St. George • Southern Utah’s D.I. Ranch, tucked away in a rugged desert valley 25 miles west of St. George, hardly seems like an alluring hangout for a mobster whom Sin City denizens once dubbed “Mr. Las Vegas.”
But Morris Barney Dalitz — called “Moe” by those who knew him best — was no ordinary criminal. By all appearances, he was a gentleman with old-school manners who was popular, polite and eschewed violence.
Ditto for the remote D.I. Ranch, which The Salt Lake Tribune profiled earlier this month. When Dalitz bought it in 1954, it looked nothing like its namesake: the famed Desert Inn luxury resort the gangster owned on the Las Vegas Strip.
Appearances, as the maxim suggests, are often deceiving — as author Michael Newton related in his book “Mr Mob: The Life and Crimes of Moe Dalitz.”
“America’s most secretive and most successful gangster never spent a night in jail, or even went to trial, despite a life of crime that spanned three-quarters of a century.” He was, Newton and others state, someone who preferred brain over brawn and knew how to keep his hands clean but was not above enlisting mob muscle to do the dirty work.
As for his 831-acre desert haven in southwestern Utah’s backcountry, the D.I. Ranch reputedly became a hideaway for mobsters on the lam and a discreet retreat for prostitutes, showgirls, gamblers and celebrities, like Elizabeth Taylor, on occasion.
(Mark Eddington | The Salt Lake Tribune) This building exists on the site of the D.I. Ranch, 25 miles west of St. George, where reputed Las Vegas mobster Moe Dalitz once lived.
The D.I., cowboy old-timers have attested, was a place patrolled by Uzi-toting guards in pickups and where dead bodies and vehicles were deep-sixed beneath mounds of earth or creek beds.
So who was Moe Dalitz? The answer, it seems, depends on who is asked?
There’s little dispute about his mobster beginnings. Born in Boston, Dalitz later moved to Michigan with his family and went into the laundry business. During Prohibition, he supplemented his laundry income as a bootlegger, ferrying illegal Canadian booze across Lake Erie to the U.S. Soon, Dalitz was linked to the criminal Purple Gang, the Mayfield Road Mob and what some federal officials dubbed “the Cleveland Syndicate.”
He also ran a string of illegal casinos in Ohio, Kentucky and Florida along with a legal one in Havana, which he fortuitously sold before Fidel Castro seized power. As one Cleveland law enforcement officer told members of a congressional committee on organized crime at the time, “ruthless beatings, unsolved murders and shakedowns, threats and bribery came to this community as a result of gangsters’ rise to power. Dalitz was considered part of that rise,” according to a 1999 Las Vegas-Review Journal article.
Too legit to quit
(Las Vegas News Agency via Wikimedia Commons) The Desert Inn hotel and casino in Las Vegas, pictured June 12, 1969. Moe Dalitz owned this longtime resort.
When Congress turned up the heat on organized crime after World War II, Dalitz made a momentous decision. Rather than quit, he would go legit by diversifying his businesses into mostly legal enterprises, shunning the spotlight and steering clear — at least publicly — of notorious ventures.
In 1949, Dalitz and partners Sam Tucker, Morris Kleinman and Louie Rothkopf — known collectively as the “Cleveland Four” — surfaced in Las Vegas, where they took over construction of the Desert Inn that developer Wilbur Clark had started but was too cash-strapped to finish.
Clark stayed on as the affable frontman for the hotel and casino, while Dalitz and his partners were the power behind the throne. Soon, people from across the country flocked to the Desert Inn to carouse, play craps or slots, lounge poolside with cocktails in hand or cluster behind giant windows in the resort’s swanky Sky Room to watch atomic bomb blasts from the nearby Nevada Test Site.
Dalitz pumped $2.7 million into entertainment during the Desert Inn’s first three years to lure top-flight entertainers like Frank Sinatra, who made his Vegas debut at the resort in 1951.
“For six bucks, you got a filet mignon dinner,” Sinatra said, “and me.”
[Read more about southern Utah’s D.I. Ranch, including fringe religious beliefs that it was once home to Adam and Eve and Book of Mormon bandits.]
Buoyed by the resort’s buoyant bottom line, Newton and other historians say, Dalitz parlayed his profits — along with cash infusions from International Brotherhood of Teamsters pension fund loans — into mostly legitimate investments that transformed the Vegas landscape and burnished his tarnished reputation.
(AP Photo, File) Frank Sinatra, in this 1990 photo, made his Las Vegas debut in 1951 at the Desert Inn.
For example, Dalitz invested in the Stardust and Flamingo casinos. He helped build the Las Vegas Country Club, created the PGA Tournament of Champions tour event in Las Vegas and tapped his financial backing and Teamster contacts to help construct Sunrise Hospital, Boulevard Mall, the Las Vegas Convention Center and the La Costa Resort and Spa in Carlsbad, Calif.
He also donated generously to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and a variety of charities.
“People started seeing Moe as a civic and business leader in Las Vegas rather than a mobster,” said historian Geoff Schumacher, vice president of exhibits and programs for The Mob Museum in Las Vegas. “It got to the point in the 1970s and ‘80s where he was being honored by different organizations as the ‘man of the year’ for his philanthropy and involvement in different causes.”
Dalitz does Muhammad Ali one better
(John Rooney | AP) Muhammad Ali stands over fallen challenger Sonny Liston in their 1965 bout. Dalitz and Liston once went the rounds, so to speak, during an encounter in Hollywood.
Notwithstanding Dalitz’s suave and civilized veneer, he was not above showing some syndicate steel. Dining in Hollywood, Dalitz was once accosted by heavyweight boxing champion Sonny Liston who told him, “You ain’t such a tough guy away from Las Vegas” and raised his hand as if to strike him.
