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Is Vegas going to remind us it's 1960 at the beginning of every episode? Because I don't think that's necessary.
Anyway, Sheriff Ralph busts up a jewelry robbery with the same non-urgency he had when shooting out the tires of a car driving straight towards him, by calmly waiting outside with a broom handle to kick the shit out of the thief with when he tries to make his getaway. I mean, I realize that we're supposed to realize when a cool cucumber he is, but given that he saw the thief enter the store with a shotgun, you'd think he would have been a little more worried that the guy was going to use it.
But that's just the opening, and doesn't have much to do with what follows: a dead casino dealer who was attacked by someone with a mask. Turns out someone else in the dealer's regular poker game was attacked too, and in both cases they were looking to hit a safe full of unreported income -- not likely to be reported missing by the victims.
The Lamb boys follow the trail through a safe installer to a robbery duo who bought a list of the installer's clients (one of whom gets shot by Dixon, who saves his father's life by doing so) and finally to the ex-boyfriend of the girlfriend of the dead dealer. Jealous at being thrown over for an unmanly "card-flipper," he'd hoped the crimes would be pinned on the robbery guys. But he ran into squinty justice instead.
Meanwhile, Savino's getting antsy at the damage Bob Perrin can do to him and his associates, but Sheriff Ralph has cleaned the jail out of any flunky who can eliminate that problem. A thug purposely gets himself thrown in jail and is moments from stabbing Perrin to death, but Dixon stops that, due to sheer luck, and fortunately his dad turns the thug back over to Savino. Not so fortunate for Savino, obviously, who's running out of time before the feds move Perrin to a more secure location. Savino winds up popping a fire hydrant that forces a detour of the prisoner transfer, and a car bomb along the route leaves Perrin's car ablaze.
Savino's still rubbing up against Sheriff Ralph, who is discovering that his predecessor may have been a little friendlier with a particular casino due to the stash of hundred-dollar chips in his desk drawer. Savino's also got continued interest from back home, who sends the daughter of his friend to be the new count room manager, after fallout from Perrin's skimming has cost a few more people from the casino crew. Mia Rizzo fits the familiar casino trope of noticing all the little things (like Savino himself) but she oversteps her bounds, when she suggests dealers hit on soft 17 for a slight boost in profits. Savino won't do it, so she goes over his head and the change gets implemented. He points out that the slight boost in profits will be more than wiped out by the loss of business when gamblers figure out what's going on and move to other casinos. She promises not to go over his head again.
Sheriff Ralph, after a good hard day's work, ends the episode at his ranch, discovering that someone's been there -- and left an ominous gift: several stacks of chips like the ones found in is his predecessor's drawer.
Daniel is a writer in Newfoundland with a wife and a daughter. He'd be in the mob's pocket for, like, half the chips they gave Sheriff Ralph. Follow him on Twitter (@DanMacEachern) or email him at danieljdaniel@gmail.com.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!"Las Vegas 1960" the screen announces -- in case anyone forgot from last week and the old-timey casinos and cars and Nixon newspaper headlines aren't enough to remind people that we're not in the present day.
We open with Sheriff Lamb eating breakfast at a diner, where he has to tell the waitress to keep calling him "Ralph" instead of "sheriff," and he'd like to continue paying for his meals, despite her attempt to give it to him on the house, a benefit his predecessor wasn't shy about taking advantage of it seems. ADA O'Connell comes in to buy a pack of gum and continue lay the foundation for the love-interest story, and they leave together. I mean, not together together, just together.
Outside, O'Connell exposits that the mayor's got a stump speech and Lamb attends to avoid it, what with him being simple and honest and squinty and everything. He walks her to her car -- little brother observing -- and then they see a shady guy nervously walk across the street. Ralph notes the collection of cigarette butts that have accumulated in the place where the guy was apparently staking out the jewelry store across the street, and more important gets a glimpse of the shotgun he carries into the store with him. With a little less urgency than I think the situation warrants, Ralph deputizes a handy street sweeper's broom and pulls the handle off the brush while he calmly waits just outside the jewelry store door. And when the shady guy runs away, Ralph beats the crap out of him with it. Good thing we didn't hear any shotgun blasts in there.
As it happens, Vincent Savino is driving (well, being driven) by to take in the Lone Ranger. Ralph appears to see him and gives a little smirk as he makes a big show of emptying the would-be thief's shotgun of its shells.
He's on his way to talk to his casino staff, where he reminds them all of Bob Perrin's nefarious dealings and warns that anyone who was working with him should heed his advice: "Leave now, and never look back." Within a few moments, three staff members have filed out and Savino looks like he's trying to keep his surprise in check. His right-hand, Red, tells him they can replace the crew no problem, but the manager who just left will be a problem. Savino tells him Chicago will send them a manager they can trust.
