by Shawn Levy
Joey was in.
I‘m not going to stooge for anyone
The story became almost as familiar as George Washington chopping down the cherry tree: Half-batty New York gangster Ben Siegel came to a sleepy little desert town, got a look at the sawdust-strewn Old West gambling joints, and had a vision of a European-style casino resort with ultramodern amenities and big-name entertainment; he convinced a cadre of partners back East to invest in his project, then endured all sorts of costly problems getting it built—some of which were clearly due to his inexperience in such undertakings (for instance, Siegel was neurotically hygienic, and his hotel incurred huge cost overruns when he insisted that each toilet have its own sewer line); the hotel, the Flamingo, finally opened the day after Christmas, 1946, and it was a disaster—inexperienced dealers suffered big losses, and without any rooms to stay in (only the casino, restaurant, and showroom were finished), the winners took their money home with them, leaving the joint high and dry; Siegel’s partners, already incensed with the escalating cost of building the place, began to feel as if they’d been taken; they ordered Siegel executed and took over the hotel, which not only turned into a stunning success but became the model for the next half-century of Las Vegas moneymaking enterprises. Like Moses, he never saw his promised land realized.
Great yarn—the founding fable of Las Vegas—and parts of it were even true. A few crucial details were missing: The Vegas Strip already had two thriving resort casinos (the Last Frontier and El Rancho Vegas) when Siegel arrived; the Flamingo was already under construction when he muscled himself in on the deal for a controlling percentage; the East Coast mob had already infiltrated Vegas a few years earlier through ownership of several downtown joints and the telegraph service that helped bookies keep track of horse-races around the country. But the basic shape—that a single visionary crackpot with a taste for the high life recognized a little western watering hole as the locus of an American Monte Carlo in the desert—carried the weight of both fact and myth nicely. Benny Siegel did, in fact, invent Las Vegas, insofar as Las Vegas meant glitter, glamour, and hedonistic escape.
Frank knew Benny. When the gangster came West to organize Los Angeles’s inept crime syndicate (known back East as the Mickey Mouse Mob) and rub elbows with Hollywood swells, Frank, typically, delighted in the chance to brush up against real mob muscle, and he would bore friends afterward with talk about the hits Siegel had contracted for Murder Incorporated. Frank liked Benny’s idea about turning Vegas into a vacation spot. In 1946, when the Flamingo was under construction, Frank announced in a Vegas paper that he was planning to build a resort casino with its own radio station (a decade later, Frank launched a similarly chimerical Havana casino, in which he was to be partnered with Tony Martin and Donald O’Connor, among others). And Frank had coincidentally been on the spot at a weeklong convocation of mob bosses in Havana in 1947, when the potentates of organized crime decided that Benny Siegel needed to be eliminated.
But Frank’s association with Las Vegas took some time to develop. Though he enjoyed visiting the city to gamble and party through the late forties, he didn’t perform there until 1951, at the nadir of his career, when he was booked at the Desert Inn in a gesture of kindness on the part of owner Wilbur Clark. The D.I. remained Frank’s Vegas home for the next few years, and it was surely there that he became aware of the details of the new casino resort opening on the site of the old LaRue Club, just a half mile or so down the road, midway between the D.I. and the Flamingo. The owners and builders of the new place used Clark’s hotel as their base of operations during construction, and they leeched plenty of Clark’s best employees when their joint finally opened. They called it the Sands, and it would become the quintessential Las Vegas casino of its era.
The Sands set new standards for Las Vegas with just its look. The exterior was pointedly Moderne, with a gigantic, strikingly styled sign sticking out over the road and an eye-catching series of angled arches serving as an entryway; inside, it was dimly lit and burnished in deep wooden tones more reminiscent of a sophisticated London gambling club than the sort of bright, lively playground evoked by such rivals as the Flamingo and the D.I. Moreover, the Sands drew upon patrons’ familiarity with a famously swank New York landmark, the Copacabana, importing the legendary nightclub’s renowned Chinese menu and hiring away its single most important human asset, assistant manager Jack Entratter.
