B009HOTHPE EBOK (37 page)

Strictly speaking the Italian mobsters weren’t allowed to come to Vegas period, but naturally they did. When these guys would sneak into town and come to Rat Pack shows in the late 1950s and 1960s, if the spotlight accidentally strayed into the audience, you’d see six guys jumping under the table.

As much power as Tony and Lefty Rosenthal wielded, management wouldn’t let Lefty or Tony in any of the hotels or casinos. They had this black book that 86’ed certain people from entering the casinos. Tony was one and Lefty was another. Lefty was a boyhood pal of Tony’s, a sports bookmaker, a casino owner, and, in FBI lingo, “organized crime associate.” The character Sam “Ace” Rothstein played by Robert De Niro in
Casino
was based on him, just as Joe Pesci played the Tony Spilotro character as a Mafioso loose cannon.

Lefty, the cool partner in the deadly Tony Spilotro–Lefty Rosenthal duo, had a highly popular prediction show. In the movie,
Casino,
they have Lefty starting his show at the Stardust (which they call the Tangiers Hotel in the movie), but actually the first year he did it from Jubilation. Every week they had different guests. Lefty would come out and give his picks on the games—that went on for quite a while. Was it a year? I would say at least six months, some version of that. He was a sharp guy and still is, there was no one sharper, an incredible oddsmaker. These new guys, they couldn’t carry Lefty’s underwear. He, too, worked as a technical adviser on
Casino.

Lefty handicapped the football line. At some point we realized we didn’t want him in the club. It was too scary having Lefty and his buddy Spilotro in there, but no one knew how to approach Lefty or Spilotro. How exactly do you put the bell on these cats? I remember the night the management objected to Tony and Lefty being at Jubilation and they asked Marty Gutilla to eject them. “Are you seriously asking me to go tell these guys they gotta leave?” He didn’t want to go personally to tell Tony and Lefty they had to get out of there. That wasn’t going to fly. Marty just told management, “I don’t think that’s in the cards right now.” Fortunately, the situation resolved itself in the end for technical reasons. They needed more production equipment and decided to move the show to the Stardust.

Doing Lefty Rosenthal’s wife wasn’t a smart move on Tony’s part. Lefty was making a lot of money for him. Especially at the Stardust. Every bookmaker in the country used Lefty’s line, the line being Lefty’s inside line on the bets. Lefty always gave the guys at the Stardust the line first. Nobody got it before they got it at the Stardust—not anybody. The bookmakers were cleaning house. Those were the days before computers, but take all the computers you want, it’s still tough to overcome the eleven-to-ten odds. It goes like this: If you make a $100 bet on a football game and you lose, you have to pay $110. If you win, you win $100. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but extrapolate that over hundreds of thousands of bets and that’s serious money. Let’s say one bookie had 20 grand on team A and another bookie has 20 grand on team B. If team A wins, you collect $17,000 plus $1,700. That’s $18,700. If team B wins you pay 20 grand so you lose $300. Now you collect $2,200 from the losers and 817 from the winners so you now have $5,000 on an even proposition. Think about it: if you lose, you lose $1,300; if you win, you win $5,000. A 3.5 increase on your money. What is it you wouldn’t have to do if you were making that kind of money? It’s that innocent $110 that does people in. People don’t realize how strong that is until they begin gambling and consequently start paying up. It’ll gobble you up. It’s like interest on a credit card—pretty soon you see what’s happening. Did you ever know a bookie that didn’t drive a Cadillac and smoke a cigar? Sometimes a bettor will win 15 million. That’s what keeps people coming back—that once-in-a-blue-moon win. With luck, you got a razor’s edge on your bets. Lefty was making an absolute fortune for Tony.

It was an odd relationship between Tony and Lefty. Tony would always bark at Lefty, and Lefty would kind of take it but the truth is Lefty knew that if he went to somebody and said this guy is out of line or he is this or that or he’s fucking my wife, that would be all he would have to say. Tony’s involvement with dope dealers is what in the end brought the heat on the bosses in Kansas City. That was what absolutely did him in. That was the icing on the cake. They might have even been able to deal with the fact that he had his arm in the dope dealers. They might have been able to straighten out the Lefty and his old lady deal. But they could not straighten out that they were all going to jail because Tony had gotten so crazy. These old mob bosses were so ancient, they came to trial with oxygen tanks. They were really old men. Do you think these guys want to go to jail at eighty years old because some guy is doing wild little shit and is up to ten or eleven in the morning betting all over the country with their bookmakers?

