Not to put too fine a point on it, the Nevada Gaming Commission (and before the NGC, the Gaming Control Board, too) really screwed the pooch with their June 22nd decision to create a preferred class of casino investors. For the gory details, read Business Press Editor Ian Mylchreest’s take on the sorry spectacle in Carson City or his previous column on the subject.

Basically, Goldman Sachs batted its pretty, blue-chip eyes and the NGC hit the canvas, agreeing to an arrangement whereby three executives of Goldman Sachs subsidiary Whitehall Fund will share one seat on the board of the Las Vegas Hilton. (That’s going to be one very crowded chair.)

Although Colony Capital remains the nominal owner of the LVH, Whitehall gets 40% ownership and veto power over unspecified budgetary decisions. Small wonder that Colony Capital turned out to be a paper tiger in the bidding war for Aztar Corp., if it needs Whitehall to help pay the freight at the LVH, which Colony obtained at a fire-sale price from Caesars Entertainment.

NGC Chairman Pete Bernhard’s assertion that Nevada needs to expand its sources of casino capital doesn’t pass the laugh test. And, as much as I like Frank Schreck, attorney for the newly installed Cerberus of Goldman/Whitehall execs, his statement that the threesome would be independent of both Whitehall and Goldman is also replete with amusement value.

Or it would be if the NGC weren’t subverting its own responsibility as gatekeeper of the casino industry. One convicted felon made a bizarre run at the Sahara hotel-casino, while another is heading up the proposed Maxim-branded casino, for which the backhoes are busily digging away. At the risk of stretching a point, had the NGC made this see-no-evil decision six years ago, “Kenny Boy” Lay, Jeffrey Skilling and Andrew Fastow could have been licensed to sit on the board of Nevada casinos with nary a peek being taken into the serpentine financial dealings of Enron.

What’s more, as Ian puts it: What is to stop a collusive agreement between the two that would effectively siphon off gaming money as unusually high rent payments? A branding agreement can easily be used to do the same. I’ve already been hearing accusations that Morgans Hotel Group paid more than it’s letting on for the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino and adjoining land, and that some of the overage may have been stashed in the values assigned to the Hard Rock’s intellectual property and other assets. Given Morgans CEO Ed Scheetz’s underwhelmingly noncommital attitude toward the Hard Rock brand, it’s hard to fathom why he paid $69 million for it.

Through all this, Control Board member Bobby Siller has been the voice in the wilderness. Already his fears of here-today/gone-tomorrow casino developers are coming true. On Wednesday, North Dakota businessman Gary Tharaldson was bloviating to the Las Vegas Review-Journal about the $1.8 billion casino-hotel-condominium he was preparing for Clark County approval. That same day, Tharaldson was floating a cut-and-run strategy to Reuters. In that same Reuters article, Pinnacle Entertainment, once so passionate in its pursuit of Aztar’s Las Vegas Tropicana now professed relative indifference to the Vegas market.

For such an expensive town, Vegas sure has become a cheap date.