How UFC conquered MMA: From Galveston to Vegas

Fertitta family values and an athletic commission vote that never happened

Sometimes, when I pause to take a breath and look back at all the major stories we’ve been covering at The MMA Draw, stories focused on Hollywood and D.C. power players and front-men for brutal foreign regimes, I have to ask myself one question:

‘How the heck did cagefighting come to this?’

We spend so much time discussing the antics of TKO’s Hollywood owners because the UFC and WWE were not always run like this. Not even close.

So when we see TKO insiders playing major roles in not one but TWO American major party Presidential campaigns while simultaneously having the sovereign wealth funds of multiple foreign countries as major investors, we’re a little bit taken aback.

As Zach always likes to say, no one was prepared for world governments to be fight co-promoters.

This would never have happened in the 1980s when we were cutting our teeth as pro wrestling fans, and UFC didn’t even exist. It certainly wouldn’t have happened in the 1990s when Ted Turner and Vince McMahon were battling it out and the UFC’s original owners were going from overnight success to struggling business.

It wouldn’t even have happened in the 2000s and 2010s, when WWE was a family-owned business that had nearly monopolized its niche and the UFC was a family-owned business that was rapidly monopolizing MMA.

Now that we’re two years into WME Group (formerly Endeavor) ownership of WWE and seven years into their stewardship of the UFC, we can look back in wonder and absolute horror.

But if we look closely, we can see the threads that connect the high-stakes global politics business that is combat sports/entertainment in 2025 with the often seamy roots of the families that built this business.

Oddly enough, to properly tell the story of the Las Vegas family that monopolized mixed martial arts in the 21st Century, it’s necessary to go back to the first third of the 20th Century and a town called Galveston, Texas.

The brutal but community-minded Fertitta crime family of Galveston spawned a Las Vegas casino dynasty

Everything in this post leads to the key moment in our story: Lorenzo Fertitta and his brother Frank III buying the UFC in 2001.

A 27-year-old Lorenzo Fertitta would never have had a seat on the Nevada State Athletic Commission when the Nevada Athletic Commission kept the struggling UFC out of Las Vegas, without his father’s incredible success in Las Vegas.

Lorenzo’s father, Frank Fertitta, Jr., would likely never have enjoyed even a fraction of the success he enjoyed in the mob-controlled Las Vegas in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s if his family hadn’t ruled Galveston, Texas, in the post-WWII era.

And the Fertittas only became the dominant figures in a thriving illegal gambling and vice scene in Galveston because Frank Jr.’s grandfather, Joseph, married into the Maceo Family, which took over the Galveston underworld in the 1930s and pivoted from bootleg alcohol during Prohibition to high-class casinos and prostitution after booze was legalized in 1933.

The Maceo-Feritta Family ruled Galveston with a unique blend of generous community service and brutal monopoly control of local vice markets.

Their complete control of local politicians and law enforcement meant their casinos and cathouses could operate virtually out in the open and made Galveston something of a state treasure in conservative, religious, Jim Crow era Texas.

Epic American roots: The Maceo-Fertitta Family turned crime into community service in the War Era

Readers will notice some elements in the story that we continue to harp upon in the TKO era. Namely, the importance of regulatory capture — ie, controlling the politicians who control law enforcement — the power of celebrity spectacle, and the combination of public-facing front men and more shadowy figures in the background.