“She came back to the house furious,” Lefty said. “In her mind she thought I had something to do with the thing. That was crazy. But she always felt I had him killed.”
Lefty Rosenthal’s mind was not on his domestic problems. He had four casinos to run, on top of which he had to pretend he wasn’t running them at all. And he had a television show. After only a few months on the air, the show was so successful that Rosenthal decided to move it from the television studio he had been using to the Stardust Hotel itself. “For the first time in the history of Las Vegas,” the press release said, “a regularly scheduled television show will emanate live from a casino.” The show was not truly regularly scheduled—it had appeared only about five times in its first five months; but the announcement was fraught with promise: Frank Sinatra would make his talk show debut on the first show. Jill St. John and Robert Conrad would also appear. A special studio was built at the Stardust, and a thousand people turned up to watch the show taped at 7:30 P.M. on August 27, 1977. They cheered as Sinatra gave his opinion on a subject of more than routine interest, blasting the NCAA for placing the University of Las Vegas basketball team on a two-year probation.
At 11:00 P.M., the public tuned their televisions to KSHO, Channel 13, to watch the show and instead saw a little cartoon character holding a card that read ONE MOMENT PLEASE. The moments stretched into minutes and more than an hour. The videotaping equipment at the station had broken down. Hours later, the station resumed broadcasting with The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. “We don’t know exactly what happened,” said Channel 13 general manager Red Gilson. “This was a one-in-a-million occurrence. It’s almost an impossibility to have two tape machines break down at the same time.”
Once again Frank Rosenthal was on the front pages of the Las Vegas papers; and the following day he was there again suing the television station for damages in excess of $10,000 and charging that the breakdown had disastrously injured the reputation of The Frank Rosenthal Show. Rosenthal and his staff made noises for several days about taking the show to another television station; one of the local columnists even suggested sabotage. But when no other station took the bait, the show resumed on Channel 13 and became a strange and amazing local curiosity, one that made Rosenthal seem permanently entrenched.
Meanwhile, Lefty’s seemingly endless legal battles with the Gaming Commission continued. The U.S. Supreme Court decided not to review Lefty’s case, and gaming officials once again demanded that Glick fire Lefty from his food and beverage job and stop him from using the Stardust lounge to broadcast his TV show. Lefty and Oscar Goodman immediately sought a restraining order in federal court, and on January 3, 1978, Lefty got a belated Christmas present. Federal District Judge Carl Christensen said that while the Gaming Commission could bar Lefty from getting a gaming license, it could not bar him from working in the Stardust in a nongaming capacity.
Glick, therefore, quickly appointed Lefty the Stardust’s entertainment director, a post traditionally considered far enough removed from the casino operation that it had often been used as a safe haven for those with licensing problems—like Joe Agosto at the Tropicana.
“Nobody in the state believed that one,” Murray Ehrenberg, who remained Rosenthal’s casino manager, said, “so we had agents hanging around watching Frank, me, and everyone else all night long, trying to catch him being the boss. But Frank didn’t have to do whatever he did for everyone to see. We’d talk to him later about this or that. We could be having a sandwich and ask about a guy’s credit. We could be watching his show and he could say he wanted somebody hired or fired. What did it take for him to be the boss? He was the boss.”
Rosenthal’s acquaintances in the mob were as irritated by his celebrity as were his enemies in law enforcement. Joe Agosto, the entertainment director at the Tropicana, who actually supervised the skim there, began to call his boss, Nick Civella, to complain about Lefty Rosenthal; Agosto was concerned that Rosenthal’s mania for publicity would eventually affect Agosto, and both of them would be thrown out of the casino business. At one point, Agosto telephoned Carl DeLuna, the underboss of the Civella crime family; the FBI was listening.
AGOSTO: Nobody can handle any more. He [Rosenthal] is a killer, he’s got a killer instinct, he’s gonna pull everybody into the mud. Now I’m concerned about that. I don’t want any shit to spill over, to make it impossible to live in this fucking town. He’s starting out on the wrong foot now, and somebody … should tell this fucking guy where the stop sign is. I mean if he committed suicide, he should accept the fucking deal, that’s all, don’t put another half-dozen fucking people in the firing line.
