Oscar Goodman

I'm eating a very Riley-mode snack.

Please tell me about you.

The 11 Madison Park granola.

Oh,

signaling a field goal.

It's the granola they give you at 11 Madison Park if you go, but you can make it at home and it's really easy.

That's fun.

Wait, so you have duped the 11 Madison Park granola.

Cartoonist Lucy Nysley has duped the 11 Madison Park granola on an Instagram post.

Should have to Lucy Nisley.

And well done.

Where a friendly raccoon makes it in the comic.

And of course, you identified with that raccoon in the sense that you also made

it.

I'm going to count us down 3-2-1 Mark.

And when I say Mark, I'd like you to really crunch the granola quite loud, but in one distinct kind of audio peek

in such a way that we can sync up the thing.

Riley, you don't have granola, so you're just going to have to improvise.

That was a loud crunch.

That's what crunching would have sounded like if i did it with my hands if there was granola in my hands it would have gotten pulverized that's why they call me captain crunch welcome to an episode of no gods no musophonia uh i am your mayor for this episode november kelly i'm joined by my co-mayors matthew lubchansky and riley quinn hello prime and it's it's me again i'm writing episodes again um because for a long time i wasn't you may have noticed my slacking uh in the schedule uh and the reason for that was i was finishing my degree i have now got my degree.

And so now I can do this again.

Now I can get back to the real heavy work of trying to come up with an hour of entertainment about a mayor.

I mean, letting the mayor tackle this speak to you about an hour of entertainment with the mayor.

This is the thing, though.

After that time away, you know, after my rum springer in academia, I kind of panicked, right?

When it came time.

I think that's the opposite of a rum springer, to be fair.

Yeah, it's sort of a bumspringer in that it's a bummer.

Yeah.

The big spotlight turned on me again, and I panicked because I worried that I had lost the ability to discern what the Meritaculus was telling me, you know.

And, you know, sometimes in these cases, we feel a kind of what Mormons call a prompting.

You know, we feel a kind of a sort of like clear divine signal to use certain tools to aid us, certain schematics, certain dogmas, such as, for instance, Googling mayor plus noun, like karate karate mayor, for instance, um, which got us to Gorvardanian.

So, in this case, what I googled was mayor statue,

and there's a few like interesting statues, but one grabbed me.

Uh, and it's this statue that you see on the first page of the notes, which is a bronze of a guy with an open double-breasted suit jacket and a martini glass aloft.

I think that this is like the um, this is the 20 mid-20th century sort of mobbed up local politician version of like a Roman equestrian statue where like the drink they're holding indicates what he was indicted on.

He's holding the martini aloft, which means he was indicted in battle.

I just want to say about this statue, Nova.

On the pedestal, these words appear: the happiest mayor in the universe.

This is true.

We speak of Mayor Oscar B.

Goodman, the mayor of Las Vegas, Nevada, from 1999 until 2011.

What a time to be mayor of Vegas, too.

So this is going to be the story of the happiest mayor in the universe.

But first, items.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Welcome to item roundup.

Is it called item rodeo?

It's called municipal roundup.

I swear to fucking Christ, the two of you goons are going to kill me.

And so

the first fucking steer into the rodeo of Item Rodeo.

What's it called?

Item Rodeo.

If someone trying to patronize us?

It's not my first item rodeo.

Developing a new bit where I quit the show on air.

I can't work under these conditions.

I'll be in my trailer.

Learn your goddamn life.

Give me an item.

Give me an item.

Okay, item.

Item.

Item.

Eric Adams update.

This past week in Las Vegas, the city we're covering today, was Bitcoin 2025.

And Eric Adams appeared at a party calling himself the Bitcoin mayor, which our friend Francis Suarez might want to talk to him about that.

And I'm going to rehearse from...

Also, to jump in here quickly.

Please.

Having talked extensively about Eric Adams and having devoted a whole episode to Francis Suarez, Eric Adams is not the the fucking Bitcoin mayor.

Francis Suarez is the guy who minted Miami coin is the fucking Bitcoin mayor, quite literally.

You're not enforcing your like mayor trademark.

Sorry, you tried to get one Bitcoin paycheck, Eric Adams, and it failed.

So anyways, here's a quote from him.

I'm going to read the whole quote, which is from the New York Daily News, a little bit of what was going on from Defector.

in a piece that was illustrated by some ugly fuck.

Okay, here's from the daily news.

Just as our flag still flies, Bitcoin is going to continue to fly in our country and New York City, Adam said, adding that crypto business people are, quote, the Betsy Ross of today after reciting part of the Pledge of Allegiance.

Part of the Pledge of Allegiance is my favorite part.

Part, do we think?

Anyway.

I hope he just did like the middle of, I hope he read like all of the sentences, but only the middle parts of each sentence.

You know, allegiance to the flag, Republic which it stands, et cetera.

Nation undivisible.

Nation under.

Nation Indivisible under.

Livision.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah.

And here's.

I read the Pledge of Allegiance, but only the nouns.

Okay, so here's from also a story on Defector by Patrick Redford, who went to Bitcoin 2025.

Yeah, Eric Adams tells a confused room of people at a private dinner club party hosted by former child star, alleged sex criminal, and

Porto crypto kingpin, kingpin, Brock Pierce.

And Adams' gnarled formulation, he and apparently also you guys, like America's most legendary upholsterer, came from the working class and yet achieved greatness.

He underscores this in his talk by going line by line through the Star-Spangled Banner, a song after all written about the flag Betsy Ross famously stitched and somewhat less famously did not stitch.

Hold on, hold on.

Did he just have like

the genius app open on his phone to the Star-Spangled Banner?

I'm assuming.

Rockets Red Glare.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Eric Adams connected all this back to his personal journey from prosecution to the welcoming arms of Bitcoin.

After he wrapped up, Piercett's about attempting to film an episode of his Shark Tank rip off crypto nights in the crowded restaurant space, interrupting, filming multiple times to scream at everyone to please shut the fuck up.

Just a beautiful scene with Eric Adams at the center.

You are the Betsy Ross of today.

Yeah, all of you, what, collectively, like a sort of Habesian Leviathan, and then you are all Betsy Ross.

Former child star and adult sex offender allegedly is going to come in and scream at everyone.

Yeah.

And it's like, it doesn't mean anything.

Like, the only thing we know about Betsy Ross is the flag thing.

And also, who cares?

I'm loving Eric Adams' kind of Lydia Tyre directing video game music in Thailand arc.

Eric Adams.

Also, right, like with Eric Adams, what you notice is like he will fixate on stuff for a little while and then keep bringing it up.

In this case, it seems like someone told him that like the, there's a crypto flag or something.

He just sort of came up with that and was like, I'm going to hit that twice at two separate events.

Yeah.

He loves to do it.

In many ways, a kind of 9-11 of conversational technique.

Item.

Item.

Item.

Hot town.

Summer in the city.

This is a quick one.

I'm reading here from a journalist Ethan Stark Miller, who was last week, Eric Adams was giving a press conference at the beaches opened here in New York City.

And last summer, there were a lot of drownings, like the most in years, probably because they stopped hiring lifeguards.

Who knows?

But

anyways, so like all things, Eric Adams wants to solve the problem with drones, which is not the worst idea in the world.

A drone could fly a floatie out to somebody, right?

Whatever.

But here's just a little quote from this press conference.

Speaking about drones that can tell swimmers who may be drowning that help is on the way, Eric Adams says, quote they're gonna use my voice because i have a calming voice

just

playing the pre-recorded ai generated translations he did hola soy el calte eric adams

uh i like um drowning is the breathing of swimming welcome to new york you know atlantis is always the first stop Can you just imagine if you're like, you're okay, so you and your boo are out at beautiful Rees Beach enjoying a day out in the surf and the sand, and you go out for a swim and you get ripped under the riptide and you get pulled out to sea.

And the last thing you hear is

the whir of a drone and Eric Adams' voice being like, let your floaters become your boaters.

When you drown at the beach of success, help is on the way.

Rambling about how he used to have a girlfriend out there.

Yeah, you are the Betsy Ross of drowning.

New York York City, where anything could happen between someone starting a business and you drowning.

Condolences.

My condolences.

My condolences for your untimely death.

It just drops a wreath instead of a flotation device.

It's just, it depends on how far you are from shore and how likely they are to rescue you.

It drops either flowers or like a two.

Unfortunately, we will not be able to rescue you.

However, know that you are being mourned and that your efforts to make this city great will help New Yorkers get swag for generations.

Keep up the good fight, Eric Adams.

You're a pretty good Eric Adams cadence, I will say.

Yeah.

From having listened to him talk too much.

Yeah.

As they say in my native Colombia, Nicaragua, Spain, Venezuela, Mexico, and Chile.

Maybe you'll escape the cycle of Samsara, or maybe you'll come back and start a business.

