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It is lawless right now in the Wild West. There's even a real estate agent (and the figures and details are slightly changed here to protect him) whose out-of-town investor demanded that the agent find a way to cover some of the losses he was taking on the $60,000 down payment he'd sunk into a house. So the agent created a separate contract, never shown to the bank, that said the new buyer had to purchase a $60,000 Persian carpet from the seller--a check his mortgage company, which was sucking up hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses on the short sale, would never see. When the buyer--who was happy just to get a deal on the house--asked if the Persian carpet was really worth $60,000, the agent looked at him as if he were insane. "I bought it at Wal-Mart," the agent told him. Now all the friends of the investor who got his $60,000 back are asking the agent to pull the same scam for them. And he's doing it.
Leaving the condo with the sale apparently finished, Boemio drives into a huge subdivision in western Las Vegas, one of the hardest-hit areas. The houses look nice enough, but every third one has a for sale sign, and there are almost no cars in any of the driveways. She picks a house at random, and we go to the back. She figures the odds are high that a squatter has left a door or window open. Indeed, the bathroom window has already been pried open, and the screen is bent, so I bend it a little more and squeeze myself through onto the toilet seat and then open the porch doors and let Boemio and her husband in. There's a Rolodex's worth of real-estate-agent business cards on the kitchen counter, but this home has been sacked and stripped: black mold creeps across the ceiling and walls near the pipes where the washing machine had been; paint is angrily splattered on the walls, including an artistic flourish of purple handprints. They're almost all like this, Boemio says. The police can't stop it because people have the right to trash their home while they still own it. This is what an empire looks like when it falls.
The recession has hit everything from philanthropy to stripping to the solvency of Nevada. Because Nevada has no income tax and relies almost entirely on taxing casino owners, the state is nearly bust. Governor Jim Gibbons, a Republican, whom only 11% of voters say they would re-elect, tried to turn down federal stimulus money, was accused of cheating on his wife and lost control of the legislature, having his vetoes overridden more times than any other Nevada governor. Budget cuts have closed the only hospital cancer wing for uninsured patients. "We're on the bottom of every bad list," says Steven Horsford, majority leader of the Nevada senate and de facto head of Nevada's government, who tried and failed to enact a corporate income tax. The state is so desperate, the legislature even considered a state lottery. Which is about as good a revenue plan in Nevada as opening a literary salon.
The devastation has spread into every aspect of Vegas. The city has lost the Las Vegas Art Museum, its oldest one. Strippers, who are facing less extravagant tippers and floods of newly unemployed women from other cities flying in to audition, are shelling out more than $100 for online classes at a site called StripandGrowRich.com to hone their sales tactics. There are lifeless shopping malls everywhere; Neonopolis, the $100 million, 250,000-sq.-ft. downtown mall, has almost no open stores left.