DELUNA: Uh-huh.
AGOSTO: You know what I mean?
DELUNA: Uh-huh.
AGOSTO: Now I mean the thing is getting out of hand. If I was a stranger, if I didn’t know this guy’s friends and I was only here to protect my own little nest—you know what I mean?
DELUNA: Uh-huh.
AGOSTO: I would take action myself, without asking anybody permission, you follow me? If I didn’t know better.
DELUNA: What are your fears, Joe? …
AGOSTO: I am afeared of this motherfucker when he cannot take the consequences of his actions. He’s already made threats…. What I’m saying, I feel very strongly about it—there are certain stop signs, certain limitations, where the muddy water splashes on other people’s laps…. I’m afraid now of the oversplash. There is no question that at the least that will happen. The best that will happen is that he will not get indicted, but there is no question that he’s gonna get thrown out of the fucking place, and if he cannot see the sign, he’s gotta be the dumbest son of a bitch I’ve ever come upon in my life.
17
“Look at that fuck. He doesn’t even say hello.”
TONY SPILOTRO WAS finding Lefty’s celebrity harder and harder to take. He had to watch him on television. He had to watch him walk into the Jubilation nightclub trailing a chorus line of showgirls, lawyers, and bookmakers, all kissing his ass. “People were falling all over themselves to get me tables,” Rosenthal said, “and I think Tony grew to resent the fact that I was able to move about more freely than he was.”
Says Frank Cullotta: “Tony resented Lefty because Tony felt he was the real boss in Las Vegas, and there was Lefty walking all over the place taking bows as though he was the big man in town. I was sitting with Tony in the Jubilation one night when Lefty walked in. When Tony and I went there the boss always gave us a table by ourselves. He never sat anyone nearby because we didn’t want anyone on the eary. Around our table there was nothing but white tablecloths, even if the joint was crowded.
“And this night in comes Lefty and he’s got his whole entourage from after the TV show. He’s got a couple of the dancers he’s got his eye on, and there’s Oscar and Joey Boston and all of Lefty’s ass kissers.
“Tony sees Lefty walk in the joint, and everybody jumps up to shake his hand. And Lefty’s loving it. Tony’s just watching. He’s getting pissed, especially when Lefty doesn’t even nod over in Tony’s direction for respect. It’s like Lefty’s saying, I’m the big man in town and fuck you.
“I don’t know if that’s what Lefty’s thinking. I’m saying that’s the way Tony starts to take it. One night he says to me, ‘Look at that fuck. He doesn’t even say hello.’
“I tell Tony, ‘How the fuck’s he gonna say hello? He’s not even supposed to be in the same joint as you.’ And Tony says he knows that, but there are ways to say hello and ways not to say hello.
“Tony was beginning to feel that Lefty was getting way out of control. That the TV show and everything was going to his head. That he had a gigantic ego to start with and this was all getting out of hand. He said Lefty was getting so nuts that the other night when he was having some drinks, Tony’s friend Joey Cusumano was at Lefty’s table and Lefty said, ‘I’m the biggest Jew in America,’ meaning the biggest Jew in the mob.
“Joey answered him, ‘Oh yeah, Frank, I didn�
�t know Lansky was dead.’ Tony loved that story. He told it to everybody. That Joey slapped Lefty right back in his place.”
“Whenever the papers mentioned Tony,” Rosenthal lamented, “they always used my name in the next paragraph. No matter how many times I told them that even though I had a long personal relationship with Spilotro, I had no business dealings with him, the media always linked us together. It was no help. In fact, I’m certain I would not have had the kinds of licensing problems I had except for being linked all the time with Tony.
“The truth is—and I know this for sure—Tony was as light as a feather in the outfit. The public perception was the opposite of the facts. All Nevada—Moe Dalitz, my own wife, for God’s sake—all thought Tony was the boss of Las Vegas. But the truth was, he wasn’t. But he began to believe his own PR.
“But not everyone went along. People would come up with all kinds of propositions saying they were coming from Tony. Most of them didn’t even know Tony. Lots of times the propositions were just not good business, and they’d get turned down.
