The politics surrounding a massacre BY THE WAYNE MADSEN REPORT
Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo was surprisingly open to the press about where his initial investigation was leading in the wake of alleged gunman Stephen Paddock's massacre of 58 people and wounding of some 489 others gathered at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas on October 1. At a press conference on October 4, Lombardo held out the possibility that Paddock may have had assistance in carrying out his deadly massacre from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel & Casino on the Las Vegas strip.
Lombardo said, "Do you think this was all accomplished on his own? . . . Self value, face value, you got to make the assumption that he had to have had some help at some point. And we want to ensure that that's the answer. Maybe he's a super guy ... [he] was working out all of this on his own. But it'd be hard for me to believe that."
Lombardo also revealed that Paddock booked an AirBnB room at the Ogden condominium in Las Vegas the prior weekend. That room overlooked another concert venue, the Life Is Beautiful music festival. Other factoids offered by Lombardo included the fact that Paddock, while firing his weapons, stood back from the hotel's smashed-out windows to protect himself from return police sniper fire. Lombardo later revealed that a note with a list of numbers was found in one of the two adjoining suites comped to Paddock by the Mandalay because of his high-roller gambler status. The sheriff's office was also the apparent source for a report that someone with a room key card and who was not hotel staff entered Paddock's suite while he was away from the hotel.
Lombardo's willingness to be open with the public hearkens back to the "Sagebrush Rebellion" of the 1980s, when elected sheriffs in the Rocky Mountain West demonstrated their fierce independence from dictates out of Washington. The more information Lombardo offered the press, the more Las Vegas FBI special agent-in-charge (SAC) Aaron Rouse pushed back against Lombardo's revelations. The conflict between Western sheriffs and the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies are ingrained in federal-state relations extending from Arizona through Nevada and into the upper Rockies.
Lombardo, a Republican, was elected sheriff of Clark County in 2014. Lombardo spent 30 years as a Las Vegas police officer prior to being elected sheriff. His office also places him in charge of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Department. While Lombardo has police authority within the city limits of Las Vegas, the famed "Strip" lies outside the city limits but Lombardo still has ultimate police authority over the casino region as the sheriff of Clark County.
It was noteworthy that Las Vegas mayor Carolyn Goodman pushed back against Lombardo's statement that Paddock may have had help. Goodman brushed off additional parties being involved in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer. She insisted that the word "may" was key and reiterated the investigation remained inconclusive, despite the earlier comments by Lombardo. Ms. Goodman succeeded her husband Oscar Goodman as mayor seven years ago.
Oscar Goodman, who owns a steakhouse in Las Vegas, is a former Philadelphia lawyer for mobsters like Nicky Scarfo and Phil Leonetti. While practicing law in Las Vegas, Goodman represented other mobsters, including Meyer Lansky, Herbert "Fat Herbie" Blitzstein, and Stardust "skim" boss Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal. Now an independent, Oscar Goodman ran for mayor in 1998 as a Democrat. Carolyn Goodman declined to endorse either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. Some local Las Vegas journalists regard the Goodmans as part of the mob scene in Las Vegas. Oscar Goodman pushed hard for U.S. Congressional approval and budget earmarking for Las Vegas's Mob Museum, located in the old U.S. Post Office Building and which honors the mob's contributions to the founding of Las Vegas.
FBI agent Rouse only offered up the fact that the FBI's investigation of the mass shooting extended "across the United States and all across the world." Paddock is known to have traveled widely international, including booking cruises to Europe and the Middle East. Rouse was appointed Special Agent-in-Charge for Las Vegas in 2016 by then-FBI director James Comey. His previous job was section chief in the Counterintelligence Division at FBI Headquarters. Prior to that he served in the Tampa and San Antonio Divisions. In what may represent a first, Rouse announced that the FBI, Las Vegas Police, and Clear Channel Outdoors, a subsidiary of the right-wing iHeartMedia, Inc., were partnering in a Las Vegas area billboard information campaign to encourage people to contact the FBI if they have information on Paddock or anyone else with knowledge of the shooting. Borrowing from the Department of Homeland Security's "If you see something, say something" campaign on counter-terrorism, the FBI is spearheading a campaign based on "If you know something, say something,” along with a 1-800-CallFBI tip line.
