DON WILDMAN: Las Vegas,
Nevada is a city built on cold hard cash, from
the early days when mob money fueled Sin City. All of the underground
secret passages would provide the opportunity
to skim casino profits. DON WILDMAN: Today, with major
corporations spending billions to put on the biggest show. OK, Las Vegas, watch out. MAN: Whoa. That's tense. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
It costs a fortune to engineer this
oasis, and now everyone wants a piece of the action. That is awesome. All right, so, we're really
going down into the bowels of the dam here. If you're claustrophobic,
this is where you feel it. DON WILDMAN: We're peeling
back the layers of time on "Cities of the
Underworld Las Vegas." [music playing] I'm Don Wildman. I'm in Las Vegas, Nevada,
America's Sin City. For nearly a century,
Vegas has found a way to make big bucks on our
country's favorite vices, transforming a barren desert
into a booming metropolis. The dream of big, quick cash
still drives this gambling Mecca, and from
smuggling tunnels under one of Nevada's
oldest casinos to top secret vaults
to secure the dough, to mega-engineering projects
that made this town, Las Vegas has always done things
big, above ground, and below. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER): Located
in the sun-baked Mojave Desert, Las Vegas means "the
meadows" in Spanish. It was named for fields growing
around its small natural springs, but today, a
different kind of green defines this city. In Vegas, bigger is better. Fifteen of the 20 largest
hotels in the world are here, and every year gamblers lose
$6 billion in their casinos. Hidden underneath the glitz
and glamour of the Strip is a virtual fortress
of underground vaults, guarding Vegas's vast fortune,
$6.75 billion annually. From the earliest days
of Vegas gambling, crooks, cheats, even
casino employees have looked for ways to beat
the odds by beating the system. But casinos combat
this challenge by spending up to $30 billion
annually across the country on security, developing equally
ingenious counters to even the craftiest crooks. Vegas casinos are on 24-hour
lockdown with eye-in-the-sky surveillance and
super-secure vaults hidden in their underground. Casino security has evolved
from strong-arm tactics to high-tech surveillance. So I went to check out
where old-school Vegas meets 21st century expertise. Fitzgerald's Casino is one of
the classic casinos on Fremont Street, the stretch
of downtown Vegas once known as "Glitter Gulch." I met with John Fiato,
the security director at Fitzgerald's. John has been working security
in Vegas for 25 years, and he knows the key
to beating cheaters is keeping track of
every single nickel. We're going to follow security
officers to the soft count room. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
Just as we arrived, we immediately had to follow
along on a strictly scheduled money drop, swapping
out full cash boxes all over the casino
for empty ones, ending in a highly-secured
underground vault rarely seen on TV. What is he doing,
John, at this moment? He'll turn the key which
releases a locking mechanism in the back of the sleeve. He removes the full box. OK, so there's
money in this box? There you go. It's always a good day when
there's money in the box. How many times a day do
you have to do this routine? This happens
three times a day. Everything is on
time, on schedule, and the Gaming Control Board
knows every casino's schedule when it comes to this process. If you missed your
appointments on these routines, what would be the consequence? Once you start deviating,
you could get on their radar, and then they want to know why. The similar theory we use
in the casino security. Yeah. Everyone enters the
casino for a purpose. It's a play, it's scripted. Guests are here to
eat, drink, or gamble. Right. Once someone
doesn't do that, they don't execute their
role on my stage, that's our cue to watch them. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
Keeping an eye on the millions requires multiple backups,
constant surveillance, and an underground vault.
