Stan Hunterton died recently. He is the kind of person we cannot afford to lose.
Hunterton was an attorney, practicing in Las Vegas with his own law firm for more than thirty years. He represented big names, from utility companies to Steve Wynn, and boxer Buster Douglas after his fight with Mike Tyson. Hunterton taught at UNLV’s William S. Boyd School of Law. He mentored attorneys in other ways, from working with the state bar to his involvement in the Inns of the Court, which promotes professionalism and ethics in the legal profession. He was devoted to his family, and fun to be around.
All of that would be reason enough to talk about him. But he also was both a spectator and participant in our history—especially involving organized crime.
Hunterton earned his degrees at Syracuse University and headed to Detroit. He was working for the U.S. Justice Department in 1975 when he became involved in a prominent situation that happened in that city: the disappearance of Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa. Hunterton showed up in the nation’s newspapers talking about the car driven by Hoffa’s foster son, who had borrowed it from the family of a Detroit mob boss. Hunterton later marveled that that was his first big case.
There would be many more big cases. In 1978, Hunterton moved to Las Vegas as part of the Organized Crime Strike Force. That was during the period when federal, state, and local officials worked together—and, to be fair, sometimes against one another—to try to root out the mob. Over the next six years, he prosecuted cases involving Tony Spilotro and the burglary ring known as the Hole in the Wall Gang. He was involved in the investigation of Argent Corporation, and its skimming operations at the Stardust and Fremont Hotels. You think you know the story of those cases from the movie Casino. Well, not entirely. Hunterton also worked on the investigation of mob ties to the Aladdin Hotel.
His work led to Hunterton going to Washington for two years as deputy chief counsel to the President’s Commission on Organized Crime. But he came back to Las Vegas in 1986 and entered private practice.
He often spoke to the public to explain how the mob cases worked. He was interviewed for “The Mob on the Run,” a documentary that Bob Stoldal and the late Ned Day did for Channel 8. Hunterton said of prosecuting Teamsters cases, “It shows, in a very simple way, that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. When Allen Glick got his 67 million-dollar pension fund loan from Central States, there were strings attached. He may not have realized until years later that there were
strings attached, but it’s obvious now with the benefit of hindsight that there were.” He also found humor in it all. He said, “Some electronic surveillance had an organized crime figure in Milwaukee referring to going to Chicago to get his transfusion. The man was not referring to a blood transfusion.” He also said there’s “a very thin line between being a victim and an accomplice. It may depend on who is the first one to the prosecutor’s office to make a deal.”
Stan Hunterton knew how to make a deal and knew how to win a case. He served us well.