Sin City's faded Starlight casino finally dims on the Strip

LOS ANGELES - Not too much remains of the old Las Vegas - the cheesy, 1950s-era casinos where Rat Pack wannabes downed manhattans and smoked while Mob enforcers sent down from Chicago or Kansas City made sure everybody stayed under control.

Now one of the last icons of that era, the Stardust, is set for demolition as soon as the end of this year.

Once vaunted as the largest casino with the largest swimming pool in town, the Stardust has come to look increasingly like a relic of a bygone era. Its purplish hue looks decidedly unambitious next to the pyrotechnic wonders of the Luxor pyramid or the ersatz splendours of Paris, New York New York or the Venetian further south on the Las Vegas Strip.

Its end also symbolises Las Vegas' transition from Mob town to corporate entertainment capital.

The Stardust was one of three casinos run by Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal, a sports bookie and Mob placeman whose fictionalised counterpart was played by Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese's 1996 movie Casino.

Rosenthal ended up blacklisted and chased out of town, while his enforcer, the notorious Tony "the Ant" Spilotro, was beaten with baseball bats and buried alive in a cornfield.

The Stardust will have its last hurrah on Halloween night before being shuttered for good - two months earlier than originally scheduled.

Then the wrecking ball will come down to make space for a spanking new 63-acre luxury casino and resort complex to be called Echelon Place.

It's a demise that has been a long time coming. The Stardust's contemporaries - the Dunes, the Sands and the one-time showcase, the Desert Inn - have all vanished in the past decade to make room for lavish new high-end casinos with gourmet restaurants and novelties like impressionist art collections.

Many of the new edifices - the Bellagio, the Mirage and the super-lavish US$2.7 billion ($4.2 billion) Wynn Las Vegas - were conceived by the uncrowned king of Las Vegas, entrepreneur Steven Wynn.

The Stardust clung on, partly because it was at the somewhat unfashionable northern end of the Strip and partly because of the enduring popularity of its headline act, lounge singer and self-proclaimed "Mr Las Vegas", Wayne Newton.

Newton, however, gave up his gig last year after a seven-year stretch and the new corporate investors in Las Vegas, in the shape of the Boyd Gaming Corporation, swooped.

The Stardust opened in 1958 in the first big building boom along the Strip. It was Rosenthal, though, who arguably put the place on the map. He introduced sports betting - a first in Vegas, quickly copied by rivals.

And he employed Sin City's first female dealers, an innovation so obviously good for business it's a wonder nobody thought of it before.

The Stardust was also known for its topless revue, the Lido de Paris, in which performers cavorted with flocks of doves and camels and danced to re-enactments of natural disasters - one of the inspirations for the famously terrible 1995 movie Showgirls.

- INDEPENDENT