Entratter was one of the great showmen of his time. A hulking six-foot-three bear hobbled by a childhood bout with osteomyelitis, he was twenty-six years old and a bouncer at the Stork Club when he signed on at the Copa in 1940. For the next twelve years, Entratter, Nice Guy to manager Jules Podell’s Thug, was beloved of the stars who played the Copa, offering high salaries and deluxe accommodations such as personal suites in the hotel above the club. Entratter’s arrival in Las Vegas signaled to the biggest entertainers in the business that the Sands would be their new home in the desert. As soon as they were contractually free to do so, Frank left the D.I., Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis left the Flamingo, and such performers as Danny Thomas, Lena Horne, Tony Bennett, Nat King Cole, Red Skelton, and Milton Berle all began appearing regularly in Entratter’s showroom. (There were weirder acts, too: Edith Piaf, Tallulah Bankhead, Ezio Pinza, Señor Wences, Van Johnson, who sang a very little, and the immortal duo of Robert Merrill and Louis Armstrong all performed at the Sands within its first six months.) “He was our love,” said Jerry Lewis of Entratter. “We wouldn’t go anywhere in Vegas but where Jack was.” Virtually from the moment it opened, the Sand’s Copa Room became the town’s undisputed top nightspot.
If the decor, chop suey, and famous faces made the Sands feel like a western satellite of the Copacabana, the financial setup of the operation made it seem even more so. The Copacabana had been owned, in the public record, by Monte Proser, but it was widely known that Proser’s interests were a front for the real ownership, which included mob boss Frank Costello and such confederates as Joe Adonis. Proser was a classic front man, a relatively legitimate guy paraded out in front of the authorities to give the club the appearance of being owned by benign parties. The Copa had a few others—Podell, a bootlegger and armbreaker well known to the police, and, eventually, Entratter, who was rewarded with points of his own in the club as his role in booking it expanded.
Even if the real percentage of his ownership was, like Proser’s, far less than it was reported to be, Entratter still had a sweetheart deal. He was a great front man, with a brilliance at ingratiating himself with performers and a golden touch at showmanship—his chorus line, the Copa Girls, was as famous as Flo Zeigfeld’s had been in its day. Working for Costello at the Copa allowed him to flourish as an impresario and live in an extremely comfortable style. Besides, he knew how the world worked: His older brother had run with Legs Diamond during the flashy gangster’s heyday and had been killed, in fact, in a shoot-out. This rare combination of criminal acquaintance and showbiz expertise made Entratter a perfect manager for the Copa—and his bosses there correctly surmised that he’d be even better at the Sands.
If it initially surprised some observers that Entratter would leave the Copa for the Sands, they hadn’t understood the potential of Las Vegas as a money-earner for the mob—or the need for experienced front men. True, the Flamingo was built and run by mobsters with almost no recourse to window dressing like Entratter, but the notoriety Benny Siegel earned for the place made its real owners uneasy. Since then, virtually every hotel built on the Strip was the property of some group of gangsters, but not so as you could show it on paper. The Thunderbird was connected to criminal financial whiz Meyer Lansky; the Desert Inn was run by Moe Dalitz, a onetime bootlegger and racketeer with ties to organized crime in Cleveland and Detroit; the Stardust was the dream project of Los Angeles gambler Tony Cornero (the only Italian-American ever to build a casino on the Strip) and, with Cornero’s death (of natural causes, yet!), was commonly believed to have been taken over by a combination of Chicago mobsters
and the Desert Inn group.
The Sands, as befitted the newest and most refined jewel of the desert, had remarkably varied ties to the Boys, as the mob came to be known in Las Vegas. Pieces of the hotel were secretly held in New York, New Jersey, Chicago, Boston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Texas, St. Louis—just about anyplace there was a group of gangsters worthy of the name. If the other Strip hotels were like little mom-and-pops run by the various out-of-state mobs in competition with one another, the Sands was owned by a syndicate so egalitarian in its ownership as to be tantamount to an honest-to-pete corporation.
Chief operating officer of this shadow enterprise for the hotel’s first decade—unofficially, of course—was Joseph “Doc” Stacher, a major player in the New Jersey rackets almost since their inception. By the time he was thirty, Stacher had been arrested at least ten times in Newark and had once been rousted in a Manhattan hotel room along with Benny Siegel, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, and Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro. In the fifties, he weathered denaturalization proceedings and an indictment on illegal gambling charges stemming from his involvement in a casino near Saratoga Springs, New York. At the same time, just as the Sands was beginning to materialize, Stacher kept appearing ominously in Lake Tahoe, Reno, and Las Vegas; Las Vegas police observed him conferring with Lansky (one of his codefendants in the Saratoga Springs case), and he was seen cruising around town in a Cadillac sedan with blueprints for the Sands in tow. When the hotel finally opened, Stacher was the single biggest shareholder, though his name was nowhere to be found on any official documents; the federal government spent the next decade in unsuccessful efforts to bring his interest in the casino to the surface.
