B009HOTHPE EBOK (38 page)

At nine on a Tuesday morning it was like New Year’s Eve in Times Square over there. Everybody all whizzed up, doing the shit, wild-eyed and crazy at 5
A.M.
There were ten or fifteen doormen dribbling guys out the door one after the other. One morning Marty and I drive over there from Jubilation. We pull into the parking lot and we’re just getting out of the car, when a guy comes screeching around the corner and crashes into three cars. He hits them with such force that one guy flies out of the window of his car—he’s all torn to pieces. It was a horror story, really unpleasant thing to watch. There’s blood all over the place and people screaming. The ambulance arrives and the paramedics are trying to save the guy. Now, I swear to God, twenty minutes went by and another car comes tearing into the parking lot. (This was the ’70s when fancy cars were a lot faster.) The guy slams into the ambulance so hard he kills the ambulance driver and the guy he was attending to, who, I’m assuming, was fatally injured as it was.

Casino
is as true to what it was like as you could possibly imagine. Joe Pesci hit it right on the head. Imagine a guy like that on the loose. If you want to go see something that’s the most realistic thing you’ll ever watch about the mob in Vegas, that’s
Casino
. They changed a few names around is all. In the movie, they called the Stardust the Tangiers, little stuff like that. Mob guys got hired as technical advisers—they were paid peanuts, but the dopes thought it was a lot of money.

You know who were technical advisers on
Casino
? Joey Cusumano, Tony’s bodyguard, and Frankie Cullotta, he has a credit at the end of
Casino
as technical adviser. Not only was Cullotta a technical adviser on the movie, you can actually see him in the scene where they’re burying Tony and his brother. That was a real interesting moment, a shock, really, because he was always hanging around Tony at Jubilation.

Frankie Cullotta was a guy who grew up with Tony Spilotro and he ratted Tony out in the end. He turned out to be a beefer. In those days there was no such thing. With the mob nobody talked. It was
omertà,
a conspiracy of silence. Today, everybody talks. They rat on anybody. In those days it was an outrage when this Frankie Cullotta came out and ratted on Tony. They killed together. They did whatever they had to do. What Frankie Cullotta knew about Tony was devastating. So it was really like a horror story when this guy turned on him. Maybe he saw the handwriting on the wall and wanted to get out. Who knows why? He turned on Tony and became a government informant. Cullotta got out of it all by turning Tony over.

Cullotta walks around town now, and nobody bothers him. He walks around like you and I do, strolls into a bar, has a drink, and walks out. He isn’t concerned about anyone coming after him anymore. Who is going to bother him? This guy is old. One of those other old mob guys that are still around, you think they’re going to run the risk of doing a hit because they want to take care of some guy that beefed on Tony?

When you’re around that ballpark you hear stories. They told me what happened to Jimmy Hoffa. You know what they did with his body? Somebody in his family fingered him. They picked him up and put him in one of those wood choppers. That used to be one of their favorite disposal methods. We are talking about cutting their victims up into tiny little pieces and spreading them around. It was a specialty of this guy, Frank “the German” Schweihs.

The feds would basically focus on the big fish. They would create some ruckus about a guy they would figure was a headline-type mobster—that was their MO. These U.S. attorneys were indicting guys that they thought could get their names on the front page. That’s mostly what they were doing it for—for the publicity. They didn’t give a shit about justice. You tell them some black guy killed twelve people and they don’t want to hear about it. That’s when they tell you, “Call your local police department.” Yeah, right.

There was another interesting character, we’ll call him “Snake Eyes,” a guy that I knew who was a genius handicapper. Snake Eyes would have three TVs on at the same time on which he used to watch the games. That was when you couldn’t switch between channels with a remote, so you had to have different televisions with three different channels on. He was so good and so many people got in his line it created problems for the insiders. He got too hot. Once the word got out, the bookmakers on the inside got crucified and I mean across the whole country. Snake Eyes would give out his information and that guy would tell another guy and before you knew it two thousand guys had the number and then there’d be another two thousand in. Multiply that by ten and you have two million guys betting the same game. The insiders didn’t like that. When he was good, he was right on.

