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Leaving the condo with the sale apparently finished, Boemio drives into a huge subdivision in western Las Vegas, one of the hardest-hit areas. The houses look nice enough, but every third one has a for-sale sign, and there are almost no cars in any of the driveways. She picks a house at random, and we go to the back. She figures the odds are high that a squatter has left a door or window open. Indeed, the bathroom window has already been pried open, and the screen is bent, so I bend it a little more and squeeze...
...devastation has spread into every aspect of Vegas. The city has lost the Las Vegas Art Museum, its oldest one. Strippers, who are facing less extravagant tippers and floods of newly unemployed women from other cities flying in to audition, are shelling out more than $100 for online classes at a site called StripandGrowRich.com to hone their sales tactics. There are lifeless shopping malls everywhere; Neonopolis, the $100 million, 250,000-sq.-ft. downtown mall, has almost no open stores left...
...aren't nearly as depressed as those in far less devastated cities. "This is a town built on hopes and dreams, and people don't give up hopes and dreams when there's a recession," says Neal Smatresk, executive vice president and provost at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Anyone who has ever stood at a craps table knows that losers always believe they're one roll of the dice from starting a winning streak...
That is true even of Sheldon Adelson, who has lost more during this recession than anyone else on the planet. The 76-year-old chairman of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., which owns the Venetian hotel, the Sands Expo and Convention Center and the Venetian Macao, was in 2007 and '08 the third richest person in the world, with - by his estimate - a net worth of $40 billion. By February of this year, he said he had lost $36.5 billion - more than the GDP of half of the countries in the world. In the years before that slide, banks were...
...banana peel, and there's a high wind. It's all wrong," he says. Adelson, always a self-believer, has reinvested more than $1 billion in his company. But he has also fired his longtime right-hand man, been sued by shareholders and shed more than 700 Las Vegas employees since November. Read "Stick It to the Recession: Wynn's Vegas Encore...