Chapter One

Reno, Nevada, has always been a rough-and-tumble kind of town, even during its meager frontier beginnings when it was little more than a gateway to the gold-mining town of Virginia City, nestled in the rugged hills some twenty miles southeast of Reno. Mark Twain began his writing career in Virginia City, where he worked as a reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. Many things have changed, of course, from the time when Reno, part of the Silver State, made itself known as the birthplace of gambling and brothels. This incarnation happened shortly after a man named Charles August Fey, a Bavarian, who had immigrated to the U.S. when he was about fifteen, invented the country's first mechanical slot machine and named it the Liberty Bell. He had placed it in a San Francisco saloon, where it proved to be very popular, and the rest, of course, is history. Gambling did not become legal in Nevada, however, until Governor Fred Balzar, on March 19, 1931, signed a bill into law legalizing it. Although Nevada has more mountain ranges than any other state-a little-known fact-the state is perhaps recognized more for the fact that it is a place where people come and lose money.

Although once fueled by tourism and quickie divorces, Reno nowadays is feeling the effects of the nearly mortally wounded national economy. A number of well-known gambling hotels and casinos, such as Fitzgerald's, now sit dark and idle, and the once-bustling downtown gambling center, located on Virginia Street, where the famous arched neon sign proudly proclaims that Reno is THE BIGGEST LITTLE CITY IN THE WORLD, struggles today to draw in custo

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