Being Oscar: From Mob Lawyer to Mayor of Las Vegas

by Oscar Goodman

  I thought this was a cheap shot, and I think it said more about him than it said about me. He wasn’t a particularly bright fellow, but he was holier-than-thou. And it was very disturbing to think that he was calling the shots when it came to the Black Book, and in a position to make moral judgments based on some dime-store-novel-like stories that might have appeared in the media—stories without any evidence to back them up. I thought the whole thing was un-American.

  That’s the kind of mindset that existed when Spilotro came to Las Vegas. He and the guys around him were constantly under surveillance, either by the FBI or the Intelligence Unit—talk about an oxymoron—of the Metro Police.

  A few months ago, I was given a copy of an Intelligence Unit surveillance log from 1979–80. Investigators working for the unit filed these daily reports. What a waste of taxpayers’ money! It was just nonsense, following people around, going from casino to casino and reporting who was there. No one was immune from their invasive presence—judges, county commissioners, lawyers, everyday people, and, of course, Tony and anybody with whom he was in contact.

  I loved the comments about me.

  There was one from January 5, 1980, that read in part: “Pissed off Oscar Goodman.” I have no idea what that was about, but on January 25 there was a second notation, “Oscar Goodman still pissed off.”

  Who gives a shit? This is what law enforcement is about? They were tracking my comings and goings. “Oscar is going to the airport. . . . Oscar is back in town.”

  When my daughter Cara turned 13, we had her bat mitzvah at a lodge outside of town. I invited everybody—state Supreme Court judges, senators, assemblymen, clients, family members, friends. At the bottom of the hill, Metro Police and the FBI set up surveillance. They took down the license plate numbers of every car heading for the lodge that day. It was ridiculous, like something out of The Godfather. And the saddest part was, some of the people I had invited turned away when they saw the authorities. Too bad for them—we had a great time. Tony was there, and so was Joey Cusumano and some of my other reputed wiseguy clients. They weren’t worried about anybody taking down their license plate numbers.

  FBI agents came up to the lodge and asked whether they could come in. I told them to drop dead.

  Joey Cusumano was a really interesting guy. Originally from New York, the feds and the gaming regulators alleged that he was tied to the Chicago Outfit. Naturally, they wanted him excluded from the casinos. I represented him in that fight, but he still ended up in the Black Book.

  He had one conviction tied to an alleged insurance scam involving the Culinary Union. I didn’t think that proved he was a “career criminal,” as the authorities alleged. I also pointed out that Joey had a great resume. He was one of the line producers for the movie The Cotton Club and had run a successful restaurant. He moved in circles that had nothing to do with the criminal underworld. He was an avid tennis player and a regular at the Las Vegas Country Club, where he mixed and mingled with the city’s movers and shakers.

  Why he shouldn’t be allowed in the city’s casinos was beyond me. I argued that he was targeted because his name ended in a vowel, like many listed in the Black Book, but the authorities didn’t want to hear that.

  Joey Cusumano never complained about the situation. He fought the fight, lost, and moved on. I appreciated that. He was the reason we held my daughter’s bat mitzvah at the lodge and later her engagement party at our home, instead of in one of the casino-hotels. If we had had those events at a casino, Joey couldn’t have attended. That’s another example of how ridiculous and discriminatory the exclusion law was.

  Joey’s friendship meant a lot to me, and I wanted him there for those events. He and Tony were more than just clients. And it bothered me to see the way the law was able to abuse them.

  Tony and the guys around him were stopped almost every single time a cop saw them in a car. The cops took them out of the car and harassed them. One associate of Tony’s, Frankie Bluestein, was killed. He worked at the Hacienda as a maitre d’ and was supposedly “with” Spilotro. The Hacienda was one of the casinos that the Chicago Outfit allegedly had an interest in. Bluestein was a thirty-five-year-old hotel worker driving home one night, not speeding or driving erratically. But he got stopped by two Metro detectives, and they shot him dead. They said he got out of his car with a gun in his hand, but that was bullshit. He was holding the keys to his car in his hand and didn’t have a gun.

