Casino Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Nicholas Pileggi

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Part One: Betting the Pass Line

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Two: Taking the Odds

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part Three: Crapping Out

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  About the Book

  No one knew more about casinos than Frank ‘Lefty’ Rosenthal, the gambling mastermind who, along with his best friend and partner Anthony ‘the Ant’ Spilotro, virtually ran Las Vegas for the mob. For years it was the perfect arrangement – Lefty provided the smarts, while Tony kept the bosses happy with weekly suitcases filled with millions in skimmed cash. It should have lasted forever, but Lefty’s obsessions with running the town – and Tony’s obsession with Lefty’s beautiful showgirl wife, Geri – eventually led to the betrayals and investigations that exploded into one of the greatest scandals in mob history.

  Casino is the shattering inside account of how the mob finally lost its stranglehold on Las Vegas, the neon money-making machine it created.

  About the Author

  Nicholas Pileggi has been a journalist and writer covering crime, politics and corruption in New York since 1956. In 1986 he wrote ‘Wiseguy’ which he developed into the Academy Award-winning screenplay for ‘Goodfellas’ (1990) with Martin Scorsese. Pileggi followed that success with ‘Casino’ (1995) (also with Scorsese) and has since written and produced several other crime-based films and TV. He was married to fellow author and screenwriter Nora Ephron until her death in 2002.

  By the Same Author

  Casino

  Wiseguy

  Blye, Private Eye

  Praise for bestselling author

  Nicholas Pileggi

  and his unsurpassed mob chronicles

  The Stardust . . . The Fremont . . . The Marina . . .

  They ran them all.

  And they lost. Big time.

  CASINO

  “EXTRAORDINARY. . . . Pileggi unravels another fascinating true-crime Mob history. . . . Like Henry Hill in Wiseguys, Lefty Rosenthal tells Pileggi the story of his career in no-holds-barred fashion, exposing the rampant, multileveled corruption in extensive detail. . . . WITH NONFICTION PAGE-TURNERS LIKE THE KIND PILEGGI WRITES, WHO NEEDS CRIME FICTION?”

  –Booklist

  The families, the wives, the girlfriends, the drugs, the payoffs, the paybacks, the busts, the jail time, and the Feds. It was the life he knew.

  WISEGUY

  “Exciting, at times amusing, but always chilling. . . . Wiseguy is topflight.”

  –Detroit Free Press

  “Fast, unrelenting . . . crisp, on-target writing that transforms the old Mafiosi figures into the mythic figures of a novelist like Mario Puzo . . . the only nonfiction book I have ever encountered that I could not put down.”

  –The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Pileggi tells it all without frills. . . . A chilling tale of human rot, all the more effective for the restrained tone.”

  –People

  “Entirely fascinating . . . cynical, violent, avaricious, lawless . . . Hill’s testimony has the clear ring of truth.”

  –The Washington Post Book World

  “Sleazy recollections slip off Henry Hill’s lips fast and furiously . . . the kind of crude authenticity that we haven’t had since The Valachi Papers.”

  –The Sun (Baltimore)

  “Even if you think you’ve had our fill of Mafia books, Nicholas Pileggi’s account of a small-time crook will keep you bug-eyed. . . . A terrific job of reporting.”

  –Newsweek

  “One of the best parts of Wiseguy is a detailed account of the 1978 heist of $6 million in cash and jewels from a Lufthansa airline vault at New York’s Kennedy Airport. . . . A close-up look in Hill’s own words of how he romped through life thieving, bribing, and scheming.”

  –The Wall Street Journal

  “A fascinating book.”

  –Mario Puzo

  “The nitty-gritty, ranging from the death struggles of condemned gangsters to the scandalous country-club atmosphere at some federal detention centers.”

  –The Los Angeles Herald Examiner

  “A true picture of crime . . . Wiseguy has the sound and horror of authenticity.”

