Being Oscar: From Mob Lawyer to Mayor of Las Vegas

by Oscar Goodman

  “You’d better support her in the style to which she’s become accustomed,” her father told me, “or I’ll kick your ass from here to 76th Street.”

  “If you’re big enough,” I said.

  It was a rocky start, but we got past it. I spent the summer in New York after graduating from Haverford. I stayed in the Goldmarks’ home and got a job working as a janitor in a community center in Harlem. Carolyn had a job there, too, working the telephone switchboard.

  I got to know her family and they got to know me. Dr. Goldmark had asked us to wait a year before we got married, so we weren’t wed until the following summer, after I had finished my first year at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

  Our anniversary is June 6, 1962. Most people of my generation know June 6 as D-Day, the day Allied troops invaded France and the tide began to turn in World War II. But for me, June 6 has a different meaning. I look at it as the best day of my life.

  Carolyn is not only my wife, but the person I most admire and trust in the world. She’s the only one whose advice I will always listen to. She cuts through the bull. She tells me what she thinks and why. She also knows me better than anyone. And despite that, she apparently loves me.

  When the kids were young, we took a trip to Disneyland. Carolyn drove. When we got there, she left me with the four of them while she parked the car. As we stood in line, I suddenly felt petrified that one of them might take off. I spent days dealing with important criminal issues and fighting big legal battles, but I’d never experienced that kind of fear or anxiety.

  We were waiting in line. Nothing was happening. Then Carolyn came strolling up after parking the car and said, “What are you doing?”

  “Waiting in line,” I said.

  She looked at me and shook her head.

  “Oscar,” she said. “This is a bus stop.”

  Then she pointed in the opposite direction to a sign that said Disneyland.

  “The entrance is over there,” she said, taking the kids by the hands and leading the way.

  Like I said, she loves me.

  I was much more adept in court. And the more I worked at it, the better I became.

  One day I got a call from John DePasquale, a bartender at the Golden Nugget in downtown Las Vegas. He had been indicted in a big federal bookmaking case out of Miami. It was the first national case built around the use of the new wiretap laws, part of the Omnibus Crime Bill of 1968. DePasquale was a minor player, but he had been picked up on some wires and got charged along with some fairly significant bookmakers from other parts of the country.

  John was accused of using the phones to provide bookmakers information about the morning betting line. One of the big targets was Little Marty Sklaroff and his father, Jesse, a bar owner in Miami, who had been a major figure in sports betting, too. The feds were very familiar with them. The FBI had put a tap on a public pay phone at the Miami airport that Little Marty used.

  Marty, a dapper, well-dressed fella with a huge pompadour, was an associate of Gil “The Brain” Beckley, who at the time was considered the number one bookmaker in the country. Beckley was based in New York City. I visited him there once. He lived in a circular-shaped apartment building on Central Park, and I was struck by the fact that every apartment unit on his floor had a pay phone. Whether each unit was part of his gambling operation was something I didn’t bother asking about. There are things that a lawyer doesn’t need—or want—to know.

  Young Marty was enthralled with Beckley. You could see that he was trying to emulate the Brain in the way he did business. Whenever Beckley was in Miami, they’d go to dinner at Joe’s Stone Crab—Beckley would hold court there. He was used to being center stage. The word in the gambling world was that Beckley had sources in the locker rooms of several teams and was able to get inside information that he used to set his betting lines. He did a lot of the complex computations in his head. There were rumors that he had been able to bribe athletes and referees to fix basketball games.

  Marty Sklaroff loved those stories and never hesitated to share them with me. I think he saw himself as an up-and-comer in the business. He wanted to be Gil Beckley. There was, of course, a down side to that life and those aspirations. According to most law enforcement reports, Beckley was killed in 1970 because some people in the Patriarca crime family out of New England believed he was cooperating with the FBI. No one knows for sure because Beckley just disappeared. His body has never been found.