  The cops were cowboys; the good guys were the bad guys. The FBI was no different. Yablonsky, their leader, was the kind of guy who would make J. Edgar Hoover roll over in his grave. This wasn’t law enforcement; it was harassment. Wherever I went, there was Yablonsky’s cigar-chomping ugly face.

  He came to Vegas for the wrong reason, and did his job the wrong way. He retired in 1983, and I like to think I had something to do with that. I like to think I helped run him out of town. He talked about law and order, but at the same time his wife had a business where she was selling shrimp and seafood to the casinos. Do you think the fact that her husband was the Special Agent in Charge of the Las Vegas FBI helped her make any sales? By mistake he received a huge payment from a bank one time. I think it was $40,000. Did he return it? Hell, no; not until it became a big issue three years later.

  The FBI and the Organized Crime Strike Force were single-minded in their focus, but they lost sight of what their job was all about. Their brazenness toward Tony pervaded almost everything they did. Once I had a client who had been subpoenaed before a federal grand jury. I took him to the federal building and waited outside the grand jury room. In the hallway, up on the wall, there was a plaque with these caricatures of Nick Civella, one of my clients and the supposed mob boss of Kansas City; Lefty Rosenthal, another one of my clients; and Judge Harry Claiborne, a good friend of mine and one of the best defense lawyers to ever practice in Nevada. Harry was a federal judge at the time, and the Strike Force had a caricature of him as a clown up on the wall. This is what you saw when you were heading into the grand jury room.

  It was intimidating and frightening. The message was clear: if you don’t play ball and do what these guys want, you’re going to end up targeted and your face will be on that wall.

  I wasn’t going to stand for that, so I did a most unusual thing. I applied as a citizen for a search warrant. Judge Roger Foley approved my application and sent federal marshals in. They took the thing off the wall. I think it was one of the few times—maybe the only time—a federal judge issued a search warrant based on an application from a citizen.

  I made the plaque public, figuring what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. I wanted people to know how these guys operated. I think it demonstrated the arrogance of the Strike Force, the FBI, and the pieces of garbage in Washington who backed up everything they did.

  When I first got to Las Vegas, it wasn’t like that. The sheriff back then, the guy who headed the Metropolitan Police Department, was Ralph Lamb. He was a throwback to another time. He had been a rancher and a calf roper, a legitimate tough guy. This was his town, and he was the law.

  He’s now the subject of a television show written by Nicholas Pileggi, in which Dennis Quaid stars as Sheriff Lamb.

  One of my favorite clients, Nick Civella, used to sneak into town all the time. Nick just loved Las Vegas. There was a restaurant, the Venetian, that made pork necks in vinegar just the way he liked them. He’d fly out for the food. He didn’t care much about gambling, but he loved those pork necks. Sheriff Lamb would have his people waiting at the airport to turn Nick around and send him back.

  There were probably two people in my life who should have been living in the days of ancient Rome. One was J. R. Russo from Boston, who I’ll talk about a little later. The other was Nick Civella.

  Nick was balding with white hair, thick lips, a prominent nose, and eyeglasses as thick as coke bottles. But there was just something about him. When he walked into a room, you got the sense that everyone should stand at attention. He
had more street sense than anyone I ever saw.

  Nick was intuitive, and he was also very well read in the classics and history. He was an intellectual. If Nick had gotten his hair cut, he could have been the president of IBM or AT&T. He would quote Shakespeare or Cicero. And he was around people who weren’t intellectuals, certainly people who weren’t going to engage him in an academic discussion. He liked to call me on the phone to talk about these kinds of things; Nick would wax eloquent about the classics. Or if he saw a movie, he would evaluate the script and the acting. We shared mutual interests along those lines. But in his world, people were at least smart enough to know not to mess with him.

