The bar also was a stab at appeasing his wife, June, Gaffey said. He opened the Frontier Club and a swanky bar called the Mandalay Room adjacent to it. McAfee set his energy to business on Fremont Street. Griffith, McBride said, and the businessman built the Frontier around Club 91. He came here because gambling and selling alcohol were legal.” “He was tired of being investigated and fodder for the scandal sheets. “He wanted to be legitimate,” Gaffey said. He changed the name to the 91 Club and entertained the high-end clientele he treated at the Clover Club. McAfee’s first business endeavor in Las Vegas was to purchase the Pair O’Dice Club and Casino on Highway 91, which is now Las Vegas Boulevard. I’m pulling out because I want to and no other reason.” Get this straight, no one ran me out of Los Angeles. I’ve cut myself a slice of a new kind of life. “I’m not saying the Bowron administration made it too hot for me, for that wouldn’t be strictly true. “I came to Las Vegas because I’m happily married, have a great sized stake and have decided to operate in a community where my business of gambling is a legal proposition,” McAfee said. McAfee laid out his intent in an undated Las Vegas Review-Journal article in roughly 1939. “People in Las Vegas knew who Guy McAfee was before Guy McAfee made his advent there.” “He had such a reputation down there,” he said. When McAfee moved to Las Vegas, rumors abounded that he was either run out of Los Angeles or was broke, McBride said. The family enjoyed wealth and had homes in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, where June Brewster McAfee liked to fly privately back and forth, Gaffey said. He adopted her daughter Kathleen Elizabeth McAfee, McBride said. His third marriage to Hollywood starlet June Brewster had staying power. His second marriage, to the madam, left him a widower. McAfee became a police officer after being a firefighter. His relationship from then on with his daughter was estranged, and she was intentionally omitted from any share of his estate, McBride said. McAfee severed ties with them to become a firefighter in Los Angeles. He married a woman named Ava and had a daughter named Alice. 19, 1888, and was orphaned young in life. McAfee was born in Winfield, Kan., on Aug. The bookends of his life shine a bit brighter than his seedy Los Angeles days. McAfee often was referred to as the Overlord of the Gaming Tables, said Dennis McBride, historian with the Nevada State Museum in Las Vegas. It was during Prohibition, and the club was outfitted with reversible gambling tables in case of raids. He ran the Clover Club on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles and catered to wealthy patrons. McAfee’s connections kept him mostly out of trouble, aside from various investigations and a rumored 1931 connection to the murder of two rival businessmen. The group included Los Angeles politicians, most notably a mayor named Fletcher Bowron, who often made things tumultuous for McAfee. He and a growing gang of thugs, mostly fellow law enforcement employees, had their hand on the purity pulse and in the illegal services’ purses.

He accepted bribes from illegal business owners and even married a brothel madam at one time, said Patrick Gaffey, cultural program supervisor for Clark County Parks and Recreation Department. He was in the department’s vice squad and became a power player in its purity squad, which took aim at an outlawed trio of offenses: alcohol, gambling and prostitution. McAfee cruised into Las Vegas in 1939 on a road paved by his reputation of crooked dealings as a Los Angeles police officer. Guy McAfee helped define the high-end watering hole in Las Vegas and changed the face of Fremont Street by opening the Golden Nugget, but he may be best known for unofficially naming Las Vegas Boulevard “the Strip.” He very well may be the Guy who gave one of the world’s most renowned streets its famous nickname.

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