs and a bull-nose that jutted out over the the street. The Stardust needed a sign and a facade that promised the "galaxy under one roof".

Kermit Wayne was one of the senior designers, along with Hermon Boernge, at YESCO that routinely got tapped for big jobs and this one was no exception. The construction foreman asked YESCO and the other sign companies for ideas. YESCO held a design contest among its top designers.

Kermit Wayne's galaxy of neon facade and sign were chosen. According to Alan Hess, with so much space and so many fragmented elements spread across the huge lot, the facade and sign were crucial to the design. Passing motorists had to be engaged as they approached the resort and the signage had to tempt them off the highway. Because the Stardust was surrounded by desert, the owners were afraid that at night the hotel would be hard to see.

Abandoning the Old-West themes and the more sophisticated signage of the other hotels, Wayne went for broke and put the entire solar system across the front of the hotel that exploded out towards the edges. At the facade's center was a large, plastic earth, that according to Hess, "was 16 feet in diameter, formed in slices three feet across and ringed by a Sputnik, which was right off the front page of the daily papers. Cosmic rays of neon and electric light bulbs pulsed out from behind the earth in all directions."

Three dimensional planets spun into the night alongside twenty neon starbursts. Plastered across this universe, in space-age lettering that became iconic, were the letters Stardust. The "S" alone contained 975 lamps. During the day, the sky's painted sheet metal looked deep blue but on a clear night the neon constellation was said to be visible sixty miles away as motorists made the turn around the mountain into Las Vegas.

Standing on the highway in front of the hotel was a free-standing planet, a circle with a cloud of cosmic dust surrounding an outer ring and covered in stars. The resorts name was emblazed across the top amid a circle of neon. The marquee board boasted the Lido de Paris (all the way from France) and the lounge entertainment. Smaller signage marked out the property lines. The roadside sign was no bigger than the Desert Inn's Marquee or the Flamingos but it took neon signage on the Strip into the stratosphere.

The facade was bent slightly in the middle allowing the planet earth to jut out. This was to conform with the building. The southern half of the sign angled back so it could be seen by north-bound traffic.

The rest of the building seemed non-descript by comparison. Lacking a dramatic entrance and with parking in the front and along the sides the facade quickly became the most memorable part of the building. Roadside venacular had been kicked way up.

After the resort had opened, Kermit Wayne was visiting a friend of his at the Desert Inn, a pit boss. They decided to go to the Stardust and another man, coming up on their conversation, asked for a ride. The pit boss immediately said yes. When they pulled into the Stardust, the man told Wayne and his friend "I designed that sign." Wayne, very proud of his work, called the man on it and made it clear that Wayne had designed the sign. When the man left without saying more, Wayne's friend turned to Wayne and told him that the man had been Moe Dalitz.

The Stardust finally opened on July 2nd, 1958. With its space-aged theme, the hotel seemed to be Cornero's vision come to life. According to Alan Hess the Stardust was "architecturally little more than a warehouse." It had 1,000 rooms in two-story wings (garden-style rooms) that stretched to the rear of the property like boxcars." The 105-foot Big Dipper pool glistened in the summer sun inviting guests to jump in and cool off. The 16,500 square-foot casino was air-conditioned as were all the rooms.

The Lido de Paris was the largest production show yet produced on the Strip. It featured the world-famous Bluebell Dancers from England. They were overseen by Madame Bluebell, a friend of Frederic Apcar's from France. Other dancers in the show included a young female line captain, Fluff Lecoque who would become Donn Arden's muse for his tragedies like the sinking of the Titanic and his right hand when she ultimately moved off the line and into staging.

Opening night entertainment in the Ticker Tape lounge included the Happy Jesters, Billy Daniels, the Idiots, Dianne Payne and her Men of Note and the Stardusters.

At the back of the property was a drive-in theater, the Motor-Vue where teenagers and families would go on summer nights to enjoy a movie. The Stardust ended up buying the drive-in and renaming it the Stardust Drive-In.

The Stardust was the last hotel to be built on the Las Vegas Strip in the 1950s. It's arrival was also heralded by the older properties remodeling and renovating. Everybody it seemed needed more hotel rooms, more space, more machines. The Old West theme was almost gone from the landscape as older hotels raced to embrace the space-age theme. America had astronauts and Russians had launched a dog into space. The future was coming faster than anyone realized and Las Vegas was perched to ride that wave of optimism and can do spirit.

Kermit Wayne's Galaxy of Neon

Special thanks to UNLV Special Collections and Eric Lynxwiler for letting us use these images.

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THE STORY OF THE STARDUST CONTINUES:

LIDO DE PARIS, ROSENTHAL AND SPILOTRO, THE MOB,

AND MORE!