Tony was using “Fat Herbie” Blitzstein’s account, betting all over the country for him. He owed this guy three hundred, another guy six hundred, another guy two grand—all on Herbie’s account. People didn’t know it wasn’t Herbie Blitzstein’s money he was betting with. “Fat Herbie” was Tony’s buddy. Tony was stiffing the bookmakers, stiffing them, and blaming Herbie. These guys would come from New York to Vegas, and ask him, “Tony, how do we get our money from Herbie?” Tony would say, “I can’t get my own fucking money from him. How do you want me to get yours?” But, in the end, everybody knew it was Tony. He was becoming pretty blatant about it. But who would challenge him? Eventually, though, he brought heat on himself. Herbie himself came to a bad end in the early nineties—the mob wanted his auto repair service (Herbie’s front) and so they just killed him.

Tony becoming a coke head was bad enough, but messing with Lefty’s wife was his first big fuck-up. Even in the movie, his character says, “This is a big mistake. I don’t know how I got involved with this.” Tony could handle any situation, but now he knew he was fucked. He was messing with other guys’ wives. Lefty was making him a lot of money … well, what they thought was a lot of money. To be a millionaire in those days was considered really big bucks.

Since under normal conditions you couldn’t meet Tony in the casinos you had to hook up with him in these joints on the strip. You had go to a place called Rube’s, a dive owned by this guy named Rubenstein from Chicago. A bar in one of those little shopping centers. Marty remembers seeing see him there and saying to him, “Tone, what are you doing?”

Marty tells me, “It’s ten in the morning and there’d be Tony, he hadn’t gone to bed yet—probably been up for days—going full blast. I am going, ‘Why is this guy still up at ten o’clock?’ I started figuring. Unless you are gambling, or messing around with hookers or tarts until ten in the morning, you’re doing the shit. Then I started hearing some rumors about him hanging with dope dealers in Vegas.”

That really pissed everybody off, especially the bosses in Chicago, Kansas City, and Cleveland—the Midwest mob scene. Their beef with him was all about the drugs. The drugs were warping Tony and he was getting out of control and that was bringing heat on them. He was now way over the line—whatever line there was, he was past it.

Tony Accardo, the big mob kahuna in Chicago, didn’t like what Tony was doing with the dope. Accardo was one of those guys who was totally antidrug. You couldn’t even mention the word “drug” in front of him, any level of it—weed, coke—I don’t care what level you were on. Whereas in New York that is all they did, the five big families. They spread out into the drug business in the forties. Remember
The Godfather
? They didn’t want dope around the schools, they all agreed, but otherwise it was wide open. That would never have happened in Vegas because of Tony Accardo—he was the big boss in Vegas. There would not have been a discussion. That was the end of it.

I don’t remember exactly how Tony’s fall began, but an accountant got caught with all the names in a book nobody was meant to see. It was some action Tony had taken to get the guy heated up to get him caught. Needless to say they killed the guy—Allen Dorfman. They all liked him, but after that he was fucked. In
Casino,
one of the characters says of Dorfman’s character, “Oh, he is a good, stand-up guy.” The next mobster agrees with him, “Yeah, a stand-up guy. And his old man was really a stand-up guy, too.” And he was. Al Dorfman was a good guy. The last guy goes, “Ah, yeah, but why worry about it.” Then they rubbed him out. In reality, Tony did the hit on Dorfman in Chicago, at the Hyatt in Lincolnwood where he was staying. He was walking to breakfast, and Tony walks up behind him and hit him in the back of the head. You know how they do it. That was the end of it.

Tony hung out with these two small—and deadly—guys: They were both shorter than Tony, and Tony was short—he was called Tony “the Ant” Spilotro because that’s what William Roemer had named him, “that little pissant.” When someone said “The little guys are looking for you,” you’d see men messing their pants. Tony was a master of torture. He fed a guy salt pork for two or three days until the shit started coming out of his nose and out of his ears and eyes. He’d boast about this stuff. He was supposed to be the guy who in 1961 had hung William “Action” Jackson, a loan shark enforcer, on a meat hook and then tortured him for three days with a cattle prod. He was a real monster.

It was probably around 1980 to 1982, some version of that, when Tony had all these problems. Lefty, they tried to rub him out, too. Fortunately for him General Motors had installed a steel plate in his Eldorado (to correct the car’s balance)—and that’s what saved him in 1982 when his car was bombed.

