Being Oscar: From Mob Lawyer to Mayor of Las Vegas

by Oscar Goodman

  He basically told them to go fuck themselves and fought them all the way.

  He started his own television show. He would go on TV and blast the gaming regulators who were after him. It was a horrible show, but everyone watched it. People would run home on Saturday night so they could see what he was going to say next, and then everyone talked about it at work on Monday. He had major entertainers on the show, such as Sinatra and O.J. Simpson, as well as showgirls and bookmakers.

  Rosenthal really understood sports betting, and he changed the way the sports books worked in Las Vegas. Before him, a bookie joint would be a hole-in-the-wall kind of place with a bunch of guys standing around with cigarettes in their mouths. He made it comfortable and plush, with big-screen television sets and all kinds of information available. All the races from all over the country, all the ball games were there for viewing.

  He was really good at whatever he went into, and he was always a step ahead. Whether you liked him or not, he was a force to contend with. For instance, before the bombing, when he was in charge of entertainment at the Stardust, he booked Siegfried and Roy.

  Unlike Tony Spilotro, who never tried to be anything other than a street guy, Lefty considered himself a sophisticate. He always wore tailored clothes. It wouldn’t be the latest fashion, but it was what he liked. Always light colors. He was very much into himself; he couldn’t walk past a mirror without stopping to check out his appearance.

  We used to meet on a daily basis because he had a lot of serious issues. They were trying to ban him from the casinos even though he didn’t have a serious criminal record. He worked for the Argent Corporation casinos (the feds would later charge that Argent was a front company for the mob). At different times he held posts at the Stardust, the Freemont, the Hacienda, and the Marina. Usually he’d take a job that did not require state licensing, something in entertainment or food. But whatever job he was assigned, the state would come in and demand that he get licensed. Sometimes they’d change the regulation because of him. It was a vendetta, and it wasn’t based on anything he had done, but rather on who he was.

  That’s one of the problems I have always had with the Black Book and the approach that the regulators took. These holier-than-thou guys on the gaming board considered it guilt by association—guilty until proven innocent. I found that to be fundamentally unfair, but the courts upheld the regulators. I thought it was all bullshit.

  Rosenthal and I would meet, sometimes at restaurants, but rarely in his office. He was concerned about bugs, and I didn’t like speaking to him in that atmosphere. When we would meet at his home, invariably he would be wearing one of those Hugh Hefner–type bathrobes. His wife, Geri, who was the nicer of the two by far, waited on him hand and foot. He would demean and berate her, acting as if he were entitled to do this.

  He was also a perfectionist, which I guess made him a good businessman, but he had a mean streak. At the casino, if he saw a cigarette butt on the floor, he would pick it up. Then he would find out who was supposed to be picking it up and have that person fired. Even the way he raised his kids was very demanding. He made sure they got up every morning at 4 A.M. to go to swimming lessons before school.

  All these guys treated me well, but I learned a really important lesson when I first started representing Rosenthal. I was supposed to file something on a minor case, but the time had lapsed. I told him what had happened, and instead of berating me, he said, “As long as you tell me, it’s okay. Just don’t ever try to hide anything from me.”

  A judge once told me the same thing: “When a lawyer tries to hide a mistake, it grows.”

  It was a good lesson.

  Rosenthal wasn’t an intellectual, but he was innately smart. He always wanted to know what I was doing. And I can tell you, it wasn’t a pleasant experience to be around him.

  The car bombing only made things worse.

  At the time, there was already a lot going on in the circles in which he and Tony Spilotro traveled. A year earlier, the cops and feds had made a big bust, bringing down several members of the so-called Hole-in-the-Wall Gang.

  These were burglars who went about their business by cutting holes in the roofs or walls of establishments they had targeted. Law enforcement believed these guys worked for Tony, and that some of the merchandise, particularly when there was a heist at a jewelry store, ended up for sale at The Gold Rush, a jewelry shop that Tony and his brother John had opened.