Oh, yeah, here we go. [music playing] This is downstairs. I mean, the casino's
over our heads here. We're going in to see the hard
count room where the money is counted. All that take from the
floor brought down in this-- these shifts all day long. Yeah. Into here. Right. And now you get a sense of how
many different barriers there are to get into this place. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER): This
vault is almost never seen on television. It's known as the
hard count room. Hard count refers to coins. Soft count is paper
money, dollar bills. The money travels down from
the casino's two upper floors in special service elevators
with restricted key access. The number of access points
and the exact thickness of the walls and ceiling are
a closely-guarded secret. Now you're really at
the heart of the matter. Oh, the nickels that were
taken into the slot machines. So the coins went through
the conveyor belt, fell into this hopper. What now? JOHN FIATO: We'll
activate another switch, and the nickels, they'll
feed up this conveyor, and they will only be allowed
to drop into a machine that's ready to roll nickels. And out they come.
Look at this. They're just
spitting out of here. So these are the nickels
that went into a slot machine last night and were
counted by the team, brought back here,
shoved in here, and this is basically
$2 in nickels. They made their money. And off it goes to the bank. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
Before getting banked, the hard count is stacked
in a storage area. As much as $300,000 flow
through here each day. If I'm a cheat and
I come to Las Vegas, my mouth is watering. I'm standing among
stacks of money, almost $100,000 on
this wall alone. Right. And this is just
one of your vaults. Correct. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER): There
are 13 major casinos downtown, and 41 on the Strip, each one
collecting and storing millions of dollars daily
in areas protected by high-tech facial
recognition software, lasers, and security teams
trained by special forces. But all that money exerts an
irresistible pull on scammers, thieves, and cheaters. From the infamous
MIT math geniuses who use computer models
to improve their odds at the blackjack table, to
thieves known as rail birds who grab money off of a table
and make a run for it. There are a million ways
to swindle the casinos. How much of
security in Vegas has changed since the
days of Bugsy Siegel, you know, the beginning? When I started in this
business 25 years ago, our role, the security
officers' role, was that basically of a bouncer. Now, every casino
in the Valley-- and I know the directors
at almost every property, because we meet monthly-- and we meet with
Homeland Security and we meet with
Israeli special forces. And it's constant
training and an evolution. So if somebody is cheating
you on your floor, eventually-- actually quickly-- somebody else
knows about it at another floor in another casino. That's correct. If something happens here,
everybody in the 13 downtown properties knows
within 30 minutes. So I'm leaving the
hard count room, and I'm getting wanded here
to make sure I didn't walk out with any coin. I mean, they have to worry about
people on the inside scamming them just as much as they have
to worry about people coming from outside. It's just my
sunglasses, all right? [beeps] Steel shank. These are tough macho boots. [beeps] All right?
- Looks like you're all clear. Thank you very much. So even though this guy is the
head of security of the casino, he still has to be checked
coming out of the count room to make sure he's not
stealing from the pot. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
But the best protection for the underground
is found up above, where cutting-edge
surveillance technology is the name of the game,
from tracking software implanted in chips to
sophisticated surveillance cameras. Some experts say Vegas has
more cameras per square foot than any airport or other
institution in the country, including Washington D.C. And
all of Fitzgerald's cameras are monitored from one room,
a nerve center hidden deep inside. Look at this
bank of TV screens. How many are up here? Upwards of 60. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
For security reasons, the faces of the employees
who operate and monitor the surveillance
rooms cannot be shown. So what are we
looking at here? We're looking at
blackjack tables, we're looking at craps games. Close-up on chips. JOHN FIATO: You can see right
down to the denominations. So if you are suspecting that
someone at this blackjack table was cheating, how do
we get a closer look? We're watching cards, we're
watching dealers' hands. Once we know she's
dealing a clean game, then we can come
out and we can start to evaluate the player of
each of these individuals on the table.
