On October 1st, 2017, a 64-year-old man opened fire from his room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. His targets were unknown to him, just a gathering of people at a country music festival on the hotel’s property below. After 10 minutes, he’d killed 58 and wounded 413 others. Hundreds more were injured as terror and confusion tore through the Las Vegas Strip. Then he killed himself.
It was the deadliest mass shooting by an individual in U.S. history, and yet, as a new documentary from director Ramsey Denison posits, all but forgotten in the popular consciousness. We still talk about Parkland, which occurred just four months after the Vegas shooting; we still talk about Sandy Hook, which occurred almost five years before. Those names, like Aurora, Colorado, the Pulse nightclub, and Columbine, are forever synonymous with the tragedies that occurred there. Why not Las Vegas?
Money Machine, which is streaming as part of the Cleveland International Film Festival through April 28th, offers an explanation: money. It was imperative, the film deftly argues, that people keep coming to Vegas, keep spending money in its casinos, and under no circumstances associate it with what happened on October 1st, 2017.
Rather than focusing on the shooting itself, Denison revisits the months that came after. What he reveals is a web of corruption and cover-ups that make the Vegas of yesteryear, when it was still run by the mob, seem positively quaint. In Denison’s telling, a Las Vegas controlled by huge corporations and a compromised police department is vastly more nefarious than the city built and run by gangsters well into the 1980s.
When the Las Vegas shooting occurred, people immediately began speculating about the shooter’s motives. He was a millionaire with no criminal record. An American citizen with no apparent grievances against any group, whether political, racial or religious. What could have motivated such a horrifying act?
Money Machine suggests he was angry with the MGM-owned hotel and casino where he staged the attack, and wanted to hurt it the only way he knew how: by killing as many innocent people as possible, and forcing MGM to clean up the mess.
What he may not have anticipated was just how quickly MGM would sweep that mess under the proverbial rug through an elaborately orchestrated scheme that involved lying about the timeline of events, corrupting the city’s sheriff, Joe Lombardo, by donating massive sums to his reelection campaign, denying major media outlets information about the attack even after the Supreme Court ordered the company to provide it, and even suing the victims of that October 1st shooting—some as young as six years old—in a preemptive strike against any potential lawsuits they might file against MGM.
Denison, whose previous film, What Happened in Vegas, looked into unchecked police brutality within the LVPD, has clear affection for the city and its people, but equal disdain for the powers that control it. With Money Machine, he isn’t interested in giving any more airtime to those who might try and spin the story for their own benefit. He chooses instead to give voice to those MGM and Sheriff Lombardo might just as soon try to silence.
People who were there the night of the attack offer chilling, graphic accounts of their experience, as well as their fury with how MGM and Sheriff Lombardo tried to manage the fallout. A journalist and former police officer and investigator named Doug Poppa, who penned more than 135 articles about the attack and its aftermath for the Baltimore Post-Examiner, provides sharp, informed insight into how that mismanagement played out. And the professionals charged with analyzing the attack in the days that followed share expert, forensic intelligence on exactly what happened, and how those facts undermine the false claims and denials of responsibility by MGM and Joe Lombardo.
At the heart of the MGM-Lombardo PR campaign to make the shooting disappear as fast as a gambler’s fortune in one of the city’s casinos was the slogan “Vegas Strong,” an allusion to the “Boston Strong” campaign following the Boston Marathon bombings of 2013. Like that previous campaign, which sought to restore civic pride and encourage resiliency in the face of a terrorist attack, Vegas Strong soon became a social media meme, a hashtag and an easy way for people like Joe Lombardo to appear appropriately solemn and resolute. At one press conference shown in the film, he punctuates his remarks by bowing his head, clenching his fist and declaring, “Vegas Strong.”
In reality, the Vegas Strong campaign, which officially generated more than $10 million, only added to the charges of corruption at the highest levels of power. Nevada governor Steve Sisolak, who was running for office at the time, led the initiative on behalf of the Vegas Strong Resiliency Center, but then denied any responsibility for how the funds were distributed. According to the film, only about $20,000 was given to victims and their families in the first five months after the attack, when they needed it most. Countless other companies profited from the slogan as well. Even Dunkin’ Donuts was selling Vegas Strong T-shirts.
“Nobody wanted the 1 October event to happen,” says the founder of Vegas Emergency Incidents, Mikey Slyman, in the film. “But when it did I think there’s people who found a way to make it work for them. One October was kind of like a show, a Vegas show, and once the stars of that show got what they wanted, they didn’t care anymore, and neither did Vegas. Keep the money dropping off the tables and keep the slot machines going and keep the registers ringing.”
The scheme appears to have worked. In 2019, nearly 43 million people visited Las Vegas, making it the second-most popular tourist destination in the United States after New York City. And those visitors are betting more than ever. But, as Slyman puts it, “When they say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, they’re talking about your money.” The house, or in this case the city, always wins.
Maybe so, but Denison wants us to at least see it for the sham it is.
