In 2020, they kicked off their fourth decade as a unit with their ninth album, Ohms. The group formed in Sacramento, California in 1988, when then high-school students Stephen Carpenter (guitar), Abe Cunningham (drums), and Chino Moreno (vocals) first began to jam together. They chose the name Deftones and began playing out locally shortly thereafter, going through several different bass players before finding a permanent bassist in the form of Chi Cheng. Photo Courtesy of Las Vegas News Bureau.īy the late summer of 1946, Guy McAfee was the best-known big shot in Las Vegas.

McAfee, 58, had spent more than $1 million to open the Golden Nugget casino on August 30. Located on downtown’s Fremont Street, the Golden Nugget was the largest gambling house in town. Meanwhile, McAfee’s old associates from Los Angeles, Billy Wilkerson and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, were constructing what would become a more famous casino, the Flamingo, several miles to the south on Highway 91 – latest known as the Las Vegas Strip.

The Flamingo would debut on December 26.įew in Las Vegas knew or cared about how McAfee earned his way to Las Vegas from Los Angeles.

In the 1930s, he owned the Clover Club, a nightclub and illegal casino on Sunset Boulevard – the “Sunset Strip.” The Clover Club was popular with the Hollywood set. Born in Kansas in 1888, he joined the Los Angeles Police force in his twenties. In the 1920s during Prohibition, while serving as captain of the vice squad, he took hush payments from bootleggers.

For years, along with gambling, McAfee had his hands in the city’s brothel racket.Īfter marrying a brothel madam, he quit the force to make more cash as one of the criminals, joining the ranks of Los Angeles’ top crime syndicate.īy 1931, after the death of Mob boss Charles Crawford, McAfee led the syndicate peopled by the likes of City Hall power broker Kent Kane Parrot, bookmaker Ezekiel Caress, nightclub manager Milton “Farmer” Page, slot and pinball machine runner Robert Gans, and gambling ship operator Tony Cornero. Things were fine for the syndicate until 1938, when city voters overwhelmingly recalled syndicate-friendly Mayor Frank Shaw and voted in Superior Court Judge Fletcher Bowron as a reform mayor to put a stop to the pervasive vice rackets. McAfee soon left town for Vegas with his wife, the sexy movie actress June Brewster (they would divorce in 1941). In 1939, he bought the small Pair-O-Dice casino and auto park on Highway 91 outside Las Vegas.

Adp payroll teampay