  In the Miami case, the FBI set up surveillance from a cargo container in which they had cut peepholes. That’s how they watched the pay phone. In the middle of this investigation, a couple of airport porters came along and were moving the container. All of a sudden they heard, “Stop! FBI.”

  The porters took off running, their eyes wide as saucers.

  As a result of that phone tap, a dozen major bookmakers must have been indicted. John DePasquale’s indictment was returned in Miami. Little Marty was represented by a fine lawyer, Dave Rosen, whose reputation preceded him since he had also represented Meyer Lansky. Dave told Marty to tell John to hire me because Mel Horowitz had told him about my “win” in Las Vegas. I flew down there to represent John at trial.

  In reviewing the case, I saw that John was hardly even mentioned in the indictment. He was clearly a small fish in the scheme of things. I argued that he should be granted a severance. I filed a motion saying that he was entitled to be tried based on the evidence against him, and that to stand trial with the other defendants, with all that the government alleged against them, would be unfair and would create an undue prejudice. It was a pretty standard severance argument, and in this case I think it was righteous.

  After hearing two or three days of evidence without John’s name being mentioned, the judge agreed. John headed back home to Las Vegas, and he was severed from the case. Dave Rosen, who took me under his wing, asked me to stick around. I did, but there wasn’t much for me to do, so I listened and learned.

  Spending a lot of time around Marty Sklaroff was the beginning of a life lesson for me. It was the first time I was around one of the “fellas” who I came to represent over the years. And I learned that no matter how the government and its handmaiden, the media, came to characterize my clients, putting them in the worst light, the people I represented had redeeming qualities and were worthy of salvation.

  Marty told me that when he was a young man, he experimented with drugs and ended up a heroin addict. I had heard how hard it was to get that monkey off your back. He told me firsthand how he did it. He locked himself in a room and made sure no one came in until he broke the addiction. He said it was like a bad case of the flu, but it could be done.

  He also was a great father. He gave his daughter a confirmation party at the Fountainebleau Hotel in Miami, to which I was invited. These fellas had the best of everything. Each table offered the best scotch, the best gin, the best rye whiskey; you made your own drinks. His daughter made a speech about her father, how much she loved him and all that he had done for her. I realized there was more to this guy than the prosecution and the FBI were saying. I ended up thinking that way about many of my clients, and that’s one of the reasons I worked so hard to defend them.

  On a personal level, and there’s no point in denying this, I was impressed by the way he and the other guys lived. I told myself that when I gave a party for my daughter, Cara, I wanted it to be just like the one at the Fountainebleau. No expense was spared, the guys were all dressed as if they were going to a fancy wedding, and the women were dripping with diamonds. It was a scene right out of a Damon Runyon short story, “Guys and Dolls,” set in Miami.

  The cast of characters included a guy named “Wingy,” who had one arm shorter than the other; “The Camel,” who had a noticeable hump on his back; and “Lefty,” which I assumed meant he was a southpaw. This was a world I had never seen before. It was fascinating and seductive, but as I was sitting there enjoying the party, a voice in the back of my head—my wife Carolyn’s
voice, actually—kept saying, “Don’t become your client.”

  That was something she told me again and again as I got more deeply involved in representing high-profile criminals. “Who would want to live like that?” she would ask. “You have the glamour and the luxury, but you’re on the cusp of illegality. That’s not who we want to be.”

  Wiretaps can be devastating—ask any defense attorney who has had to deal with them. The problem is, you’re sitting at the table with your client, and the jury members have their headphones on. The next thing you know, they’re listening to your guy, in his own words, substantiate the charges against him.

  You can’t cross-examine a tape, so the best defense is keeping the recording out of the trial, finding a way to get the incriminating evidence ruled inadmissible. To do that, you have to understand the wiretap laws. I became the guru of defense attorneys when it came to the wiretap statutes. I knew them upside down, inside out, and backwards. The DePasquale case was one of my first experiences with an electronic surveillance case, and, as I said, I really didn’t do much, other than get my client severed.

