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‘The Tailor of Sin City’ Review: Designing Crime
“The Tailor of Sin City” is a wildly improbable story told by an unreliable narrator, full of celebrities, gangsters, drugs, guns and glamour. Still, one of the more fascinating aspects of this four-part documentary concerns genius. Not Mozartian genius. The kind that comes out of nowhere—unnurtured, unschooled, inexplicable and, in this case, blithely corruptible.
For AJ Pratt, the gift was for fabric, sewing, clothing design and having an eye for the line—what made people look good. How did he happen? As is emphasized often enough, Pratt grew up with nothing in rural Arkansas and developed an obsession with tailoring by way of a derelict sewing machine. Moving to Kansas City, Mo., he fell in with the local mobsters who liked his suits, made his way to Las Vegas and eventually amassed a clientele that, in one way or another, involved showgirls, “working girls,” Elvis Presley and Pablo Escobar. He also became the biggest cocaine distributor in so-called Sin City. Escobar, too, wanted to be a better dresser.
The series is based on “The Tailor: How I Dressed Elvis, Escobar, the Mob . . . and Became the Las Vegas King of Cocaine,” which was written with author Sal Manna, who appears here to rather unorthodox purpose: After episode 2, during which Pratt’s history hits a kind of cruising speed, the ghost writer starts questioning which stories were strictly accurate and which were embellished by his subject. Pratt, who died in 2016 at age 76, is seen in archival interviews and heard on Mr. Manna’s tapes, and is a charismatic figure—tall, handsome and always well-dressed, even if the size of his lapels and his hair scream 1970s.
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