Here is the freight side of how Newport paid for Las Vegas:
Moe Dalitz got his start hauling bootleg Canadian whiskey in his family's Michigan laundry delivery trucks.
When he and the Cleveland Syndicate moved from Newport's Beverly Hills Country Club ($426,199 net profit in 1948–49) and Lookout House to the Desert Inn and Stardust, traditional banks wouldn't touch casino paper, so naturally, they turned to Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund (an alliance Dalitz forged by brokering a $17,500 payoff to settle the 1949 Detroit laundry-truck strike).
How did a truckers' union end up sitting on enough cash ($91M in loans by 1961) to build the Vegas strip?
The Motor Carrier Act of 1935 locked interstate trucking into protected routes. In 1953 (ATA v. United States, 344 U.S. 298), the Teamsters even hired Burton K. Wheeler (the senator who sponsored the 1935 Act) to appear at the Supreme Court defending the ICC rules that abolished one-trip "gypsy" leasing.
Protected ICC routes on top built the Teamsters pension bank that funded Vegas.
Meanwhile, up to 150,000 private and exempt carriers exploited the loopholes created by regulation.
The same topic my pinned article is all about.
What happens in Vegas started in Newport.