The FBI did not seem interested in the fact that on the morning of October 2, the morning after the Las Vegas shooting, Nye County Sheriff's deputies arrested wanted violent felon Duane Johnson, who may have been armed, run into Manse Elementary School in Pahrump, Nevada, which is about 62 miles to the west of Las Vegas. Johnson was not apprehended. Nye County Sheriff's deputies also responded to reports of an armed man at both Floyd Elementary and Rosemary Clarke Middle Schools, both also in Pahrump.
In the past few days, Lombardo has apparently been sidelined at joint FBI-Las Vegas Sheriff's Department press conferences by his Undersheriff Kevin McMahill, a graduate of the CIA-connected Harvard Kennedy School of Government's Senior Executives in State and Local Government Program. McMahill is a graduate of Columbia Southern University, a distance-learning and for-profit institution headquartered in Orange Beach, Alabama. Lombardo's recent absence coincides with a tightening up on law enforcement information provided to the media concerning the mass shooting.
There is increasing evidence, based on Paddock's life style, background -- including being a private pilot -- financial wealth, and international travel, that he may have served as an underworld hitman. Two Hollywood movies, "The Mechanic" and "The Accountant," provide main characters -- hit men -- who mirror Paddock's personality and
background. Paddock's fascination with numbers and weapons, as well as his previous job as an accountant for a Lockheed subsidiary and the Internal Revenue Service, closely match the persona of the Ben Affleck character, Christian Wolff, in "The Accountant." 
[pictured right].
Las Vegas is the capital city of contract hits. Adding credibility to the Paddock-as-a-professional-hitman theory is Lombardo's stated belief that Paddock [pictured left] intended to survive the aftermath of the shooting. Paddock may have had a specific target in the concert crowd but some other party may have altered the scenario from a single hit to a mass shooting. Paddock appears to have specialized in sniper hits into large crowds at long ranges and from tall structures as evidenced by his interest in renting hotel rooms overlooking Chicago's Grant Park during a major music festival there in the summer of 2016 and Boston's Fenway Park, another popular venue for concerts.
Within the past decade, there have been over a half-dozen criminal cases involving Las Vegas-based hitmen. In July of this year, Thomas Randolph, 62, was convicted of hiring a Vegas hitman, Michael James Miller, to kill his wife. After Miller murdered Sharon Causse, Randolph's sixth wife, Randolph shot Miller to death. Randolph was convicted of a double homicide and sentenced to death. In 2012, Noel Stevens, a Vegas hitman, who went by the name "Greyhound," murdered Shauna Tiaffay, the estranged wife of a Las Vegas firefighter. The firefighter, George Tiaffay, paid Stevens $600 to club his wife to death with a hammer.
In 2004, Las Vegas habitué and hitman Ronald Bruce Bigger stabbed Tucson, Arizona physician Dr. David Brian Stidham. Bigger was paid $10,000 by Stidham's medical partner, Dr. Bradley Schwartz. The case is germane to Paddock because Bigger was diagnosed by an Arizona forensic psychologist as suffering from a personality disorder with narcissistic and antisocial features. Paddock has been described in very similar terms.
In 2009, Wen Jun Li was stabbed and slashed 32 times by Taiwanese United Bamboo gang martial arts hitman Xiao Ye Bai for failing to pay back $10,000 in gambling debts. The attack occurred a few blocks west of the Strip at the KTV karaoke bar.
Contract hits have become so common in Las Vegas that the Las Vegas police run undercover officers posing as hitmen who are contacted by individuals trying to arrange murders-for-hire. In 2012, Jorge Velasquez of Las Vegas paid one such undercover officer $2000 to murder his wife as his 32nd birthday present.
Chicago hitman Frank Cullotta worked for Chicago mobster Lefty Rosenthal, a numbers man who ran the mob's casino "skim" of the gross house take at the Stardust Casino. Cullotta is now a featured speaker at Oscar Goodman's pet project, the Mob Museum. Cullotta joined the Federal Witness Protection Program after rolling on the mob.
Las Vegas, which continues its reputation as a "mobbed up" city, may never truly solve the Paddock case. If Paddock was, in fact, a professional hitman, other cans of worms may be opened that the "city fathers" may very well want to keep closed.
Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo was surprisingly open to the press about where his initial investigation was leading in the wake of alleged gunman Stephen Paddock's massacre of 58 people and wounding of some 489 others gathered at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas on October 1. At a press conference on October 4, Lombardo held out the possibility that Paddock may have had assistance in carrying out his deadly massacre from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel & Casino on the Las Vegas strip.
Lombardo said, "Do you think this was all accomplished on his own? . . . Self value, face value, you got to make the assumption that he had to have had some help at some point. And we want to ensure that that's the answer. Maybe he's a super guy ... [he] was working out all of this on his own. But it'd be hard for me to believe that."
Lombardo also revealed that Paddock booked an AirBnB room at the Ogden condominium in Las Vegas the prior weekend. That room overlooked another concert venue, the Life Is Beautiful music festival. Other factoids offered by Lombardo included the fact that Paddock, while firing his weapons, stood back from the hotel's smashed-out windows to protect himself from return police sniper fire. Lombardo later revealed that a note with a list of numbers was found in one of the two adjoining suites comped to Paddock by the Mandalay because of his high-roller gambler status. The sheriff's office was also the apparent source for a report that someone with a room key card and who was not hotel staff entered Paddock's suite while he was away from the hotel.Lombardo's willingness to be open with the public hearkens back to the "Sagebrush Rebellion" of the 1980s, when elected sheriffs in the Rocky Mountain West demonstrated their fierce independence from dictates out of Washington. The more information Lombardo offered the press, the more Las Vegas FBI special agent-in-charge (SAC) Aaron Rouse pushed back against Lombardo's revelations. The conflict between Western sheriffs and the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies are ingrained in federal-state relations extending from Arizona through Nevada and into the upper Rockies.
Lombardo, a Republican, was elected sheriff of Clark County in 2014. Lombardo spent 30 years as a Las Vegas police officer prior to being elected sheriff. His office also places him in charge of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Department. While Lombardo has police authority within the city limits of Las Vegas, the famed "Strip" lies outside the city limits but Lombardo still has ultimate police authority over the casino region as the sheriff of Clark County.
It was noteworthy that Las Vegas mayor Carolyn Goodman pushed back against Lombardo's statement that Paddock may have had help. Goodman brushed off additional parties being involved in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer. She insisted that the word "may" was key and reiterated the investigation remained inconclusive, despite the earlier comments by Lombardo. Ms. Goodman succeeded her husband Oscar Goodman as mayor seven years ago.
Oscar Goodman, who owns a steakhouse in Las Vegas, is a former Philadelphia lawyer for mobsters like Nicky Scarfo and Phil Leonetti. While practicing law in Las Vegas, Goodman represented other mobsters, including Meyer Lansky, Herbert "Fat Herbie" Blitzstein, and Stardust "skim" boss Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal. Now an independent, Oscar Goodman ran for mayor in 1998 as a Democrat. Carolyn Goodman declined to endorse either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. Some local Las Vegas journalists regard the Goodmans as part of the mob scene in Las Vegas. Oscar Goodman pushed hard for U.S. Congressional approval and budget earmarking for Las Vegas's Mob Museum, located in the old U.S. Post Office Building and which honors the mob's contributions to the founding of Las Vegas.
FBI agent Rouse only offered up the fact that the FBI's investigation of the mass shooting extended "across the United States and all across the world." Paddock is known to have traveled widely international, including booking cruises to Europe and the Middle East. Rouse was appointed Special Agent-in-Charge for Las Vegas in 2016 by then-FBI director James Comey. His previous job was section chief in the Counterintelligence Division at FBI Headquarters. Prior to that he served in the Tampa and San Antonio Divisions. In what may represent a first, Rouse announced that the FBI, Las Vegas Police, and Clear Channel Outdoors, a subsidiary of the right-wing iHeartMedia, Inc., were partnering in a Las Vegas area billboard information campaign to encourage people to contact the FBI if they have information on Paddock or anyone else with knowledge of the shooting. Borrowing from the Department of Homeland Security's "If you see something, say something" campaign on counter-terrorism, the FBI is spearheading a campaign based on "If you know something, say something,” along with a 1-800-CallFBI tip line.
