Extortion, Nevada-style

Oakland Raiders majority owner Mark Davis has, through the Las Vegas Sands casino company and Majestic Realty, has now told Nevada residents that if they want his National Football League team to move from the literal cesspool that is Network Associates McAfee Overstock.com o.co Oakland Alameda Mausoleum Coliseum to their fair city, they will be required to pony up a minimum of $750 million dollars toward a luxurious 65,000-seat football palace.  The web site Business Insider reports the overall estimated cost as being $1.9 billion, with $500 million somehow coming from Davis himself.

Las Vegas Sands President Rob Goldstein dropped the financial hammer on taxpayers:

"Not to be difficult, but we're not negotiable.  If we can't get 750 [million], we respectfully thank you but we're going to move on."

The San Jose Mercury-News reports that Goldstein was speaking on behalf of Sheldon Adelson, a casino magnate with a reported net worth of $29.2 billion.  Adelson owns two casinos in Las Vegas and a third in Singapore.

Las Vegans have been debating a new stadium for the University of Nevada-Las Vegas (UNLV) Rebels football team; Sam Boyd Stadium opened in 1970 and is viewed as being almost as inadequate as Oakland Alameda Mausoleum  Coliseum.  It is located in Whitney, an unincorporated portion of Clark County 8.1 miles east of the UNLV campus and 10.3 miles east of the Strip.

Sam Boyd Stadium opened in 1971 and seats under 36,000 fans of the mass exercise in large-group chronic traumatic encephalopathy that is American football.  (Wikimedia Commons)

Here in the real world, we usually call this extortion.

The Wilf family and Minnesota's intellectually-challenged governor Mark Dayton extracted roughly $498 million from Minnesota taxpayers for the Vikings new football palace that debuted earlier this month.

Down in San Diego, the Spanos family, owners of the NFL's Chargers, are trying to convince voters to spill $800 million to build a new football palace—right on top of a branch of the Rose Canyon Fault.  This would be prohibited by California state law, but of course, the law means little to certain politicians.  (Cough! Hillary!)

But Messrs. Davis, Adelson, Goldstein, and the others obviously do not care, because they have already commissioned a preliminary design and even had a video created, featuring a CGI fly-through and AC/DC's "Back in Black" as the music bed:

This writer is absolutely certain that Raiders majority owner Davis, the owner of a pathetically dippy haircut (right), will wind up losing financial and day-to-day control of his team through sleight-of-hand, much as Davis' own father used deceit and trickery to gain control of the Raiders franchise back in the 1960s.

As I explained here, Davis the elder brought the Raiders back to Oakland from Los Angeles in exchange for the City building a $200 million, 10,000-seat grandstand on the east side of the Coliseum.  Of course, the ticket buyers have stayed away, and the enormous upper deck of the grandstand is covered with a large tarp both for Oakland Athletics baseball games and for Raiders NFL games.  Meanwhile, the aging and decrepit Coliseum, which not well-suited for either baseball or American football, now has massive plumbing and sewage problems.

Of course, the citizens of Oakland and Alameda County (at least those who have not yet moved away from the crime-ridden city) are still on the hook for some $100 million of debt from construction of Mount Davis.

This will not end well for Raiders fans—either in Oakland, San Antonio (another would-be suitor for the franchise), Los Angeles (where the Raiders played from 1982 through 1994), or anyplace else.  And none of the dramatis personæ involved will come out of this looking favorable.  Not even Oakland's socialist mayor, Libby Schaaf, who has thus far refused to kowtow to Davis.

Since Al Davis moved the Raiders to Los Angeles in 1982, the NFL has had six other franchise transfers—including the Raiders' 1995 return to Oakland.  That number is seven if you count the Rams' move from Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to Anaheim Stadium in 1980, before eventually moving to Saint Louis, Missouri in 1995.  In fact, Saint Louis has now lost two NFL franchises; the Cardinals left in 1988, while the Rams moved back to Los Angeles this past January.

The two most notorious transfers were by the Baltimore Colts to Indianapolis on March 29, 1984, and the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore.  Fans and taxpayers have paid dearly in all of these cases.

Yes, here in the real world, we usually call this extortion.  But in the National Football League, it has been "business as usual" for 35 years.