Both of these could be considered good outcomes.

Just giving me tips on how to hustle while I'm drowning.

I learned about Samsara in my native country of Nepal.

I'm Eric Adams.

If you come back as a ghost, consider picking up some garbage on the street to help beautify the city.

I'm Eric Adams.

Are you trying scaring a rat out of your house?

Okay,

I don't.

I'm I'm moving us through this.

I got a lot of Oscar Goodman.

Okay, okay, okay.

Okay, all right, all right.

This is going to be a quick item.

This is my item.

It's also Eric Adams.

Eric item.

It's part of like something that I like.

I like to walk the sunbeat.

Of course.

I like to look at what the sun is.

Like Apollo.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's exactly.

I ride my chariot of suns across the sky, and then

I look at Icarus dropping like an idiot.

So anyway, this is for the New York Toast.

New York Toast?

Riley, can you just go check in a mirror real quick if you're both your pupils are the same size?

I smell New York.

Oh, that's what Eric Adams would say if he had a stroke.

I smell New York Toast.

I will be calling it this now in perpetuity, along with the ski dudes

that follows the New York Toast.

So this was written in the New York Toast.

Jordan Coleman.

Whatever happened to me.

Jordan Coleman, you know, like I know that they've both, like, there's newsletters and stuff, but it's not the same as it used to be.

I like the one about the two monks.

Yeah.

So Jordan Coleman, Mayor Adams, Mayor Eric Adams' 29-year-old son, is back in New York after competing abroad in the Albanian equivalent of American Idol and has dropped an EP.

Albanian Idol.

Yeah, Albanian Idol.

And has dropped an EP of five party songs inspired by Eastern Europe.

He said, I think that this right now is about to be the biggest chapter of my life because I'm a young man and I have a lot of responsibilities, but I also have something to say.

But he talks like Eric Adams, too.

It's heroic.

Yeah.

Terrorism.

You can get.

I caught it.

Well, this is, this is the son who I assume during the election when Eric Adams was pretending to live in Brooklyn, he was like squatting in his son's house.

Yeah.

So I imagine he just saw, he just had to listen to his dad enough, just like puttering around the kitchen looking for salmon or whatever

that he just picked up some of his mannerisms.

I'm assuming.

Yeah.

Hey, hey, Jordan, did you eat all my chia seeds?

I have to eat two cups of dry chia seeds every day to maintain my swag levels.

So a substitute teacher and sports coach at Palisades Park High School who released Jet Lag Dreams under his rap moniker Ju on April 25th.

Embarrassing for your teacher to be rapping, I feel.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Unless they're like rapping about, you know, geometry or whatever.

I feel like who I really wanted to be, the teacher, actor, musician, and filmmaker told the post, like that last portal where you rap, he's also got teaching in there.

Like that last portal where you step into your big boy boy career.

So I realized I need to make music that people could relate to while I'm out there.

Using the phrase big boy career at the age of 29 is so fucking funny.

This dude's five years younger than me.

Stepping through that last portal?

What the like the way he drops out like it's a phrase that everybody says and knows into my big boy career.

Uh-huh.

So basically portals, like um Eric, so Jordan Adams has this uh uh sorry, excuse me, Jordan Coleman has this theory of portals

where like

that's how he got to Albania.

Yeah, he did quantum time.

Basically,

he says

that like, he says, I call them portals.

I was entering a new portal when my dad was getting into office, and now I feel this current portal is the end when he was first

when he was first coming to office.

Guy who plays now we're going to have a new portal.

A new portal to step into with him going for his re-election.

So yeah, he's like, his theory of portals is that like you is that every major moment in your life is like a portal to the rest of your life, but also the portals, you can step out of them when those moments are done.

And most of them are to do with his dad's career as mayor.

Yeah.

But now he's making his own portals.

That tracks.

I see that all three of us have now highlighted the next sentence in this article.

Uh-huh.

I have a purpose that keeps me up at night and wakes me up in the morning, said Colvin, who was a finalist on the talent show.

I sleep so poorly.

Yeah.

I've never slept because I have so much purpose.

Every night is a portal and sleep is a portal to not working with purpose.

And I will never step into that portal.

I will stay in the portal of being awake and rapping and hustling and teaching and acting and making films.

Never step into the portal into my bedroom, which is from my living room into the bedroom.

He says, I have to prove it to myself that I'm not crazy.

And I have to prove it to the world that I have something for them too.

And then this is also crazy.

The back, the jack of all All Trades, this is the New York Post again, the New York Toast, excuse me, who first rose to fame as a child actor as the voice of Tyrone

on the Nick Jr.

cartoon The Backyardigans is also wrapping up shooting a hip-hop musical where he plays a secret agent trying to stop clout chasing zombies.

I feel like after Hamilton, you don't even really need to say hip-hop musical.

That's just a musical now.

Like it's just a major general.

Okay, sure, fine.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so some of the tracks on Coleman's new album, which include titles like Girls in the City and Up to Some, were debuted at a live birthday bash.

He's written Gracie Mansion in August.

Up to Some, by the way, is

up the number two, SUM, which might be about math.

You might be rapping about algebra.

We hope so.

It's one of those songs where I'm just like, Dad, I'm recognizing who you are, and I appreciate you and mom for making me.

And it's just like, here we are in this Gracie Mansion, and we're just living our life.

Here we are in this Gracie Mansion.

I'd rather be in a Gracie Mansion full of haste.

The other thing as well

is it's kind kind of insulting for Eric Adams to have a theme song that he uses for everything that is Empire States of Mind when his son is a rapper.

Like, okay, sure, it can be really bad, but like, you don't have to tell us that you don't respect your son's rapping ability.

What's incredible about this is that the son here is so clearly a sort of a Kendall Roy, but his father is also a Kendall Roy, which is

multiple Kendall's.

Everyone is one step down from like like where they would have been in succession.

So it's like, yeah, it's like Kendall's meth buddies sucking up to Kendall, who's in the position of Logan.

Unfortunately, he's way more consequential for whether or not young New Yorkers go to school.

Yeah.

And also whether or not ICE is blackbagging people fucking downtown.

Sure.

Yeah.

So though we're not really big into politics, the Big Apple's first son doubles as a consultant on young voters to his father.

I love that.

The Big Apple's first son, a like description comprised entirely of like words you could teach at a first or second grade level?

So I ask him, how can I help?

And I offer a lot to help in the sense of trying to give them ideas of what people I age might think might be cool or what people my age might think.

29 years old.

Yeah, he's 29.

He's 29 years of age.

Like, is he, I love, I want him to still be doing this.

Like, okay, on Trash Future, we talked about a guy called Richard Evans, who I'm still obsessed with, who's like a 54-year-old who still talks like this.

Because his dad's like a lord and he just basically sells access to his dad.

This is giving me the same feeling that I thought when I was learning about Richard Evans.

This guy will be a son his whole life.

Yeah, he's destined to be nothing more than a son.

Even if he has kids,

he will only ever be a son.

So being the mayor's son has perks, but also drawbacks.

With my dad being who he is, give me the foundations of what I have.

It's come to the time in my life where every time I step up, I need to present myself in a positive light.

When you're the mayor of one of the world's biggest cities, your son's going to face pressure.

Tagline to a completely forgotten Mel Gibson movie.

Yeah.

All right.

All right.

Those are the items.

I just think it's really important when I saw Eric Adams' son in Albania.

It was just like I shot up with a cold sweat in the night

thinking about the immortal precepts.

Rapping in Albania.

Call that skip hop.

Yeah.

Anyway,

that's my item.

Good.

Good items.

Support for the nation of Albania.

Yes.

Of course.

Of course.

Unswerving.

Unswerving.

What good items?

Thank you so much.

Can we maybe say that maybe being the mayor is that when you're the mayor of one of the biggest cities in the world, your son's going to face pressure is another precept?

Yes.

Like we know that.

Actually,

I would adopt that unhesitatingly.

I'm pulling it up.

Okay.

I just want to get the wording.

Number seven.

When you're the mayor of one of the largest cities in the world, your son's going to face pressure.

Which is undoubtedly true and universally so.

Yeah, no question.

Okay, great.

That's number seven.

Thank you so much.

So precepted.

Good.

All right.

Yeah.

All right.

Our feature presentation.

So.

As with Fiume and with Vernon, I'm kind of establishing a niche here as being the woman for weird cities.

And okay, every city is weird, but like Las Vegas is a very weird city.

And I'm going to tell you a fact, right?

Which people don't necessarily know about Las Vegas and which is going to change a lot of things.

The strip, the big streets with all the casinos and stuff on it, that is not in Las Vegas.

Oh my God.

So what happens there doesn't stay there?

Well, kind of.

It's legally, right?

That's not part of the city of Las Vegas.

It's not within city limits.