Meanwhile, the Lamb brothers have finished whipping on the bearded jewel thief -- that'll teach you not to shave, hippie! -- when Dixon pulls up and says they should head over to Henderson.
It's a crime scene in a house, a dealer lying dead on the floor. Neighbors heard a gunshot, but didn't get a plate number from the car that was seen fleeing the scene. Ralph gets annoyed when he discovers that the deputy who found the body untied the dealer, who had been bound. Ralph yells at everybody to not do that again, so he can do his Sherlock Rancher thing. The full money clip that Jack has found attests to this not being a robbery, but Ralph is the one who -- despite a full house of cops -- finds a woman tied up in the trunk of a car in the garage.
Back at the station, he says he's sorry about her husband, and she says they weren't married. Well, either way she's available now! She and Wes met at the House of Cards casino, where she was a waitress. She says she stopped by this morning to bring him some soup because he had a cold. There was a knock on the door, and then a guy with a mask and a gun pushed his way in, tied up Wes, threw her in the trunk and that's when the gunshot went off. She says she doesn't know anyone who'd do this.
Jack and Ralph discuss the case while Ralph cleans out Sheriff Clyde or Clive or whatever's office. He'd rather be at his ranch, dispensin' justice and ropin' lil' dogies, but the mayor apparently wants Ralph there since he's been on the payroll a couple of weeks now (along with every available Lamb male, it appears). Ralph opens Clive's desk to find stacks of hundred-dollar casino chips, and says it looks like the former sheriff was on two payrolls. Ralph flips the chips around in his fingers quite effortlessly for a mere rancher, if you ask me.
Elsewhere, O'Connell and DA Reynolds are meeting with Perrin and his lawyer. Reynolds threatens the gas chamber for Perrin's murder of the governor's niece, and Perrin, through the lawyer, offers to give up everything he knows, which is supposedly good enough to take down Savino as well as the Chicago mob.
Naturally, the scene is Reynolds laying this all out for Savino on a back road, calling it a "hail Mary" but if Perrin knows anything, the gaming commission could pull Savino's license. That's why Reynolds is stumping so hard for the gas chamber, but that doesn't satisfy Savino, since there's plenty of time to talk between conviction and execution. He wants Reynolds to let Perrin walk, but Perrin says the eyewitness maid is a rock-solid witness. Savino says the maid is "going away."
Cut to the maid and her family being escorted out of their motel by Savino's men, under the impression that they've won a trip to Cleveland, which I'm sure is nice and all, but they seem a little too thrilled about that. Good god, there are kids with them. Please don't kill them.
Jack and Dixon are over at the House of Cards asking about the dead man, who was apparently loved by all, winners and losers alike. Made a guest feel like he was rooting for them. Dixon manages to find out that Wes Sutcliffe wasn't a complete Boy Scout, and took part in a regular weekly backroom poker game, where he recently won big. So the working theory is that maybe someone who got beat bad figured he'd even the score his own way.
Man, they move fast! O'Connell is now telling Jack and Ralph that none of Sutcliffe's poker buddies are crooks, but one of them, Bill Rickers, was recently brought in on suspicion of domestic abuse after his wife was beaten. She refused to press charges, saying she fell down the stairs. In the evidence photos, there are rope burns around her wrists, and hey, wasn't Sutcliffe tied up?
Speaking of moving fast, Savino and Red are strolling through the Savoy and talking about the duties of the count-room manager that Chicago has already sent a replacement for. And Savino has no idea who it is, for some reason, but knows that he's arriving in the car that's pulling up outside, and then the music changes, all "Whaaaaa--???" when out steps a lady. A young woman, actually. Mia is her name -- Savino knows her and is quite surprised.
Strolling through the casino, we find out that she's the daughter of a friend of his, and he hasn't seen her since she was 16, and he won five-large off her old man on a Bears-Packers game. He says he's surprised to see her in the business, but she says her dad wanted a son and raised her as one, and after college he sent her to learn the trade, and she's been running count-rooms for the last three years, so Chicago thought she'd be a good fit down here. If she's not boning Dixon by around episode six, I don't know what's what. She's adorable.
Naturally, she's all business in the count-room, informing the crew that she needs to know everything that's coming in so she knows what's going back to Chicago. Taking note of the large scale, she announces that she weighs herself every morning, and steps on -- the scale goes to a hundred pounds, sixteen under what she actually weighs, meaning it's fourteen per cent under, as opposed to the ten per cent they use to determine the skim. So someone's been skimming the skim. Wait, they do that by weight? All right. She says she's sure Savino would have discovered that on his own eventually. "Welcome aboard," he says, smiling happily.