Such was the way things worked. Jack Entratter and men like him ran the place and declared themselves the owners of huge chunks of it, but Stacher and men like him were the ones who actually profited on every dollar the casino made. The Boys got their money and a certain amount of plausible deniability; the front men got glory and the trappings—if not the substance—of wealth.
Entratter wasn’t the only front man at the Sands. In a stroke of genuine inspiration, the hotel’s invisible owners allowed Sinatra to buy two points in the operation, thus assuring the singer’s unwavering loyalty. “Frank was flattered to be invited,” said Doc Stacher years later, “but the object was to get him to perform there because there’s no bigger draw in Las Vegas. When Frankie was performing, the hotel really filled up.”
Almost as public a figure was Jakey Freedman, a Russian-born Jew who rose from fruit peddling to oil drilling, making a fortune on the side with illegal gambling in Houston and Galveston; he was, on paper anyway, the single largest stakeholder in the joint. If Entratter represented the sophisticated eastern atmosphere in which the Sands wanted to wrap itself, Freedman was his utter opposite. Tiny (he stood maybe five foot three), favoring absurdly large western hats, string ties, and checked shirts, he gave the hotel its only touch of the Old West bullshit that typified other Nevada casinos.
He also gave it its first taste of trouble. In the summer of 1952, just before the Sands opened, Freedman was denied a casino operating license by the Nevada Tax Commission. Asked if he was hiding the ownership interests of organized crime, Freedman bristled, “I’ve been the star all my life. I’m not going to stooge for anyone this late.”
Stooge or no, he managed to get his license, a good thing, in the long run, considering that he was the guy who, just three years later, brought to the Sands the man who would become the third key figure in its history: Carl Cohen, the Sands’s longtime casino manager.
Cohen had been in the gambling business his whole life. “He was a bookie,” said his brother, Mike. “I won’t lie. Wherever he was, he worked sneak joints and was a bookie. He loved to gamble. He was always in the gambling business.”
He was born in 1913 in Ohio, where he first learned the ins and outs of his trade in illegal gambling clubs run by the Mayfield Road Gang under the proctorship of Moe Dalitz. Cohen’s knowledge of the gambling racket—“There wasn’t nothing you could pull over on him,” his brother boasted—coupled with his intimidating physical presence (like fellow shtarker Jack Entratter, he stood decidely over six feet and regularly carried 250-plus pounds), made him an ideal candidate for advancement in the casino business. Within a decade, he was running the entire casino at El Rancho Vegas, which had passed down to Jake Katelman’s nephew Beldon upon the founder’s death. Cohen prospered at El Rancho, respectful always of the prerogatives of the Boys and of such esteemed guests as Howard Hughes, for whom he kept a hotel cabin permanently reserved.
It was Cohen’s willingness to cater to Hughes that wound up leading him to the Sands. One night in 1955, Sophie Tucker was making one of her frequent appearances at El Rancho, and the joint was mobbed. As Beldon Katelman wandered through the pits and the showroom looking with favor upon the fruits of his success, he noticed Cohen paying special attention to a motley character dressed in jeans and tennis shoes—an eyesore in the midst of the high-rolling splendor. Katelman took Cohen aside and ordered him to expel the geekish-looking fellow; Cohen refused (it was Hughes, of course). The argument, right in the middle of the bustling casino, escalated until Katelman took a poke at his casino manager. Retaliating, Carl busted his boss on the jaw, sending him sprawling among the feet of his guests, and then turned and walked out of the joint; not a single security guard lifted a finger against him; half of the dealers, none of whom could stand Katelman, either, walked out as well.
A few hours later, Cohen’s phone rang. It was Jakey Freedman calling to say he understood Cohen needed work and he should come and see him in the morning.
Cohen showed up at the Sands the next day still agitated. Freedman asked him if he wanted something to eat. “When Carl was mad,” his brother remembered, “he ate with both hands and he didn’t give a shit about nothing.” Freedman picked up the phone and called room service for a half dozen bagels with lox and cream cheese. “Make it a dozen,” Cohen told him.