That is unincorporated Clark County land.

So

the people who actually have pull

over

like the casinos and stuff are the Clark County Board of Supervisors.

Different thing.

Not mayors.

We're not interested.

But like the city of Las Vegas is this weird L-shaped block around the strip that has all of the people who work in the casinos and kind of nothing else.

Right.

Yeah.

It's a little like miami in that sense that it's like the actual city of las vegas is not what you think it is yeah the city the city of las vegas is kind of like uh this accessory to the theme park and it it doesn't really have anything else going on that's the big narrative here that's the big battle is either you know the the city is just this kind of accessory to the strip or if you look at it the other way the strip is this kind of like big tumor right that is like uh growing out of control and like draining all the resources out of the city.

And the city, the city has some problems, right?

Most notably, Nevada has no income tax, which is, it makes it a great place to start a casino, makes it a really bad place to do anything else.

Like it, it can't fund anything.

Nevada spends, I think this is right, the second lowest amount per capita in the country on education.

It's right ahead of Mississippi.

Cool.

Yeah, because

they don't have the money for it.

Well, you could learn how to deal blackjack in like 20 minutes.

Yeah, exactly.

And you get really good at like some specific types of, you become like savant level at some very specific types of media.

Adding up within 21, easy.

Yeah, like the outcome, the mission of American education is to prepare you for jobs.

So if all the jobs are like raking, you know, chips,

yeah.

Well, like, for instance, Las Vegas does have a university campus, but until like a couple of years ago, it didn't have a medical school, for example.

You couldn't go running rebels.

You couldn't train to be a doctor in Las Vegas.

Yeah.

Cool.

Yeah.

So you have what is frankly a pretty like poor city and a state with a lot of like idiosyncrasies.

Like conversely, all of the casino workforce in Vegas, or most anyway, is union, which partially because of a long tradition of that and partially also because of the mob, right?

Because they controlled labor unions and so it benefited them to have unionized labor in all the casinos, which is still there and now demobbed.

It's kind of like, you remember when we did Apostolic Roundup, right?

I was talking about how like sort of secular earthly politics doesn't really translate to the church one-to-one.

Yeah.

Same again with Nevada.

Like Nevada is in like electoral college terms on the big map, it's purple.

But

all the culture war stuff still comes in, but it all has to be translated to Nevadan first.

And there's this strange kind of Nevada-ness

that puts this twist on everything.

Yeah, it's, you could call it the Nevada.

Thank you.

Yeah, it contains a Nevada-ness.

All of which is why today I wanted to talk about Oscar Goodman, who, as we mentioned, was mayor of Las Vegas for the first decade of the 21st century, like 99 99 to 2011.

That's like, but that's such an insane decade to be mayor of Las Vegas because that's like the decade that it switched over from this is a place you're going to go get chlamydia and maybe have your knees broken to, you know, well, eating like infinite shrimp cocktails to a fun family destination that also has like raves and crypto startups.

Like that's the decade that Las Vegas pivoted.

Well, it's not even the raves and crypto stuff isn't here yet exactly.

This is like straight up Disneycation disneyfocation stuff yeah it's resort stuff like this is when they're trying to make vegas like family friendly this is when they literally build the second strip right yeah like the new strip yeah

so it's also something where oscar goodman doesn't necessarily have much to do with that process this is something that kind of happens without him because what he's in charge of again is like the functional behind the scenes bit of vegas and he's not even really in charge of it but so we got to talk about the guy, right?

Who is this guy?

So first things first, he's from Philly, which is going to explain a lot about why he's like this.

This is, there's some personality here.

He's he's from like a law family.

His dad's a fairly prominent lawyer.

He's like born in 39, so like grows up in the like 40s and 50s amidst insane anti-Semitism, gets his nose broken a few times as a kid, notably.

Again, this will explain a lot about why he's like this.

Goes to law school at UPenn, works at the DA's office in Philly for like a bit less than a year, and he marries up.

His wife, Carolyn, she went to Bryn Moore.

She had to propose to him, which I think is cute.

Feminism win.

Yeah.

And her family, who are like higher for looting than his family, don't like him.

It's a whole like touching story, right?

Because he has this like very brash kind of affect.

And then she she sees the like the real Oscar when he's around his family and she falls in love with him.

It's, it's just, it's sweet.

It's nice.

But so one day his boss, the DA in Philly, who is Arl Inspector, weirdly, future senator.

Strange.

Has him talk to these two detectives who are up from Vegas on some like extradition thing.

And he gets talking to them about Vegas and he gets this idea in his head.

Well, maybe we should move out there.

And so

the story is he wakes up.

Sounds nice.

I'll go there.

Yeah, sounds nice.

I guess I'll just relocate my entire life because it sounds cool.

He wakes his wife up in the middle of the night and he's like, do you want to move to the land of milk and honey?

And in her words, she thinks he's gone insane and wants to move her to Israel.

That's the subtle anti-Semitism of assuming we all want to move there.

She genuinely is like, I thought he wanted me to move to Israel.

That's so bizarre.

Either way, waking up with like an ecstatic vision, like I have to move

to Nevada in like what year?

64?

64, 1964.

That's not like Vegas seems fun.

That's like, yeah, like Vegas is a place to get your knees broken.

Yeah, genuinely.

Bizarre.

They actually go out there on a bonibreth flight as like an experience to see it one time, and then they just immediately move there on like the next plane functionally.

Damn.

Which you could just do back in the day.

Yeah.

So 64, they moved to Vegas.

And the story that these two tell continually.

is it's some real boomer shit, right?

Is we moved to Vegas.

We had $87 between us.

And like Oscar had a law degree, but he's not like licensed in Nevada.

So he can't like get a law job until he passes the bar.

So he's waiting for that to happen.

And just race that $87 for 20 months.

Yeah, exactly.

And which you could do back then.

Well, yeah.

And in 2025 dollars, it's over $7 million, I think, $87.

Yeah, that tracks.

That tracks.

So, you know, I assume they buy a house with like a dollar of that and then settle down.

But like Vegas is still a very small town.

It's like 100,000 people and it's it's literally like four casinos in the desert.

And of those hundred people, 70,000 of them are in the mob.

So

just

in the course of hanging out in bars, which is the only thing they can really like do because there's nothing else that happens in Vegas, they kind of meet everybody because you know how mob guys are.

They're introducing you to motherfuckers.

It's a whole thing, you know?

This is a friend of mine, friend of mine.

They're all the same name.

Sure.

Yeah.

So we've all all seen good fellas yeah they're they they kill time waiting for oscar to take the bar exam he takes the bar exam he passes the bar exam and he gets a job at the da's office again and he's doing that and it's kind of mid whatever uh and then one day through his wife interestingly he gets asked to take a defense case for that's so not usually what happens in mob move the wife is always against further involvement with the mob yeah no in this case it's like because she's she's hanging out she's meeting all these guys so he gets asked to take a defense case for extortion.

If you don't win, we're going to try to cut off your toe.

Funny, you should mention.

So they both drive out to meet the guy.

And

another guy who is not their client gives Oscar an envelope with $3,000 in it and hundreds, which in 2025 is like $18 trillion

and says, don't lose the case.

And at this point,

at this point, it dawns on Oscar Goodman that these are mob guys, right?

Like,

what?

You're living in the cartoon mob town.

And so

you live in 1960s Las Vegas, and you're like, I think Rocco's pinstripe suit is trying to tell me something.

I think it's a sign.

Ring-a-ding, ding, baby.

Yeah.

I think this guy who can only communicate by like.

uh sort of giving me a kiss on the cheek and then slipping money into my pocket might be in the mafia yeah yeah yeah so he he gets he quits the da's office and he gets into the only game in town for a criminal defense attorney in Las Vegas.

Mob lawyer, right?

And he's a really good mob lawyer.

He wins cases.

All these guys love him.

He represents Maya Lansky, for instance.

Oh.

He represents Lefty Rosenthal, who

is Robert De Niro's character in Casino.

He represents Nikki Spilotro, who is Joe Pesci's character in Casino.

He plays himself in the movie Casino.

And that is true.

he's playing robert de niro's lawyer um that's incredible he has a he has a real vendetta against clark county commissioners who he made sure were portrayed as idiot hicks in the movie casino yeah genuinely uh the the the feds are surveilling his daughter's bat mitzvah because half of the roma mob guys

oh my god i just i hear that and i'm just filled with so much yearning you will never go to a 1964 mobbed up bat mitzvah yeah like you just realize it's like there are whole sort of, there are entire

like super categories of human existence that are just closed forever.

This is what they took from us.

Yeah.

They're doing this to demoralize you.

Us brackets, Jewish lawyers who moved to Vegas in the 60s.

Yeah.

I could never be a Jewish lawyer who moves to Vegas in the 1960s and then becomes friends with Meyer Lansky and Lefty Rosenthal.

