Being Oscar: From Mob Lawyer to Mayor of Las Vegas

by Oscar Goodman

  Over my forty-year career as a defense attorney, I regularly came into contact with people who lied, cheated, and tried to bend the system so that they would come out on top.

  Most of them worked for the government.

  I’ve never shied away from being called a mob lawyer. That’s what I was. But—and this is important—the men I represented were my clients. They were entitled to a lawyer, the same as any other citizen.

  That’s one of the things that always bothered me about the federal government. Strike Force attorneys and FBI agents acted like they were doing God’s work, and therefore they didn’t have to play by the rules. They thought the guys I was representing were evil, and even if there wasn’t enough evidence to prove the charges, it didn’t matter because they were guilty of something. The agents felt that the ends justified the means.

  That’s not what the Constitution says, nor is it what the Bill of Rights is about.

  My clients were some of the most notorious mobsters in the country, but the guys in the white hats were the ones who I saw breaking the law. In almost every case I tried—and I tried hundreds—Federal prosecutors and FBI agents thought nothing of withholding evidence, distorting the facts, or making deals with despicable individuals who would get up on the witness stand and say whatever they were told.

  I was the guy who tried to make the government play by the rules. Sometimes I succeeded. And when I did—and I really mean this—I felt as though I had done something good for the country. I was helping to guarantee the fundamental rights that we’re all entitled to. The grocer, the librarian, the trash collector, and the accountant are all the same under the law. And so is an alleged member or leader of an organized crime family. Just because his name ends in a vowel doesn’t mean some snot-nosed prosecutor with a law degree from Harvard can come along and take away his rights as a citizen.

  Maybe that feeling that we’re all equal has more to do with where I came from than where I was when I started practicing law. I grew up in a tough neighborhood in West Philadelphia, a Jewish kid among a lot of Irish Catholics. We’d fight a lot. Sometimes I’d win, most of the time I’d lose, but I wouldn’t back down. Eventually I ended up playing football with a lot of the Catholic guys, and we became friends.

  That’s one of those life lessons you learn over time—lessons that you’re not even aware you’re learning. Mine was this: never back down. It’s the way I lived my life as a lawyer, and later as the mayor of Las Vegas.

  I had other things going for me, of course. My father, A. Allan Goodman, was a lawyer who worked in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, and my mother was into the arts. I was the oldest of three children, and I received tremendous support from my family. My parents always made me feel I was the handsomest, the smartest, and the best at whatever I did. You can’t underestimate the power of liking who you are if you’re going to make it in the world.

  My dad was a nice, decent man who was treated with respect and admiration wherever he went. He came to watch me play ball, and he took me to Phillies and Eagles games. I remember classic pitching duels between Robin Roberts, the Phillies great right-hander, and Don Newcombe of the Brooklyn Dodgers, both excellent hitters as well. I also remember Eagles’ games at Franklin Field and the great middle-linebacker Chuck Bednarik. They called him “Concrete Charlie” because he was so tough.

  We lived on Christian Street in West Philadelphia, where my dad set up a blackboard in the basement. Every night my sisters and I had to do our homework in chalk on the blackboard first. Once it was perfect, we could copy it onto paper that we would turn in at school the next day. My dad was a stern taskmaster who knew how important education was, and that’s how he instilled its importance in us.

  I loved both my parents very much, and I’m who I am because of them. My mother, Laura, was a card who took over any room she entered; I inherited my dramatic gene from her. Her father, Oscar Baylin, for whom I was named, came from Russia and settled in Chester, Pennsylvania. He started out with a pickle barrel and ended up the wealthy owner of a giant food market. He lost it all in the Great Depression, but his philosophy was that it was better to have had it and lost it than to have never had it at all.