  On the previous Fourth of July, 1981, the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang had targeted Bertha’s Gifts and Home Furnishings. An informant had given up details about the planned heist, and the police and feds were waiting. Six members of the gang, including a former cop, were arrested.

  One of the guys busted was Frank Cullotta, who the feds had identified as a “top associate and bodyguard” of Tony Spilotro, but I never believed that. I was having dinner with Tony once at Piero’s, a nice Italian restaurant, and he pointed to Cullotta, who was sitting across the room with some other men.

  “Never say anything around that guy,” Tony said. It was clear he didn’t trust him.

  Cullotta, like Tony, had come to Las Vegas from Chicago. He had a pizza parlor called “The Upper Crust” and appeared to be one of those hangers-on types. I never liked him. Later Cullotta would claim that I had represented him, but that wasn’t true.

  I bumped into Cullotta once while he was on his way to court. His lawyer had an office in the same building, and they were coming down the stairs through our lobby. Cullotta asked me, “How do I look?”

  I told him he should be wearing a tie because it was important to show respect for the court. He said he didn’t have one, so we found one in the office. Then he said he didn’t know how to tie a knot, so I showed him. In hindsight, I probably should have strangled him with it.

  After the Bertha’s bust, Cullotta cut a deal with the government. Among other things, he had been suspected of the murder of a guy named Sherwin “Jerry” Lisner. Lisner was found dead in the backyard pool of his Las Vegas home in 1979. He had been shot multiple times.

  When Cullotta agreed to cooperate, he said he was the shooter in the Lisner hit, but claimed it was ordered by Tony. He also tied Tony to the infamous M&M murders in Chicago and said Tony was the brains behind the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang.

  This was another example of law enforcement’s willingness to deal with despicable people in order to make cases against individuals like Tony. Cullotta eventually admitted to being involved in four murders, yet the government was happy to use him as a witness and to vouch for his credibility in front of a jury. As far as I was concerned, he was a low-life. The FBI hated Cullotta when they were investigating him, but after he flipped, they fell in love with him. He was still the same rotten person he was when he was on the streets, but now he was their guy and could do no wrong.

  He ended up getting eight years—not bad for four murders. And I think he actually spent little more than a year in jail. When he came out, he became this “Mafia expert” and gave talks and made appearances. It was as if he had become Professor Cullotta, which disgusted me.

  Shortly after word got out that Cullotta had flipped, John Spilotro’s home was shot up. Somebody sprayed his house with gunfire in a drive-by. No one was ever charged, but speculation is that some of the investigators who were working the Tony Spilotro case were behind it. They were “celebrating” Cullotta’s decision.

  That’s not the way law enforcement is supposed to conduct its business.

  But the mob also had changed. Cullotta was not the kind of guy who would have made it to the inner circle of any organized crime group twenty years earlier. The oath of omerta, the code of silence, meant something back then.

  This is not to justify or defend the Mafia, but merely an attempt to explain it. Those so-called “men of honor” from the 1930s and 1940s were different than the wiseguys of the 1980s. Some of them—not all of them, but some—truly believed they were part of a special society. They lived by their own code. They wer
e outlaws, but they had rules and—I know it sounds bizarre—ethics.

  Cooperating with law enforcement was unheard-of. To them, the Mafia was a way of life. If someone was arrested and sent to prison, his family would be looked out for. When he finished his time and came home, there would be a job waiting for him. A lot of that had fallen by the wayside by the 1980s. For many of these guys, the Mafia wasn’t a way of life, but a way to make money. And when they got jammed up and were looking at a prison sentence, omerta wasn’t part of their mindset. Instead, they looked at it from a business perspective: how do I cut my losses?

  Cooperating with law enforcement was the simple answer. And so in case after case in city after city, you saw the government making deals with murderers, extortionists, and drug dealers. Cullotta fit into that category.

  So did Aladena “Jimmy the Weasel” Fratiano, another Mafia snitch who had the perfect nickname. I was with Tony in San Francisco a few years earlier when we crossed paths with Fratiano. We had gone up there for a grand jury appearance, and Fratiano was in the hallway of the courthouse when we got there, ready to testify against Tony.