  –Time

  “You have to redefine a life of crime after reading Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy . . . a definitive, first-person, inside look at the life of a hoodlum who breaks the law as easily as he breathes.”

  –Benjamin Bradlee

  “Pileggi has lifted the rock of organized crime, and the reader is transfixed with horrid fascination at what crawls out. . . .”

  –Detroit Free Press

  “Wiseguy hurls you into a world you’ve never known . . . filled with vivid, authentic, fascinating detail. . . . There’s more knowledge about human beings–and sympathy for their weaknesses–in Wiseguy than in a dozen novels about the Mafia. Its characters are seared into my mind, and it will be a long time before I forget them. . . . Gripping, compelling.”

  –Robert A. Caro

  For Nora

  Introduction

  “Why is my car on fire?”

  “I HAD JUST had dinner and gotten in my car,” said Frank Rosenthal. “I don’t remember whether or not I turned on the ignition, but the next thing I saw were these little flames. They were only about two or three inches high. They were coming out of the defroster vents. I never heard any noise. I just saw the flames reflected against the windshield. I remember, I asked myself, ‘Why is my car on fire?’ And then the flames started getting bigger.

  “There must have been a strong enough jolt to throw me against the steering wheel, because it hurt my ribs, but I don’t remember any of that. All I thought was that my car was having some kind of mechanical problem.

  “I didn’t panic. I knew I had to get out of the car. I had to get away from the flames. Call the garage. I reached for the door handle. I almost torched my arm. There were flames shooting up between the seat and the door. Now I knew I had to get out of the car or I’d never see my kids again. This time I used my right hand to grab the door handle, and I threw my shoulder against the door at the same time. It worked.

  “I fell out onto the ground. There were flames all around me. Some of my clothes were on fire. I was burning. I rolled around on the ground until the flames were out.

  “Two men helped me to my feet and got me about twenty or thirty feet from the car. They told me to get down, but I didn’t want to. I kept saying that I was all right. They insisted I get down, and when I did, it was as though the atom bomb had gone off. I saw my car jump about two feet into the air, and then flames shot up through the roof about two stories high.

  “That’s when I realized for the first time it hadn’t been an accident. That’s when I knew somebody put a bomb in my car.”

  Before his car was blown up outside Marie Callender’s Restaurant on East Sahara Avenue on October 4, 1982, Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal had been one of
the most powerful and controversial men in Las Vegas. He was in charge of the largest casino operation in Nevada. He was famous for being the man who had brought sports book-betting to Vegas—an achievement that made him a true visionary in the annals of local history. He was a gambler’s gambler, the man who set the odds, a perfectionist who had once astonished the kitchen help in the Stardust Hotel by insisting that every blueberry muffin had to have at least ten blueberries in it.

  But Frank Rosenthal had been dodging trouble most of his life. He started as a clerk and bookie for Chicago gamblers and mobsters before he was old enough to vote. In fact, before going to work inside the casinos in 1971, Lefty had held only one legitimate job—as a military policeman in Korea between 1956 and 1958. In 1961, when he appeared at the age of thirty-one before a congressional committee in Washington investigating the influence of organized crime on gambling, he took the Fifth Amendment thirty-seven times. He wouldn’t even tell them whether he was left-handed—which fact, by the way, had earned him his nickname. A few years later he pleaded nolo contendere to bribing a college basketball player in North Carolina—though he never admitted his guilt. In Florida, he was banned from horse and dog tracks for allegedly bribing the Miami Beach police. And in 1969, along with a dozen of the nation’s biggest bookmakers, he was indicted by the Justice Department in an interstate gambling and racketeering conspiracy case that dragged on for several years—until Lefty’s lawyer got the indictment thrown out because John Mitchell, the attorney general at the time, had failed to personally sign the case’s wiretap orders, as required by law. Mitchell had been out on a golf course the day the court orders were to have been signed and had instructed an aide to forge his name.

