So picture this: 1987, and a Las Vegas casino owner running for mayor of the city sends gift fruit baskets to potential voters — not campaign literature, not yard signs, actual baskets of fruit, delivered to the doorsteps of people he was hoping would put him in charge of the city. It’s a small, strange detail, and it tells you almost everything you need to know about how Bob Stupak approached politics: as one more promotional stunt, run through the same playbook as his casino coupons and his board-game challenges, except this time the prize was public office instead of gaming revenue.
He never won.
Two Runs at Mayor, and Everything After
Stupak’s political career started in 1983 with a first, largely forgotten run for mayor of Las Vegas, and picked up again in 1987 with the fruit-basket campaign. He survived the 1987 primary with 33 percent of the vote — a real showing, enough to make it to the general election — before losing to incumbent Mayor Ron Lurie. He later ran for Clark County Commissioner, also unsuccessfully. When he wasn’t running himself, he was bankrolling other people’s campaigns: he financed his daughter Nicole’s 1991 run for Las Vegas City Council against Frank Hawkins, a race Hawkins won despite what one retrospective account described as “plenty of dirty tricks and thousands of dollars spent” on the Stupak side. He backed his son Nevada’s 1999 campaign to unseat incumbent Councilman Gary Reese, another loss. And he’s credited with helping elect his nurse-turned-girlfriend, Janet Moncrief, to City Council in 2003 — a win, finally, for a Stupak-backed candidate, though Moncrief went on to become the only Las Vegas City Council member in the city’s history to be recalled from office.
The Newspaper That Investigated His Own Loss
Somewhere in the middle of all this losing, Stupak got so convinced the local media was treating him unfairly that he started his own newspaper to fight back: the Las Vegas Bullet, a self-published weekly built specifically to counter what he saw as biased coverage of his campaigns and casinos. And in maybe the single most Stupak detail in his entire political career, after one of his election losses, he reportedly ordered his own reporters at the Bullet to go investigate why he’d lost — treating his own newspaper less like a normal publication and more like a personal inquiry into his own failed campaign, with himself simultaneously as the subject, the publisher, and the aggrieved party demanding answers.
One Last Run
Stupak’s final campaign came in 2006, nearly two decades after the fruit baskets, when he ran for lieutenant governor of Nevada. By then he was visibly frail — his health had been declining for years — and asked why he was running at all after years out of the public eye, he offered a characteristically blunt answer about simply having been out of the game too long. He finished third in the race, drawing 17 percent of the statewide vote, a respectable-enough showing for a fringe candidate but nowhere close to competitive. It was his last attempt at elected office, and his last real turn in the statewide spotlight before his health forced him fully out of public life in the years before his 2009 death.
Why He Kept Running
None of Stupak’s campaigns were ever seriously expected to win, and it’s worth asking why a man who’d already built and lost a casino empire kept spending money and energy chasing offices he had no real path to holding. The most honest answer, based on how everyone who knew him described his temperament, is that Stupak genuinely believed the people running Las Vegas’s government were doing it worse than he could — and that running for office, win or lose, was simply one more arena where he could put his name, his money, and his instinct for a good headline to work. Jan Jones, the mayor who eventually beat one of his allies and later helped the city officially proclaim him “Mr. Las Vegas” in 1996, put it about as generously as anyone did after his death: “Right or wrong, Bob Stupak stood behind what he believed. He would not compromise for better or worse. He never apologized for himself, nor should he have.” Gamblers Book Shop owner Howard Schwartz was less charitable, describing a man who “thought of himself as larger than he was” and who never quite earned the respect he was visibly chasing through every campaign, every fruit basket, and every self-published headline along the way.