  Nick wanted me to file a civil rights lawsuit against Sheriff Lamb and the Metropolitan Police because they were denying his access to Las Vegas. I told him that before I did, I wanted to sit down with the sheriff. So I contacted Ralph Lamb and asked if we could meet. He said that he’d be at my law office at 5:30 the next day.

  “Fine, I’ll see you tomorrow night,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “Five-thirty in the morning.”

  When I got to my office early the next day, he was already waiting at the front door. He walked in and sat down in my chair behind my desk, bigger than life. Before we started talking, he felt around under the desk. I think he was looking for a bug. I told him I had no intention of recording our conversation, and he said neither did he.

  We hit it off. He said he didn’t want any trouble, and I told him Nick Civella wasn’t going to cause any trouble. He just liked those pork necks, and he wanted to come into town without having cops waiting for him at the airport ready to send him home. Nick Civella and Ralph Lamb never met, but they came from the same era. You gave your word and you stuck by it. I promised the sheriff that Nick wouldn’t be a problem. And Lamb said as long as that was the case, his people wouldn’t stop him from coming.

  It was like those old cowboy movies where the sheriff has everybody check their guns when they come into town. That’s what Las Vegas was always about, and Ralph Lamb understood that. And I think law enforcement was better served as a result.

  Not so with Yablonsky, who was judgmental. Someone who understands and believes in the law doesn’t operate the way Yablonsky did. It was as if he “knew” someone was guilty even before he had gathered any evidence. That’s not the way the system is set up, but unfortunately, it’s the way a lot of these guys operated. It made for great press. Yablonsky kept talking about Spilotro and the mob, but he never built a case against Tony. He used the media to get people excited and to act like he was doing the Lord’s work, instead of solving the rapes, murders, and robberies that were taking place. It was easier simply to call people names.

  Don’t get me wrong: the system is supposed to be adversarial. Not everyone in law enforcement was a bad guy, and not everyone was abusing the system. But too often those in charge were allowing abuses to take place in “the interest of justice.”

  I didn’t see it that way. I defended Tony Spilotro and, over a ten-year period, I was able to ensure that he didn’t spend any time in jail because I was able to show that the government wasn’t doing its job. When I did that, I saw it as protecting every American from similar abuse.

  I can remember the newspaper headlines: “Spilotro says this . . . Spilotro says that.” In fact, Tony never said anything. I did all the talking, and he was a great client that way. He let me be his mouthpiece. I genuinely enjoyed the company of guys like Tony and Nick. And the bottom line was that by representing them, I got a chance to keep the system honest.

  In law enforcement circles, however, I was perceived as the bad guy. And somebody like Yablonsky, who—it seemed to me—didn’t care about the law, was the good guy. That never made sense to me, and it still doesn’t.

  CHAPTER 6

  HEAVYWEIGHTS I HAVE KNOWN

  Two of my favorite sports are baseball and boxing, and my criminal practice offered me opportunities to move in both those worlds.

  In 1980, the Phillies played Kansas City in the World Series. Nick Civella, who by that point was one of my major criminal clients, arranged for me and my family to travel to Kansas City to take in a World Series game. The last time the Phillies had played in a World Series was 1950, and before that it was 1915—and they lost both times. So this was a very rare event and one that, as a longtime Phillies fan, I really looked forward to.

  In 1964, the year Carolyn and I moved to Las Vegas, the Phillies had suffered one of the greatest all-time collapses in baseball history. They were leading the National League (back then there were no divisions, just a National and an American League) by six and one-half games, with just twelve games to play. Gene Mauch, the “Little General,” was a genius manager who looked to bring the Phillies their first National League pennant since the days of the 1950 Whiz Kids. Then the bottom fell out. We were in Las Vegas, following it from a distance, because there wasn’t the kind of daily national sports coverage or cable television network coverage that we have today. We would read about it in the paper and follow the sports reports on television and the radio. Still, it was agony, although certainly not as painful as it must have been for those in Philadelphia. Mauch’s team lost ten straight games, and the St. Louis Cardinals got redhot and won the pennant.

