Tycoons: Action in Las Vegas

By his own account, Frank Sinatra has "admired and respected Howard Hughes for many years." But last week his feelings became less felicitous. While Recluse Hughes remained in his suite in Las Vegas' Desert Inn, which he bought last March, Frank was doing his best to tear down another recent Hughes acquisition, the Sands Hotel. Drowning his sorrow after his casino credit was cut off at a mere $200,000, Sinatra 1) tried unsuccessfully to set fire to his suite, 2) jerked all the telephone jacks and trunk lines out of the hotel's switchboard, 3) promised a pit boss that "I'm gonna break both your legs," 4) overturned a table on the casino's credit manager who, in return, threw a punch that separated Frank from the caps on his two front teeth, and 5) announced that he was ending his 16-year association with the Sands and moving to Caesars Palace.

All this made headlines—and ob scured the fact that Howard Hughes, 61, has quietly been making news of his own. Picking up properties around Las Vegas, he has, in addition to the Sands and Desert Inn, bought Alamo Airways and the Krupp ranch in Red Rock Canyon. Hughes already owned 30,000 acres of Nevada land.

Why the intensive interest in Las Vegas? Primarily, it is because Nevada has no income tax—a natural draw to Hughes, whose net worth is over a billion. As to his plans, a clue came when Hughes Aide Robert Maheu carried a statement to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. It was Hughes's first utterance for publication in seven years. "I have," said Hughes, "heard of plans to enlarge Las Vegas' McCarran Field." Instead, Hughes suggested, it might be a good idea to build a new airport far ther from town. Then Las Vegas might "just barely turn out" to be the southwestern center for the U.S.'s supersonic transport planes of the 1970s.

While state officials hoped that the Hughes statement meant that he was about to build a rumored industrial center at Vegas, Federal Aviation Agency officials were quick to warn that to move McCarran away from the city would be a mistake. Then came an other surprise—a second statement from Hughes, in which he predicted that Las Vegas could eventually grow to the size of Houston. If this happens, said Hughes, "the present location of McCarran Field would be approximately comparable to having the airport for Los Angeles located on Wilshire Boulevard at the Miracle Mile."

Out of all this came only one predictable thing about unpredictable Howard Hughes: if he has his way, Las Vegas property values will skyrocket.