Rosenthal ended up blacklisted and chased out of town, while his enforcer, the notorious Tony "the Ant" Spilotro, was beaten with baseball bats and buried alive in a cornfield.The Stardust will have its last hurrah on Hallowe'en night before being shuttered for good, two months earlier than originally scheduled. Then the wrecking ball will come down to make space for a 63-acre luxury casino and resort complex called Echelon Place.It is a demise that has been a long time coming. The Stardust's contemporaries - the Dunes, the Sands and the one-time showcase Desert Inn - have all vanished in the past decade to make room for lavish high-end casinos with gourmet restaurants and novelties such as Impressionist art collections. The Costa Turchese, which is home to a marine nature reserve, is to be rigorously protected from all construction. Once vaunted as the largest casino with the largest swimming pool in town, the Stardust has come to look increasingly like a relic of a bygone era - its purplish hue looking decidedly unambitious next to the pyrotechnic wonders of the Luxor pyramid or the ersatz splendours of Paris, New York New York or the Venetian, further south on the Las Vegas strip.

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Its end also symbolises Las Vegas's transition from a Mob town to a corporate entertainment capital blessed by Wall Street.

The Stardust was among three casinos run by Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal, a sports bookie and Mob placeman whose lightly fictionalised counterpart was portrayed by Robert De Niro in the 1996 Martin Scorsese movie Casino. Now one of the last icons of that era, the Stardust, is set for demolition as soon as the end of this year. Ms Kampusch has also been offered incentives, understood to include a job and support with her education.. Not too much still remains of the old Las Vegas, the cheesy, 1950s-era casinos where Rat Pack wannabes downed Manhattans and smoked their way through the night while Mob enforcers sent down from Chicago or Kansas City made sure everybody stayed under control. "This is a wonder, which is why I can understand the interest. Somewhere in the world, someone returned from the dead."The Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF), the chain which ran Wednesday evening's television interview, said it would transfer all money pledged, as well as the foreign rights, directly to Ms Kampusch, who indicated she would like to put at least some money towards helping the hungry as well as women in Mexico who had been abducted and raped.

"A woman approaches the public with fantastic articulation, choosing her words very carefully and being very specific," he said, adding he had expected a far more evidently traumatised person to emerge from such an ordeal. Ninety-five per cent of people surveyed by market researchers said they found Ms Kampusch "likeable" and 93 per cent said they thought she had done the right thing by talking to the media. Wolfgang Fellner, the publisher of the country's newest daily, Oesterreich, went as far as to say that "the whole country has fallen in love with Natascha".Mr Friedrich said he could understand why the media had taken such a shine to Ms Kampusch. Dietmar Ecker, Ms Kampusch's media adviser, said that no more interviews had been planned soon and ways would be found to reduce the pressure on her.But the first series of interviews seems to have given as big a boost as possible to Ms Kampusch's public image.