  Phillies fans like me had been suffering ever since, and now the 1980 team—including Mike Schmidt, Pete Rose, Steve Carlton, Bob Boone—was in the World Series. Finally, we had arrived. So when Nick Civella asked if I wanted to bring my family out for a game, I jumped at the chance.

  Carolyn and I and the kids, Oscar Jr., Ross, Eric, and Cara, were at the airport waiting for the plane to Kansas City. It turned out that Tommy Lasorda, the great manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and Bill Russell, the team’s shortstop, were waiting for the same plane. I sent the kids over to get their autographs. Both men were very nice to the children and we exchanged pleasantries. I think the kids had lost the autographs by the time the plane landed, but that’s beside the point. When we were leaving the airport in Kansas City, we ran into Lasorda and Russell again.

  Nick Civella had sent a limo to pick us up, and I offered them a ride since they were staying at the same hotel. Tommy Lasorda and I exchanged business cards, and I guess he figured that would be the end of it.

  That night we were at the game. We had great seats, front row right behind home plate. At one point I turned around, and about fifteen rows up I saw Lasorda. He was looking at us, and I could tell he was thinking, “Who the hell is this guy?”

  After that first encounter, we became friends, and whenever he was in Las Vegas or I was in Los Angeles we would try to touch base. Several years later Carolyn held a charity fundraiser for the Meadows, the school she had founded, and Tommy was in town to help with the event.

  The Meadows was entirely Carolyn’s idea. She was never one to complain, but when she saw a problem, she’d try to figure out a way to correct it. It was clear to her in the late 1970s that the public school system in Las Vegas was a sure path to nowhere. She didn’t think it could be fixed from within, so in 1984 she started her own private school. I was bouncing all over the country at the time representing clients in high profile cases. Our children were in school, although only Cara was young enough to attend the Meadows.

  Carolyn started that school with some pre-fab classrooms for kindergarten through sixth grade and ended with a modern, 40-acre campus that is now the home to one of the best prep schools in the state, grades pre-K through 12. She did this as a labor of love and because she valued education for children, and she never took a salary.

  At the time of the fundraiser, I was in the middle of a really difficult trial. My client was the previously mentioned oral surgeon who was accused of sexually assaulting patients while they were under anesthesia. The case was being tried in Carson City before Judge Archie Blake, and I could tell he wanted to give my client a zillion years. I couldn’t catch one break: none of my motions were granted, and none of my arguments seemed to carr
y any weight.

  But I knew Blake was a really big baseball fan, so I told Carolyn to have Tommy sign two baseballs. One he inscribed, “To Judge Archie Blake, the greatest legal mind of the century.” And then I asked him to sign another one for the prosecutor, Noel Waters. Tommy signed it: “To Noel Waters, the fairest prosecutor in the land.”

  When I went back up to Carson City the next week for the trial to resume, I had both the baseballs with me and I told the judge I wanted to see him.

  “I’ve got a gift for you, your honor,” I said.

  He was a little standoffish and said, “Wait until Mr. Waters gets here.”

  I knew he would do that. You couldn’t have an ex-parte conversation with one side or the other during a trial. It wouldn’t look right. That’s why I had Tommy sign a ball for the prosecutor as well.

  When Waters got to court that morning, the judge called us both up to the bench.

  “Get on with this, Mister Goodman,” he said.

  But as soon as I handed him the baseball, his mood changed. After that, my motions were heard and some of them were even granted. I also received a very favorable jury instruction before the jury went out to begin deliberating. Did those things make a difference? I don’t know. There was a lot of conflicting and circumstantial evidence in the case. What I do know is that my client was found not guilty. I also know the judge was a big baseball fan. In a criminal trial, you have to use whatever tools are available. In this case, one of them was Tommy Lasorda’s autograph.

  That’s not the kind of thing they teach you in law school, but it’s the kind of thing you have to use in order to give your client the best representation possible.

  Over the years, my criminal law practice also brought me in contact with some of the major players in the boxing world. The experiences were both fascinating and rewarding.