It's just I'm sorry, that's true.

Imagine like you're just like, imagine this, right?

You're at your daughter's bat mitzvah, and like people can't stop coming up to you, kissing you on the cheek, and handing you like envelopes full of money.

You know, you're, you're fucking around, you're chopping it up, and you sit down, you eat a ham in case, no, you wouldn't eat a ham-in-case in jello, but maybe you have like, I don't know, like

a beef aspic dish, perhaps.

Like, oh, like, like, what a time.

It's got like five different antennas sticking out of it because it's mostly listening devices like it's it's fantastic and then and then and then you get to like mouth off to a federal agent because you know that they're not going to do anything to you in the near term and so you can like go past you know like someone you know is watching you for the fbi and you can be like hi sweetheart hello you know you could do that and then you could go back to your awesome party is it legal for a butt med supposed to be that italian like yeah can you i just i just imagine you're at lake tahoe doing the horror and lifting a chair and you look to your left and it's Meyer Lansky and you look to your right and it's John the Ant Spilatro.

Imagine.

Like imagine just living in the first half of one of the Scorsese movies.

So his big, big case is this there's this one guy, Jimmy Chagra.

who is not Italian.

He's Lebanese.

Jimmy Chakra, he's very aligned.

Lebanese Jimmy Chagra.

So

send Jimmy Jimmy Chakra over to, let's just say, ground him permanently in his safe room.

Let's just say he found his key points.

We had to fit it for a pair of cement Reiki wands.

That's Chagra, C-H-A-G-R-A.

Yeah,

we gave him the acupuncture, if you know what I mean.

The needle was pretty big.

We fucking did it.

I don't know.

I have an intuition from the universe that he's going to talk.

Why do you give him the whole Las Vegas acupuncture, huh?

So, this guy,

I'm a very intuitive person.

I'm not even going to fucking say his name anymore.

This guy, he's like a big time, like whoever he may be, marijuana trafficker.

He traffics weed.

And he gets indicted.

And the federal judge, I forget his name, it's like John Holland or something.

They call him Maximum John because he's a real piece of shit.

He tries to bribe him.

He thinks that's not going to work.

And eventually he decides, I'm going to assassinate the judge who has my case.

And that judge gets assassinated.

And weirdly, the hitman who killed that judge on behalf of Jimmy DeChakra was Woody Harrelson's dad.

So small world.

Extremely.

But so Jimmy Chakra gets acquitted of conspiracy to kill the judge.

They still get him on the weed charges and he goes to jail for the rest of of his life.

But like, it's, it's wild that Oscar Goodman is able to get this guy acquitted of the actual like assassination.

By the way, during this point, his wife starts a private school because we mentioned the Mississippi thing earlier.

Like there's no money for schools.

She doesn't want to send her kids to the like public schools.

But so Oscar gets pretty famous doing this.

And

he's got a very kind of like hostile kind of affect.

He starts wearing black and white pinstripe suits like his clients.

It's dazzle camouflage.

You can't tell the client in the

lawyer park and they don't know who to arrest.

He's like, he's on TV a lot.

There's an interview here I've got a quote from, but how did Tony Spilatro, for example, get the money to pay Goodman?

Goodman says that he doesn't know.

All I know is when Mr.

Spilatro is with me, he's a kind, decent, attentive, genteel person.

Spilatro was alleged to have put a rival's head in a vice and tightened it until his eyes popped out.

It's not relevant as to where they get their money as far as I'm concerned, says Goodman.

I love, if you've seen Casino, that you're basically saying, yeah, this is, you know, Nikki is like, he's like, what?

What do you mean?

What do you mean, dangerous sociopath?

He's always been very nice to me.

That money could have come from anywhere.

It could have fallen out of anybody's pockets while they were being held upside down.

Yeah, He's always like, as you would expect, very like vocally defensive of his clients.

You know, these people deserve their constitutional rights.

They're being railroaded by the fucking FBI.

Weirdly, the most ambivalence he ever expresses about his days as a mob lawyer is in a profile, which is one of the first profiles that comes up when you search for him in Cigar Aficionado magazine, which is the first time that's been a primary source for him.

Yeah, well, look, people always let their guard down to Cigar Aficionado, because they hired Isaac Chotner.

uh he does have a story about how one time he's mediating a thing between two mob guys and it's getting kind of heated and he backs up into the light switch turns the lights off and just hits the deck instantly so yeah he's he's he's having a a fun time doing this and he does this for like oh my gosh so so far what's happening is again like in the scorsese movie he hasn't switched to the rock and roll soundtrack yet yeah yeah like he's still doing the like oldies soundtrack yeah yeah, yeah.

And this is, this is all like montage, but he has a whole career as a mob lawyer, right?

And he's really good at it.

So like, how does that get us to no gods, no mares?

It doesn't stand for no gods, no mob lawyers.

So, although no Endor's.

I'm going to have to use the phrase in his telling a lot because he's the kind of guy to do a lot of telling and a lot of it is not true.

But in his telling, he is having dinner with his wife and his now grown kids and he's like, I shit you not.

This is very nearly a direct quote.

I think I can change the system from the inside.

Where have I heard that before?

Yeah, yeah.

And they go, what do you mean you want to be a cop?

You're a podcaster.

Are you stupid?

Also, what's also what's a podcast?

My eyes rolled back and I just said that.

I said that in the voice of a Canadian guy who's been living in Britain for a long time.

It's kind of weird that

she did that.

Yeah.

But no, he's genuinely like, I think I've had enough of like trying to change the system that like the crooked system that oppresses these innocent Italian-American guys from the outside.

Sorry, I'm sick of trying to change the system by being a mob lawyer.

Yes.

I'm sick of building Italian-Jewish relations by fighting italophobia

as a mob lawyer.

You can fight italophobia from inside City Hall.

Oh,

I'm working for my new charity.

It's called Spaghetti Mission.

And we highlight instances of anti-Italian Italian discrimination on campus.

So, obviously,

everyone tells them this is a bad idea.

They're like, you're never going to be mayor.

You were a mob lawyer, for one thing.

And for another thing, people keep booking you on TV because you're a mob lawyer and getting you to say mob lawyer shit into a camera.

You keep endorsing all of these known mobsters and they called you in casino.

You called Joe Besci's character in Casino a kind, decent, attentive, genteel person.

And then starred in a movie where they showed everything he does.

Nikki is

attentive.

That is true.

I mean, not to his wife necessarily.

Yeah, he doesn't let a lot of things slide.

But so we go into the 99 Vegas mayoral election, and Oscar's like 17 to 1.

No shot he wins.

He's up against two boring guys who don't have Wikipedia.

And you know, those odds are probably like pretty accurate, right?

17 to 1 was pretty specific for them.

Yeah.

It's like a property developer and a county supervisor.

One of them finds a video of him on TV saying he thinks Megan's Law is a dumb idea, which is meant to be the big kind of like knife.

And he goes, oh, yeah, I didn't believe any of that shit.

I said I was just on TV.

He wins 63% of the vote on a 26% turnout, which is the funniest possible landslide, I think.

I think that's, I mean, it just goes to show that it's like, what you really have to be is just whoever's been on TV most for longest is going to win.

That's it.

Yeah, basically.

Name recognition.

That's the truest thing in American politics.

Yeah.

The one guy who like wanders in off the streets sees a name he recognizes.

During the campaign, it was reported that Goodman said with a big grin, I'm running for mayor.

I need your financial support.

And if you don't give it to me, I'll have you whacked.

But what?

He doesn't, surely he doesn't need financial support.

He's the last person who needs financial support.

Because you'd be like,

what do you think?

Hey, Mob.

Oh, I got my friends from north of the border.

They're

giving me a new pair of socks for Christmas, if you know what I mean.

I need your financial support because I forgot which tile in my kitchen all the cash is under.

And I don't feel like looking for it.

And he loves all this mob shit.

And as Vegas is trying to family-friendly itself,

and like all the campaigning against him is like, oh, Vegas is trying to like, uh, the phrasing in one of them is remarry the mob, right?

He's a big mob guy, he's pro-mob.

Like, he's not pro-mob, but he's like,

that's such an awesome position to do.

He's like, pro the kind of mob sizzle.

He says at one point, if people wanted to go to Disneyland, they could drive another 200 miles.

When they come out here, they don't want to see Mickey Mouse under a rock.

They want to see a little bugsy seagull.

I really believe that.

I can't believe he hung out with the mob enough enough to be so pro-mob, but not enough to remember the part of Omerto where you're supposed to say the mob isn't real?

No matter.

I mean, I think he, I think he did deny the existence of the mob for a long time, but also the existence of prostitution in Las Vegas, which is really funny.

I mean, here's the thing about him, and this is what I keep coming back to, is

he loves the mob, but like, as a as like a sort of social phenomenon that produces fun guys.

