The Sands Hotel — Rat Pack Las Vegas

The Sands Hotel and Casino on the Las Vegas Strip was the home of the Rat Pack — Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop — who performed together in the Copa Room lounge in January 1960 while simultaneously filming Ocean's 11 at locations around the city. The shows, which were improvised, boozy, and apparently electrifying, were sold out nightly and became one of the defining cultural moments of the Kennedy era. The Copa Room recordings capture something that couldn't be manufactured: five men at the height of their individual fame, performing for each other as much as for the audience, in a room saturated with cigarette smoke and improbable glamour.

The Sands was the most glamorous casino on the Strip in the late 1950s and early 1960s — opened in 1952, it had a guest list that included Humphrey Bogart, Marlene Dietrich, and eventually every significant figure in American entertainment. Sinatra's residency transformed it into a pilgrimage destination. The hotel's willingness to allow Sammy Davis Jr. — who was Black — to stay on the premises and gamble in the casino was, in the context of Las Vegas's documented racism of the era, itself a statement of some consequence.

The Sands was imploded in 1996 to make way for the Venetian Hotel, which now occupies the site. No marker on the Venetian's Strip frontage acknowledges the Sands or the Rat Pack. The Mob Museum in downtown Las Vegas has material on the era.