  My mother was the oldest of five daughters. She was a remarkable artist and sculptress who studied with the greats—Hans Hoffman, Milton Avery, Wharton Esherick, and Jacques Lipchitz. She was a graduate of the Moore School of Art, and for a time she taught the blind how to sculpt and also used art as a tool to counsel troubled teenagers. Remarkably, in her eighties, she earned a Ph.D. Her talents were passed on to my sisters. Lona is an actress, and Ericka was a prima ballerina with the Joffrey Ballet and danced for George Balanchine in New York City.

  My mother lived in Philadelphia for most of her adult life, but at age ninety-one and a few years after my dad passed away, I finally convinced her to move to Las Vegas where it was warmer and where she wouldn’t have to deal with the ice and snow. We moved her into a senior citizen facility across the street from the private school that my wife Carolyn founded. A few weeks after we moved her in, I got a call at my City Hall office.

  “Mayor, your mother is causing a riot,” one of the administrators said. “Talk to her, or we’ll have no choice but to ask her to leave.”

  I rushed down there to see what was going on.

  “Mom, what’s the problem?” I asked.

  “Oscar, they don’t have any live food,” she said.

  I had heard that expression once before from a Boston mobster, “Champagne” Dennis Lepore, who was complaining about the meals he was being served in prison.

  “They don’t have baked potatoes or broccoli,” my mother complained. “All they serve is that powdered stuff and boxed stuff.”

  I asked my mother what she had done to get the staff so upset.

  “Well,” she said. “I organized everybody who lives here, and we’re on a hunger strike until they serve live food.”

  The families of the other tenants began to call the complex and ask the administrators what was going on. Some threatened to move their mother or father to another complex. Laura Goodman led a revolution. From that day on, and until she passed away at ninety-three while exercising, she had all the baked potatoes and broccoli she could eat.

  Those are my roots, my bloodlines. That kind of support gave me great self-confidence. I was never afraid to make a decision or express my opinion. More often than not, I believe I was right, but not always.

  When I was at Haverford College, which at the time was ranked the number one liberal arts college in the nation by U.S. News and World Report, I was part of a class that boasted some of the smartest people of my generation. In a student body of fewer than five hundred, I had classmates who would become the CEO of Time-Warner, the editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Times, a judge on the First Circuit Court of Appeals, the editor-in-chief of Time Magazine, and the leading researcher of Tay-Sachs disease. Some of these guys played football, and so did I. I think the coach was afraid to put me in an actual game, but I practiced every day. I was a center and a linebacker, and a very good long snapper, by the way. In one practice, on three straight plays I tackled an All-America running back who was on our team.

  In the classroom, I thought of myself as a student of letters. I took a creative writing course, and my Dad, who was very proud of the fact that I was attending Haverford, would listen as I spoke of the theater arts. At the time, some friends of his had been invited to invest in a show that was heading for Broadway. My father, who was considering investing, asked me to attend a reading of the script. I think the price was $5,000 for a point in the production.

  My father was told that if the play lasted a week on Broadway, it would get picked up and be made into a movie, and investors would also have a piece of that. I went up to New York City and attended the reading, along with a lot of very rich potential investors. After listening to a half hour of the script, I left and told my Dad the play was so bad that it wouldn’t last five
minutes on Broadway.

  He relied on my counsel and passed on the investment.

  You might have heard of the play. It was Neil Simon’s first: Come Blow Your Horn. It ran for 677 performances, and Frank Sinatra starred in the movie. The investment returned tens of thousands of dollars on the one point.

  It was the last time my father asked for my advice.

  But you have to have confidence; I always did. I had something else, too. The Yiddish word is bashert. It’s a sense that even though the odds look insurmountable—even though there’s no way in the world you can win this thing—somehow you’re gonna do it. I went into a lot of criminal cases with the attitude that I would find a way to win; that somehow I’d catch lightning in a bottle. Often, I got lucky.

  I believe in two expressions that say a lot about luck. Ben Franklin, another Philadelphian, supposedly once said, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” There’s something to that. It’s a different spin on that other great expression, “Luck is the meeting of preparation with opportunity.”

  I guess, in a way, I was prepared when I came out here. And Las Vegas in the 1960s provided me with all kinds of opportunities.