  But the law works in funny ways sometimes.

  The trial in Miami ended with Sklaroff and the others convicted, but my guy walked away. The government never came after him, and I eventually got the charges dropped.

  No big deal. In the greater scheme of things, John DePasquale was a small cog, not someone the feds really cared about. In certain circles, however, the bottom line was that I had once again gotten somebody off. That translated to being a wiretap expert, even though John’s dismissal had nothing to do with the wiretap aspect of the case. But the word started to spread that the only defendant to beat a big wiretap case was Oscar Goodman’s client.

  I got a phone call from Rosen, the attorney who befriended me when I was down in Florida. His client, Meyer Lansky, had been indicted along with Morris Lansburgh and Sam Cohen, the owners of the Fountainebleau, for being part of a skimming operation at the Flamingo Hotel-Casino in Las Vegas.

  Skimming was a big part of the mob’s game when it ran several of the major casinos. It’s not a really complicated crime, when you think about it. Anyone in a cash business could understand the principle. In essence, the mobsters owned the casino (although their names never showed up on any papers), and what they were taking by skimming was their own money.

  But they took it before the casino’s earnings had been reported to state regulators. Of course, money that was reported was subject to taxes. It was the cost of doing business; part of the deal a casino struck with the state in order to be licensed. Simply put, the mobsters who had their hooks into certain casinos wanted their money—or at least a piece of their money—before taxes.

  This kind of stuff happens every day in the business world. People are always looking to get one over on the tax man. In Las Vegas, at least in mob-controlled Las Vegas casinos, the skims totaled millions of dollars and involved mob families from Chicago, Kansas City, and several other jurisdictions.

  When I got the call from Rosen asking me to represent Lansky, I jumped at the chance. This was the number one criminal in the underworld, according to the FBI. He was the financial genius who grew up poor on the Lower East Side of New York City and rose to the top of his chosen field. One of his best friends was Bugsy Siegel. They built the Flamingo, and in doing so turned Las Vegas into the gambling capital of America. Say what you will about Lansky and Siegel, but there’s no denying when it came to Las Vegas, they were visionaries.

  “Would you be Lansky’s local counsel?” Rosen asked.

  “You bet.”

  Once again luck shone on me. I received a handsome retainer from the man reputed to be the financial genius behind organized crime.

  As the case moved forward, I sought delays because of Lansky’s purported bad health. His Miami doctors said he’d risk death if he traveled to Las Vegas for a court appearance, and that his condition made it impossible for him to withstand the rigors of a trial.

  I worked on the case for several months, but I never met Lansky or had a conversation with him. All my contacts were with Rosen, Lansky’s primary lawyer, or with Lansky’s doctors. Looking back on it now, I realize that it would have been fascinating to sit down and have a discussion with Meyer, but the reality is if that did happen, we would never have talked about his reputation or background. It would have been presumptuous of me to ask him about that, or about any of the people he did business with. It just didn’t work that way. As a lawyer for such clients, all you have to know are the facts in the case, and then figure out a way to use them to win an acquittal. In this case, the only thing I really needed to know was his medical condition. Could he withstand the stress of a trial? His doctors said again and again that he could not. That’s what I had to work with.

  As the trial date came closer and closer, the government prosecutors got more and more frustrated. They had photographs of Lansky walking his puppy on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach.

  “Certainly he can’t be that sick,” they said.

  But I kept on presenting medical records to Judge Roger Foley in Las Vegas, and he became more and more convinced that Lansky’s condition was very serious. Edward Bennett Williams, the great trial attorney from Washington, and Bill Hundley, Robert Kennedy’s right-hand man, were representing the owners of the Fountainebleau. They got a kick out of my driving the prosecutors nuts. The trial came and went. Their clients were convicted, but Meyer Lansky was still walking his dog in Miami.