- Wow. They watch every square
inch of what transpires on that floor, up
to and including what happens in the
surveillance room itself. DON WILDMAN: This
is us right here. That is me from a
camera right over there. Nobody gets trusted
in this place. . Absolutely everybody's
being watched. At all times. At all times. You can't get away
with anything in here. We hope not. [music playing] In the early 1900s, Las
Vegas looked a lot like this. It was a tiny town in
the middle of the desert, growing rapidly as a key stop
on the Union Pacific Railroad. But in 1927, the
railroad left, and Vegas was on the verge of extinction. Then, just one year
later, the US government passed a bill funding an
unprecedented engineering project just outside of town. It would be known as Hoover Dam. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER): It was
a massive, and often deadly, risk, building the
largest dam in the world, holding back trillions
of gallons of water in the middle of
the barren desert. When construction began
on the Hoover Dam in 1930, over 42,000 men applied for
the 5,000 available jobs. It was the depths of
the Great Depression, and people were desperate for
work, even dangerous hard labor in the middle of nowhere. I'm heading out to Hoover Dam. When the dam was
first constructed back in the 1930s, the government
housed this huge influx of workers, thousands of people
in a brand new company town called Boulder City. But Boulder City was a dry town,
so when these workers needed to have fun, they
had to go somewhere. Where did they go? A little desert oasis
called Las Vegas. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
Hoover Dam is located 30 miles southeast of the
neon lights of Vegas, on the Nevada-Arizona border. It took $50 million,
equal to $600 million today, to build this
eighth wonder of the world, and enough concrete to build an
18-foot wide roadway from San Francisco to New York. This thing is so spectacular. Look at it, this enormous shape. And inside this, you can
see-- there's windows inside-- there's a world inside of this. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
I met facilities manager Bill Bruninga,
who could take me down inside this massive
structure to parts of the dam few have seen besides the men
who built it 70 years ago. DON WILDMAN: How
tall is this dam? The dam is 726 feet tall
from riverbed to the top. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
The Hoover Dam harnesses the power
of the Colorado River, containing it in the
biggest man-made reservoir in the world, Lake Mead,
to provide electricity for California,
Arizona, and Nevada. So there's elevators that
go right down into this thing? There's two elevators
at Hoover Dam, and they take us directly
inside the dam itself. This elevator can go 500
feet in about 1 minute. [music playing] DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
Elevators took us down to nearly the halfway
point in just seconds. But in case of a power failure,
there are about 4,000 stairs as well. Whoa, look at that. So these are all steps, all
the way to the top of this dam? BILL BRUNINGA: Yes. How far up does that go? BILL BRUNINGA: Oh, that's
a good couple hundred feet. Damn. Isn't that amazing? And, take a look at this, the
other direction, going down. Incredible. So I'm basically seeing from
top to bottom of the Hoover Dam. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER): We
were moving through maintenance tunnels, originally installed
to keep tabs on how well the dam was holding up. One crack could grow into
an unimaginable disaster. Without the dam, 25 million
people in the Southwest would be without water. One of these. We're going to need
some safety equipment. Hard hats, here you go. BILL BRUNINGA (VOICEOVER):
Hard hats were essentially invented here during
original construction. The workers would put two
baseball caps together, dip them in tar, get
them nice and hard, and that would
protect their heads. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
At the height of construction, as
many as 5,000 workers a day toiled around
the clock in 3 shifts, battling 119-degree
heat and falling debris with no real safety equipment. Look at this. Check this out. These are the drill holes
for the blasting, OK? So right through here, they're
putting the dynamite in. These holes are
all over the place. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
Dynamite blasting often released deadly
carbon monoxide gas. The only safety precaution for
the guys on blasting detail were the chasers, men
who ran into the tunnels every 12 minutes to pull
out those who had collapsed. And sometimes, they
weren't fast enough. [explosion] Ninety-six men died, building
the dam over five years. But during the Great
Depression, there were always replacements,