“Lots of time, members of his family were turned down for things just because of his reputation, and that really frustrated him. One time, his own brother went to get a job at a casino. I’ve got to say his brother was more than qualified. Legitimate. But in forty-eight hours the poor guy got fired—because of his last name. The casino owner didn’t want to put up with the heat he knew he’d get from the Control Board. Tony went nuts. He’s ready to go to war with the casino owner. I told him to take a Valium and go home.”
“It was a very tough time for Tony,” Cullotta said. “He’d get so mad he wanted to whack everybody. One time some newspaper reporter was writing stories on him and he hated them. ‘I want to kill that SOB,’ he says to me. I told him it would be the end for everybody; they’d bring out the army. He kept saying, ‘You’re wrong. We’ll put guys in line. It’ll help us. One night I met him on a desert road way out. He had a plan. He wanted to take over the Midwest. He starts talking about the guys he can count on. Then he talks about who are the guys we have to kill.
“I’m thinking, ‘Who am I dealing with here.’ He’s talking to me about taking on the world. I knew all the players and all the while he’s giving me the names of who has to be whacked.
“I slowed him down. I said, ‘Tony, let’s say you’re successful—and I don’t think the chances are fifty-fifty. What do you think will happen in Kansas City, Milwaukee, Detroit, New York?’
“He jumps right in and says that I’m talking about places east of the Mississippi. We’re not part of that. Let’s stick to the Midwest. He’s arguing geography. The truth is the east of the Mississippi crews don’t have anything to do with the Midwest and the West, but murdering several family bosses might change a little of that for a while.
“No, no, Tony only wants to discuss it in terms of Midwest crews.
“Okay, I say, do you think the other groups are not going to be aware that there’s a mad crew in Chicago who took over without permission? You’ll be considered the most dangerous crew in the world. Also, if you knock out the top bosses of Chicago, what makes you think their underlings are going to fall into line?
“But he had dreams. He would become the pope of the mob and Lefty would become Lansky. That’s the crazy way he was talking, standing out there in the desert. I went along because otherwise I would have never come home.
“You think if I turned him down on this he could afford to have me walking around knowing what he had planned? He’d have blown me away before I got in the car.
“I think he wanted Lefty to endorse his plans, too, but I think Lefty turned him down or something, because later he got very pissed whenever Lefty’s name came up. He used to say that every-time he had any ideas about doing anything and he needed Lefty’s help, Lefty used to ‘X’ him out. I could see he was coming to hate Lefty. He thought Lefty was pissing on his parade. Lefty had turned him down one-too-many times.”
The Las Vegas FBI had been on Spilotro’s case for years and had built up a considerable dossier on him and his crew. The information was assembled in order to prove that Spilotro was what the newspapers always said he was—the mob’s main man in Las Vegas and the true power behind the Stardust Hotel. But almost none of the information picked up on the FBI bug seemed to confirm Spilotro’s reputation.
Spilotro and his crew of bookmakers, shakedown artists, loan sharks, and burglars were exactly that—bookmakers, shakedown artists, loan sharks, and burglars. They did not seem to operate anywhere near the top of the casino business. In fact, they were lucky to get the minor assignments handed them by the bosses back home accomplished. “We got Spilotro running errands more than running casinos,” retired agent Bud Hall admits.
Typical activities picked up on telephone taps and room bugs between April 13 and May 13, 1978, dealt with the mundane and tedious details of getting people jobs and comps. The FBI heard Spilotro’s brother Michael call their brother John to discuss getting a friend of his a job at the Hacienda. They overheard Culinary Union official Stephen Bluestein call to ask Spilotro about getting someone’s daughter a job at the Stardust. They heard Spilotro call Marty Kane, the manager of the Stardust’s sports book, and tell him to fire a woman he had just hired and put a young woman friend of Spilotro’s to work instead. They taped Spilotro’s gofer Herbie Blitzstein calling Joey Cusumano at the Stardust and asking Cusumano to get him some Stardust pay envelopes so he could make up some for himself. They even caught the local police calling Spilotro to tip him that an IRS agent had been allowed to review Spilotro’s police record.
