Thinking about the recent closure of Tropicana Las Vegas and the passage of time, I parked outside Carolyn and Oscar Goodman’s house in Scotch 80s with its old-growth mesquite and cottonwood trees that still manage to stand despite the many years.
The place has been the home of the current Las Vegas mayor and her predecessor since the days he was known as a mob lawyer and she was busy raising four children and running The Meadows School. Team Goodman has been married nearly 62 years, a quarter century of that time leading their own parade at city hall.
On the phone he had warned me that he’d taken a fall at home and his familiar face might surprise me. I reminded him that I’d once worked an undercard corner with legendary boxing cut man and trainer Johnny Tocco. But Goodman was right. Standing in the doorway, he smiled despite a bad case of raccoon eyes.
We traded allusions to Carmen Basilio and “You should see the other guy” one-liners, then fell into a discussion of the characters he’d represented — a veritable encyclopedia of nicknames and crime families — his city hall tenure and his post-political life as the happiest mayor of Oscar’s Steakhouse at downtown’s Plaza Hotel & Casino.
Goodman, 84, was mayor of Las Vegas throughout the first decade of the 21st century, a time that saw substantial change and plenty of downtown redevelopment highlights — the creation of The Mob Museum clearly his favorite. It was also a decade marked by insufficient social services and problems that plague the human condition.
Las Vegas has never been good at aging. It buries its true story and implodes buildings that elsewhere would receive historic designation. The endless boomtown mentality sends an existential reminder that nothing lasts, but Oscar Goodman still remembers his Las Vegas.
In the early 1960s, he arrived with a law degree but no license and spent months waiting for the annual Bar exam. It’s the Rat Pack era, and the newlyweds do the town on a budget and meet the community’s leading lights and its Runyonesque rogues’ gallery. Some, such as Sheriff Ralph Lamb, would become life-long friends and occasional adversaries.
“When we got here, we didn’t know a soul. So, it was easy, you start with zero,” he says. “Carolyn and I had two cents between us. We’d go to the Thunderbird, sit in the lounge and watch Sarah Vaughn and Frankie Lane, big names in those days, and they’d buy the drinks. It was a much better town. I don’t know any other way to put it. We were new to town, and we met everybody. That wouldn’t happen today.”
The times only got faster after he began practicing criminal defense after a brief stint in the Clark County District Attorney’s Office then led by Ted Marshall. For the next 35 years he gained a reputation for fierce advocacy of some of the most notorious characters in organized crime. Pick a client, and there’s not only nickname and a colorful story, but the defense that went with it.
“I never had a bad day during those days,” Goodman says. “I think about it every day. I have the type of memory, and I don’t know if it’s inborn, but I think it’s called an eidetic memory. Around the office, they used to call me the great citator, because after I read the case I could tell you the page, I would tell you the paragraphs. I couldn’t even remember what Carolyn asked me to bring home for dinner that night, but those things that were important to my professional life, I don’t forget. I remember every single day.”
His decision to run for mayor and three terms in office have been well-chronicled, and perhaps being a defense attorney prepared him to represent a city forever in need of defending. He admits he had little idea what he was getting into.
“I’d never been to city hall. I didn’t know what a mayor was supposed to do. I thought I was supposed to be Boss Tweed or old man (Richard J.) Daley. So, I went on my merry way. It was very…
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