One Fire He Watched From Outside. The Other, He Lit Himself. Ninety Days and Eight Floors Apart, Las Vegas Burned Twice — and One Man Was Standing in the Middle of Both Infernos.
So picture this: 7:17 a.m., November 21, 1980. A pastry display case in a ground-floor deli at the MGM Grand — the largest, newest, most modern hotel in the world — develops a ground fault behind the wall. No spark anyone sees. No smell anyone notices in time. Just a slow electrical failure inside a wall cavity that, within minutes, becomes the deadliest single disaster in the history of the state of Nevada.
By the time anyone realizes what’s happening, the fire has already climbed the wall of the restaurant and eaten through the ceiling into the casino above — a casino with no sprinklers, because none were required when the hotel went up seven years earlier. It races across the gaming floor at a speed nobody in the building can outrun. Then-Governor Robert List arrived at the casino not long after, and forty years later he still hadn’t found gentler words for what he saw: “It was hell on Earth.” Bodies were slumped over blackjack tables and slot machines exactly where their owners had been sitting. “That time in that casino is etched into my memory just like a tattoo that would never come off,” List said. “That terrible smell and the blackness without color, and the bodies that were there.”
Eighty-five people died that morning — 78 guests, 7 employees, according to the official count, though contemporary wire reports and later retrospectives cite figures as high as 87, and the exact number has never fully settled in the historical record. Roughly 650 more were injured. It remains the third-deadliest hotel fire in modern American history, behind only the 1946 Winecoff fire in Atlanta and the 1946 La Salle Hotel fire in Chicago. Most of the MGM’s victims never saw flame at all — they died of smoke inhalation and carbon monoxide poisoning in their own hotel rooms, floors and floors above the actual fire, because the building’s elevator shafts and stairwells weren’t properly sealed and the smoke simply climbed straight up through them like a chimney, pouring into rooms through the air conditioning vents while people slept.
The rescue effort that followed was its own kind of chaos. Helicopters plucked survivors and the dead alike off the roof. Guests broke windows on upper floors and tied bedsheets together, dangling them out into the desert air, praying somebody below was watching. A volunteer city firefighter named Joe Castiglia spent that morning carrying bodies up flights of stairs to the roof for helicopter pickup — “The people we were taking up there were dead, were bodies,” he said, decades later, still carrying it. Clark County fire captain Stanley Grismanauskas was handed a master key and sent to clear the 17th and 23rd floors, some rooms blocked by a wet towel jammed under the door, some blocked by the person who’d tried to keep the smoke out and hadn’t made it. He marked each cleared door with chalk and kept going for six or seven hours.
And there was money in that fire too, just like there would be at the El Rancho two decades earlier — Charlie Lombardo, an apprentice slot mechanic who crawled out of the casino on his hands and knees that morning, still keeps a burned, bubbled coin from the vault as a keepsake. Becky Lomprey Grismanauskas, a criminal investigator for the district attorney’s office who worked the fire’s aftermath, kept a melted casino chip from the same wreckage. Both objects sit in drawers in Henderson homes today, forty-plus years later, next to photographs nobody in those houses particularly enjoys looking at.
Ninety Days Later, Three Miles Away
The investigation that followed the MGM fire was, by every credible account, thorough and conclusive. Lead fire investigator Lorne Lomprey — who literally wrote the county’s official report — has said flatly and repeatedly, for decades: “The MGM fire was 100% an accidental fire, 100% an electrical fire.” A National Fire Protection Association team reviewed the findings independently and agreed. More than 1,350 legal claims followed, leading to a $223 million settlement, one of the largest mass-tort cases in the country at the time, and nowhere in that entire mountain of litigation did arson ever surface as the accepted cause. The official record has never moved: MGM was an accident. Full stop.
But ninety days after the MGM fire, on the evening of February 10, 1981, a second fire broke out at the Las Vegas Hilton — then the largest hotel in the world, three miles down the road — and this one really was set on purpose. And in the strange, small-town way that Las Vegas often works, at least one investigator on the scene that night believed, and told colleagues he believed, that the same person was responsible for both.
The Hilton fire started on the eighth floor, in an elevator lobby, and it moved fast enough that flames were visible climbing 22 stories up the side of the building within the hour. Firefighters, having just been through the MGM catastrophe, used local television broadcasts to tell guests to stay in their rooms rather than flee into smoke-choked hallways — a direct, hard-won lesson from November, and it worked. Eight people died instead of eighty-five. More than 200 were injured. Guests again broke windows, again tied bedsheets into ropes, again waited on the roof for helicopters, in a scene that felt, to everyone watching from the ground, sickeningly familiar.