Yes.

He just loves hanging out with these guys.

But so he gets elected mayor, and it's 1999.

Pretty soon, 9-11 happens.

This is only important in to note that he makes friends with like this FBI agent he used to be enemies with because now the mob is cute next to like terrorism.

It's like that one episode of The Sopranos.

This is just going to set me up for something later.

But meanwhile, while New York City is experiencing 9-11, Las Vegas is facing Las Vegas's 9-11, which is urban decay.

So basically, every mayor has tried to get more stuff going in Vegas that isn't gambling, like in the city.

And so the previous mayor had built this thing called the Fremont Street Experience.

I've been, it's mid.

It's a bunch of LEDs over like a street and you look at the LEDs.

Yeah, it sucks.

Yeah, it sucks.

It's just an arcade.

It's like an arcade.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it never really took off like because Vegas has a downtown, which is not the strip.

like that's where Fremont Street is.

But, like,

who cares?

Nobody cares.

You're not going to see downtown Vegas.

What are you going to see Julie Farkas at the old Mormon fort?

No, you're not.

Come on.

You're going to go and gamble because that's what it's for.

Yeah.

I got to go get my legs broken at Circus Circus.

That's what I'm getting.

Exactly.

And so there's also

this kind of arrangement, which is really familiar to us, which is that the mayor of Las Vegas has no actual power.

The mayor is one vote on a five-member city council that controls none of of the casinos.

And so all you can really do with that job is hustle and pitch and sell, largely on the basis, and Oscar admits this, that people will not know that the Las Vegas Strip isn't in the city of Las Vegas.

Oh, my God.

I mean, this is,

there are certain mayoral roles

that attract these kinds of people.

I think like Darren Lyons, Francis Suarez, all of these like quite weak positions where your whole role is just to be a pitch man for your town.

Yes.

But based on the idea that people don't really understand your town very much and you just got to keep, kind of keep bamboozling them.

Mind you, this is a guy who cannot get his car parked by the valet out at like any of the casinos.

He has a story about this.

He goes and gets them to park a car and he's like, I'm the newly elected mayor.

And she's like, I don't give a fuck.

you're not you're not some guy in a cowboy hat that yells at robert de niro yeah exactly and and so come back when you're a clark county commissioner literally yes so basically all he's doing is dealing with out-of-towners and being like hey i'm the mayor of las vegas and they go oh okay i'm the mayor of las vegas oh cool can you tape me with the casinos no no only if you only if you can park your own car um but like this is kind of the role that oscar's born to play though like he gets his face printed on casino chips at this one tiny, like, Austro casino called the Four Queens, with his face and the happiest mayor in the universe.

He's going everywhere with like a showgirl on each arm, and his office is in like an Adobe strip mall at this point.

Come on.

So,

basically, Oscar has a three-point plan.

to restore like life to downtown Vegas.

And point two.

Point one, business.

Love it.

Okay.

This is kind of Vision 2030 when you think about it, because like we said.

The strip's in a line.

Yeah, the strip is in a line.

It's in a desert.

Plus Vegas has one industry, one commodity, which is killing it from overdependence and because it's completely unsustainable, right?

It's like petrodollars.

Gambling dollars don't really stay there.

American Neon.

Yes.

It's supported by the constant threat of violence, or at least it was for a very long time.

Yeah, it's American Neon.

It was set up with the help of the CIA.

Yeah, as well.

So, so Vegas has to diversify, right?

If there's going to be a city there, it has to diversify.

And that means there need to be non-casino jobs downtown.

And so Oscar calls everyone.

And his big success here is pulling in this

locally big company called Zappos, which I think sells shoes.

That is a huge website.

Online.

Yes.

It is a big old shoe.

It's like Amazon for shoes.

They're not being owned by Amazon now.

Okay.

But they were for years.

It was like, you could get any shoe delivered to your house tomorrow.

And they have an enormous inventory.

For some reason, Amazon for shoes is still its own country.

It's owned by

one guy called, I think his name's Tony Sier, but like he gets them to move their headquarters from Henderson, which is like down the road, into Las Vegas.

Oh, no, sorry.

They were bought by Amazon.

Excuse me.

Anyway, let's keep going.

And this guy Sierra also invests a lot into like this kind of non-governmental like downtown project.

And they build some stuff.

They build some parks and stuff.

And okay, they put a lot into downtown.

One of the big crowning achievements is

downtown Las Vegas has a brain center now.

which only sounds funny when you say it like that.

It's like a brain, brain injury

treatment center thing.

Oh,

I legitimately, I did not even think about that.

Yeah, that's what we're doing.

You say brain center, it's like, I thought it was like a con, I thought it was like an innovation lab, you know.

No, it is an actual thing.

It just, it's funny to say brain center.

But like the kind of small fry-ness of this is clearly like rankling.

And, and, you know, Oscar, Oscar takes that really personally.

Um, like at one point, he says on the record about the like company that has just dumped a bunch of money and moved all their shit to Vegas, that they are $10 an hour phone people.

Like he doesn't, like, it's fine, but he doesn't want Amazon for shoes.

He wants Microsoft going on the computer.

That's a growth industry, right?

Yeah.

People are going to stop wearing shoes any day now, but going on the computer is forever.

Imagine if Microsoft moved to Vegas.

I mean, eventually, like, they did get those guys.

Like, one, like, Horowitz from Andreessen Horowitz lives in Vegas.

Oh, we'll get to that.

That's a whole other episode.

Sorry.

Okay.

All right.

But so there's some real Nevada-ness political skew coming into this again right because so bill gates is in town for a convention likely place for him to be but the convention is at the sands whose labor is striking right like there is a picket in front of it and although he is invited as a courtesy oscar will not cross the picket right hell yeah yeah but based based off of oscar goodman uh because he needs the unions right is the thing it's extremely extremely a union town that's like why bernie sanders won the state in 2016 right like yeah extreme extraordinarily so i don't even know to what extent this is a principle thing for him i don't know if oscar really like has principles like that but he won't go right he snubs the thing um and if we if we think of him in terms of his like love for the mafia i think you could maybe be like no the unions there are guys yeah for sure i think maybe i think the principle is probably not like anything progressive but i think he he knows who his guys are yeah big labor unions also kind of create fun guys.

That's true.

But so this sets off a mortal enmity between Oscar and the owner of the sands and the reason why the labor force is on strike, Sheldon Adelson.

Oh, that's right.

Castle Thunder, please.

Like these two fucking hate each other genuinely.

And so there's this like lifelong enmity that is sparked off by this.

Like, okay, Adelson's paper,

the review journal, had been, they had run like an anyone but Oscar campaign in the election because, again, they were trying to make it family friendly.

But like, that's politics.

This is the real like personal fissure here.

And after this, it gets quite like last two Jews in Afghanistan not on speaking terms anymore between them.

Fine.

You don't get Microsoft anymore.

And you have made a powerful enemy this day by sticking with the unions.

On the other hand, you've made a relatively powerful friend by sticking with the unions, which is nice that you get to do that, but who cares?

Plan B and Plan B,

sports.

To be fair, that's where the Neom comparison holds up because that's also what Neom is doing.

So the sports thing, it's not just the money, right?

Like a lot of this proceeds from the analysis that bringing in a professional sports team brings a lot of money to the city.

This is bullshit.

Everyone knows that they actually cost money.

Yes.

More importantly, Oscar feels like, with some justification, Vegas doesn't really have like a civic identity, right?

Like the city itself doesn't really exist.

People forget it exists.

And so the, like, it's, it's like, you know, a

million people, million plus people, probably more.

Like, I don't know how many people it is, but it's a, it's a big city.

It's a big enough city to have the big four sports.

Yeah, sure.

In.

the in town or at least a couple.

And it doesn't have any like sort of cultural impact or cachet that isn't gambling.

And he wants to change that.

Now, specifically, Oscar is a basketball guy.

And the thing that he wants more than anything is an NBA team.

Let me tell you, this guy does the full court press of pitching, right?

Like, this is our most basketball-aligned mayor after Sarah Palin.

I'm locking it up.

You'd think, like, so I'm really understanding Oscar Goodman through the lens of experiences he wants to have.

Like, he wants to sit.

He wants to be in the legitimate businessman's social club getting kissed and given money.

He wants to be, he wants to be surveilled about mitzvah uh he wants to sit courtside stand up and clap for a team he's like has kind of a stake in yes yeah that makes sense and i'll also just real quick context as the american sports knower on the podcast around this time in the in the early 2000s every single small market team is constantly threatening to move to las vegas It is almost about to happen all the time.

It is every time some dumb fuck owner in Tampa is trying to get a new stadium built, they say, we're moving to Vegas.

It almost happens so many times.

It finally happened a couple of times recently

where now the Oakland A's are moving there and the Raiders moved there, but it was for a very, very long time.

