LAS VEGAS, February 26 (UPI) -- Casinos thrive on mystique. In the ideal casino, nothing is ever what it appears to be. The dice table is a festive communal party. The baccarat parlor is a mystical ritual enacted in a room resembling a temple. The slot machine is a little self-contained fantasy world, where the spinning reels and flashing lights have meaning only for you and are somehow connected to your fate. Goddesses in togas smile at you and bring you free drinks, because they like you.

Most of us go to casinos because we want to be lulled, massaged and tantalized. Even 30-year veterans of the felt tables are subject to the allure. Even my own jaded eyes--that have seen behind every false front of the Vegas Strip--can fall under their spell.

There are ceremonies in Vegas that don't exist anywhere else. When you're granted an appointment with a casino official, for example, you're never given a location. You're told to call a number on the house phone and then wait by a certain casino landmark--the keno parlor, perhaps, or the VIP lounge--and after a few minutes a beautiful woman magically appears to guide you on a long journey.

You'll enter an unmarked door guarded by a security officer, and then your hostess--who might be from Sri Lanka, or Colombia, or Norway, since beautiful girls from all over the world seem to be able to get work permits in casinos--will lead you past dozens of offices with ever more specialized signs like "Marketing/Malaysia" and "Promotions/Latin America" and "Golf Group Sales" and the clandestine-sounding "Special Services," and you're always tempted to lean around the doorways and see what the people look like who are chattering in strange tongues.

The Asians and Europeans wear ties; the Americans usually don't. Otherwise it looks like a casual Friday at a busy brokerage firm in, say, Memphis. At length you'll be ushered into a waiting room, and then a secretary's office, and finally into the casino executive's inner sanctum, in the heart of the corporate bunker, which might look like any office on Wall Street except that it's likely to be windowless. A window is problematic in Vegas, since one of the cardinal rules is that the tourist must never see the back of the shop.

Here is where the open-collar suits plan the future of the American gambler, although they'll never call him that. He's a "visitor" and they're in the business of "gaming"--the same word used by 14-year-old video-game addicts. It's as though they're conducting pinball tournaments or inviting people over for a session of Trivial Pursuit. It's a protective term, translating into "This is a ritual, not a contest."

"Gambler" is considered disreputable, a word from the Old West used primarily to refer to criminals and saloon owners, yet once worn proudly by old-school casino moguls like Benny Binion and Sam Boyd. The younger generation has cast that mythology aside. The new Casino Man frequently begins with, "Let me tell you how it used to be in this town." And he will trace the history, his own history, rewriting as he goes, in the time- honored way that Las Vegas recreates its past. There's a grain of truth in everything he says, but there are Soviet-style omissions along the way, and there is always the moment when he says "People say that Steve Wynn did . . ." or "People say that Jackie Gaughan was . . ." or "People say that Bugsy Siegel built . . ." and then the closer: "But let me tell you how it really happened."

Las Vegans love a story, and most of all they love their own story. In the coming weeks I'm going to tell that story, and it will rarely fit in with what the public has come to accept as the "official" Vegas legend.

I've identified, in fact, ten major myths about Vegas that I'll be examining in detail--everything from the influence of organized crime to the legend of Steve Wynn to the great failed experiment in converting Vegas into a family destination. Some of the conclusions are going to make my Vegas friends angry, but that won't last long. "Well, that's what people say," I'll tell them, "but now let me tell you how it really happened."

Interestingly, after you finish your interview with the casino executive, the beautiful girl from Sri Lanka is usually nowhere to be found. When you're leaving a casino, you find your own way out.

© Copyright 2002 United Press International and Joe Bob Briggs

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