The series of phone calls that perhaps most perfectly typify the scut work that Spilotro was asked to do for the bosses in Chicago took place on May 1, 1978. It began with a call from Joseph “Joey the Clown” Lombardo, one of the outfit’s top street bosses and Spilotro’s capo. Herbie Blitzstein, who hung around the Gold Rush along with his girlfriend, Dena Harte, answered the phone. Lombardo wanted to know why his request for free room, food, and drinks at the Stardust for Barbara Russel, Gregory Peck’s secretary, had been ignored. Spilotro got right on the phone with his Chicago capo and promised he would immediately look into the problem.
“I tell ya,” Spilotro said, “I’m awful sorry. I don’t have any idea what took place.”
“When I call you,” Lombardo said, “you’re supposed to take care of it.”
Spilotro said he had even left a message at the hotel that the request was from Lombardo.
“In other words,” Lombardo said, “you didn’t do a damn thing.”
Spilotro assured Lombardo he would look into the lapse immediately and for the next several hours the FBI listened in as Spilotro tried to disentangle the botched comp. After determining from Blitzstein that the request had been made, he called Leonard Garmisa, an acquaintance of Lombardo’s and of Teamster pension fund chief, Allen Dorfman. Garmisa had originally asked Lombardo for the favor.
Gold Rush, May 1, 1978, 3:12 P.M. Outgoing call secretly recorded by the FBI between Spilotro, Leonard Garmisa, and Dena Harte, Blitzstein’s girlfriend:
SPILOTRO: (off the phone) … this guy’s Dorfman’s friend. What can I tell ya?
GARMISA: Hello.
SPILOTRO: Yeah, Irv.
GARMISA: Who?
SPILOTRO: Irv.
GARMISA: Irv who?
SPILOTRO: Is this Irv Garmisa? That’s who.
GARMISA: Who is this?
SPILOTRO: Tony Spilotro.
GARMISA: Tony, it’s Lenny Garmisa.
SPILOTRO: Oh, Lenny, how ya doing Lenny?
GARMISA: All right.
SPILOTRO: Well, I’m close anyway.
GARMISA: Huh?
SPILOTRO: I’m close, aren’t I?
GARMISA: Yeah, you’re very close, but I didn’t know it was you. How ya feeling, Ton?
SPILOTRO: I feel fine, excepting that I called, that’s very aggravating, that’s all.
GARMISA: Well, I told him not to call ya. But I wante
d him to know, that’s all.
SPILOTRO: All right, let me hear what happened, Irv.
GARMISA: Lenny.
SPILOTRO: Lenny, let me hear what happened.
Garmisa then tells Tony that while they had missed talking directly he had given his request to one of the men answering the phone at the Gold Rush.
SPILOTRO: Right. That’s fine, he got the messsage, and …
GARMISA: So, I said, listen, call up this lady, Barbara Russel, she’s staying at the Stardust, she’s already checked in. Whatever the hell you can do, do for her. You want to charge it to me, you’re more than welcome, but give her the royal treatment. I said, that’s it. That’s the last I heard. Now today, Gregory Peck called me up to invite me to his daughter’s birthday party, so I talked to his secretary. I says, Barbara, did you have a good time. She says I had a marvelous time. Did anybody call ya? She says what do you mean? I says, well, I told you I’d have somebody call you. She says, nah, nobody called.
SPILOTRO: Okay. All right. Let me ask you something.
GARMISA: Yeah?
SPILOTRO: Was she charged?
GARMISA: I think that she, well, I don’t know.
SPILOTRO: Do you think? All right, let me tell you something, Lenny. You get on the fucking phone, and you find out if she was. Okay? And, I’ll get the money back, how’s that?
GARMISA: Do me a favor.
SPILOTRO: But, if she … hold it, you listen. If she was charged you get on the phone and you call Joey back. This girl was supposed to be in red. Do you understand what red is? Lenny?
GARMISA: Yeah.
SPILOTRO: That’s a comp.
GARMISA: Yeah. I know.
SPILOTRO: All right, now you don’t know if she was comped or not?
GARMISA: I have no idea, but I don’t think so.
SPILOTRO: You don’t think so?
GARMISA: I don’t think so, but I’ll call her, if you want me to call her on the other phone while you’re waiting.
Garmisa then called Peck’s office and when he got back on the phone it was clear from his tone, according to the FBI monitors, that he was sorry he had ever gotten involved in the mess.
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