“If you hit me … you’d better kill me,” Newton quotes Dalitz as replying. “Because if you don’t, I’ll make a phone call and you’ll be dead in 24 hours.
“...Liston couldn’t have been more stunned if he’d been hit over the head with a crowbar,” Newton wrote in “Mr. Mob.” “... Forget Cassius Clay’s ‘phantom punch.’ Moe Dalitz knocked out Sonny Liston with no punch at all.”
(Mark Eddington) Michael Newton's biography of Moe Dalitz, titled “Mr Mob: The Life and Crimes of Moe Dalitz.”
Clay, who later changed his name to Muhammad Ali, ostensibly knocked out Liston with the invisible “phantom punch” in their 1965 title tilt, causing some to speculate the fight was rigged.
Despite such incidents, as well as periodic unwelcome bouts of publicity over his mob ties and alleged skimming from casinos, Dalitz stayed largely above the fray. Even when reporters and investigators landed a stinging blow, civic and elected leaders often rushed to his corner.
On one such occasion, Dalitz approached Clark County Commissioner Thalia Dondero during her Las Vegas mayoral campaign and told her that he would understand if she would rather not be seen with him.
“If I can’t be friends with you, Moe,” Dondero reportedly replied, “I don’t want to be the mayor.”
D.I. days: Holing up and hiding out
(Suzanne Dalitz via The Moe Dalitz Archive) Joe and Averill Dalitz and their daughter, Suzanne, on a visit to the Grand Canyon.
Dalitz’s life in the sunshine and the shadows defy easy description.
“It’s complicated,” Suzanne Dalitz Gollin, a writer who lives in New Mexico, said about her late father and his legacy. “You can sympathize with the plight of a young girl when they told her that her father was a mobster, or with the young woman trying to form an independent identity while being called a mob daughter and having to endure everyone’s ‘Godfather’ movie references.”
Some of Suzanne’s fondest childhood memories are the times she spent with her father and mother, Averill, at the D.I. Ranch, riding her ill-tempered Shetland pony, romping around the grounds or relaxing at the house.
Even though she was just a little girl, Suzanne has vivid memories about the D.I. and how it differed from her Vegas home. Instead of maids and nannies, she remembers, there were cowboys and Paiutes.
She once spotted a rattlesnake on the bunkhouse steps and ran to tell her father, who was skeptical but grabbed his pistol and sauntered outside “like a real gunslinger, moving slowly until he saw the rattler.”
“Whaddya know, you’re right,” Suzanne recalled him saying. “Then he shot the snake dead and made me and my friend Judy hold it up like a trophy for a photograph, even though its guts were getting all over our hands.”
By the time Dalitz bought and built the ranch house, Suzanne explained during a 2016 presentation to the Washington County Historical Society, he had largely left behind his lawbreaking past.
“Dad didn’t want to be a mobster,” she said. “He wanted to be a lion-hunting, cattle-wrangling cowboy and a respected Las Vegas city father.
“...I never did see a single high-rolling customer, prostitute or bodyguard there, which isn’t to say that kind of thing didn’t happen,” added Suzanne, who was 6 years old when her parents divorced.
(Suzanne Dalitz via The Moe Dalitz Archive) Moe Dalitz on horseback at the D.I. Ranch.
Jay Leavitt, who lives in nearby Gunlock, was a boy when his father, Rodney, was Dalitz’s partner and helped manage the D.I. While he doesn’t discount Dalitz’s mobster past, he believes some of the tales spun about him and the ranch are a bit taller than the truth.
“When I was a little boy, we called him ‘Uncle Moe,” Leavitt recalled. “He would send truckloads of toys to kids in Gunlock.”
Jay said his father ran a telephone line all the way from the family’s Gunlock home to the D.I. Both dwellings had old-style crank phones Dalitz and his dad used to keep in touch.
He remembers Dalitz, upon learning he was about to be indicted, bringing his male German shepherd to the Leavitt home and asking his father to look after the dog while he went into hiding.
“He called my dad later,” Jay said, “and asked him to get his dog a girlfriend so he wouldn’t be lonely.”
Larry Shurtleff, who managed the ranch for subsequent D.I. owners Hyrum and Gail Smith in the 1990s, said Rodney Leavitt once told him about the time he was warned by Dalitz that federal agents would be coming to the D.I. in two days.
Facing possible arrest, Dalitz told his partner that he was leaving the country. Sure enough, “the feds” arrived as scheduled, only to find the ranch owner had vamoosed.
“[Dalitz] was always two steps ahead of everybody,” Rodney reported, “because he had moles everywhere and knew exactly what would happen two or three days before anything ever happened.”
Beating the rap, burying the past
In 1967, Dalitz sold the Desert Inn to billionaire recluse Howard Hughes and found a buyer for the D.I. Ranch two years later. He also hobnobbed with celebrities like Sinatra, Bob Hope and Lee Majors and rubbed shoulders with then-Nevada Gov. Paul Laxalt and other prominent politicians, many of whom hailed him as “Mr. Las Vegas” for his philanthropy and business acumen.
Still, his mob roots and relationships loomed too large for some to ignore. By the time of his death at age 89 in 1989, Dalitz was said to have beaten every rap except his checkered past.
Suzanne recalls watching a home movie a few years ago of a mountain lion her dad caught and caged in an enclosure at the D.I. that he dubbed the “Lion Hilton.” She remembers her father posing by the cage, looking at the lion as it looked back at him.
“In that lion’s plight,” she said, “I could see my dad’s own dilemma, captured as he was by old stories and bad choices, a man destined to be hunted by the press and government for the rest of his years. I see a man on the outside of a lion’s cage [who] was once a mighty predator but now dreamed of a different life, one out on the open range where the past was past and there were no limits to a cowboy’s horizons.”
