By most accounts he was a cheat, an egomaniac, a friend of the mob, and he
most brilliant man ever to have ruled the Las Vegas casinos—before he was
finally blacklisted by the Nevada gaming authorities in the 1980s.
The influence of Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal over Sin City was such that his life
became the subject of a 1995 Martin Scorsese movie, Casino, in which he was
played by Robert De Niro (a casting choice that left Rosenthal “almost
impressed”, according to those who knew him). Meanwhile, his former lawyer,
Oscar Goodman, is now the city’s high-living Democratic Mayor.
Even after his exile to Florida, it was widely believed that
Rosenthal—nicknamed ‘Lefty’ for the notorious instance when he plead the
Fifth Amendment no less than 38 times, refusing even to confirm that he was
left-handed—was indestructible. After all, he had survived a direct hit by a
car bomb in 1982 outside Tony Roma’s steakhouse—a fluke probably
attributable to the steel plate fitted to his Cadillac Eldorado to correct a
balancing problem. Locals claim they can still point to the scorch marks in
the restaurant’s car park on East Sahara Avenue.
But mortality caught up with Rosenthal on Monday, when the former casino boss
died of natural causes at his luxury Miami Beach high-rise condominium. He
was 79-years-old.
“He was the innovator and creator of what we know today as the race and sports
book in Las Vegas with all the modern accoutrements,” Mayor Goodman told the
Las Vegas Review Journal, adding that Rosenthal was “a loyal friend and a
loving parent” and “the kind of guy who, when working in the casino
industry, would see a cigarette butt on the floor, pick it up himself, and
dispose of it. And then fire the employee whose job was to have picked it
up.” Rosenthal never really approved of the modern, post-mob, highly
mortgaged Las Vegas—a city now as famous for its gourmet chefs and hot-stone
spa treatments as its endless banks of flashing and gurgling one-armed
bandits. Many residents argue that he would never have allowed Sin City to
become so caught up in the current credit crisis—with stalled multibillion
dollar construction projects now threatening the future of the very casinos
that were supposed to bankroll them. Today, thanks to Las Vegas’s
diversification into real estate and business conferences—and the resulting
loans from Wall Street—the city must fear recessions instead of thriving on
them, as it did without fail from the 1970s until the weeks after September
11, when it showed its first signs of vulnerability to the overall health of
the country’s economy.
This year’s savage downturn has resulted in the Sin City tycoon Sheldon
Adelson liquidating half a billion dollars of his fortune to bail-out his
struggling Venetian-themed Sands hotel-casino.
Meanwhile, revenues on the iconic Las Vegas Strip are down by an astonishing
15 per cent.
Born on June 12, 1929 in Chicago—when Alphonse ‘Scarface’ Capone was running
the notorious Chicago Outfit—Rosenthal learned the gambling trade through
back alley bookmaking operations, moving to Nevada only at the age of 39,
where he found to his astonishment that he was able to live as a
‘respectable’ member of society. Although he was never able to get his own
gaming license—his many problems with the law saw to that—he ended up
running the Stardust, Hacienda, Fremont and Marina casinos on behalf of
Allen Glick, regarded by the FBI as a frontman for the Chicago mob.
Rosenthal even hosted his own weekly Stardust-sponsored TV show—The Frank
Rosenthal Show—on which his first guest was Frank Sinatra.
All the while, the authorities suspected Rosenthal’s casinos of engaging in
‘skimming’—where cash from a legal business is shipped off to crime
syndicates before it’s ever counted. Rosenthal’s ‘enforcer’ in this activity
was said to be his boyhood friend Anthony Spilotro (an Italian-American,
unlike Rosenthal, who was Jewish). Indeed, it has been noted that there was
a 70 per cent spike in the Las Vegas murder rate after Spilotro’s arrival.
By the late 1970s, however, Rosenthal and Spilotro had fallen out over
Spilotro’s affair with Rosenthal’s estranged wife. Meanwhile, Spilotro had
formed a jewel-thieving ring known as the Hole in the Wall Gang and had been
blacklisted by the gaming authorities thanks to the testimony of Aladena
“Jimmy The Weasel” Fratianno, which saw him indicted for skimming. Some
believe that Spilotro might have conspired to kill Rosenthal with the
bungled 1982 car bomb attack. Whatever the case, Spilotro ultimately became
a liability for the mob and it is said that his execution was ordered in
1986 by captains in Chicago. According to popular folklore, Spilotro was
beaten and then buried alive in a cornfield, along with his brother,
Michael. The autopsies supported the theory.
It was Rosenthal’s association with Spilotro that ultimately drove him out of
Sin City. “In retrospect, reputation and the fact that we were boyhood
friends—there was no way for me to overcome it,” he admitted to Florida’s
Sun-Sentinel.
Others suggest that Rosenthal’s strong-arm style of business was simply going
out of fashion. Allen Glick once summed up the casino boss’s philosophy as,
“If you interfere with any of the casino operations or try to undermine
anything I want to do... you will never leave this corporation alive”.
Although Rosenthal fled Sin City after the car bombing, he loomed large over
the city as he fought against his inclusion in the Nevada gaming
authorities’ ‘Black Book’ while managing to escape unscathed from multiple
corruption hearings. Meanwhile, Las Vegas moved on, with mob-controlled
operations being sold out one by one to large corporations, many of them
publicly listed on Wall Street. Many now idolise Rosenthal’s Las Vegas.
Others aren’t so sentimental.
As one anonymous former federal prosecutor told the Review Journal yesterday:
“It’s been said you should never speak ill of the dead. There are exceptions
to the rule. Frank Rosenthal is one of those exceptions. He was an awful
human being.”