  How we got here, Carolyn and I, is where this story starts. Neither one of us knows yet where it’s going to end.

  I’m a gambler. I have been all my life. I’ll bet on anything: baseball, football, basketball. Two cockroaches having a race. I just like the action. It gets my adrenaline going. I remember my first bet. I was in grammar school in Philadelphia, and this bookie used to come around the school yard during the baseball season. You could bet ten cents and you got to pick three players. If they combined for a total of six hits in that day’s game, you won. It paid ten-to-one. I was one of his best customers.

  My Dad sensed that I liked to gamble. Early on, he wanted to teach me a lesson that the odds were always against you. When I was eleven years old, he took me to the Chester County Fair, just outside of Philadelphia. The carnies were out and about, the smell of cotton candy floated on the air, and there were all kinds of “games of chance” waiting for suckers.

  We played the one where you pitched a quarter at a stack of plates. If your quarter landed on a plate and didn’t fall off, you won. The higher the plate, the better the prize. Well, I was a big winner. One of my quarters (and I must have spent five dollars that night) landed on a top plate.

  “What prize do ya’ want, young man?” the operator of the game asked.

  With great pride, I chose a “very expensive perfume.”

  “I’m going to give it to Mom,” I told my Dad.

  When we got home that night, I couldn’t wait for her to open the carton with the perfume in it. With great aplomb she took out this bottle of “perfume.” It smelled like tap water sprinkled with two cloves.

  A gambling lesson learned: even when you win, you may not come out on top.

  But it didn’t stop me from placing bets. And the problem was, very often I won.

  In college at Haverford, I remember betting on a horse named Sherluck in the Belmont Stakes. Sherluck had finished fifth in the Kentucky Derby and in the Preakness, which I had watched on TV. And even though he had only won once in ten starts that year, I had a feeling about him. He went off at 65-to-1 in the Belmont. The track was damp, and I thought anything could happen.

  I bet $10 on him and he won going away. He creamed the favorites. He paid an astounding $132.10. I won $650 based on my $10 bet. It was a veritable fortune to me at the time. I’ve been betting horses ever since—Del Mar, Santa Anita, Fairplex—and I have never seen another horse pay 65-to-1.

  I think I spent most of my winnings at the Blue Comet, a diner near campus that we used to call the “Blue Vomit.” Carolyn and I ate a lot of hamburgers there on Sherluck.

  I’m also a drinker; I tell everyone not to call me after five o’clock. When I finish working, I enjoy a martini or two. You call me on the phone and I’ll be perfectly lucid, but there’s a good chance I won’t remember our conversation in the morning. That’s who I am, and I’ve never tried to hide any of this. I was the same person when I was a defense attorney, trying big cases all over the country, and after I became mayor. I guess when you look at it that way, it made sense that I ended up in Las Vegas.

  But when I was young, Vegas wasn’t even a glint in my eye. In 1964, I was working as a clerk in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office while I was in my third year of law school at the University of Pennsylvania. The third year of law school is really a waste of time; in essence, you’re just waiting to take the bar exam.

  There was a case in which a woman named Lulabell Rossman had been murdered. The two suspects had stolen $300,000 that she had hidden under a mattress, and they went to Las Vegas because it was the ideal place to launder money. For some reason, these were all new bills. So these two guys went to the casinos, bought chips, played for a while, and then cashed out.

  They ended up in Omaha, where they got arrested and were brought back to Philadelphia to await trial. In preparation, two detectives from Las Vegas came to Philadelphia. Arlen Specter, who was an assistant district attorney at the time, assigned me to debrief the detectives. I was just a law clerk, so that was my only involvement with the case. We were on the seventh floor of City Hall, the wind was blowing through the walls, and it was dank and dreary. As we were going over the cops’ story, one of the two detectives said to me, “What’s a young guy like you doing here?” I said, “Where else am I gonna be?” And they said, “Why don’t you come to Vegas?”