It was like the eternal threat of your small market team to extort the city you lived in was Las Vegas has no teams.

Yeah.

And we're about the same size as that.

And during the course of all of those disputes, every single person involved down to like the janitor was getting 20 phone calls an hour from Oscar Goodman.

This is like he was doing the hardest sell you can possibly imagine.

And nobody wants any part of it.

All the commissioners, all the leagues hate Vegas and they hate Oscar specifically because he is that intent on it.

Like the only sport that likes Vegas at this point is boxing.

And that doesn't help you because you box in a casino like an Ocean's 11 and none of that money comes to the city.

Like Vegas doesn't have a tax base because it doesn't have income tax.

So if you want to build a stadium in the city, you're not getting any public money for that.

And that's the only thing that moves people anywhere is how much money can we extract from a municipality to like pay for this shit.

Yeah.

You need the entire country to become addicted to gambling and then

and then you can get a team there.

Yeah.

And so finally, after like, God knows what wheedling and cajoling, he finally gets the NBA to agree to an all-star game, like one game in Vegas in 2007.

I remember this.

And this is, this is like on sufferance, right?

Because everybody involved is like, not only do we not want to like have a team in Vegas, we don't even want to go to Vegas because Vegas isn't, it hasn't cleaned up yet.

They're trying, right?

And it's like, Vegas is sports betting.

We do not want to sully the like sanctity of like,

you know,

like the National Basketball League or the National Football League or whatever by association, by proximity with like sports betting.

That's so funny as well, because this has just come off the back of so many gambling scandals.

No, I was going to say, this is the 2007 NBA All-Star game is like a couple of months before the Tim Donaghy scandal breaks, which was the NBA ref that was caught gambling.

This is like, there's so, it's like their worst fear.

Yeah.

And also the casino owners hate it as well, because that's competition with them.

And it would wean Vegas off of their shit a little bit.

And so the All-Star game itself,

the salient thing that happens for Oscar is that this NFL cornerback, Pac-Man Jones, is in town and one of his entourage shoots two people outside a strip club, which is, he paralyzes one of them.

This is about as bad press as you can get.

By the way, Oscar has always been vocally in favor of legalizing sex work in Clark County and the city of Las Vegas.

Again, the Nevada-ness dimensions of that.

And so, suffice it to say, you're not going to get an NBA team in Vegas after this.

Everything that could have gone wrong basically went wrong.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then the season.

Michael Jordan re-debuted his Hitler mustache.

Maybe this time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So what's the year after 2007 called again?

2000?

No, no, no.

This one was the song before.

2010, I can be here.

2007.

Eight.

Eight.

Oh, 2008.

Yeah.

When the entire economy crashed.

Yeah, okay.

Oh, yeah.

Was that bad for gambling and vacations?

It was not good for gambling or vacations.

No.

The entire world was hooked on the film 21 starring Captain Spacey.

Vegas had the highest unemployment rate and the highest foreclosure rate of any major city in the U.S.

Like

it was that bad.

And Oscar, of course, Pitchman, remained supremely confident.

His line is, I don't think anybody saw this coming.

It's not our problem.

We have the greatest infrastructure in the world.

We've got the best hotels.

So it's going to be fine.

Let's write it out.

Yeah.

He's right.

Nobody saw it coming and they do have good hotels.

That is true.

I will say, I hate, I hate Las Vegas so much that I famously spent two years of my life writing a book about how much I fucking hate Las Vegas and being there.

The hotels are nice.

They're nice.

He's like

making it so much easier to get permits for anything that like that he points to that and he's like, look, there's still cranes going up.

Right.

But so this Vegas gets like one leg knocked out from under it.

And so plan A is fucked.

Plan A was business, that's fucked.

Plan B of sports, that's fucked too.

So we're now down to plan C, right?

And as Vegas is kind of like rebuilding, the only thing left to do is authoritarianism, right?

So cool.

The Vision 2030 thing was not just a joke.

Oscar is a big urban blight guy, and the similarities do not end.

The similarities to Saudi Arabia do not end there because some kids get caught spray painting the welcome to las vegas sign and he says they should have their thumbs cut off oh that's that's the funniest thing you could possibly say given his background it'd be like oh i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna get i'm gonna go get the irishman out of like the retirement home and he's gonna cut your thumbs off uh just point of order you you spray the graffiti with your index finger i just i it's just not an effective punishment how would you hold the can with with no thumb with

You'd hold the can on the palm of one hand and then push down with your other finger, thereby allowing you to continue making simple shapes.

In accordance with the Sharia, you cut these guys' thumbs off.

In fact, this is part of Oscar's bizarre authoritarianism, and it's bizarre in the sense that it lands on everyone other than sex workers.

Because of Nevada-ness,

as in things being politically unusual in Nevada, not as in failing to crack somebody's somebody's egg.

So

in particular, Oscar is really down on homeless people.

I found one article that, without further explanation, describes him as regularly remonstrating with the homeless.

Just like going and castigating them.

Yeah, like he.

Quick question.

Are experiencing homelessness and doing survival sex work co-located at all in any sense?

I wouldn't worry about it.

I think also homelessness and a massive gambling industry being co-located might also be what about homelessness, a massive gambling industry, and a hugely over-levered property market.

Oh, that's...

Johnny Carson holding the envelope to your hand.

Las Vegas.

The movie 21.

I don't know what remonstrating means in this context.

I think it means the mayor just like yells at you.

Like, he doesn't have anything better to do.

He's just kind of like walking around the like uh non-casino bits of Vegas, shouting at people.

Remonstration to me is like tut-tutting, like he's just walking right around me, like

not very good,

shaking his finger.

At one point, he suggested moving them all to a concentration camp in the desert 30 miles outside the city, which is also very vision 2030.

Oh,

boy, he, I mean, he learned that from Giuliani, yeah, yeah, yeah, basically.

I mean, this is a rich, a rich tapestry of mares doing this shit.

One of the parks that Amazon for Shoes built that is supposed to be, in his words, a nice boutique park.

People start sleeping rough in it.

So he has sprinklers installed specifically to spray them at night.

I have some quotes here, which are some of the more evil things I've read recently.

I love the homeless, said Goodman, who once proposed shipping them to an abandoned prison 30 miles away.

That's so Trump.

That's such a Trump thing to say.

I love the homeless.

They're They're often very nice.

Wisdom.

You see a lot of wisdom from the homeless and they have good signs.

They write good signs on cardboard.

They can get a lot on there.

I love the homeless.

Unfortunately, they're really interfering with the quality of life.

They say I'm a bad guy because I don't want these folks wandering around neighborhoods, Goodman said.

If it comes down to a choice between helping my good neighbors or helping the homeless, I choose my good neighbors.

Is this guy still alive?

Yeah, I believe so.

All right, I want to go.

Okay, yeah, sure.

He can pop off the mic for a couple of hours.

Next, Goodman said he wants to be able to.

We're going to go remonstrate with him.

He wants to propose an ordinance that would allow police to send homeless people who appear to be mentally ill to psychiatric hospitals.

He still believes his idea to send them to an abandoned prison was not half bad.

The place had a kitchen and a hospital, he said.

Oh, it had a kitchen?

Goodman said his intentions.

His intentions are good.

He just wants to figure out a way not to be misunderstood, to help those who help me

helped.

Yeah.

And then that article concludes by interviewing a homeless person who is homeless because they fell 15 feet off a roofing job and like broke their back and lost their job and then gambled the rest.

And yeah, I think that's a very good neighbor of him.

And an evil man.

So he also just really likes threatening people, just like in general.

I mean, you can guess why, why, right?

That's the mob lawyer thing.

Goodman today speaks to critics much like he did to the prosecutors he faced in the courtroom.

I'll bury you, he roars.

I'll have your job, he threatens.

He has promised to ban from City Hall reporters who write unflattering pieces about him, and once threatened to break the legs of a journalist who dared ask a difficult question.

He said of a New Yorker columnist, I'll take a baseball bat and break his head if he ever comes here.

Yeah, again, Chotner.

I can't be exposed by that guy.

A different reporter for the New Yorker wrote that Goodman kept a list of people who opposed his campaign so he could later, and this is in quotes, get them.

He got them a nice bouquet of flowers.

Enemies, enemies list.

He threatens to burn down the Plaza Casino if they don't shape up.

Unclear what he meant by this.

Probably that he was going to burn down the Plaza Casino, I imagine.

He also has a long-standing and pretty racist, one-sided beef with Obama, who

he calls a real slow learner.

This is purely because

this is really like I don't think about you at all stuff.

Obama makes some joke about the Republicans' budget or whatever being like blowing the kids' college fund in Vegas in New Hampshire on the campaign trail.

And the only person who listens to that is Oscar, and Oscar takes it way too personally.

