We don’t usually publicise our Family’s history, but following several erroneous reports of late in the local media, we feel obliged to set a few facts straight. After reading, please forget everything contained here-under:

Built in 1865, this magnificent St Petersburg mansion was the family home of Piotr “Pierre” Kirillovich Buzukhov. Leo Tolstoy based a leading character in War and Peace on Pierre, changing the surname to Bezukhov for obvious reasons, and the Mansion was mentioned in the pages of that epic novel. While it’s true Tolstoy did employ a certain dramatic license in fashioning his Pierre, certain details from the novel were true to life: the real Pierre did have a passion for the roulette wheel and did kill his first wife’s lover in a duel; and he did flee to Moscow to become a Freemason, specifically involved with the secret society known as the Illuminati. Like Tolstoy’s creation, the real Pierre did eventually come to his senses and find peace with a woman called Natasha, returning to live in the family Mansion in St Petersburg. He dedicated his later years to music, writing several operas with libretti based on Benjamin Franklin’s Almanacs of Poor Richard Saunders, and gave concert performances of them in the lavish ballroom, playing the Armonica, invented by Franklin and sometimes referred to as ‘The Voice of the Angels’. Pierre also attempted to rehabilitate what was left of the Family’s estate. It had suffered from a certain mismanagement and been in decline since the liberation of the serfs. To do this, he turned part of his Mansion into a gambling hall, distinguished by two things: a high stakes version of the fashionable parlour game Gossamer; and a variation on the famous Russian card game Podkidnoy Durak (‘Fool who throws in the towel’). This game is famous for its insistence that the Loser, the fool who throws in the towel, must wear two cards, a pair of sixes, on his epaulets, as an emblem of his foolishness. Pierre embroidered the traditional game by combining it with the finer points of Russian Roulette. All went well in the Mansion until 1905, when disaster struck in the form of the first of Russia’s revolutions. (See Battleship Potemkin and the opening chapters of Doctor Zhivago.) The ageing Pierre narrowly avoided assassination in Odessa and was forced to flee Russia with his son and heir, Evgeny. How Pierre and Evgeny and their coterie of Russians ended up in the middle of the Mojave Desert is a bit of a mystery… …but they did.

What was certain was that Buzukhovs used part of their family fortune, magnificent diamonds smuggled out of Russia in a red scarf (concealed in a private part of a certain body), to buy land in the railway town of Las Vegas, purchased from a certain copper magnate named William Clark. They built a new Mansion, which was, in fact, a replica of the Buzukhov family Mansion in St Petersburg, except more colourful. (By 1919, the Bolsheviks had turned the original into a stolovaya, a canteen-like restaurant serving utilitarian meals to Soviet workers – a far cry from the Buzukhov love of caviar and champagne.) Following the death of his father, Evgeny honoured the family tradition by giving the Vegas Mansion a double identity: he made it Las Vegas’s finest (and certainly its most secretive) illegal casino. The Mansion thrived, especially after the arrival of the gaming sensation Le Multicolore, an alternative divertissement to roulette invented in 1919 by the French President Raymond Poincaire, and brought to America by a Frenchman named Charles Le Savant. Many believe Charles was connected to the local landmark Frenchman’s Mountain, but his descendants will tell you this is questionable, given Frenchman’s was named after a Belgian. Evgeny called his mansion/casino: Nocturne. He used the proceeds of his divertissement to track down and bring to Las Vegas all the surviving instruments of his grandfather’s magnificent musical collection, including the Armonica and the Glass Harp.

The Falzone family, originally from Florence, were the proprietors of one of Europe’s largest and most renowned entertainments, The Falzone Family Circus, celebrated for its clowns and animals and a combination of both, The Clanimals. In 1906, they chanced to be presenting their magnificent spectacle in San Francisco, opening on April 14, just four days before the devastating earthquake that destroyed 80% of the City by the Bay. For the Falzone family, the natural disaster was catastrophic. Many of their acrobats, trainers and backstage crew died in the initial quake; and their magnificent Big Top burnt to the ground in the subsequent fire. The majority of the animals and, indeed, all the Clanimals, fell victim to the flames and the trauma, many of them dying in their cages or caravans. In the weeks following the catastrophe, the surviving family members gathered at the Embarcadero and, pooling their resources and joining forces with two Chinese survivors (one a mysterious monk, the other a restaurateur), bartered a voyage South on the clipper ship Forever which, with favourable winds, took them swiftly to the Mexican port of Veracruz. For the next 13 years the Falzones wandered the South-West as gypsy travellers, performing (and making noodles) wherever they could: in dancehalls, saloons, and on bandstands in parks – even in family homes, where they would play improvised musical instruments, juggle with their feet and do the closest of close magic on request. On special occasions they might even summon the spirits of the Clanimals, in a strange, jaggery dance that found celebration and optimism in what was essentially a tale of woe. In 1921, by chance, the Falzone family staggered into the railroad city of Las Vegas and, when passing a magnificent Mansion, heard a strange, mesmeric sound: “The voice of the angels”. As if under a spell, the beautiful family heir, Fiorenza, knocked on the Mansion’s door and… The man who opened the door on that fateful day was Evgeny Buzukhov and… The rest is Las Vegas history. The Buzukhov-Falzones have lived in this Mansion for over 90 years, performing certain rituals for the entertainment of visitors who come to dine, socialise or trade fortunes on the capricious wheel of Le Multicolore. The also use the Mansion as a refuge for Unusualists – anyone who, like the original family members, is distinguished by a colourful past or hobby and needs a place to prosper and prepare.