Bellagio

LAS VEGAS - The boys sat there swilling coffee and bemoaning a depressing reality: What happens in this town doesn't necessarily stay here - thanks, they say, to the national media spreading scuttlebutt. The gossip doesn't involve a tawdry tryst in a hotel room off the Strip. These days, the diciest Sin City escapade is just trying to scratch out a living here, claim the news reports. "Everybody," insurance salesman Rodney Leavitt told his coffee klatch buddies, "likes to beat up on the big guy when he's down.

For those who want to spend more time than money in Las Vegas, here are 21 things to do for less than $21, all aimed at keeping the bottom line low and the fun factor high. 1. Springs Preserve. Forsake the fake pyramid and fake Statue of Liberty for a power walk through the real Vegas: 110 acres of pre-Bugsy Siegel desert. There are miles of cactus-filled trails, botanic gardens and a museum that pays tribute to the city's Mojave Desert roots. Open daily 10 a.m.-6 p.m. daily.

The Alaska National Guard has sent 60 troops, mostly to wield shovels, to the tiny fishing town of Cordova, which has been socked by 15 feet of snow, and with more on the way. The storm has already caused avalanches along Seward Highway, cutting off Anchorage from neighborhoods to the south and the ski area of Girdwood . . . . After six years, Las Vegas' version of "The Phantom of the Opera" is winding down. Show officials said this week that the last performance at the Venetian Hotel will be Sept.

Efteling plans to unveil a $24-million nighttime spectacular this year that features water fountains, flame-throwers, synchronized spotlights and symphonic music set to fairy tale stories drawn from the Dutch theme park's signature attractions. Aquanura, which will be the third largest water show in the world, is scheduled to open on May 31 as part of the Netherlands theme park's 60th anniversary celebration. PHOTOS: Aquanura water show at the Netherlands' Efteling theme park The water show will be built by Los Angeles-based Water Entertainment Technologies (WET)

He was the founder and chairman of the board of Calabasas-based ValleyCrest Landscape Cos., the nation's largest landscape services company, whose projects have included the gardens at the Getty Center and the rooftop community garden at Walt Disney Concert Hall. But Burton S. Sperber preferred being called the "head gardener. " Sperber, a Malibu resident whose lifelong love of magic rivaled his passion for horticulture, died Friday of complications from surgery at St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica, said company spokesman Dennis Kaiser.

Suddenly, those towels and robes and magazines and pens and stationery and slippers you swiped from the Paris Hilton don't seem like such a big deal, do they? Not when you consider Saturday night, when one or more thieves engineered an art theft at the Ritz-Carlton Marina del Rey Hotel. While security staffers and a curator were looking elsewhere, Los Angeles County Sheriff's officials said, somebody swiped a 6-by-11-inch Rembrandt pen-and-ink drawing worth an estimated $250,000.

The so-called Biker Bandit pleaded guilty here Tuesday to carrying out a movie-worthy heist at the Bellagio casino in which the helmet-wearing thief waved a gun at a craps table, swiped $1.5 million in chips and escaped on a black motorcycle. Anthony Carleo, 29, admitted to armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon, sparing him a trial on multiple felony counts. He faces at least three years in prison when he is sentenced in August, said Christopher Owens, the assistant district attorney handling the case.

Longing for a culture fix? Las Vegas (yes, Sin City) could be just the ticket this weekend, when the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art opens an exhibition of landscapes created by world-class artists.  " A Sense of Place: Landscapes From Monet to Hockney ," which runs Saturday through January 2012 at the museum in the Bellagio hotel, offers more than 30 paintings and photographs, plus a video creation. The art includes both Impressionist works, such as haystacks painted by Claude Monet in 1885, and precise pigment prints created by Vik Muniz in 2006.  Among the other  artists are Marc Chagall, Christo, Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Rauschenberg.

The man suspected of robbing the Bellagio casino of $1.5 million in gambling chips and later selling some to an undercover police officer will stand trial on multiple felony counts, a Las Vegas justice of the peace ruled Friday. Anthony Carleo, 29, is accused of being the helmet-wearing "Biker Bandit" who stormed into the casino in December, brandished a gun, demanded chips from a craps dealer and zoomed off on a black motorcycle. In the weeks that followed, authorities said, Carleo returned to the Bellagio and gambled away so much money that the casino, as it typically does with high-rollers, gave him a free hotel room.

It takes a lot of nerve to advertise a new $3.9-billion casino-hotel development with a line that begs to be mocked. Yet the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas has held tight to its tagline, "Just the right amount of wrong. " As the latest major development to open on the Las Vegas Strip, the Cosmopolitan has endured many wrongs since the project broke ground in 2005. Foreclosure, changes in concept and ownership, extensive redesigns and, oh, that little inconvenience called the recession. But this hotel, built atop a former parking lot, is a confident competitor.