The Road to Mandalay Las Vegas Style

The City of Mandalay was the last royal capital of the country formerly known as the Republic of Burma—now known as the Republic of the Union of Myanmar—and is the second-largest city in that country after Rangoon. The city has a population of over 1 million people.

Mandalay was founded in 1857 by King Mindon of Burma at the foot of Mandalay Hill as a “metropolis of Buddhism . . . on the occasion of the 2,400th jubilee of Buddhism.” It is located on the Irrawaddy River in northern Myanmar and includes a restored Mandalay Palace surrounded by a moat dating from the Konbaung Dynasty, which took power in 1752 and lasted until England incorporated Burma into its Empire in 1885 after the third and final Anglo-Burmese War. Buddhist pagodas and statues shimmering in gold leaf established the fairytale of a Mandalay rich with promise, beauty, and treasure.

Mandalay has always functioned as Burma’s main commercial, educational, and health center, and suffered extensive damage from Japanese bombing and occupation during the Second World War, as well as a series of twentieth-century fires that ultimately led to substantial rebuilding.

Isolationist and military rule plagued the city until a few years ago, and the country was profoundly influenced by the moral leadership of Aung San Suu Kyi, co-founder and leader of the National League for Democracy and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 following her imprisonment and lengthy house arrest.

(In recent months, Myanmar has also become a hotspot for massacres of over 1 million ethnic Rohingya Muslims, who speak a language akin to Bengali, are not regarded as legitimate citizens of Myanmar, and tend to live on the western edge of the country next to the Bay of Bengal near Bangladesh. Hence, Myanmar encompasses both a long overdue rehabilitation of the official government that includes Aung San Suu Kyi as well as the horrors of barely acknowledged ethnic cleansing of the Rohingyas, which has caused at least 400,000 survivors to flee from Myanmar to crowded Bangladeshi refugee camps.)

Historically “Mandalay” has signified romance as well as golden riches. The western world took notice when the English writer Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Mandalay” was first published in 1892, describing the nostalgia of an English soldier for a Burmese girl he had once kissed:

“By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ lazy at the sea,

“There's a Burma girl a-settin’, and I know she thinks o’ me;

“For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:

“ ‘Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!’

“Come you back to Mandalay,

“Where the old Flotilla lay:

“Can’t you ’ear their paddles chunkin’ from Rangoon to Mandalay?

“On the road to Mandalay,


“Where the flyin’-fishes play,


“An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ’crost the Bay!”

The poem was partially set to music by Olie Speaks in 1907 as “On the Road to Mandalay,” becoming a best-seller in piano sheet music and being recorded by a variety of twentieth-century singers including several prominent operatic baritones, as well as Frank Sinatra in a controversial jazzy version with some changes to the lyrics.

The classic 1940 movie “Rebecca,” based on the Daphne Du Maurier novel (adapted as Alfred Hitchcock’s first feature film), is set in a towering Gothic mansion appropriately named—what else?—“Manderley.”

The movie’s first line is the narrator’s recollection that, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” The dual nature of the mansion—magnificent and richly furbished as well as a bastion of dread and sorrow—foreshadows the dramatic but ambivalent storyline.

More recently, in 2016, Burmese filmmaker Midi Z released his movie “The Road to Mandalay” featuring a pair of illegal Burmese immigrants who seek a new life in Bangkok, preserving the theme of Mandalay as a place of irreconcilable opportunities for both happiness and calamity.

Fast forward to the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in America’s Sin City, Las Vegas, the country’s quintessential gambling lure in the desert, available to enrich or bankrupt wandering souls, sometimes both in quick succession.

Enter Stephen Paddock, 64-year-old real estate speculator and compulsive gambler who spent long nights toying with fate at the tables and slot machines, as well as high-stakes video poker, and who had eventually become a millionaire of sorts, entitled to a variety of gambling perks including free accommodations and meals. He had bragged about winning or losing large sums over the years, including the weeks immediately preceding his check-in at the Mandalay Bay with its lavishly decorated rooms and common areas gaudily reminiscent of the fabled golden city of Mandalay.

Paddock grew up as the oldest of four children of Benjamin Hoskins Paddock, who began his criminal career in Illinois with auto thefts and a confidence game, graduating to bank robberies for which he was convicted in 1961 and sentenced to twenty years in prison. Seven years later he escaped from federal prison and was featured on the FBI’s Top 10 list for some years, being recaptured in 1978 in Oregon where he was running a bingo parlor.