  Finally, Judge Foley said, “Enough is enough,” and dismissed the indictment against Meyer. Another “win.” This time my client was the biggest name in the criminal underworld.

  You can’t buy that kind of advertising. Now I started getting more phone calls, from guys in Cleveland, in Chicago, in Detroit. Would I be available to come out and represent them? My practice took off.

  This eventually led to my involvement in one of the biggest wiretap cases the U.S. Justice Department had ever brought. And it got me face to face with John Mitchell, the pipe-smoking attorney general of the United States under Richard Nixon.

  I think I was drawn to these wiretap cases because of the fundamental issue that was involved. To overhear a person’s words and thoughts through a listening device is clearly a violation of an American’s right to privacy, and it’s not something that should be handled in a cavalier fashion. The law was supposed to provide safeguards. The idea was that a wiretap was an investigative tool of last resort. When all else failed—when there was no other way to get the information and when the case was of significance—then, and only then, could a judge be asked to consider approving a wiretap on a phone. Only then would investigators be allowed to listen in on private conversations.

  That was the theory of the law, but the practice was something else. FBI agents would file sworn affidavits seeking wiretap orders, and judges would rubber-stamp them. Instead of being an investigative tool of last resort, wiretaps became the opening salvo in building a case, and thus the feds became Orwell’s “Big Brother.” The government got to enter our homes and listen to our conversations, and this was usually based on the caprice of FBI agents who were only interested in building a case.

  In 1970, the FBI conducted a series of raids targeting a national bookmaking operation with supposed ties to organized crime. Mitchell, the attorney general, bragged that these were the “largest coordinated gambling raids ever.” They took part in eleven different states and in twenty-six different cities, including Las Vegas.

  Marty Kane, one of the most successful sports bettors in Vegas, asked me to get involved on behalf of a friend of his, Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal. Rosenthal had been indicted as the result of a wiretap that had been placed on a phone used in connection with the race and sports book in Las Vegas. He had a reputation as being one of the sharpest gamblers ever.

  Marty Kane was old-school like Bob Martin and Mel Horowitz. Everybody who was anybody in the gambling business knew he was tops in the field. His
opinions on how a game would turn out could, and usually did, change the betting line substantially. This is no small thing in the bookmaking business. As someone who likes to bet sports, I appreciated what that meant.

  They called Kane “Marty the Jew.” He had friends like Marty Sklaroff in Miami and Gil Beckley in New York. By this point I was starting to get a sense of who some of these people were. These were the major players in the sports betting world, a world that fascinated me long before I became a lawyer and that provided me with clients through my entire legal career.

  I genuinely liked Marty. He was a little gruff, but we spoke the same language, especially when it came to sports betting. I was fascinated with what he did, and how he was able to do it. Marty was a little portly, and he had permanent dark circles around his eyes, which made him look like a woeful raccoon. But he was an educated guy. I think he had a degree in journalism, of all things, from New York University.

  He used to hang out with some of my other clients, guys like gamblers Ruby Goldstein, Joey Boston, and Frank Rosenthal. Marty, Ruby, and Joey were major players in the sports betting business. They would work at it all day long, booking and betting and setting the lines. They knew more about sports than the athletes who played the game or the businessmen who owned the teams. I loved watching them operate. It was a skill that few people had, and that even fewer people appreciated. As someone who loved to bet, I felt I was in the presence of genius.

  Marty had asked me to represent him in a case a few years earlier, and it turned out pretty well. He had been indicted in Mineola, New York, and for two years we fought extradition. There was no way I was going to let him go back there to face gambling charges. They were trying to tie him to a $100-million-a-year illegal sports betting operation with alleged mob ties. Mike O’Callaghan was the governor of Nevada at the time. He listened to my pleas on Marty’s behalf and refused to sign the order that would have required Marty to surrender in New York. I threw up every roadblock I could think of and sparred with the prosecutors back there over every issue. I didn’t give an inch. Finally, I think they knew they were going nowhere fast and just got tired. So they proposed a deal.