men willing to risk anything for a decent paycheck. On their days off, workers
headed into Las Vegas, where gambling, booze, and
prostitution were all legal, cementing its reputation
as "Sin City." and all the danger and
hardship they faced was to generate this-- power. What is this? Oh, man. The turbines. This is the power
being generated. Yes, it is. This is the Arizona Power Plant. DON WILDMAN
(VOICEOVER): Hoover Dam has a total of 17 turbines
in its two 650-foot wings, nine in Arizona,
eight in Nevada, and they generate more
than 2000 megawatts of hydroelectric power. If the dam were to fail
or turbines shut down, there would be power
outages in three states, dealing a devastating
blow to the entire economy of the Southwest. That's Lake Mead that way. The dam is all around us. This is what we saw
looking down on it, and all of these turbines are
turning the generators that are creating the power. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
The turbine's wings are located near the base of the
dam, connected to the surface 500 feet above by seven
miles of maintenance shafts. But there's an even lower level
called the seepage gallery. A hollow area where
the water that seeps in through the
surrounding rock is collected, then pumped back out
downriver of the dam. For security, I'm going to
have to ask you to stop here. We're going to have
to off the cameras. OK. Turn off the camera. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER): Bearing
the most pressure, the base of the dam is extremely
vulnerable to both nature and sabotage, so access
to this restricted area is closely guarded. All right. So, the public sees a lot of
Hoover Dam, I mean, upstairs. The thing is a
national monument. It's gorgeous. There's gorgeous floors. But there's also a belly
of the beast, you know? This is the works down here. We're going down below. Do not enter. We're entering. This is a chamber
that's normally flooded. It's collecting all
the seepage water, but they've pumped
it out for us today. Now take a look at this
right above your head. Oh yeah, right. So this is
calcification, you know, lime coming down
through the water. You start to get a
sense that you're really in one of the biggest
dams in the world. BILL BRUNINGA: It's
getting dirtier. DON WILDMAN: Yeah. BILL BRUNINGA: Now,
watch your step. It's very slippery.
DON WILDMAN: Very slippery. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER): Near
the very bottom of the dam, pumps operate 24 hours a day
to remove the 1,500 gallons of water per minute that surge
in from the surrounding canyon walls. All the way down
to the bottom, this is the seepage
that's coming through the rocks
around the dam, and it's being
collected down below. We get the sense now-- think of this-- there's
hundreds of feet of concrete over our heads. On either side, canyon
walls, over there, Lake Mead, millions
of gallons of water. Everything is pressing
down on this spot. If you're claustrophobic,
this is where you feel it. DON WILDMAN
(VOICEOVER): A minute later, we arrive at the place
where very few men have ever stepped foot, at the absolute
bottom of the Hoover Dam, all 4 million cubic tons of it. How far are we down below? BILL BRUNINGA: Oh, there's
almost 700 feet of concrete above us. And over here, millions
of gallons of Lake Mead. BILL BRUNINGA: Yep, and just,
we're just a few feet away from the bedrock
below Hoover Dam. No kidding. So this is the bottom
of the thing, right? Yes. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER): To
start with, engineers carved out four diversion tunnels. With the Colorado River
temporarily redirected, they excavated along the rocky
walls of Black Canyon for two years to make room for the dam. Finally, six million tons
of concrete were poured, and the dam was complete. To make sure the
concrete at the base was completely dry
and solid, engineers used 230 separate massive
blocks to build that section. The blocks were
assembled as columns, and then concrete was poured
into the spaces between. In 1935, the dam was complete. The diversionary tunnels
were temporarily blocked off, and Lake Mead began to fill up. The tunnels were then
converted into spillways, used to keep the water in Lake
Mead at a safe level, just like the overflow
pipe in a bathtub. We were given rare access
into these spillway tunnels, 550 feet below the
highest level of the dam. I'm going for a boat
ride on the downstream side of the Hoover Dam. This is crazy. It It is huge, huge, and dark. We are now going underneath
the canyon walls, 50 feet in diameter,
huge tunnels that serve-- even today-- a purpose, which
is if Lake Mead gets too high and they want to release some
of that water it may spill over into that spillway, come
roaring down this tunnel. And if we were there
at that moment, we'd be going
straight to Mexico. So that's daylight down there. BILL BRUNINGA:
That's now daylight. That is awesome. That is really awesome. Look at that. That is daylight up there. Lake Mead is just
beyond there, and this is where the water pours
down and keeps the balance. 1930s concrete is what we're
looking at here, 1930s genius. In a sense, this is
what made America great, projects like this,
huge vast vision. I mean, this is just
part of Hoover Dam. Just look at that. It's immense. It's unimaginable. [music playing] DON WILDMAN
(VOICEOVER): Las Vegas was part Wild West, part big,
bad city, and a perfect place for mobsters to move
in and take over. But criminal activity in the
West wasn't only in Sin City. It also took hold in the remote
mountains of northern Nevada. The Cal-Neva Lodge is
located on the shores of Lake Tahoe in the Sierra
Nevada mountain range. Comedian Bill Eddington, he's
an expert on Nevada gaming. He's going to take me
right through this place. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
Originally constructed in 1926, the Cal-Neva
straddles the state line between California and Nevada. Here in this hideaway,
deep in the woods, the hotel's rich
and famous clientele could enjoy gambling, drinking,
and prostitution, thanks to shady underworld
characters who built a secret
network of tunnels to keep the illegal fun flowing. So really, Tahoe, Reno area,
was really a testing ground for the mob in Nevada. BILL EDDINGTON: We had
mobsters get involved here, but they were more or
less local mobsters, not the mafia families out
of Chicago or New York. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER): The
hotel's celebrity showroom brought in famous
celebrities and performers, but beneath the noses
of an oblivious public. Some of America's most
notorious criminals may have been running the show. There were mobsters
who were here. We know that. And what's interesting
about it is they were not really allowed
to be seen in public. And so they would often
want to see the show. They would use the tunnel system
to come from the cabins here, and they would often
sit up in the eaves of this particular theater. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER): A
trapdoor beneath the floor made an easy escape route for
mobsters running from the law, or celebrities hiding
from the spotlight. This would provide
the opportunity to skim casino profits, and to
carry them out in brown paper bags. With all of the underground
secret passages, it would not be difficult
to get money out. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
The Cal-Neva's location, right on the state
line, would have made it easy to shuttle
dirty money back and forth over the border. And if the law did show up, it
was easy to make a quick exit. All right. So the public
doesn't go down here. No, nobody has
access to this area. All right. [music playing] All right, so we're down below
the Cal-Neva Lodge right here. You're in the tunnels of
what was a giant speakeasy back in the day. I mean, this whole thing-- all these networks of tunnels-- go off in every direction. Look how far down it goes. This thing is vast. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
There are roughly 100 yards of secret tunnels
beneath the Cal-Neva. They run under the main
lodge, and even branch out to the cabanas, all
to ensure that anything, or anyone, could be moved
in and out of the resort without being seen. Originally, these were
bootlegging tunnels during prohibition, but
when the mafia moved in, these tunnels hid their illegal
operations and even some of their celebrity friends. The mob had been
worming their way in to control
gambling in Nevada, ever since the state
legalized it in 1931. Mobsters from around the country
wanted a piece of the casino business, quick cash that was
easy to hide from the taxman. While Bugsy Siegel had opened
the Flamingo in Las Vegas, another notorious mobster
named Sam Giancana came here. Sam Giancana, who was a very
notorious Chicago-based mobster who was alleged-- He's a big-time national-- He's a big-time guy. He's alleged to have ordered
the murders of 200 people. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
Their biggest obstacle was the Nevada Gaming
Commission's black book, a list of undesirables who
weren't allowed to set foot in, let alone own, a casino. They needed frontmen, the
more respectable, the better. And this happened
all over the country. I mean, this is the idea
of a silent partnership. The mobsters are in the
shadows, and they find someone to be in the public eye. Yeah, I think that's
probably the pattern. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER): One
high-profile respectable owner of the Cal-Neva was none
other than Frank Sinatra. Because of his reputed
ties to the mob, the FBI compiled a
2,000 page report that links him to notorious
mobsters like Carlo Gambino and Sam Giancana. Frank focused a brilliant