Hence, Stephen Paddock’s father was removed from his family when young Stephen was only seven years old, and apparently remained away both by circumstance and choice and, in addition, was something of a gambler himself who ran confidence games and a bingo parlor.

Benjamin Paddock, who tried to run down an FBI agent in Las Vegas in 1961 with an auto, foreshadowed the death and mayhem his son would visit upon that city fifty-six years later. When Benjamin escaped from prison the FBI described him as a “psychopath” and “extremely dangerous.”

Stephen’s younger brother Bruce Paddock has a long arrest record for criminal threats, arson, vandalism, petty theft, burglary, marijuana use, driving on a suspended license, and contempt. He was “a habitual drug user and seller” who used meth and weed and was considered “extremely erratic and unpredictable.”

Consequently, both Stephen’s father and younger brother exhibited antisocial behavioral traits that would ultimately be mirrored in Stephen’s Las Vegas massacre.

Stephen had worked as a young man for the IRS and for a predecessor of defense contractor Lockheed Martin. Two early marriages failed, one that lasted three years in the late 1970s and a second that lasted about six years in the late 1980s. Both marriages were childless, and neither former wife will provide details of her married life to the public. Stephen Paddock’s girlfriend at the time of the shootings was Marilou Danley, a petite Filippino native whose long-time marriage to an Australian ended when she began living with Stephen Paddock in 2013.

Marilou was considerably more sociable than Stephen, keeping in touch with a Filippino daughter and grandchildren in Los Angeles, and even the stepchildren of her Australian former husband of twenty-five years, Geary Danley, now a resident of Arizona. Her first husband had died. Prior to her cohabitation with Stephen Paddock, Danley had been considered to be a “chatty extrovert.” That changed significantly when Marilou began spending most of her time with Stephen.

Paddock’s influence on Danley caused the couple to tend to avoid contact with neighbors in their Mesquite, Arizona neighborhood, and Stephen was deemed to be “a loner, reclusive, [and] aggressively unfriendly.” He kept a large safe in his garage, and the two were frequently absent for months at a time. Paddock was observed to be verbally abusive and overbearing toward Marilou Danley in routine social settings, curt and intolerant. Danley was publicly subservient and obedient.

Stephen Paddock’s dark side became increasingly more evident over time. Marilou has described him as exhibiting symptoms such as lying in bed and “just moaning and screaming ‘Oh my God.’” Danley was careful not to use perfume, hair spray, or bubble bath to avoid aggravating Paddock’s allergies.

Paddock was already years into his itinerant life as a full-time gambler, spending long nights in casinos and sleeping during the daytime. He had made a small fortune in real estate and business deals and tended to drink heavily while he gambled. He also liked to take long cruises on ships which featured casinos on board, frequently taking Marilou along. The cruises included stops at ports in Spain, Italy, Greece, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates. Little is known about any port stops the couple may have made during their joint cruises.

Paddock’s neighbors in the town of Mesquite, Arizona, where the couple lived when Stephen wasn’t gambling or on a cruise, observed that the shades were drawn during the day when Stephen was in residence and that he was nonresponsive to efforts to draw him into neighborhood activities. At times Paddock would open his garage door, “revealing an enormous safe the size of a refrigerator.”

Something critical occurred to Stephen Paddock in October 2016 that set him on the path to mass murder. At the time he owned seven guns. But thereafter he began buying additional handguns, rifles, and assault weapons as well as huge amounts of ammunition and the chemical ingredients for explosives (which were ultimately stored in the vehicle that Stephen parked at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino garage).

He apparently bought his weapons one at a time in a variety of gunshops in four different states, passing background checks without red flags, stashing the weapons in his Mesquite garage in the enormous safe, and eventually accumulating a total of over forty different guns by the summer of 2017.

Marilou claims to have been entirely unaware of the arsenal being amassed by her boyfriend. Whatever had triggered Stephen’s gun-buying spree the previous October was not known to her.

Paddock booked two hotel rooms in Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel for early August 2017 with a “clear view” overlooking the Lollapalooza outdoor music festival in Grant Park. An estimated 100,000 people attended the festival each of the four days it was held, including the Obama daughters Malia and Sasha. Paddock eventually elected not to stay at the Blackstone.

During the summer Paddock also researched hotels near Fenway Park, the home of the Boston Red Sox, but seems to have discovered that he could only obtain an obstructed view of the ballpark from those hotels. This appears to indicate that Paddock considered planning a mass shooting of Red Sox fans during a baseball game.