After knocking back the bagels with a few pitchers of coffee, the two men got down to business. Freedman spoke frankly: “I need a man of your caliber who knows the business and has a following. I don’t want this joint to fall on its face.” Cohen said he’d have to consider it. He conferred with his bosses back East—the people whose percentage in El Rancho he’d been covering for—and got the okay, provided he really was the boss of the casino. Accepting Freedman’s offer, Cohen took five points in the operation, expanded the playing area to make work for the dealers who’d walked out of El Rancho Vegas with him, and brought along all his best high-rolling customers, including Hughes, who told him, “Wherever you go, I’m going with you.”
Freedman died in 1958, and the Sands was—on paper, anyway—put into the hands of Entratter and Cohen, who turned it into the most magnetic and sparkling operation on the whole of the booming Strip. They came up with all sorts of elegant touches—an actual floating crap game in the swimming pool, a manicured putting green, electric carts transporting guests between the casino and the two-story buildings that housed their rooms. They set up reservations offices in Beverly Hills, Houston, Mexico City, and other towns likely to funnel gamblers to Vegas. They also expanded the allure of the joint to high rollers and celebrities by upping Sinatra’s percentage in the operation from two to nine points and selling Dean Martin a 1 percent piece. With Sammy Davis Jr. and Joey Bishop already signed to long-term deals, the Sands was de facto home of the Rat Pack before the notion of a Summit ever entered anyone’s mind.
For all of them, it was a family place. Cohen and Entratter lived on the premises—they had private pools off their apartments—and Frank eventually had a private suite (the Presidential Suite!) set aside for him as well. Cohen’s brother, Mike, was hired on as a slot machine repairman and then as a craps and blackjack dealer. The various owners’ wives and widows always vied for the staff’s attention at each other’s expense.
The nepotism was endless, if it occasionally backfired.
Entratter brought in a nephew, who managed to get the sack after echoing Beldon Katelman’s foolishness at El Rancho Vegas. Frank and the boys were cutting up with the lounge act after one of the Summit shows, and a casually dressed guy with a hat brim hiding his eyes was leaning against a wall watching them intently. Entratter’s nephew had him hustled out by security. A few minutes later, an enraged Entratter came storming into the lounge (“He was a big man,” recalled an employee, “but when he was angry he was eight feet tall”) wanting to know which genius had just ordered Danny Kaye ejected from the joint.
Other employees were smarter. Bellmen, room service waiters, maids, valets, and anyone else who might stumble into a locked room learned to see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing. In a town full of discreet professionals, they were exemplary. A guy might catch the unforgettable sight of showbiz royalty cavorting with a trio of mixed-race hookers, or he might see New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison getting the full four-star treatment on the arm from Mario Marino, Carlos Marcello’s man on the scene. But was he gonna blow a job at the best hotel in town over gossipmongering? The Sands was so special that it was almost beyond reproach.
They called it “A Place in the Sun,” but the joy of it for most of the more famous guests was the promise that it held of shadows. Cohen catered to the high rollers, with secret rooms where there were no betting limits. Entratter stroked the stars. “Whatever Frank Sinatra wanted, Mr. Entratter always gave it to him,” said one employee, while another put it more bluntly: “Entratter feared Frank.”
He had good reason. Frank’s first two points in the casino were purchased over-the-counter in a fashion that the gaming commissioners couldn’t object to. But the other seven points weren’t quite so clean. Word was that Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo, yet another confederate of Meyer Lansky with ties to the Genovese family, had made a gift to Frank of the additional seven points the singer owned in the hotel. Alo’s name appeared on no documents concerning the hotel, but he was apparently tightly connected to it, a fact that Entratter knew all too well. After he’d built himself his private apartment on the hotel grounds, Entratter was visited by Alo, whose interest in the Sands was partially comprised of ten of Entratter’s twelve points. Entratter feted the gangster in his own apartment, which he’d had filled with showgirls, Chateaubriand, Dom Pérignon, and Cuban cigars. Alo fumed: “I should have left you a headwaiter,” he told Entratter in front of his minions. “You come over here and spend millions of dollars. You smoke your big cigars. You dress in your two-thousand-dollar suits. And you’re nothing more than lackeys.… I should send you all back where you belong.” Entratter was stunned into silence, and he tiptoed around Alo, his emissaries, and his buddies—like Sinatra—ever after.