spotlight on the Cal-Neva, as big names like his Rat
Pack friends, Marilyn Monroe, and, some believe, JFK,
dropped in for a visit. And what happened
in the tunnels-- mobsters sneaking in and
out, celebrities carrying on illicit affairs-- stayed in the tunnels. This brickwork is from 1960,
so this is the Sinatra era. He had to come through here,
take out another wall in order to link up with what
was the original loading dock for Prohibition booze. So he came through here, and
must have taken advantage of this entrance in order to
lead out to the other cabins beyond. So this is the entrance to Frank
Sinatra's subterranean world. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
The party up above came to a crashing halt in 1963. Frank Sinatra got
into an argument with the head of the
Nevada Gaming Commission, and a few insults and
expletives later, Old Blue Eyes lost his gaming license. Most of the tunnels
were sealed up, the mob was chased
out of the Cal-Neva, and would soon be finished
in Las Vegas as well. [music playing] Even though Las Vegas sits
poised at the edge the Mojave-- one of the most inhospitable
deserts in the world-- flooding is a huge problem here
and a major threat to the city. Annually, Las Vegas gets
about four inches of rainfall. But over the years,
incredible flash floods have dumped nearly that
amount in a matter of hours, turning the Strip into a
torrent and inundating casinos with water. Now the cost to the city
after a flood is huge, but as the city
continues to expand and climate changes, the
potential damage a future flash flood could wreak
is unimaginable. DON WILDMAN
(VOICEOVER): Las Vegas is located at the bottom
of a bowl-shaped valley. When sudden thunderstorms
hit, the rainwater collects in that bowl, and
thanks to hard, bone-dry soil and miles and miles of pavement,
there's nowhere for it to go. I met with regional flood
control expert Gale Fraser, to find out how the city is
using the best engineering money can buy to protect
itself from violent storms. I'm looking at a lot
of construction here. This place is booming.
- It is. This community keeps reinventing
itself, something bigger and better every year. DON WILDMAN: And the whole
city expands every year, right? Right. Our population doubles
every 10 years. - That's amazing.
- It is. It's from 500,000 when I
moved here to 2 million now. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER): There
are now over 2 million people living in the Las Vegas
area, a population increase of 85% over
the last decade, and everyone here is at risk. So you're in the middle of the
desert, but water is a problem. We could have three
inches in 90 minutes. We've had channels come up
seven feet in seven minutes. We've had detention basins
rise 14 feet in 14 minutes in a single flood event. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
To combat the problem, the government is building
gargantuan subterranean tunnels to collect and
channel the runoff. This is a site. This is one of our projects
currently under construction. And this feeds-- These boxes. Mammoth pieces of
concrete and what you're burrowing under the earth. GALE FRASER: Yep. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
These massive pipes are eight feet tall,
and 16 feet wide. They're unique rectangular shape
allows them to move more water at a faster rate
than a circular pipe, at speeds up to
30 miles per hour. Look at this object here. This is one of the units
right over our heads that they are going to lower
into the ground that comprise the whole channel system. This interior part is where
it's going to be set down into. This giant crane here is what's
required, because this thing is heavy. But these two guys--
that's what's amazing, is these two guys are basically
guiding it into place. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
But to really get a sense of how massive
this project is, you've got to go down into the tunnels. And Harold Hoover, this
project's contractor, is taking me down. So, you can see
the earth here. Doesn't let the water sink in. Water becomes dangerous. What I'm going down into
keeps Las Vegas safe. [music playing] This is an
awesome tunnel here. So, how deep underneath the
street are we at this point? We're five feet at the top,
and 15 feet to the bottom. OK. So up above our heads, Las Vegas
neighborhoods, city streets going over, they have no idea. HAROLD HOOVER: No idea. No idea. The traffic is moving
across the top of this. DON WILDMAN: Isn't that wild? Isn't it? How far are we from
the Strip right now? HAROLD HOOVER: We're about
12 miles away from the Strip. But one way or another, we
are connected to that Strip just like everything else. Without this, down at the
Strip wouldn't be possible. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