Paddock also did web research on another potential Boston target, the Boston Center for the Arts, a performing arts complex in the South End of Boston with a variety of performance spaces, but apparently none that could accommodate an audience dense enough to tempt a mass shooter or were otherwise satisfactory for Paddock’s plans.

In addition, Paddock had reserved an airbnb room in the Ogden luxury apartment complex on North Las Vegas Boulevard that includes towers overlooking the late September Las Vegas festival Life Is Beautiful. The festival, which featured acts such as Gorillaz and Lorde performing on a variety of outdoor stages in downtown Las Vegas, also included food stalls, vendors, and the like. A real potpourri target for a sharpshooter. But Paddock apparently had second thoughts about those plans as well.

Eventually, Stephen Paddock purchased an airline ticket for Marilou to visit her family in the Philippines, with an apparent stopover in Hong Kong, and surprised her with the gift, urging her to make the trip. She complied. As she was leaving for abroad, Paddock wired about $100,000 into a Filippino bank account for the benefit of Marilou and her family in order to purchase a residence, surprising her and convincing her that Paddock was ending their relationship. Paddock was clearly planning for the future, and it did not include the domestic duo of Stephen and Marilou. Hence in that regard, Marilou’s suspicions were correct.

Finally Stephen Paddock checked into Room 135 and an adjoining suite on the 32d floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas on September 25, 2017, with clear sightlines to both the performance area of the Harvest Festival of country western music on Route 91 below and huge jet fuel storage tanks adjacent to the Las Vegas airport.

Paddock must have made multiple trips with a variety of pieces of luggage and equipment—perhaps including a golf bag and/or by using the freight elevator—in order to have unobtrusively transported twenty-three guns and other paraphernalia to his rooms. His weapons included military-style rifles (four Daniel Defense DDM4 rifles, three FN-15s and other rifles made by Sig Sauer), handguns, and at least one rifle that had been fitted with a “bump stock” to convert it to a fully automatic rifle that functioned like a machine gun, firing at high speed.

Paddock had apparently also attempted to purchase tracer bullets in order to observe—and correct—any future shooting trajectory in real time, but those bullets were out of stock. This circumstance probably saved lives.

Stephen Paddock spent the next seven days preparing his attack, positioning three cameras around the rooms including one in a room’s peephole and two in the hallway as police lookouts, and posting a “do not disturb” sign for at least three of those days. During Paddock’s week-long stay, no housekeepers entered the rooms to check anything. Paddock barricaded the doors to his hotel rooms as well as the stairs. He was ready for his last act.

Country singer Jason Aldean was performing on August 2, 2017, the third and final night of the Harvest Festival, before a packed Las Vegas audience of about 22,000 mostly young music lovers in the exposed outdoor space. The final act had just begun on the stage hundreds of feet below Paddock’s suite.

That evening, Stephen Paddock took his revenge against a world that had alienated him so severely that only committing as many murders as possible would sate his sick need for redress. He broke windows in two directions. He fired out those windows with semi-automatic weapons rendered fully automatic by bump stocks as if they were machine guns, spouting bullets so rapidly that he murdered fifty-eight innocent people, wounded an astonishing 546 more people, many severely by the high-caliber wounds that tore into their flesh from the windows far above them.

And all this in the space of ten minutes, triggered by an effort less than a minute earlier by an unarmed casino security guard to check an alarm on a door located on the 32d floor that had been left ajar. Stephen Paddock shot through his door at the guard—one Jesus Campos—dozens of times, wounding Campos in the leg. And then he immediately opened fire on the crowds below.

Paddock even attempted to blow up nearby airport fuel tanks with high-powered shots, landing at least one of them but failing to ignite the fuel which was stored adjacent to both the assembled concert crowd and the Las Vegas airport. A fiery apocalyptic armageddon was apparently avoided as a result.

Two weeks later, dozens of victims remain hospitalized, many in critical or serious condition. One young woman was in a coma for at least ten days, having been shot through the face and losing an eye, but still lucky to be alive.

The security guard Jesus Campos was interviewed by a variety of media but vanished a few days ago, a hired guard with an obscured license plate sitting in his vehicle in front of the Campos residence. Why Campos is in hiding, at least for the time being, is not clear.

As for Stephen Paddock, the police stormed his hotel room and found him dead of a self-inflicted gunshot, a victim of his own cowardice, taking his murderous intentions to the grave.

In the end, the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino did not turn out to be a golden lure or prize for the hundreds of killed and wounded concert-goers and first responders but, rather, a lethal trap for innocent victims as well as a final resting place for the shooter himself, wrung from his unspeakable and unfathomable oxymoronic quarrel with the world.