So

but what is because I'm trying to think what he would take personally about it because like people do gamble in Vegas Yeah, but people only win they only win when they gamble in Las Vegas, right?

Right.

Yeah, I guess so he he like calls Obama's people constantly demanding like a walk back and a kind of like um like an endorsement of gambling in Vegas and of course, Obama being Obama delivers this kind of tepid semi-compromised thing where he's like and Las Vegas is one of the cities that there is in Nevada and Oscar takes that really personally.

And so this spirals to the point, it's entirely one-sided.

Like, there's nothing from Obama on this, but this ends with Oscar banning Obama from Vegas, which he has no power to do.

But as far as I know, he still is.

Yeah, like,

I mean, because Oscar Goodman is still alive and still, let's say, connected to City Hall.

So I'm going to say, did Obama ever go to Vegas?

Not to my knowledge.

I mean,

he's in the big casino book of like

people who aren't allowed to come in, along with like Danny Ocean, I guess.

Yeah.

I love that his inability to drink an $18 Limerita while watching his team get thrashed by the Lakers has driven him insane.

My next heading for this is what the Las Vegas Sun describes as ethical troubles.

These aren't the worst, not by our standards, right?

He gets done on ethics charges for three things, right?

And the big one is he uses his position to host a cocktail gala, no clue,

on behalf of his son's company.

He has a fail son who's like 50 now.

His son's company uses software to do polling insights, and it's called iPolitics with a small I and politics is with an X because this was 2005.

Sure.

That's like, yeah, he was like, it's the iPod of politics.

Yeah,

legitimately, you could have gone on groceries.

it's him dancing around but he's a silhouette and you can see the two earbuds oh he's listening to bohemian like you by the dandy warhold oh so so he's literally just like he gets up there he's like i'm the mayor this is my son's company please take a brochure by which is an ethics violation right like you're not really supposed to do that and the charges stick but nothing serious it's a slap on the wrist like he gets reprimanded Oscar takes this really personally.

I love him.

He's my favorite mayor we've ever done.

I love him so much.

So he appeals all the way to the Supreme Court of Nevada, which overrules the ethics board in a way that turbo fucks any hope of ever enforcing any public ethics law in Nevada ever again.

Like he is a ball of id, which I think is really fun.

Yes.

Yeah.

And then my, my, my next heading is: people fucking love this guy because he gets elected for one term in 99.

He gets re-elected twice in way bigger landslides, like 80% plus both times.

God, that's so cool.

He's rocking up like Huey Long numbers.

Well, I just saw the photo that's directly under this heading.

Uh-huh.

Yes.

Would you like to describe it?

He's evil, but now I want to vote for him.

Yeah, I would just say it's a photo of him.

One, he's wearing, there's two and they're kind of identical.

But I'll describe the one I like more.

He is in a pinstripe suit with a very long tie that looks very like a Jerry Garcia collection from JC Penny.

And he's got like a little goatee and a little haircut.

And he's got two showgirls with him in their showgirl outfits.

And then he's holding a martini the size of his own torso, holding it aloft.

It has like 12 olives in it, which also all look enormous.

Like these olives are looking the size of apples.

I don't understand where they're finding these olives is my real problem.

The glass is so big.

There's so much martini in it.

And like there's been in in the last 20 years, there's been an insane inflation of what a martini is in America.

They've gotten bigger and bigger and bigger.

They used to be like one shot of alcohol and now they're like three.

But this is just, this is like a pint of martini.

Yeah.

And he's in front of a sign that says the martini.

Yes.

Yes, he is.

That's the thing.

He's this is

this martini glass, I believe it's a different martini glass from the other picture and is slightly bigger.

He has two, at least two big novelty martini glasses.

Yeah, these will go, these pictures will go in the show notes or be the episode art or something because

they are undeniable to look at these pictures.

The aura looks like if you drank that much gin,

you would black out immediately.

If you look behind him in the first photo, five steps behind him and the two showgirls is his wife, by the way.

He mostly just like says shit.

Aren't we all?

For instance, I have a quote here from Cigar Aficionado, to whom he was talking about his opposition to

anti-smoking ordinances.

And he says, I don't like regulation.

I really don't.

The less government, the better, as far as I'm concerned.

And most regulation happens as a result of knee-jerk reaction.

If you have a child who is subject to some molestation by an ice cream vendor, suddenly people want to put all sorts of laws together to monitor ice cream vendors.

Well, yeah, that's why he was against Megan's Law.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh,

so yeah, he's just like, you know, when you get, when you get diddled by the ice cream clown, I don't know why I'm thinking of that, just as an example.

Just, I mean, this is a guy who has a real like turn of phrase like this at a few points.

He also, the big martini glass, let me tell you Oscar Goodman's martini recipe.

It's like a pint of Bombay sapphire, please, garlic stuffed olive, nova mouth.

Okay, okay.

That's that's martini.

That's that's going to be a little unbalanced there, Oscar.

Yeah.

At one point he claims on the record to be going through a bottle of gin a day.

Yeah.

Oh my god.

Call out the desert martini.

It's so dry.

That's

for some fucking insane Nevada reason.

At one point he gets asked in front of an elementary school class full of four-year-olds what book he would take on a desert island with him, and he says he would rather have a bottle of Bombay Sapphire.

Oh, okay.

Is there a word for this when you need alcohol so bad?

Yeah, do you find that your drinking like interferes with work activities?

Maybe not.

He's doing really well as the mayor while drinking a bottle of Bombay Sapphire.

Again,

I hate to keep making the Trump comparison, but again, talking to kids, but forgetting that kids aren't just small adults is also very true.

There's legitimately a story where he meets two twin 10-year-old girls at something.

And the line that he goes with is, I shouldn't have started drinking so early.

I'm seeing double, which is funny.

And then he tells the newspaper, I also thought about doing a line about how they would grow up to be showgirls, but I didn't think it would go over.

Oh my lord.

He was right.

Yeah, he was right.

It wouldn't have gone over.

It wouldn't have gone over.

It would have told the newspaper about it anyway.

Okay, we've all been there and you've got a joke so good that you're like, I shouldn't say it, but then you're like, I'm going to couch it.

And I shouldn't say it is, but

you really want people to know how clever you are.

He also lands an endorsement deal with Bombay Sapphire that's worth like $100,000 a year.

Likely company to do it.

Yeah.

That went to the ethics board as well and went nowhere, along with his use of a Cadillac loaned to the city and his involvement in a Jane magazine contest, which involves Goodman renaming a city street for the winner.

Oh, who won?

I don't, I don't know.

Sadly.

Oh my god.

Personally, never been into Bombay Sapphire either.

Like, color of the glass always puts me off.

Reminds me of Barbasol.

There are so many things that, like, could, that I wish it was possible to know that just never got recorded.

Like,

did anybody ever win the Jane magazine contest to have a street in Los Angeles named after them?

Because you can't just look at a street that's named for a woman because there are probably lots of them.

You won't know which one, if anything, was created for the winner of the Jane magazine contest.

The thing is, I did so much research for this.

I read so many more articles than I needed to.

I read almost anything I could find with his name in it, partially because, you know, the episode, but partially because they all have the Vegas local press gives you a sentence.

This is a lead.

for something that I didn't end up using that I think is a beautiful piece of journalism.

Mayor Oscar Goodman is a tireless pitch man for his town and officer hitman Anthony Brown is a cop by day and a dancer by night.

What the hell more do you want from a newspaper article?

Nothing.

That's perfect.

That is so perfect.

One thing I did find in the course of this research is a partial list of stuff that he keeps in his office.

And I'm just going to run through it now.

Stop me if you, if you like.

Two crowns.

Yeah, one for him and one for his wife.

Uh-huh.

Bowling ball that looks like an olive.

Nope, that's just an olive.

He's having a bigger martini glass engineered, and this is going to be the olive that goes in it.

He's getting a glass that's made that can withstand the weight of a 12-pound olive.

He's getting, he's, he's, he went to go see one of those, like, one of those sexy burlesque shows where the, where the lady is like in a giant martini glass, and all he was thinking was, wow, I could really drink a martini out of that.

He's got the thing like where like you're at a wedding and there's a carving station, but it's for one olive.

Got a big knife in there.

He's using the electric carver for an olive.

Big menorah.

Sure.

Humidor full of illegal Cuban cigars.

And his quote to Cigar Aficionado is: I water them as I should to keep them very moist.

I like my cigars moist.

I don't like them hard.

I like my martinis dry and my cigars wet.

Oh,

he has the original horse's head prop from the Godfather.

Oh, that's such a perfect thing for him to have.

Like, definitely.

He has a bunch of unflattering newspaper cartoons of himself.

Sure.

He has assorted Bombay Sapphire memorabilia.

Likely thing for him to have.

Many, many martini glasses of varying sizes.

He's trying to combine them into one larger one.

