The relationships between inspectors and those being inspected has always been ripe for corruption, especially in a freewheeling city like Las Vegas. But friendships between fire or building inspectors and the owners of casinos or high-rise buildings can lead to serious -- even dangerous -- problems.

Whether it's fatalities among construction workers or shoddy investigations of incidents like the Monte Carlo fire of 2008, county officials are struggling to plug the holes that have developed.

Slideshow: Fire Rages at Monte Carlo

"His exact words to me were that this is just the tip of the iceberg and he was surprised I was still alive," said former Harrah's electrician and whistle blower Fred Frazetta who knew he might be putting himself in harms way when he raised a ruckus in 2007.

After all, his revelations about the too-cozy relationships between fire and building inspectors and the businesses they were supposed to oversee were explosive and dangerous, involving big players and mega-projects. But Frazetta believed the officials who had looked the other way while unpermitted projects were built on the Las Vegas Strip had already put lives in danger.

"There were public fire safety traps, the rooms were totally unsafe, and systems that were in place to protect the public in the rooms were compromised. Basically the relationships between the fire department and the building department, it almost seemed like the hotels controlled the city," he said.

It's more than just a lack of permits though. The go-go, get it done, big profits atmosphere on the Strip over the past few years led to safety issues for construction workers as well. Several were killed, as detailed in a Pulitzer Prize winning series in the Las Vegas Sun. In response to very public allegations, Clark County hired an outside auditor, Kessler International, to evaluate the process and figure out why so much was falling through the cracks.

Kessler returned with a blistering condemnation of the building and fire departments' complaint process, documenting that officials falsified reports, did favors for friends, and essentially ran a protection racket for the projects they were supposed to oversee. Kessler confided to Frazetta: Frazetta.

"He went on to say that he could probably spend the rest of his career here in Las Vegas cleaning up the corruption he found while he was here, and he was only here for a week," Frazetta said.

Soon after the Kessler report came out, county leaders created a new team to oversee high-rise inspections and to resolve some of most glaring problems. To Frazetta and others, though, the new team could not resolve the most prickly problems. After all, nearly identical issues were raised 10 years earlier when the I-Team broke the story of senior inspector Marc Mcanally, who told of officials accepting gifts and freebies from hotels and who solicited inspected businesses for cash contributions.

Mcanally was forced out of his job, the furor died down, and it was business as usual all over again. Example, despite all the intense scrutiny of the inspections mess during the past year, Clark County admitted in January that most of the high-rise inspection work at the troubled Harmon building in CityCenter had been left to private inspectors hired by the contractors.