Snake Eyes had a very interesting premise of odds-making. This is the way he explained it to me: “Forget about all these sportswriters, locker-room bullshit. See, when you’re dealing with the odds you don’t have the time to weigh the merits of this quarterback, that running back.” Snake Eyes would embellish but he wouldn’t talk about one player or another, it didn’t make any difference to him. He didn’t want to overplay it. You could tell him, “Snake Eyes, I hear there’s a great quarterback out from South Carolina, what do you think?” You hear these stories. He would say, “So?” I said, “Well, we’ve got the dope on this guy, isn’t that useful information?” To which he’d say, “I will tell you one thing: all the times you go back and change, half of the time you will win and half of the time you will lose and it isn’t worth it; just let it go.” Thinking about quarterbacks wasn’t in these guys’ playbook. He was right. Half of the time, it meant shit. In the end, in the big bookmaker’s lexicon, the Super Bowl is just another game.

Snake Eyes had a stroke, but recovered and to this day is still betting twenty dollars a race. He’s still with that big girl he hooked up with after the two stripper sisters passed on. Those sisters loved Snake Eyes once they married him. One of the sisters died and he married the other one. I met Snake Eyes when he was with sister number two, the first sister had died of lung cancer. It was like one sister—the one who was dying—told the other one, “Snake Eyes is going to be really upset when I go, so you gotta marry him.” They were strippers and they’d found their sugar daddy after seven bad marriages between the two of them. Both smoked like chimneys. A couple of strippers and a high-profile bookie. Classic Vegas tableau.

The second sister took care of Snake Eyes like her sister asked her to, and worshiped the ground he walked on. And then when she died, he found this girl and he’s been in Vegas with her twenty years. Some version of twenty years. They pulled him back from the dead, literally. Snake Eyes is still alive. He’s got to be in his eighties by now. He’s old but believe me, he is still as sharp as ever.

*   *   *

There was a lot of shady stuff going on at those Vegas poker games, too. Scams were ongoing. Even Marty, who had seen a lot of crazy stuff, was surprised at the extent the hustles that went on. One night, Marty suggests we walk over to the Dunes. “I want you to see this hustle that’s going on over there.” We get there, the chips were this high. The big chips. There were five guys in the game. Sal Romano was there—he was an Outfit guy from New York. He, too, incidentally, ended up ratting his friends out.

We walk in, watch this poker game going on with huge bets. Marty says, “Sal, I know those two guys in that game are partners—they’re in cahoots.” Sal Romano, and this I remember, he looked at us and smiled and said, “You know something, you’re getting better. What about
all four of them
are partners? The only live guy in the game is the big fat guy next to the dealer. They bid him out of four hundred thousand or something. Why should they fight with each other? It was
all
set up. You don’t have to worry about who’s gonna win and who isn’t. Better that they each go home with a hundred thousand bucks. The fat guy wants to play big poker? Let him. He’s a restaurant owner; he says he owns a restaurant in Alabama.” Marty says, “Really? Where did he get that four hundred thousand bucks from? I’ve owned restaurants. You don’t make that kind of money in the restaurant business.” Anyway, this guy wanted to play big-time poker and he got his wish.

They used to bring Major Riddle in. He owned the Dunes, and when he showed up it was like they rang a bell and players would pop up from nowhere and wake up from their sleep because the major wasn’t a very good player. They’d deal in this partner a big Jewish guy, Sid Wyman. These games are stacked and these guys are fucking with the guy. Stay out of these games.

One afternoon Marty Gutilla said to me, “Hey, let’s go over and check out this kid who’s beating everybody up at gin, poker, and what have you.” “A kid?” I say. “Ya know, that kid Stuey Ungar.” Then I remembered the story. Sal Romano had brought this kid Stuey Ungar back with him from New York. And so it was through Marty that I got to meet the wunderkind. In the movie,
High Roller: The Stu Ungar Story,
they kind of fudged it—it was based on the book,
One of a Kind,
which he told to Nolan Dalla. Michael Imperioli, the guy from
The Sopranos
played him in the film.

Stuey would be sitting in the Dunes and when he wasn’t playing, he’d be reading a book. Sixteen years old with the glasses. A little Jewish kid from out of New York. He hadn’t gotten into the drugs yet and Vegas was alien to him. He was so young he couldn’t go into the casinos so he would read a book or sit around until they had a game. It just killed everybody how good he was. He was a sharp kid. He had it all figured out. He’d started when he was ten. Genius. A sixteen-year-old kid playing gin
this fast
. That’s how he played—at warp speed—I couldn’t believe my eyes.

This kid had played anyone and everyone in the world of gin—and nobody could beat him. After a while nobody would play him anymore. Then he played poker and he won the poker world series—twice. He was the best kid there ever was, but he had to stop playing, because no one would play him anymore. They brought these guys in from L.A. They brought them in from New York. Nobody could touch this kid. They put him in Vegas. At forty-two, Stuey died of an overdose—he’d gotten into cocaine to stay awake in all-night poker games and then moved on to crack.