  Vegas wasn’t a place I had ever thought about. Carolyn and I were living in an apartment in West Philadelphia, not far from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. It wasn’t the greatest neighborhood; we would routinely hear gunshots at night, and I bought Carolyn a container of Mace that she carried when she went to work. That night at home I asked her, “How would you like to go to the land of milk and honey?” She said, “What, Israel?”

  I couldn’t wait to get out of law school. I sent letters out to district attorneys’ offices all over the country, but I didn’t get a whole lot of offers since I wasn’t the best student in school. I had a chance to go to work for Frank Hogan, the D.A. in Manhattan, but we would have been no better off financially than we were in Philadelphia. I married a princess, but she wasn’t a rich princess.

  I didn’t want to stay in Philadelphia. My father had been in the district attorney’s office there, and later he had his own law practice. I loved my Dad, but I didn’t want to go to work for him and potentially strain our relationship. And I was intrigued by Las Vegas.

  I could care less that the Flamingo was Meyer Lansky’s and Bugsy Siegel’s baby. At the time, I had barely heard the words “organized crime.” Back then, J. Edgar Hoover was still telling everyone that there was no Mafia. All that mattered to me was whether we should relocate to the desert.

  I was looking for some adventure; something different. So I decided to write to the district attorney in Las Vegas about a job. Turns out there wasn’t a D.A. in Las Vegas; he was in Clark County. Luckily the letter got to the right place and I was offered a job. Before we decided, we went for a weekend to check it out.

  We went on a junket run by the B’nai Brith. Carolyn was ill with mono the whole time we were there, so she just stayed in the hotel room at the Flamingo. I walked around downtown on a Saturday morning. People were friendly. I stopped in some lawyers’ offices and asked what kind of opportunities were there, and everyone encouraged me. Most of their practices were divorce and civil cases, of course, but I liked the place.

  To a person, they told me the opportunities were limitless. There weren’t that many criminal cases, but every once in a while somebody would shoot somebody. It was a relatively safe city, in hindsight perhaps because the mob was there.

  Carolyn was feeling better by Saturday, so I took her to the Flamingo’s “Candlelight Room.” I ordered a martini, and Jimmy Blake, the bartender, served one with a pickled Brussels sprout as a g
arnish. I never saw one before, and never saw one since.

  By that point, I had made up my mind that I’d rather risk starting a career in Las Vegas than stay in Philadelphia. If I had stayed in Philly, I probably would have gone to work for Arlen Specter, and eventually would have become a federal judge. It was clear that Arlen was a shining light and that he was going to go places. Had I stayed, my whole life would have been different. I might have been as successful, but I wouldn’t have had the romance, the thrill of what I did in Las Vegas.

  Later, when Specter was the U.S. senator and I was the mayor, he would always talk about that case he had assigned me when I was a kid. I was in Washington once with some politicians, and we were walking around the Senate offices meeting different senators. When we ran into Arlen, he told the story again. He said he sent me to Las Vegas to collect the money from the Lulabell Rossman case, and I never came back.

  I accepted an offer to clerk for the Clark County District Attorney’s Office in Vegas, and we left Philadelphia right after I took the bar exam in August 1964. We drove out in an Oldsmobile Cutlass convertible and took the old Route 66. I drove during the day, and Carolyn drove during the night; it took us three and a half days to get there. We stopped in St. Louis one night and in New Mexico another night. When we drove up on Las Vegas, we stopped on a mesa overlooking the valley. We could see a few flickering lights blinking in the desert. But not many big buildings. This wasn’t Philadelphia. I swear, some tumbleweed rolled across the highway in front of us. The only time either of us had ever seen tumbleweed was in a Roy Rogers movie.

  My wife looked at me and said, “My parents were right. I should never have married you. Where have you taken me?” She was prescient. When she was taking courses at UNLV, where she got a Masters in counseling, one of her professors asked for a definition of cultural deprivation. Carolyn asked me what I thought. I said it was anyone in Las Vegas who couldn’t afford a round-trip ticket to San Francisco.