Jack and Ralph visit the poker game that Bill Rickers is currently playing in -- hey, it's in the kitchen at the Savoy! -- and he pays not very much attention to their request to talk, at least until they chuck him off his stool and throw him up against a wall. Their accusation that he killed Wes doesn't work, and they notice he's got rope burns too. He confesses that he and his wife were beaten and robbed by the same guys who killed Wes and they threatened to kill him if he told anyone. He says they were after his safe where he keeps more than $40,000. It's cash he keeps on hand for his poker games and he didn't want to report it missing, knowing he'd get busted for tax evasion. Ralph points out that whoever robbed him was likely counting on that.
Rickers' alibi checks out, and then Savino strolls in, all pretend-friendly, while the Lamb boys try to make their exit. Savino asks to speak to Ralph and says they got off to a rocky start. "I believe in the spirit of cooperation. No reason why we can't work together. Just time you have a problem, keep your business outside my house," says Savino. Good job smoothing over that rocky start! Ralph says they have a deal, and pulls out the poker chips from his pocket. "As long as you keep yours out of mine," he says, and dumps them in Savino's hat, saying Sheriff Clive won't be needing them anymore. Well, no. I mean, he is dead.
Back to Wes Sutcliffe's place, where they find a safe hidden behind the hi-fi records, and they ask his girlfriend why she never said anything about it. Wes made her promise not to, she says. Unlike the weaselly Bill Rickers, though, Wes's money -- made through tips from high rollers -- was going towards getting her ranch back. "He was a good man," she says, before turning to gaze at the blood stains on the floor. Good man or no, take a mop to that shit, damn.
The disappearance of the maid has DA Reynolds fake-reluctantly deciding to take the Perrin case to trial, while O'Connell is pushing for them to try to get some mob information out of him. "Bird in the hand, Katherine," he advises, and then does his best not to look too crooked, when he gets worried upon noticing that Perrin is meeting with a federal prosecutor.
Mia strolls around the casino floor, taking everything in, observing a blackjack dealer standing on a soft 17 and paying out the table. So she goes to Savino's office and tells him that the house rule should be that the dealer can hit on soft 17s instead of being forced to stand. "It makes them feel like they have an advantage," says Savino and she says that's because they do, but if dealers can hit on soft 17s, they can increase their profits by 0.183 per cent. "Small on paper, but it adds up to millions, which would all go in our pockets," she says. He says he appreciates her initiative, but it won't work. Before he can get into any reasons why, his lawyer is on the phone, and she smiles and shows herself out, passing Red coming into the office with Savino getting off the phone after just asking, "How long?" Red wants to know what Mia wanted and Savino says it doesn't matter, because Reynolds was just on the phone, saying the feds are claiming jurisdiction -- the body having been found on federal land -- and are offering Perrin a deal. "He's still in lockup. Let me take a crack at him," says Red. Savino tells him to make it quick: "I'm just going to stand here and stare at my symbolic shark in the aquarium."
The morning, Dixon is sharing none of his father's qualms over accepting free shit from local businesses -- in this case a newsstand -- when his police cruiser is rear-ended by an angry bespectacled Italian in a suit who angrily prods Dixon until he provokes a fistfight. thing we know, Nicholas Cota is getting his mugshots taken at the lockup, where he is able to leer at Perrin.
Over in the sheriff's office, Jack is thinking that maybe the safe installer has something to do with the robberies. When they find out the installer, Frank Scarpone, is an Italian and a mob associate (although clearly on this show saying "Italian and a mob associate" is redundant), they go over to see the guy, who's practicing his best Goodfellas/Casino Joe Pesci. One thing leads to another and he's thrown out the front window, so there's a little Axel Foley in there for good measure.
At the station, Scarpone says he doesn't know anything about any murder. "They didn't say nothing about killing anybody," he says, confessing that he sold his client list to a couple guys from Missouri. Threatened with prosecution as part of a criminal enterprise, thanks to an ADA "as smart as she is pretty," according to Jack, Scarpone is able to tell them the thieves drove a white Oldsmobile. He never got their names, but Ralph orders him to write them down on the client list.
Over in Savino's office, Vincent gets off the phone with "Skip" and says he'll take care of it. Hanging up, he tells Red that it turns out the big boss thinks it would be a good idea if they start hitting on soft 17s. Red, pissed off, asks if this is how it's going to be: Mia runs to Daddy, Daddy calls Angelo. After quickly letting everyone know "Andy" is coming down week to check on them, Savino wants to know where they are on the lockup thing, Red tells him Cota's in, so it should just be a matter of time.