Bobby Martin was another infamous character. He was the guy in the backroom who used to skim the money at Churchill Downs. Like almost everything else in Vegas the line was a setup, too. The bookies would all be sitting around—all drinkers, all Jewish and they all drank Canadian Club and water. Don’t ask me why they drank that stuff, but they all did. It would be like six in the morning and Bobby Martin would be sitting there. Someone would say, “Bobby, it’s nine thirty in New York. You’ve got to get a line out.” There were these five bookmakers; they would consult with each other over the phone and set the odds. I don’t think they even knew each other. They were just five guys that he respected and he used them as a barometer. It worked for an awful lot of fucking money. That is how they made all of their money—by laying off their bets.

How respected was this guy? When Bobby Martin died in 2001 they had a moment of silence for him. JFK, Bobby Kennedy, and Bobby Martin are the only people these guys in Vegas stopped gambling for as a tribute. John F. Kennedy, when they buried him, they stopped gaming for one minute. Otherwise Vegas never stops. Their caddy-up is to keep going.

Lester “Benny” Binion was another larger-than-life criminal type at the time. He was the owner of the Horseshoe, among other casinos, a self-styled cowboy, a mobster, a killer, who always kept a sawed-off shotgun handy. He’s the guy who founded the World Series of Poker. Benny Binion testified at Vegas police chief Ralph Lamb’s trial. Lamb was making thirty or forty grand a year as a cop but he was living large on a big ranch with the Cadillacs with the steer horns on them.

In 1977, Lamb was indicted for tax evasion. The government claimed that he earned money from illegal activities, which enabled him to build a home complete with a guesthouse and horsemanship facilities, and had evaded paying taxes on it. They tried to show that certain loans including one for $30,000 from Benny Binion were never meant to be repaid. But the U.S. district judge Roger D. Foley acquitted Lamb. Marty Gutilla, who was in the courtroom that day, tells a more dramatic version of what happened:

“When they asked Binion if he had bank statements showing these loans, he said, ‘Nah, it was in cash.’ And then he added, ‘As a matter of fact, if he needs more, I brought more with me.’ He opened his coat and he had like a half a million dollars in cash taped to the inside of his jacket and on his body. The whole courtroom busted out laughing. Here is a guy who brought a half a million or million to court and didn’t turn a hair. So, what could they do?” Marty may have exaggerated his numbers, but the story accurately captures these larger-than-life characters.

My sister Mariam has another view of Ralph Lamb. She says he kept an incredibly corrupt and dirty-dealing town under some kind of restraint. He came down hard on mobsters and cleaned up the rampant prostitution in the city. Many people felt he was a kind of local hero. As a kind of cowboy sheriff straight out of a Western, Lamb is now about to be the subject of a CBS-TV series starring Dennis Quaid called
Vegas,
to be written by Nicholas Pileggi (
Goodfellas, Casino
). And the eighty-five-year-old galoot can talk that sagebrush talk like Pat Garrett must’ve done down at the Dodge saloon: “Why, he got so darned excited,” Lamb said of Pileggi’s reaction to his goldarned tall tales. “He said it was the gawd-darndest thing he ever heard. He said this is the greatest thing he ever wrote.”

Vegas was full of shady characters of every stripe from mob guys to hustlers, scammers to cheaters, down to the doctors who wrote scripts—drug prescriptions—for big stars. They’d write anything—any pill, any shot, in any amount. There was a Dr. Elias Ghanem, a Palestinian from Haifa. He was the fight doctor, he’d be at all the big fights in Vegas. Real debonair, good-looking guy. He was the guy who was so helpful in writing scripts for Presley, Elvis gave him a Cadillac. This Dr. Ghanem was at Jubilation just about every night. Elaine Newton would come over to my house to see Anne, and to complain about her marriage to Wayne Newton, which was not good. I often saw her in Jubilation with Elias Ghanem, who gave Presley all those pills, Presley and Ann-Margret. Ghanem was the “scriptwriter to the stars.” He was a nice guy in a highly dangerous situation. He never got pinched, never even got indicted. See, in those days it was different. What with what happened to Michael Jackson and everybody else, today you’d be indicted in two months. This guy who gave the same pills and shots to Presley and Michael Jackson never got pinched. Different times.