He's making like a champagne fountain of all like

dyramid, but it's all martini.

Bobbleheads of himself.

Okay.

A signed picture of himself with Pamela Anderson.

Perfect.

Yep.

A diamond-studded bottle of gin.

Yeah, they give you that if you drink enough gin.

And a Red Bull mini.

YouTube plaque.

Oh.

That's just,

I get this from an article about him packing up his office after he leaves office.

He does coffees with the mayor, which inevitably turns into martinis with the mayor instantly.

So you could just have like a big glass of Bombay sapphire with a massive olive in it with him after work if you wanted.

Is it like a Willie Lantigua thing where you could just walk into his office and be like, hey, can I have a drink?

And he'd be like, of course, I'm the mayor.

Let me pour you a drink.

If you were homeless, he would walk into your office and berate you.

So like, of course.

No, he requires proof of address and then he pours you a martini.

Yeah.

And the whole time he's like relentlessly optimistic, most of all about climate change.

His big line on this is

the worst that happens is we have to pay for the water.

But Las Vegas is in the desert.

Like, that would be pretty bad if that happened.

That's the worst that can happen.

Yeah, I mean, they're already paying for the water, I think.

Yeah.

It's not like they have it already.

It's okay.

Sure.

Okay.

Yeah.

I think you'd be more concerned.

Like, maybe they double the price of the water.

Maybe.

No.

This is the worst that can happen.

Just the worst that can happen.

And so

besides Amazon for Shoes and the Brain Center, Oscar has kind of happily achieved nothing, right?

And he's done three terms.

And in 2011, he is term-limited.

You only get three terms as mayor of Vegas.

And he promises all of his cronies and like everybody else in the city council that like, I'm done, right?

I'm not going to interfere.

I'm not going to endorse.

It is your turn.

You are, you know, you can succeed.

And then the day before the filing deadline, his wife enters for the next election, his wife, Carolyn.

This fucks over some of them so bad that they campaign against her.

Like, it's not a spoiler to say that Carolyn Goodman wins and that she gets her own episode, which will also be me in the episode after this.

The next free episode, yeah.

Yeah, but the bit that I want to highlight about Oscar is this.

There's a quote.

At Carolyn Goodman's election night party, Oscar yelled at her, if you don't be quiet, I'll have you whacked when she failed to stop talking for an announcement he wanted to make.

She fell silent and all eyes settled on her husband, not because of his threats, but because they wanted to hear him talk.

Cool.

Vegas.

Basically, people just can't stop.

My love for Oscar Goodman is ironic.

Theirs seems to be quite genuine.

Oh, yeah, genuinely.

It's genuinely like, oh, that's just awesome.

Obviously, it's genuine.

Yeah, he's our guy.

We're his guy.

Everyone's each other's guys.

He must be such a good hang, right?

He's got to be.

An incredible hang.

Unless you're homeless.

Or his wife.

Yeah.

Or Sheldon Adelson.

But but if you're like nikki spilatro you're having a great time with this guy yeah yeah you're lefty rosenthal this is like your favorite lawyer like you almost want to get like key so you can go hang out oh yeah

i i also um i have one quote that i included just because i really wanted to include it because i think it's funny and because i'm doing a serious man for kill james bond soon so

that sounds interesting i wonder who else is on that yeah crazy um uh but uh the interviewed is rabbi um who says the mayor is 100 jewish he's very proud of it as a matter of fact, the day of his election, he started his day coming to Shabbat services, putting on his talus.

People magazine had a picture of him with his talas on.

He's very proud of his Judaism.

Not always the most observant, but, you know, which is great, just to get that in the newspaper.

This is

the purest expression of American Judaism imaginable.

I'll get into it on a future episode of a movie podcast.

Unnamed.

Huge coincidence.

Not always the most observant, but you know.

You know, you know it's perfect i love him mob lawyer um yeah so so he gets term limited out of office and he has a bit of a post mayoralty um he gets a steakhouse at the plaza which is the casino he threatened to burn down

yeah hey you don't keep your act together i'm gonna leave the broiler on yeah i think it's called like girls gin and something i don't remember um but he he does like a one-man show for a bit telling mob lawyer stories he says oh my god it's another thing i wish i could have seen i'm sorry

I won't have just been recorded anywhere.

Maybe if you go to Vegas, you can buy a DVD on Vermont Street.

It's just called Oscar's Steakhouse.

It is still open.

We've got to go.

He sues a true crime author for like a billion dollars for accusing him of having been in the meeting where Woody Harrelson's dad got the green light on that federal judge.

Oh.

And then the author apologizes fulsomely and then wins 250K in a poker tournament the same week anyway.

So it's fine.

uh las vegas is not a real city oh they're not going to be sorry we have to go to oscar steakhouse and get no noses mob meatballs oh my god we do incredible oh my god okay there's two more things i want to hit here thing one undying beef with sheldon adelson because uh when his wife is mayor there's like a minor scandal because while he's doing this one-man show and while he's doing kind of like convention center shit as a pitch man again um

he uses convention center security guards to drive him home because he's drunk after every one of his one-man shows.

And so he just gets the security guard to drive him home.

And Sheldon Adelson and his paper, The Review Journal, will make a big deal out of this.

By the way, Sheldon Adelson has a competing convention interest in his casinos.

This is the least surprising news to ever hit Vegas and nobody cares.

But Oscar takes it really personally.

And he has a really good line on Adelson.

He says, to have a person come along who's a misanthrope, it means somebody who's a hater.

This guy wakes up in the morning.

I just hope his wife is a misanthrope too.

He gets up in the morning with his agenda to try and hurt this city.

By the way, quick coda to the quick ironic coda to the Edelson beef.

Adelson now dead, right?

His widow, Miriam, now is the majority owner of the Dallas Mavericks.

And they very recently kind of blew up their team in a confounding way that nobody quite understood because it seems that she is most likely going to move the team to Las Vegas.

He just wins.

He can't stop winning.

Yeah.

That's why he's the happiest mayor in the world.

He's got one other thing.

He's still going to get the NBA team, yeah.

He's got one other thing.

And then I got a quote that ties this whole thing together.

So his other big thing is because he's a mob guy,

he wants to build a mob museum in Vegas.

And a lot of people try to stop him.

When they do, he takes it really personally.

Oscar takes that personally is, I think, the phrase you have said most.

Yes.

At one point, he sarcastically reproposes it as a mop museum.

Oh, come on.

That's funny.

That's really funny.

He's no such thing as the mop.

Yeah.

I mean, this is, you could almost like.

You could almost imagine that being like Nathan Fielder's idea.

And by the way,

the building where he wants to build the mob museum is the federal courthouse where he got all the mob guys acquitted.

So this is the Oscar Goodman Museum of Victory over the federal government.

And the thing is, he did it.

It's there.

It's built.

You can go and see it.

And he was able to make it happen because after 9-11, he got in tight with the FBI again.

And so, like, there's a bunch of retired special special agents who are like uh yeah of course we want to help you build the mob museum so long as we get like the fed wing of the mob museum and so it's just there and now he has a statue i love him i love you statue mayor not the things that you do but

That was your life.

Oh my God.

Oscar Goodman.

Oscar Goodman, a man who keeps alluding to contract killings.

And

the quote that I think sticks with me that I found is

just, it's from another profile of him.

Everything in my life, the 71-year-old said, has turned out just perfectly.

Wow.

Thank you to me for a perfect episode of the show.

Oh, my God.

This is why we started the show.

This is what it's all about.

This is mayoring.

Now, this, now that's what I call mayoring.

So we will be talking on the next free episode about his wife, also three-term mayor of Las Vegas, Carolyn.

Yeah.

She's worse.

I cannot fucking wait.

And the interregnum next week is going to be on the mayoral benevolent feed, which you can get if you pay $5 a month.

And we're going to be watching a documentary about Australian local politics.

Rats in the ranks.

Rats in the ranks.

And talking about the mayor, Larry Hand.

Yeah.

Just so you know, by the way, that was sent in to us by a listener and listeners, mostly mostly on Blue Sky, are sending us some great mayors.

So I monitor the DMs on Blue Sky.

Send us your mayors.

We want to hear about your mayors.

And if you are a bonus listener,

it's not streaming, streaming anywhere.

I found it on Canopy if you have a library card in America.

But if you can watch Rats in the Ranks, it fucking kicks ass.

And try to do it.

There's lots.

If you have an Australian VPN,

I think you can stream it for free.

In Australia,

try to do that.

Yep.

To be clear, we are not watching a bad movie and making fun of it.

We're watching a good movie.

It is a good movie that is.

And making fun of Australia.

Yes, correct.

In a good-humored way.

Okay, this has gone on for so long that we have to record another episode immediately.

We need to leave right now.

Okay.

Okay.

Bye, everybody.

Bye.