  Fratiano was a big-time Mafioso who had turned rat. He saw Tony and gave him the finger. Although he was surrounded by all his handlers, FBI agents, and prosecutors, Tony wanted to go after him. I think Tony would have ripped his head off. Fratiano was very smug. I looked at him, and the only thing I could think of was, “This guy’s a mouse practicing to be a rat.”

  Fratiano was never able to hurt Tony with his testimony, but Cullotta was another story. The only thing he had to deal with was information about Tony Spilotro, and so he gave the feds what they wanted. I believe he made a lot of it up, but the FBI was only too happy to make a deal with this devil.

  That was the background, the buzz, the tension in Las Vegas in October 1982 when Lefty Rosenthal’s car was blown up.

  The next time I saw Lefty, he was lying in his bed at home still trying to figure out who was behind it. He never said he thought it was Tony, but after that incident, he was a changed person. He wasn’t as arrogant. I think it took him down a peg, humanized him, showed him his mortality. Shortly after that he went through a divorce proceeding. I couldn’t get involved in that because I knew his wife Geri. I advised both of them, but I couldn’t be the lawyer for either one of them.

  I remember thinking that things were getting out of hand. To see something like this happen on the street was mind-boggling. I never thought Rosenthal would end up in that kind of spot. I had a lot of respect for his acumen as a gambler and for the way he ran a casino; he was great at that, perhaps one of the best. But you have to understand, he was not a lovable fellow.

  Still, the car bombing showed that in the world in which he did business, somebody—maybe more than one person—considered him expendable.

  Tony never said anything about the car bombing. I always look for the unusual: when somebody dies, I go to the funeral and look around for who isn’t there. I thought it was very odd that Tony never brought up the bombing, and that we never had any type of discussion about it. He had no opinion, no speculation about who did it. I wouldn’t bring it up because it wasn’t my place. I was a “need-to-know” lawyer. If you have a criminal case, I want all the information available that will help me defend you. But if there’s no case, I don’t need to know what else is going on in your life.

  I said there never were any bombings in Las Vegas, but that’s not entirely true. There had been a couple, but it wasn’t the soup of the day. In Las Vegas, the Chicago way of doing things—a .22 bullet to the head—was more common.

  When I first got to Las Vegas, somebody was blown to smithereens in a parking lot at one of the casinos, but that was the exception. When the mob was in control, there really were few murders in town. The rule was, if they were going to kill you, they took you to Arizona or California. The idea was not to bring attention to the area. It was bad for business, and they didn’t want to scare away the tourists. Kansas City was where there were bombings.

  There was one funny bomb-plot story about Ash Resnick, a guy who was a casino executive at Caesars. Ash was a big guy who had played for the Boston Celtics when he was younger. He was very well liked, but he apparently had a problem with a guy named Chuckie Berns, one of the city’s more notorious cat burglars. Berns spoke with a heavy Russian accent. He was picked up on a wiretap talking about blowing Ash up. When he was asked when he was going to do it, he said in that thick accent of his, “Boom, boom. Ash Vensday.” Whoever was listening told Ash, and consequently, there was no boom boom.

  At the time of the Lefty Rosenthal car bombing, I was representing members of four different crime families who were at odds with one another. I didn’t realize this until I saw the movie Casino. I just knew they paid me well and treated me great; I had no idea there were factions. If I had known all that was going on at the time, I would have charged a lot more money, and would have had my own private plane and an island in the Caribbean.

  Every day was an eye-opener. People I thought were clowns or jokes were the ones making the skim work for the hidden owners in a half dozen casinos. I wasn’t a big fan of Carl Thomas, but everybody seemed to love him. He was indicted with Nick Civella, the alleged mob boss, in Kansas City for skimming cash out of the Tropicana. I had met Thomas through Jay Sarno. Like so many of these casino guys, Carl was a gentleman’s gentleman. He was very generous, and always polite. I thought he was a legitimate businessman. He owned a place called Slots-A-Fun on the Las Vegas Strip across from the Riviera and next door to Sarno’s Circus-Circus. It was like a pinball arcade except it was full of slot machines. It was a joint where they offered customers hot dogs and beer in the hopes that the food would be enough to draw them in as they walked along the Strip.