The Busboy
The first person on the scene to notice smoke was a 23-year-old room service busboy named Philip Bruce Cline, who’d been at the Hilton for exactly five days. By his own initial account, he was a hero — he spotted flames flickering on the eighth-floor wall, tried to fight them with a wastebasket of water, then ran down the hall banging on doors to warn guests before heading down to the employee parking lot to watch the building burn from outside with his coworkers. For a news cycle or two, that’s exactly how the story was told: brave young busboy raises the alarm.
It fell apart fast. A Las Vegas police sergeant checking the burned upper floors afterward noticed room-service trays still sitting untouched in the hallways Cline claimed to have been actively working — a small, damning detail. “Cline wasn’t doing his job, or he wasn’t telling the truth,” the sergeant concluded. Cline was brought in, questioned, and eventually agreed to a polygraph. He failed it badly enough that, according to police, he broke down mid-session and offered a different story: that the fire had started by accident, while he was having a sexual encounter with a man he knew only as “Joe” in the eighth-floor elevator lobby, smoking marijuana, and the lit end of the joint had touched a curtain. “And I had it in my left hand and I laid my head on his shoulder,” Cline told investigators in a recorded statement. “And I put my left hand with the joint back on the backrest of the couch… And the joint touched the curtain and I didn’t notice it. And he noticed it and said ‘Oh my God.’”
It was a strange, oddly specific story, and prosecutors tried to physically recreate it in front of the jury — resting a lit cigarette against the same type of curtain fabric used in the hotel, waiting to see if it would catch. It wouldn’t. Worse for Cline, investigators determined the blaze had four separate points of origin, not one — a detail that’s nearly impossible to reconcile with a single dropped joint. No one named “Joe” was ever located, despite Cline’s own defense attorney making the rounds of Las Vegas gay bars looking for him. Investigators came to believe Joe never existed at all.
The jury agreed. On January 15, 1982, after a week of deliberation, Cline was convicted on eight counts of first-degree murder and one count of first-degree arson. In March, District Judge Addeliar Guy handed down the sentence: eight consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole, plus a concurrent 15 years for the arson itself. Cline, 24 years old, was described in press coverage that day as pale and near tears. He told a television reporter afterward, “I am not a violent person.”
Two Roles, Same Man
Here’s where the story does something genuinely strange. Cline hadn’t just worked in Las Vegas hotels before the Hilton. Records confirmed he’d also worked briefly as a busboy at the MGM Grand — May 6 through May 26, 1980, a three-week stint, six months before that hotel’s fire. On paper, that’s a coincidence and nothing more: he wasn’t employed there anymore by the time the November blaze broke out.
But according to Metro homicide detective Bob Hilliard, it went further than that. Hilliard says his investigation later turned up something more troubling — that Cline had a documented pattern of setting small fires at previous jobs (a roadway fire in Oakland, a restaurant fire in Barstow, two fires at a downtown Las Vegas casino called the El Cortez shortly after he was fired from there for embezzlement) — and that Cline was actually present at the MGM Grand on the morning of November 21, 1980, watching the fire from among the crowd of evacuated onlookers, despite no longer working there.
That’s already an unsettling detail on its own — a man who would go on to commit deliberate arson at the Hilton ninety days later, standing in the crowd outside a burning MGM Grand, for reasons nobody’s ever fully explained. But Hilliard’s account goes one step further still. He says that on the night of the Hilton fire, he crossed paths with Lorne Lomprey — the same lead investigator who wrote the MGM’s official accidental-cause report — and that Lomprey told him something entirely different from what he’d put in writing. “He said the same guy that burnt this place burnt the MGM,” Hilliard recalled, “and I said, you guys ruled it accidental. And he pulled out a Keno slip and drew me a diagram on the back of it of exactly how the suspect had started the arson fire at MGM. He was very upset when he told me that, upset with his department.” A second retired detective, Chuck Lee — the man who actually got Cline’s confession at the Hilton — says he overheard the same conversation.
Confronted with this decades later, Lomprey rejected it entirely. “Absolutely incorrect and wrong,” he said. “They may have gotten into the MGM or the Hilton mixed up, or they could get me drawing a diagram sitting around a barstool or whatever else… trying to compare the Hilton fire with the MGM fire. It’s just crazy. It’s just crazy.” He acknowledged hearing rumors that Cline had been at the MGM that morning but said no one was ever able to confirm them, and pointed out that during the fire’s litigation — with hundreds of millions of dollars and dozens of defendant companies on the line — plenty of people with a financial interest in an arson finding had tried to get him to say exactly that. “You cannot believe how many people approached me,” he said. “How many people offered me things — you cannot believe the phone calls, over and over. Even after it was over with, for several months. All I had to do was turn my cheek.” He never did.
