Cowboys and mobsters

You know you've reached a certain ripeness of age when events you lived through transcend personal nostalgia to become prime-time TV entertainment.

I'm talking about the life and times of Las Vegas' cowboy sheriff, Ralph Lamb. As a rookie night cops reporter, I covered a small piece of the last few years of Lamb's legendary tenure. And when I read about the upcoming prime-time television series about Lamb, and saw the trailers for "Vegas" at the movie theaters featuring Dennis Quaid playing Lamb, I mused one question: "Is Ralph going to be the good guy or the bad guy?"

I was never quite sure myself. And I sure as hell won't attempt to weigh in on that after all these years. To tell the story of the enigmatic Ralph Lamb, you'd need more than a 600-word newspaper column. You'd need a book. Besides, I'd hate to irritate the sheriff even at his age of 80-something. I'm pretty sure he could kick my ink-stained newspaper arse.

And he could sell tickets when he did it.

So I'll not go there. Suffice to say that Ralph Lamb (and the entire Lamb family) were key figures in a controversial legacy of a Las Vegas gone by.

You can catch the debut of the Hollywood version of Ralph Lamb on CBS on Sept. 25. The Lamb family - in particular, Ralph, Floyd and baby Darwin - kicked dirt around this place at a time in which the city changed from a rural Western town to a haven for organized crime. All of the Lambs were real, working cowboys. Their father and their grandfather were, too. Both, in fact, died in their saddles in two separate ranching accidents.

It's easy to see the Hollywood attraction to Ralph Lamb. The Las Vegas newspaper clippings from the 1960s and '70s (some of which I wrote) will give scriptwriters years of fodder.

Eventually, the city grew out of that era. In 1978, Lamb lost re-election after fighting an embarrassing court battle on income tax evasion. He was found innocent, but the damage was done. As Las Vegas marched toward its modern destiny, Lamb became a pair of brown shoes at a black-and-white ball. He never returned to public life.

There's still plenty of crime in Las Vegas, of course. Some of it "organized," as it were. But gone is the kind of influence that once allowed mob bosses a veneer of respectability while managing secret "points" in casinos that could be traded in a kind of underworld stock exchange, facilitating the skimming of cash back to Chicago, Kansas City, Cleveland and New York.

That kind of mob swagger is gone. Cowboys like Ralph Lamb are gone, too - our Western heritage faded into the brave new world of a hip, urban Las Vegas. Old-school mobsters are now relegated to not one, but two, museum tourist attractions.

Las Vegans have traded pickups for Porsches, long-neck Bud for Venti Starbucks and Stetson hats for Chopard sunglasses.

Nowadays in Vegas, topless means bare-breasted women. But once, dammit, it meant you simply left your hat in your truck.

If the Hollywood version of Sheriff Ralph Lamb reminds us of that era, then I'm all for it.

Sherman Frederick, former publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal and a member of the Nevada Newspaper Hall of Fame, writes a column for Stephens Media. Read his blog at www.lvrj.com/blogs/sherm.