A rushing torrent of water blasted
the city in 1975, leaving most of the
Strip underwater. Worried the economy wouldn't
survive another flood, officials embarked
on a $3.2 billion project to protect their
biggest asset, the flow of cash into Las Vegas, from
the flow of water. So now, I can see the
immensity of this project. I mean, not only are
each of these boxes big enough to hold a
huge amount of volume, but one after another
after another for further than I can possibly
see down here. DON WILDMAN
(VOICEOVER): The tunnel. We're standing in
is just a tiny part of a vast 450-mile network,
with another 450 miles planned. The system has grown from one
major tunnel to a sprawling web as the city's
population exploded. These channels,
made up of thousands of interlinked concrete boxes,
send all of Vegas's rainwater rushing into 75 massive basins,
with an average size of 52 football fields. The basins, in turn, slowly
drain into Lake Mead. How many of these tunnels
would you find if you went around and looked for 'em? Well, there's
probably right now 500 of these
tunnels around town, from anywhere from a
couple feet long, to miles. DON WILDMAN
(VOICEOVER): The tunnel we were walking in was
built right in front of us. By the end of the day, around
15 sections would be in place. Each section of the tunnel
weighs a staggering 50,000 pounds. But despite their
huge size, they fit perfectly, snapping together
in a tongue and groove pattern. Willie, bring that box In. This is hauling over
one of these huge boxes, and in it comes over us. We've got to get out
of the way, right? So, this box is going
to come over here and then essentially, it
just drops right down in here and fills in this gap. - Awkward?
- Coming down. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER): As the
crane drops the box in place, workers apply a sealant to
keep the bond watertight. Like magic. Just sucking itself
right in here. HAROLD HOOVER: They'll
raise it up a little bit and the dozer out
here will push it in. Raise up. DON WILDMAN: So this is done. This is in place. This section's done. And that's how you have to
build a tunnel under Las Vegas. HAROLD HOOVER:
That's how we do it. [music playing] That is the Bellagio, one of
Las Vegas's most famous hotels, and one of its largest casinos,
raking in millions of dollars all year long. But the biggest attraction here
isn't the casino, it's this. When it's showtime
at the Bellagio, the famous fountains can shoot
over a million gallons of water up to 460 feet in the air. But the Bellagio Lake isn't to
supply Las Vegas with drinking water. Its sole purpose is to show
off, to amaze the spectators who come in droves to see it. But while the people are
enjoying the spectacle up here, the show is actually run from
a dark cavern in the belly of the hotel, and from
deep beneath the surface of the lake. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
The Bellagio hotel towers 36 stories over the
north end of the Strip. Opened in 1998 at a cost
of more than $1.6 billion, the Bellagio's top
attraction was clearly the spectacular fountain show. And the headquarters for
this amazing water show is an off-limits subterranean
area known as the Bat Cave. Before the crowds gathered
for the day's first show, we were getting a rare
look inside the fountain's inner sanctum. These enormous
hotels are amazing. You know, I'm going to meet
this guy named Gene Bowling. He's the manager of the
Fountains of Bellagio. He's going to tell me how
this whole mechanism, how the whole thing, works. - Morning, how are you?
- I'm good. Nice to meet you.
- How you doing? I'm good. Wait till you see
what we have downstairs. Oh really? And there we go. [music playing] - This is the Bat Cave.
- OK. This is where all of the
maintenance takes place. This is excellent,
complete with ducks. With ducks. We have it all. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER): A
team of 36 engineers and expert divers work 24/7, 365 days a
year to keep this $40 million water show running. What we have here
is a super shooter. All right. This is another
component in our show. OK, and this is where the
water that I see come up shoots out of. Right. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
On the day we visited, I was invited to take a dive
in the lake to do maintenance on a super shooter. It's already amazing that
we're getting out there just to take a look at things. I'm actually going out there
working on the maintenance that they do every
day, you know? So we're going to take out
one of the super shooters, these giant water cannons
that shoot this water 250 feet in the air. These little ones
here, you're talking, those are receiver tanks
for super shooters. We're going to be looking at
those, and as a matter of fact, you're going to be
firing one of these. - I get to fire one of them?