The FBI did not seem interested in the fact that on the morning of October 2, the morning after the Las Vegas shooting, Nye County Sheriff's deputies arrested wanted violent felon Duane Johnson, who may have been armed, run into Manse Elementary School in Pahrump, Nevada, which is about 62 miles to the west of Las Vegas. Johnson was not apprehended. Nye County Sheriff's deputies also responded to reports of an armed man at both Floyd Elementary and Rosemary Clarke Middle Schools, both also in Pahrump.
In the past few days, Lombardo has apparently been sidelined at joint FBI-Las Vegas Sheriff's Department press conferences by his Undersheriff Kevin McMahill, a graduate of the CIA-connected Harvard Kennedy School of Government's Senior Executives in State and Local Government Program. McMahill is a graduate of Columbia Southern University, a distance-learning and for-profit institution headquartered in Orange Beach, Alabama. Lombardo's recent absence coincides with a tightening up on law enforcement information provided to the media concerning the mass shooting.
There is increasing evidence, based on Paddock's life style, background -- including being a private pilot -- financial wealth, and international travel, that he may have served as an underworld hitman. Two Hollywood movies, "The Mechanic" and "The Accountant," provide main characters -- hit men -- who mirror Paddock's personality and
background. Paddock's fascination with numbers and weapons, as well as his previous job as an accountant for a Lockheed subsidiary and the Internal Revenue Service, closely match the persona of the Ben Affleck character, Christian Wolff, in "The Accountant." [pictured right].Las Vegas is the capital city of contract hits. Adding credibility to the Paddock-as-a-professional-hitman theory is Lombardo's stated belief that Paddock [pictured left] intended to survive the aftermath of the shooting. Paddock may have had a specific target in the concert crowd but some other party may have altered the scenario from a single hit to a mass shooting. Paddock appears to have specialized in sniper hits into large crowds at long ranges and from tall structures as evidenced by his interest in renting hotel rooms overlooking Chicago's Grant Park during a major music festival there in the summer of 2016 and Boston's Fenway Park, another popular venue for concerts.
Within the past decade, there have been over a half-dozen criminal cases involving Las Vegas-based hitmen. In July of this year, Thomas Randolph, 62, was convicted of hiring a Vegas hitman, Michael James Miller, to kill his wife. After Miller murdered Sharon Causse, Randolph's sixth wife, Randolph shot Miller to death. Randolph was convicted of a double homicide and sentenced to death. In 2012, Noel Stevens, a Vegas hitman, who went by the name "Greyhound," murdered Shauna Tiaffay, the estranged wife of a Las Vegas firefighter. The firefighter, George Tiaffay, paid Stevens $600 to club his wife to death with a hammer.
In 2004, Las Vegas habitué and hitman Ronald Bruce Bigger stabbed Tucson, Arizona physician Dr. David Brian Stidham. Bigger was paid $10,000 by Stidham's medical partner, Dr. Bradley Schwartz. The case is germane to Paddock because Bigger was diagnosed by an Arizona forensic psychologist as suffering from a personality disorder with narcissistic and antisocial features. Paddock has been described in very similar terms.
In 2009, Wen Jun Li was stabbed and slashed 32 times by Taiwanese United Bamboo gang martial arts hitman Xiao Ye Bai for failing to pay back $10,000 in gambling debts. The attack occurred a few blocks west of the Strip at the KTV karaoke bar.
Contract hits have become so common in Las Vegas that the Las Vegas police run undercover officers posing as hitmen who are contacted by individuals trying to arrange murders-for-hire. In 2012, Jorge Velasquez of Las Vegas paid one such undercover officer $2000 to murder his wife as his 32nd birthday present.
Chicago hitman Frank Cullotta worked for Chicago mobster Lefty Rosenthal, a numbers man who ran the mob's casino "skim" of the gross house take at the Stardust Casino. Cullotta is now a featured speaker at Oscar Goodman's pet project, the Mob Museum. Cullotta joined the Federal Witness Protection Program after rolling on the mob.
Las Vegas, which continues its reputation as a "mobbed up" city, may never truly solve the Paddock case. If Paddock was, in fact, a professional hitman, other cans of worms may be opened that the "city fathers" may very well want to keep closed.