  Frank Rosenthal came to Las Vegas in 1968 for the same reason so many other Americans have—to get away from his past. Las Vegas was a city with no memory. It was the place you went for a second chance. It was the American city where people went after the divorce, after the bankruptcy, even after a short stint in the county jail. It was the final destination for those willing to drive halfway across America in search of the nation’s only morality car wash.

  It was also the city where you could strike it rich—a kind of money-happy Lourdes where pilgrims got to hang up their psychic crutches and start life anew. It was the end of the rainbow—American city as pot of gold—the only place in the country where the average guy had a shot at a miracle. Long odds? Sure, but for many of those who went to live in Las Vegas and for many who went to visit, the longest odds in Las Vegas were better than the odds they had been dealt in their lives back home.

  It was a magical place, the neon capital of the world. By the 1970s, the stigma of its mobster history was on the wane, and there seemed almost no limit to its potential for growth. Bugsy Siegel, after all, had died way back in 1947. And he wasn’t even killed in Las Vegas. He was shot dead in what is now the 90210 zip code—Beverly Hills.

  By the 1970s, Las Vegas was poised for such unprecedented growth that the city was much too big to be dominated, or even influenced, by a bunch of men with funny accents and pinky rings. Public corporations like Sheraton, Hilton, and MGM, along with Wall Street investment bankers and Michael Milken’s Drexel Burnham Lambert, were becoming increasingly interested; tentative investments had already begun to turn what was essentially an inhospitable, crop-defying, windblown, alkaline-salted town on the eastern end of the Mojave Desert into the fastest-growing city in the United States. From 1970 to 1980, Las Vegas would double the number of its visitors, to 11,041,524, and the amount of cash left behind by those visitors would increase 273.6 percent, to $4.7 billion. The heart of all this growth was, of course, the casino business—and by 1993 visitors had dropped $15.1 billion in town.

  A casino is a mathematics palace set up to separate players from their money. Every bet made in a casino has been calibrated within a fraction of its life to maximize profit while still giving players the illusion that they have a chance.

  Casinos mean cash. From the nickel slots to the $500 progressive superslots, cash is the blood that enlivens everything and everyone in a casino. The buildings are nothing but a cacophony of money. From the noisy geysers of a winner’s silver change rumbling into the purposely hollow metal trays to the bells and buzzers and lights announcing minute-by-minute wins, cash dominates the room. Normal business techniques of fiduciary responsibility and cash accountability crumble under the mountains of paper money and silver coins that pour into casinos every day.

  There is probably no type of business in the world where as much paper money is handled on a daily basis by more people under more security than in a casino. Dealers have to clap their hands under the Eye before leaving the table to make sure they’re not carrying any chips away with them. The small aprons they wear are to cover their pockets—and keep them from filling them. Every $100 bill changed for chips at the table must be called out by the dealer so the pit boss can watch it being slid into the narrow drop box slit with a metal paddle.

  No matter how busy a craps or roulette table might be, the chips must be evenly stacked by color to facilitate the almost continuous counting by supervisors, and blackjack dealers have to learn to cup the hole card against side readers to make sure players in cahoots aren’t swapping paints (face cards) to beat the house. An experienced stickman at a craps table is trained never to take his eyes off the dice, especially when the noisy drunk at the end of the table spills his drink on the felt, drops his chips on the floor, and takes a swing at his wife. It is at precisely these distracting Kodak moments when the shavers, or baloney dice, are slipped into the game. Trying to beat the casino—through a miraculous win or, alternatively, through the more reliable methods of being a crook—is what brings everyone to town. In Las Vegas, beating the casino by hook or crook has been raised to an art form.

  But, of course, the greatest amount of casino theft has nothing to do with cheating players or crooked dealers. Most of the major theft in a casino doesn’t even happen on the casino floor. The largest amount of larceny takes place behind closed doors in the casino’s sanctum sanctorum, the casino’s most sensitive and security-conscious area, the place where all of the cash churning its way through the hundreds of games and slot machines ultimately heads, the casino’s sacred count rooms.