  While his business establishment wasn’t anything like the city’s gambling palaces, Thomas nevertheless was a mover and shaker in town. He wined and dined with all the important people. For twenty-three years he was part of the society—whatever that means—of Las Vegas. I had no idea of the role he was playing.

  But he was picked up on a wiretap telling Civella and those guys in Kansas City how to work the skim. He went to great extremes to make sure he was not followed when he traveled to Kansas City. They would meet at this secret location and Nick apparently told Carl to take a train, a bus, or walk through the desert if he thought he was being followed. Carl always took a circuitous route to these meetings, which took place in the basement of the home of one of Civella’s relatives. Unfortunately for Thomas, Nick Civella, and several other fellows, the feds found out about the location and managed to have the room bugged. They got a complete discussion of the skimming operation on tape.

  When I got a look at the transcripts of that conversation and the FBI affidavits, it was as if my world turned upside down. It was unreal. Things I had taken for granted weren’t so. It was like Alice in Wonderland.

  Joe Agosto was another person who got indicted in the Tropicana case. He had been represented by my law office in an immigration dispute before the U.S. Supreme Court. He spoke with a really thick Italian accent and wore a silly hat. I always thought of him as a go-fer, and not much else. It wasn’t even clear that he was a citizen. There was a dispute over whether he was born here or in Italy. The story he told was that he was born here, and that his parents sent him to live with an aunt in Italy when he was a child. He came back and took over as the producer at the Folies Bergere at the Tropicana. I thought he was a clown; a chauffeur for some people. Turns out he was an inside man for the mob.

  Civella was my client in the case. I had no idea he was involved with these casinos and the skims. I was representing him in cases in Kansas City, but I never knew he had relationships with the guys back here until the Tropicana indictment. I just knew him as someone who loved to come to Las Vegas. Even after they banned him, he used to sneak in wearing a disguise.

  I realized that it was like a spider web: I was running from court to court representing my
clients, attacking the wiretaps, fighting for their rights under the Fourth Amendment. Never once did I hear about a skim. I started reading this stuff, and my eyes were popping out of my head.

  Civella’s problem was that he liked to talk. And back in Kansas City, they had this mistaken belief that if they used their lawyer’s office, it was sacrosanct; that there was no way the government could be listening. Nick and some of his guys would get on the phone in the lawyer’s office and think they were immune from government wiretaps. That’s how the Tropicana skimming case got made.

  The bottom line is, if they weren’t so greedy, they could still be running the casinos. In some of these cases, they were getting maybe $25,000 a month after they split it all up. It was insanity to risk what they had for that small amount of money. And the front people they had—such as Allen Glick with the Argent Corporation, or Mitzy Briggs, who was a wealthy heiress to the Wrigley family fortune in Chicago—were as welcome in the Las Vegas community as a rabbi or a priest would be.

  Glick, it turned out, answered to Lefty Rosenthal. When this eventually came out it created problems, but I wasn’t aware of it initially.

  Spilotro was also named in the Tropicana indictment that came out in Kansas City, but I was able to get him severed from the case. Most of the other defendants, including Civella and Thomas, were convicted. There wasn’t much you could do to defend them once the government played the tapes for the jury.

  But Spilotro had more pressing problems at the time. Cullotta was singing up a storm for the government.

  Tony was indicted in Chicago for the M&M murders. Cullotta said he helped Tony set up the hits, which occurred back in 1962. The victims were James Miragllia and Billy McCarthy, and as mentioned earlier, the M&M came from their last names. The allegation was that these two characters had robbed and murdered three people in an affluent Chicago suburb where a lot of guys from the Outfit lived. This was considered disrespectful, so Tony got the order to kill them. The murders were gruesome and included the use of a vise that caused the eye of one of the victims to pop out.