Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, NM
Mike Smith
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Seat of San Miguel County in the northeastern quadrant of our state, the city of Las Vegas, New Mexico seems to have much more in common with its Spanish namesake—“the meadows”—than it does with the Nevada metropolis of the same name.
Where Nevada’s Las Vegas boasts four-star hotels made to look like an active volcano, the Eiffel Tower, a fairy tale castle, and an Egyptian pyramid, the New Mexico town has the El Kapp Motel—with its buzzing neon sign of a man removing, and then replacing, and then removing, and then replacing, his cap.
Where Nevada’s Sin City advertises legalized gambling, nearby legalized prostitution, and stadium concerts featuring international singing stars, New Mexico’s Meadow City offers the Abe Montoya Recreation Center—with a pool, an indoor walking track, and an aquatic fitness class.
And where Las Vegas, in Nevada, seems so often to serve as a setting for stories that just get weirder and weirder and weirder—as the drugs kick in, and the hotel rooms get trashed, and the child mimes appear—Las Vegas, in New Mexico, does as well.
Take, for instance, a story that appeared this week in the Las Vegas Optic—a story that starts off odd, grows stranger, and then blooms into bizarre.
But first, a little background.
The Optic is Las Vegas, New Mexico’s only real newspaper of note, but sometime in 2006, a former Optic delivery man, Chris Lopez, founded a competing paper, the Las Vegas Times, believing the Optic, for whatever reason, to be dishonest and biased. Almost ever since then—at least since November 11, 2007, when the Optic issued a strongly-worded rebuttal to some allegedly unfounded charges of unfairness leveled by the Times earlier that month—the rivalry between the two papers has been intense. At least it was, until Lopez began publishing the Times only sporadically, consolidating the Las Vegas Times, the Mora Times, and the Santa Rosa News, into the Tri-County News Times, and then passing a number of weeks without publishing a thing. Recently, he published a copy of what he named the New Mexico Tribune, and printed a sudden issue of the Las Vegas Times not much more than a week ago; noting this decline and what happened next, one might be tempted to speculate that Lopez was spending much of his time of late growing bitter and disillusioned, beginning to look for someone, anyone, to blame for his failure. And one might be right.
“Las Vegas newspaper owner Chris Lopez was arrested early this morning after allegedly being caught defacing a car belonging to Optic managing editor David Giuliani,” read the Las Vegas Optic on May 12, 2008.
Which is odd. But not as strange as it got.
The article continued, “The incident occurred outside Giuliani’s home on New Mexico Avenue. A neighbor called police after seeing Lopez and another man using shoe polish to write ‘Rapist,’ ‘Rapist will Pay’ and a gang symbol on the car, according to a police report.”
In the early morning of Monday, May 7, Las Vegas Optic editor David Giuliani woke up just after midnight, to the sounds and lights of several police cars parked beside his house—and to the sight of his twenty-four-year-old journalistic competitor, Chris Lopez, being arrested with another man, next to Giuliani’s car.
What’s even more bizarre in this case is that Giuliani is not a rapist, as Lopez's shoe-polished message had suggested, he just happens to have the same name as a convicted sex offender out of Pennsylvania.
The Optic article makes this clear:
The arrest came just a few days after reports of a flier being circulated at a local restaurant suggested that Giuliani, born in 1969, is a sex offender. The Optic’s editor was born in 1971, has no criminal record and has never been arrested.
A search of the National Sex Offender Registry turns up no one by that name, though David L. Guiliani of Pennsylvania turns up twice, whose second and third letters in his last name likely were accidentally switched.
Lopez may have been searching the Internet for information on his rival, and come across what he believed was a sensational bit of news. Or maybe not: the photo accompanying the Pennsylvania man’s information looks nothing, absolutely nothing, like David Giuliani of New Mexico.
Just as it would be hard to confuse Las Vegas, Nevada—population 552,539—with Las Vegas, New Mexico—population 14,565—
—confusing these two men of completely different ages and appearances, would require someone either completely blind—or just someone who really doesn’t like you, who holds you personally responsible for all his problems.
"I love competition,” said Giuliani, in a May 15, 2008 KOB-TV news segment. “I think there should be more newspaper competition. But to bring down somebody with a false accusation is just not acceptable."
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