Mr. Big

Until the last controversy-lighted weeks, not one in 20 inhabitants of Nevada had ever heard of their state's self-made, baronial-minded Mr. Big, a go-getting New Englander named Norman Biltz. A Norman Biltz, it is true, was known along the Humboldt River as a big buyer of ranches. A fellow of the same name was remembered as a big real-estate operator around Lake Tahoe. A good many people in Reno were familiar with a Biltz too--a stocky, blue-eyed fellow with iron-grey hair, a Hollywood jacket and Humphrey Bogart gestures who didn't seem to have anything better to do than hang around the Riverside Hotel. But since Biltz doesn't like his name in the paper (and seldom has to see it there), few connected all the Biltzes into one fabulous whole.

Even last week, when Tyro Politico Tom Mechling cried over the radio that Biltz gouged him in the clinches in his unsuccessful Senate race with Republican George ("Molly") Malone, a good many Nevadans just didn't quite follow him. When Mechling charged that Biltz was a sinister political boss, who held the state in a "Gestapo-like grip" and stifled the state's press, most were just flabbergasted. Nevada seems like the last place in the world any self-respecting political boss would enter the bossing business.

Garden on the Moon. The greater part of Nevada (sixth largest state in the Union) is as bleak and uninhabited as the craters of the moon. The Federal Government owns 87% of the whole place, rocks, rattlesnakes, Gila monsters and all, and its total population comes to 167,000 souls, only a few more than Bridgeport, Conn. It has only three industries--ranching, mining and the care and feeding of tourists. But arid Nevada has bloomed like a garden for Norman Biltz.

Because he collects ranches much as other rich men collect securities or old masters, Norman Biltz is one of Nevada's biggest land owners. He has 43,000 acres in the fertile Humboldt River country and federal grazing rights on a million acres more. He owns 11,000 subsidiary acres in California. His 14,000 cattle make him one of the state's biggest stockmen. His S-Bar-B, Quilici-Biltz and Nevada Nile ranches make him one of its biggest crop producers. And restless Entrepreneur Biltz keeps his fingers in dozens of other likely financial enterprises, from shipping to housing developments all over the U.S.

His political grip is neither Gestapo-like nor especially sinister, but he quietly exercises a kind of all-embracing, behind-the-scenes influence which has largely vanished from more-complicated areas of the country. Though Biltz is a Republican, crusty old Democratic Senator Pat Mc-Carran communes with him from Washington almost daily by long-distance telephone. Nevada's bumbling G.O.P. Senator Malone is beholden to him. And Biltz hand-picked Nevada's Governor Charles Russell. As a result, Nevada's big gamblers (who are also big campaign contributors) listen when Biltz whispers, for the gover nor appoints the tax commission, and the tax commission licenses the gamblers. The legislature meets infrequently and seldom disappoints Biltz.

Norman Biltz, born a poor boy in Bridge port, Conn, in 1902, for a while seemed destined to run in the jostling and confident pack of those who always see but never seize the glittering tumbleweed of fortune. But after toiling as a steamboat wiper, a strikebreaker, a manufacturer's agent and a bond salesman, he switched to real estate and finally reached Nevada with a grandiose scheme, later carried out at a profit of almost half a million dollars, to peddle practically the whole eastern shore of Lake Tahoe. Nevada, at the moment, was in bad shape. Its big ranches were almost all in the hands of the banks, the cattle market had collapsed, and business was in depression. Biltz gazed on the state and its one-horse political system and saw opportunity.

Transplanted Millionaires. He knew just what to do. He went to the legislature, and after long months of lobbying, talked it into prohibiting both inheritance and income taxes in Nevada. Then, well armed with the names and idiosyncrasies of wealthy prospects, he set out to sell bankrupt ranches as tax havens, and was soon transplanting millionaires to Nevada's soil--e.g., Bing Crosby, Max Fleischmann, Bronx Politico Ed Flynn, Automobile Magnate Errett Lobban Cord, Stock Broker Dean Witter.

Nevada got back on the high road to prosperity. So did Biltz, and with the formation of the Biltz-McCarran axis, he became the state's dominant political force too. As such, he is seldom challenged. For one thing, the state's citizens have no feeling of being bossed, for Biltz not only keeps out of print, but approves "safe" candidates of either party and seldom minds which wins. For another, even Norman Biltz's critics find him hard to resist, particularly if he woos them, amid squads of millionaires, at one of his mountaintop barbecues.

Triumph for Right. Real enemies of the axis get clouted. In the past, an editor who criticized too heavily could expect to find advertising from Nevada gamblers mysteriously vanishing from his paper. But even such heretics are forgiven and rewarded if they mend their ways. Recalcitrant Editor M. M. Zenoff of Boulder City was given a fancy public-relations job after he saw the light, and recalcitrant Politico Denver Dickerson, through Pat McCarran, got a job in State Department public relations in exotic Rangoon. Dickerson may yet be brought home to be groomed as the Biltz-McCarran candidate for governor next year.

Nevada has new citizens from other states who do not seem to understand that Biltz knows what is best for them all. One of the noisiest is ex-New Yorker Hank Greenspun, publisher of the Las Vegas Sun. When gambling ads disappeared from Greenspun's paper, he sued both Senator McCarran and the casino operators for conspiring to put him out of business, and got a fat $86,000 settlement out of court. Tom Mechling is making noises like a man who wants to run for governor of Nevada next year, and he has a core of political strength among the newcomers in the trailer camps and bungalows of Las Vegas and Reno.

As much as anything else, Mechling personifies change in Nevada, and it is change which Norman Biltz resents most of all. "Mechling is just bad inside," says Biltz. "He wants to knock down everything. He criticizes the state and the government and all the things we believe in here in America." But Biltz believes that right--that is, Biltz--will triumph in the end. "I love this state," he says, "and I'll do any damn thing I can do to keep it the way it is."

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