Beneath the glittering facade of the Las Vegas Strip lies a dark underworld: hundreds of homeless people live in the city's flood channels, struggling with addiction and despair. Among them is Kregg Nattrour, a 54-year-old former truck driver who lost his wife and ended up homeless. 'I wanted to make this my last month down here,' he said, resting on a pile of mattress foam in a dark, squat-ceilinged tunnel. 'I can't handle another month of this.'
Matt O'Brien, a homeless advocate and author of 'Beneath the Neon,' visits the tunnels twice a month. He said Nattrour looked skinny, apparently because casino trips prevented him from eating well. 'I gambled all my money!' Nattrour complained. He admitted spending $60 of his social security check on drugs and over $600 on slot machines. 'Last month I put $400 into a video poker machine, and I never got a four of a kind! It pissed me off so much.'
John Aitcheson, 59, sleeps near the tunnel mouth between shifts at a Strip convenience store. 'I could get an apartment,' he said. 'But all my money would go to rent, food, electricity, water ... By the time I was done there'd be no money left over to do anything.' He moved to Las Vegas from Orlando to enjoy the city's vices: 'Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, you can gamble, drink, smoke, get hookers. Whatever you want is here in Vegas.'
Drug addiction is the most pernicious problem below ground, O'Brien said, with tunnels often segregated by whether denizens prefer heroin, crack or meth. Gambling addiction is also rampant. Lori Flores, clinic manager at the Problem Gambling Center in Las Vegas, said homeless gamblers often chase losses in a desperate attempt to turn their lives around. 'What I can do is take this $5 I've made getting change from people and turn it into a $100,000 and get my home back, get my wife back, try to get my life back on track. But that's not the way it works.'
Frank Parenti, of HELP of Southern Nevada, said underlying mental illness that has gone untreated is a key factor. O'Brien's 2007 book aimed to inspire the city or a nonprofit to help, but neither panned out. Meanwhile, the tunnel dwellers remain, with a painted message on the wall near Aitcheson's camp: 'God don't live here. Only me.'
