Scourge of Glitter Gulch

In his 25 years as publisher of the stormy Las Vegas Sun (circ. 45,000), Hank Greenspun has been a party to more than 100 lawsuits, a feat that may well make him the most sued man in U.S. journalism. This year alone, ten wrathful readers have taken him to court--from a local councilman whose voting record Greenspun disliked to an acupuncturist the Sun labeled as unqualified to practice.

Though the publisher wins most of those lawsuits, his morning daily seems to embody an old frontier reflex: shoot first and ask questions later. While Greenspun guns down local pols in his front-page column, "Where I Stand," his 25 reporters are out digging up screaming exposes in The Front Page tradition. Just before last fall's elections, the paper exposed as a fraud the mail-order gold-and-silver business of Gubernatorial Candidate James Ray Houston (he lost). Last week the Sun revealed how Greenspun and one of his reporters tracked down the lookout man in a gangland bombing and talked him into surrendering. "Yes, we're just about the most sued paper in the country," says Greenspun. "But people have to come to Nevada to sue us, and we don't lose many here."

Green Safe. People also come to Nevada to steal from Greenspun. In 1971 he told a White House aide that he knew about a $100,000 Nixon campaign contribution from Howard Hughes. Not long after, the White House plumbers apparently tried to crack the green Meilink safe in Greenspun's office. After that break-in was disclosed in the Nixon tape transcripts last year, Greenspun became the only journalist to testify before the Senate Watergate committee. The object of the breakin, he theorizes, was probably a sheaf of handwritten memos from Howard Hughes to a subordinate. Yet Greenspun mysteriously will not say how he got the memos, and refuses to publish them.

The scourge of Glitter Gulch has rarely been that reticent. Born in Brooklyn 65 years ago, Herman Milton Greenspun hit Las Vegas after a World War II Army hitch and bought an ailing Vegas newspaper. He quickly won national prominence--and circulation--with slashing attacks on Senators Joseph McCarthy and Patrick McCarran, whose Red baiting offended him. McCarran died in 1954 in Hawthorne, Nev., just after giving a speech in which he exclaimed: "Greenspunism must be defeated!" Since then, the whip of Greenspunism has been laid mostly on local figures, including Howard Hughes, who left for the Bahamas in 1970. Greenspun grew uneasy over Hughes' expanding influence in Las Vegas, and now calls his former friend "a terrible menace to this country."

Not a few Las Vegans perceive Greenspun as something of a menace himself. His ad hominem attacks offend some readers. Others recall his 1940s public relations work for "Bugsy" Siegel's Flamingo Hotel and wonder if Greenspun is still friendly with local mobsters. "That's the goddamnedest, most fabricated lie," he says, and points as proof to his occasional diatribes against organized crime. Adds Greenspun: "When you live in this town, you're rubbing shoulders with every facet of society."

Greenspun's substantial holdings--the Sun, a cable TV franchise and local real estate--have made him so rich that he may be losing his maverick feistiness. He now plays gin rummy regularly in the office of the president of Caesars Palace, and when he travels, says Greenspun, "Barren Hilton, a good friend of mine, makes all the arrangements." That creeping Babbitry is nowhere more evident than in Greenspun's disclosure last week that he wants to sell the Colorado Springs Sun (circ. 28,000), a daily he bought in 1970, because of dissatisfaction with the paper's finances. Says Greenspun: "Every time the editors get some advertising, they knock the advertisers out with editorial comment." Not many years ago, that kind of gutsiness was called Greenspunism.

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