So here is the actual, honest shape of the story, and it’s genuinely more interesting left honest than it would be smoothed over: officially, on the record, in the report that stands to this day, the MGM Grand fire was an accident and Philip Cline had nothing to do with it. Unofficially, at least two homicide detectives believe, based on a conversation they say happened but that the man at its center flatly denies, that the same man who deliberately burned down part of the Hilton in February may have also set the fire that killed 85 people at the MGM in November — and simply gotten away with it, watching from the parking lot with everyone else, before doing it again three months later somewhere he could actually take credit.
Either way — whether he was an accidental bystander to one Las Vegas catastrophe and the deliberate architect of the next, or something considerably darker — the same young man was standing inside two of the worst hotel fires in American history, ninety days apart, playing what looked to the world like two completely different roles. Witness at one. Arsonist at the other. Nobody has ever been able to prove it was more than that.
What “Life Without Parole” Actually Means in Nevada
Cline’s sentence — eight consecutive life terms without parole — sounds absolute, and functionally, it is. But the mechanics of what that phrase actually means in Nevada are worth understanding, because the state’s rules have shifted meaningfully since 1981, in ways that both harden and, oddly, slightly soften his particular case.
Nevada law (NRS 213.085) currently bars its Board of Pardons Commissioners from ever commuting a sentence of life without the possibility of parole into a sentence that allows parole — but only for crimes committed on or after July 1, 1995. That’s the modern “life means life” rule: for anyone convicted of LWOP-eligible crimes after that date, there is no administrative door left open at all, ever, short of a governor’s outright pardon.
Cline’s crimes happened in 1981, fourteen years before that hard line existed. Under Nevada’s older rules — still on the books today, in NAC 213.110 — the Board can consider commuting a pre-1995 LWOP sentence down to a parole-eligible life sentence, but only after the person has served at least nineteen calendar years. Cline cleared that nineteen-year mark decades ago; he became technically eligible for the Board to even consider the question sometime around the year 2000. Nothing in the public record suggests that’s ever happened, or that it’s likely to. Eight separate first-degree murder convictions, each carrying its own consecutive life-without-parole sentence, is about as unsympathetic a commutation case as a parole board is likely to see, and Nevada’s Board has shown no appetite, in cases far less severe than this one, for reopening sentences tied to mass-casualty violence.
As of the most recent confirmed reporting — a 2021 retrospective marking the fire’s 40th anniversary — Cline was 63 years old and incarcerated at the Southern Desert Correctional Center in Indian Springs, about 45 minutes northwest of the Strip. Earlier reporting places him at High Desert State Prison and, before that, the old Nevada State Prison at Lovelock; inmates serving long sentences are periodically reclassified and moved between facilities over the decades, which likely accounts for the different locations across different years of coverage. No public reporting located since then confirms a more current status, but nothing exists to suggest anything has changed. Barring a pardon that has never once been seriously discussed, Philip Cline will die in a Nevada prison, roughly ninety miles and forty-plus years removed from the eighth-floor elevator lobby where, whatever the full truth of that November morning down the road really is, he is the one man officially, provably responsible for what happened next.
What the Fires Actually Changed
If there’s a genuinely redemptive thread running through both catastrophes, it’s this: together, they completely rewrote how high-rise buildings get built and inspected in the state of Nevada, and the results have held for more than four decades. Governor List convened a fire safety commission almost immediately after the MGM fire, and state lawmakers adopted its recommendations wholesale — automatic sprinkler systems in every high-rise, new and existing; smoke detectors in every hotel room and elevator; posted exit maps in every room — a legislative package that became a model other states later copied outright. Clark County passed a parallel local ordinance. When the Hilton burned just three months later, before most of those reforms had even been physically installed yet, the difference in outcome — eight dead instead of eighty-five — was directly credited to lessons the fire department had learned in November and were already applying by February, even without the hardware yet in place.
Since that February night in 1981, there has not been a single high-rise fire death anywhere in Clark County. Not one, in over four decades, across a Strip that’s added dozens of new towers and tens of thousands of new hotel rooms in the years since. “You’re more likely to drown than to die in a fire” in a modern Las Vegas high-rise today, one retired Nevada Supreme Court justice put it — a genuinely remarkable outcome, purchased at a genuinely horrific price, by two fires ninety days apart and, if the more troubling of the two competing accounts is ever taken at face value, possibly by one man’s hand in both of them.
The memory outlasted the code changes, too. Long after the sprinkler retrofits and the smoke detectors became routine, MGM built the fire directly into how it trains its own people — new managers going through annual fire-safety certification have, for years, been shown footage from the 1980 fire itself as part of that training, a deliberately sober, no-frills addition to an otherwise procedural day. It’s not dramatized or narrated for effect. It’s just what actually happened, put in front of the next generation of people responsible for making sure it doesn’t happen again.