Here's where Dixon's uselessness comes in handy. Faced, for some reason, with the bill for the police cruiser repair work -- which was rear-ended, I might add -- he goes stomping into the jail because he's told that unless the other guy will take responsibility for the accident in writing, the costs will be docked from his pay so it doesn't come out of their budget, or something ludicrous. So he inadvertently manages to thwart Cota from killing Perrin with a shiv hidden in the arm of Cota's glasses while Perrin is alone, mopping up the latrine.
Apparently even Dixon had the good sense to realize something is off about Cota nonchalantly strolling up to Perrin, and later he and his dad escort Cota into Savino's office. "Your boy here got lost, ended up in my jail. But in the spirit of cooperation, we're going to drop the charges," Ralph tells Savino. Once the Lambs have left, Red yells that he's a stupid bastard and Savino throws a cup at him, all "You had one job!" Man, mob performance review sessions are rough. He orders Red to find out how much time let before the feds move Perrin.
Outside, Dixon's all, "Wow, close one -- hey, dad?" Ralph says he should have known better than to put Cota in the prison with Perrin. Dixon weakly says he stopped it, though, "Putting out a fire you started ain't something to brag about," says Ralph. I like that. Jack rolls up to let them know that the APB has turned up a white Oldsmobile with Missouri plates, and they roll up to find it parked outside the home of another of Scarpone's clients.
Ralph orders Dixon to stay outside. He's indignant, claiming he's a better shot than his dad. "These are killers, not cans on a fence," says Ralph.
He and Jack quietly make their way through the house, finding the family trussed up, and then getting themselves shot out. Jack handles one of the thieves with the butt of his gun while Ralph chases the other one into the backyard, where he gets ambushed and would have gotten shot were it not for Dixon suddenly appearing to shoot the thief in the back. Fortunately, there's a swimming pool right there, meaning the thief gets to keel over and we get a cool billowing red cloud of blood in the water.
Man, can we wrap up the boring St. Louis safe thieves story? Now O'Connell and Reynolds are arguing about how much press coverage to try to wrangle. O'Connell wants to get the message out that you don't mess with Vegas, while Reynolds wants to keep it under wraps, since "Middle America" doesn't need to know about this, lest they take their money to Disneyland instead. Yeah, if people ever thought there were shady characters in Vegas, they'd never come!
Ralph attempts to share a war story with his son, but Dixon cuts him off since he's completely OK with killing a dude, it seems. Then Ralph sees the pictures of Wes Sutcliffe's bound wrists and immediately says the city slicker from St. Louis could never have tied such a good bowline hitch -- and the family they just untied wasn't tied up with bowline hitches -- so the Missouri guys didn't do the murders. "Whoever did wanted to make it look like the robberies to throw us off," says Jack.
But who, then? Nobody knows about the robberies... except for somebody they've already met, says Ralph: one Ted Ermin, who came in on a drunk and disorderly a couple of months ago. So... before the Lambs were sheriffs? I'm confused. At any rate, this guy turns out to have dated Wes Sutcliffe's girlfriend for a while. Rickers also knows Ted and told Ted about the crimes and... anyway, Ted did it, OK? Ted did it. He was jealous of his girlfriend moving on to Wes. Ted gets to rant along the lines of the series' well-established theme of the morally bankrupt world of casinos butting up against the good honest values of hard-workin' cowboy folks ("Used to be the best cowboy got the girl. Now it's the man who gets the most tips. It ain't right," he says, wah wah), but we're going to keep covering this ground, I imagine, so the girlfriend's line about the thousand-foot neon wave ready to crush good honest folks or whatever comes off kinda corny. Whatever, hooray for the Lambs! And Ralph sees to it that Wes's money goes towards what's-her-name getting the ranch back. He manages not to offer her a job, though.
Wrapping things up elsewhere, Mia gets schooled in mob-casino chain of command, when Savino credits her for an immediate boost in revenue, but then warns her that soon the serious gamblers will be fleeing for the other casinos where they can hit on soft 17s, and the Savoy will be posting a loss. "You run the count-room, I run the casino," he reminds her. She's slightly defiant -- and it might have served Savino better to have fucking told her AT THE TIME that he tried exactly that change once, with the disastrous results he's warning of now -- but she promises it won't happen again.
As for Perrin? Well, Savino takes the top off a fire hydrant, which causes a detour for the federal transfer of Perrin, taking it right by a truck that explodes, taking Perrin's car with it.
Feeling pretty pleased with himself, Ralph heads back to the ranch, only to find they've had a visitor -- one who left behind stacks of poker chips. Woo hoo! Someone's hitting the slots tonight!
Daniel is a writer in Newfoundland with a wife and a daughter. His urge to revisit Vegas is rising with each episode. Follow him on Twitter (@DanMacEachern) or email him at danieljdaniel[at]gmail.com.
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