Pileggi Nicholas - Casino: the rise and fall of the mob in Las Vegas

Contents

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 Leftys obsessions with running the town and Tonys obsession with Leftys 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.

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.

Casino

Wiseguy

Blye, Private Eye

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.

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... Hills testimony has the clear ring of truth.

The Washington Post Book World

Sleazy recollections slip off Henry Hills lips fast and furiously... the kind of crude authenticity that we havent had since The Valachi Papers.

The Sun (Baltimore)

Even if you think youve had our fill of Mafia books, Nicholas Pileggis 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 Yorks Kennedy Airport.... A close-up look in Hills 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 Pileggis 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 youve never known... filled with vivid, authentic, fascinating detail.... Theres more knowledge about human beingsand sympathy for their weaknessesin 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

Why is my car on fire?

I HAD JUST had dinner and gotten in my car, said Frank Rosenthal. I dont 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 dont remember any of that. All I thought was that my car was having some kind of mechanical problem.

I didnt 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 Id 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 didnt 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.

Thats when I realized for the first time it hadnt been an accident. Thats when I knew somebody put a bomb in my car.

Before his car was blown up outside Marie Callenders 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 Vegasan achievement that made him a true visionary in the annals of local history. He was a gamblers 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 jobas 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 wouldnt even tell them whether he was left-handedwhich fact, by the way, had earned him his nickname. A few years later he pleaded