  Usually a windowless, double-locked, bare-bones workroom with straight-back secretarial chairs, clear plastic tables, and reinforced-steel shelves and floors to bear the tons of coins and stacks of cash that must be counted daily, the count room is the place where the hundreds of double-locked metal boxes under every table game are emptied, their contents of $10, $20, and $100 bills sorted into inch-thick $10,000 bricks and, on busy days, stacked against the walls chest high.

  There are no strangers stealing this money in the count room. This money is taken in spite of the fact that cameras are often in use, that guards check everyone walking in and out, that only a very limited number of people can even enter (state law bars even casino owners), and that every dollar counted out of every single drop box on every shift must be signed and initialed by at least two or three independent clerks and supervisors.

  Count room workers go about their tasks with the deadened glaze of people who must steel themselves against the dazzling daily experience of being immersed in the sight, smell, and touch of money. Tons of it. Stacks of it. Bundles of cash and boxes of coins so heavy that hydraulic lifts must be used to move the tonnage of loot around in the count room.

  There is such a daily fortune of stacked paper bills pouring into the count room that rather than being counted, the cash is assembled into various denominations and weighed. A million dollars in $100 bills weighs 20½ pounds; a million in $20s, 102 pounds; and a million in $5 bills, 408 pounds.

  The coins are poured into specially made Toledo electronic coin-weighing scales manufactured by the Reliance Electric Company—model 8130 being the scale of preference when Lefty ran the Stardust—that sort and count the coins. A million dollars in quarter slot mach
ine winnings weighs twenty-one tons.

  The dream for many of those who find themselves owning casinos, or even working in them, is to figure out exactly how to separate the count room from its loot. Over the years, the methods employed have run from owners getting their hands on drop box keys to employees grabbing fists full of cash before the boxes are even counted. There are complicated methods of misdirected fill slips and maladjusted scales that weigh only one-third of the loot coming through the count room doors. The systems for skimming casinos are as varied as the genius of the men doing the skimming.

  In 1974, only six years after arriving in Las Vegas, Frank Rosenthal had managed to get from Las Vegas exactly what he’d hoped—a new life. He was running four Las Vegas casinos. He had married a gorgeous former showgirl named Geri McGee, and they lived with their two children in a $1 million house facing the fourteenth tee on the Las Vegas Country Club golf course. He had a swimming pool and a housekeeper. His bedroom closet had over two hundred pairs of custom-made silk, cotton, and linen slacks—most of them in pastel shades—which he had specially fitted by tailors flown in from Beverly Hills and Chicago. He was the man to see at the Stardust, and his reputation as an innovative and successful casino manager was soon to be recognized throughout Nevada. He saw himself as part of an elite group of casino impresarios, union pension fund officials, investment bankers, and Nevada politicians who were about to transform Las Vegas from its cowboy and gangster roots into the family-oriented $30-billion-a-year adult theme park it would eventually become.

  It should have been perfect.

  But ten years later, Frank Rosenthal was under investigation as the mob’s casino man in town and the suspected mastermind behind a multimillion-dollar skimming operation. He had been denied a gambling license and was hosting an inadvertently hilarious ninety-minute talk show—which he had modestly named The Frank Rosenthal Show. He was suspected of working in cahoots with his boyhood friend Anthony “Tony the Ant” Spilotro, who the FBI said was the Chicago mob’s main muscle in town, a hit man suspected of at least a dozen homicides. At the time of Lefty’s explosion, Spilotro was under indictment along with eight members of his gang for running an extortion, loan-sharking, and burglary ring out of a jewelry shop he owned just off the Strip. He was also the prime suspect in Lefty’s attempted murder, and he was a man with a motive: he was having a love affair with Lefty Rosenthal’s wife. Well, maybe not a love affair—very little that happened in Las Vegas had to do with love—but an affair nonetheless, one that had been documented by the FBI agents who were assigned to follow Spilotro and that had eventually become public knowledge.