Tony was getting the mob nervous. And when they get nervous you don’t want to be in that spot. Tony got these Outfit guys jumpy, then he got them all indicted. Then
he
was gone. It wasn’t even a close call. It was a 200-to-1 favorite that Tony would be eliminated. His brother Michael opened his mouth. That’s how they got the brother, too. He said, “Anybody fucks with my brother Tony has to deal with me.” They said, “Well, okay, we will deal with you, too, then.” You can’t make those kind of statements to guys in the Outfit—they don’t like that, you know.

Even though his old buddies were informing on him, Tony was never going to get to court because all those Outfit guys in Chicago, Kansas City, and Cleveland had already decided his fate. They lured him and his brother to a basement, beat the shit out of them, and then buried him in Indiana, right over the border. The hit men were too lazy to dig too deep so they dug a real shallow grave and threw some sand on them. Sand was found in their lungs in the autopsy so it looked as if they’d been buried alive. Some farmer found them, Tony and his brother. It was said to be in the middle of a cornfield, but it wasn’t even a cornfield.

Tony’s gone, but no one wants to tell too many tales about him. He has brothers and he has people who still like him—the kind of people that you do not want to piss off.

*   *   *

In Vegas, you’d mix with all kinds of people, high rollers, movie stars, CEOs, Arabian princes—and mobsters. They’d come backstage, I’d see them in Jubilation. You’d hang out with these people, and the next thing you know, their story begins to unravel. “Hey, Paulie, ya know the guy that was just in here? This was the guy who dissolved his victims in acid and served their finger bones up in soup for his guests.” Instead of people being horrified by this stuff, they’re enamored with it. Let’s face it, everybody is.

Aside from Tony there were some other out-of-control hoods around Vegas in that period—like the Jimmy (Jamiel) Chagra and his brothers. Jimmy Chagra was a ruthless drug trafficker, described by
Las Vegas CityLife
as “the undisputed marijuana kingpin of the Western world.” They were there all the time, high rollers, showgirls-on-each-arm type of guys. The casinos would put them up in prime suites. I saw them frequently; pit bosses would bring them over, they’d come backstage to say hello and stuff like that. Friendly guys throwing their money around.

Jimmy Chagra lived large in a big white house off Eastern Avenue near the Sahara golf course. He got arrested in 1978—he was going to be tried before the notorious “hanging judge,” John Wood Jr. Judge Wood really had it in for this guy; he was going to give him the proverbial 1,000-year sentence, so what does Jimmy Chagra do? He tries to buy the judge with a ten-million-dollar bribe. No deal. Now he knows he’s going to get a 10,000-year sentence without parole. So what is a wiseguy to do? He hires Charles Harrelson—Woody Harrelson’s dad, as it turns out—to kill this federal judge, and while he’s at it the U.S. attorney, too. Harrelson carries out the hit, which Jimmy doesn’t get nailed for, but they give him thirty years anyway. The one brother, Lee, gets gunned down in a petty robbery of his own office, and the other brother Joe gets killed in a suspicious automobile accident in 1996. These sort of guys you’d find yourself hanging out with, drinking champagne, and the next thing you know you’re hearing these hair-raising stories.

In Vegas we worked within this infrastructure that had been made by mobsters and run by Jewish bookies. This was the hand we were dealt. But it was colorful all right, and exciting and edgy. Everybody is enamored by the mob story in Vegas. Right now, they have two museums in Vegas, dedicated to the mob. The mobsters, even the really pathological hitmen like Tony, were civil in the clubs. You still had remnants of the mob popping up in Vegas into the mid-eighties. I’ve been around mobsters much of my life. I feel like I’m in the play but I’m not a part of it.

Now that the underworld characters are gone it’s a little poignant, because this was the end of the old Vegas. However down and dirty and criminal that was, it was a flashy hot spot. This is about the evolution of where Vegas was going in the ’70s. It was the end of the era of Lefty Rosenthal, Tony Spilotro, and that group of mobsters.

Vegas had all levels of clubs, casinos, and joints—from the swanky to the skanky. At Jubilation we would start to slow down about four or five in the morning. Most of the workforce on the swing shift got off around four in the morning. And then they’d head over to the Brewery. It was like a saloon in the old Wild West. It
was
the Wild West. The guys who ran the Brewery were old-timers. They were well-connected good old boys, all related and inbred to the old Vegas families. They all had names like Rex and Tex. Good old boys.