- Yep. These are-- these are not called
extremes for no reason either, they're powerful
pieces of equipment. Let's go. So, we're taking this out? Yes, we are. It's beautiful. All right, let's go. It's amazing how similar
it looks to a real-- I mean, this is
a lake out there. Wow, it's vast. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
Lake Bellagio has a surface area
of 8 and 1/2 acres. It holds a remarkable 22.5
million gallons of water, enough to fill 35
Olympic swimming pools. So I'm getting
the sense now, I can see under here under the
surface, lots of the works. how deep is this water here? The deepest area
is 13-1/2 feet, and that's to accommodate the
equipment that stands up to 12 feet tall. It has to be totally submerged. Yeah, we're in the middle
of the desert in an 8-1/2 acre lake, which is pretty
wild unto itself. But I mean, all these things
need maintenance, work. It's an enormous operation,
and we're going down to take a look at it. [music playing] So I'm the first person other
than you guys that has ever been down here looking
at this apparatus. That's correct. We've never really allowed
anybody to do this before. I'll tell you what's
most surprising to me right off the bat, how much
mental framework is required to hold these things in place
because of the shear force of what's happening, right?
- Sure it is. They're also bolted down to
the bottom, too, you know, the cement. So we may be firing
all over the place. We'd be shooting at
hotels and stuff, and that's not
what we want to do. Yeah. DON WILDMAN
(VOICEOVER): It takes a state of the art computer
system to run the fountains. There are more than
4,000 submerged lights, and over 1,000 nozzles, 208
oarsmen that move and create the dancing water effect,
792 mini shooters which send geysers up to 100 feet,
and the big daddies of them all, 192 super shooters which
send gigantic plumes of water rocketing 460 feet into the sky. I don't know how you
keep this all straight. I mean, it's completely
disorienting. This is SCRI41 So each one of
these has a number? We're going to find It around
and find a little more to work on.
- Right. Now number 36. Thirty-six. So this must be number 35. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
Charlie gave me permission to do something that
literally no one other than the Bellagio's
elite dive team has ever done before, fire off
a super shooter from underwater. The power of these water
cannons is so great that the detonation
could literally kill me if I was in the wrong position. The super shooter is basically
a tube filled with water connected to an air tank. There is a
magnetically-controlled valve between the two,
and when it's open, air rushes in, driving
the water up and out of the tube with deadly force. So I'm going to put
this magnet on there, and then what happens? It's going to open that valve
up, there's going to be a gate and it's going to open, going
to lift 500 pounds of pressure goes sinking into the bottom
of that big super shooter and jet that water up about 460
feet, almost tall as the tower. OK, do I need to
strap myself down? No, you'll be fine. You'll be fine right
where you're at. OK. On the count of four. Yes. - Then I take it off again.
- Yes. DON WILDMAN: OK, Las
Vegas, watch out. Here we go. [music playing] DON WILDMAN: Whoa. Three, four. CHARLIE: Take it off. DON WILDMAN: Take it off. Damn. CHARLIE: That's it. Whoo, that's tense. Compressions. No, that's fantastic. The sense of-- the power
of the compression. That's a very powerful feeling. It's setting off a death charge
underneath the Bellagio Lake. What it takes to
run a fountain, huh? [music playing] DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
From spectacular displays on the Strip to top secret
surveillance techniques, Las Vegas lives by
the motto, "You've got to spend money
to make money." this over-the-top neon mirage
in the middle of the desert was built by shady characters
and brilliant engineers who have one thing in common. They do Sin City's
best work underground.
