by Paul Anka
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There are really only two enduring myths in American culture: the cowboy and the gangster. The cowboy got tired of sagebrush and beans, rode into town, tied up his horse, lost the chaps and spurs, bought himself a fancy suit from back East, and opened the Dry Gulch Saloon. After a few shots of white lightning and watching Lillie Langtry, the naughty petite Jersey nightingale, crooning at the player piano, he said, “Boys, I think I’ll stay.”
Around 1946, the mob arrived in Dodge and the Dry Gulch Saloon turned into the bar at the Flamingo Hotel. Actually this originally had been the dream of Billy Wilkerson, owner of the Hollywood Reporter—to turn the sawdust-on-the-floor joints on Fremont Street in a Euro-style resort, that would attract celebrities to come out to the desert, but he couldn’t lure enough movie stars out there. The mob, however, saw an opportunity—a virtually tax-free cash cow in the gambling industry. That’s where the first great American gangster Bugsy Siegel comes into the Vegas story, opening the Flamingo at a cost of six million bucks in 1946. And you needed entertainment, right? So no sooner had the first casino began rolling the bones that another great American type showed up: the boogie-woogie man, the crooner, the pop singer, the entertainer, the guy you go to hear who’ll take you away from everything, put you in some kind of trance, and let your mind float downstream. That place was a state of mind: in the 1950s and 1960s it was Las Vegas.
Even though it wasn’t a media-driven society back then, you still heard everything that was going on. We all knew what the wild and horny senator John Kennedy was doing; we knew what was going on behind closed doors, but nobody talked about it. People left you alone. It was controlled. They didn’t run out with every piece of gossip, but it was out there.
When you hear the words, “the mob in Vegas,” your average person gets an image of this bunch of violent guys in suits, black shirts, and pink ties. That’s straight out of the movies; it was nothing like that. In the movies you’ve got mob guys cutting people up and planting them in cornfields, vicious fights, shootouts. You can’t take these stereotyped guys from the movies literally, that’s bullshit—well, maybe not the burying mobsters in cornfields part … and it wasn’t even a cornfield, actually. Still, Casino is probably the closest to the facts with Joe Pesci as Nicky Santoro from the infamous Hole in the Wall Gang, and Robert De Niro as Sam “Ace” Rothstein, but even there, even when they retold actual stories, it was blown up out of proportion—naturally.
When the mob ruled Vegas, that’s when all the serious skimming went on. All the money, whenever it came in they would send it around the country. If you went back to one of the counting rooms in those days, the private rooms in back, you’d see these wooden boxes. Everything except the hundred-dollar bills went in those boxes. They didn’t bother with the twenties or the fifties. They’d divvy up C notes, $100 bills, to the various Outfit guys around the country. They’d go, “This one’s for you, this one’s for you, this one’s for you.” The mob guys never bothered with the small bills.
I knew Johnny Roselli from when he used to spend a lot of time at the Sands—he was a dapper, stylish guy. He was an essential character because of his looks and his knowledge about what went on at every level. The Mormons were clueless about casinos, gaming, or whatever else went on in the sin-filled dens of Vegas. As one of then said, “None of us knew snake eyes from box cars.” So they relied on Roselli to guide them through the Vegas underworld.
Johnny Roselli was an even-tempered guy. He had the demeanor of a diplomat, and could deal at any level of society. He was a fixer and that is how he eventually landed in Vegas. He was connected to Chicago and to the Dragna mob family in L.A. The guys that I knew at the Sands—Carl Cohen, Charles “Tooley” Kandel, Jack Entratter, and Roselli—essentially corralled Howard Hughes via Bob Maheu into purchasing the Desert Inn, the Sands, and a group of other mob casinos—the mob naturally still running and robbing the places even after he had purchased them.
Roselli had been part of the Hollywood scene in California, and that’s why the mob eventually moved him out to Vegas. He would sit at the bar and talk to me in the early ’60s. He was very close to Moe Dalitz, a racketeer who ran the violent Cleveland Syndicate before moving to Vegas.
Moe was known as “the toughest Jewish mobster in Vegas,” notorious for savage beatings, unsolved murders, and shakedowns. He’d once killed a Cleveland city councilman just because he’d thwarted one of his plans.
Moe Dalitz owned the Desert Inn, the hotel Howard Hughes eventually took over. When Hughes slipped into Vegas Thanksgiving of ’66 they took him right to the Desert Inn; his right-hand guy Bob Maheu made all the deals, he was the guy behind the scenes. Hughes came in on a train, his own personal train. I’d met Hughes a couple of times at the Beverly Hills Hotel with Ben Silverstein, who owned it. I think Hughes was coaxed to come up to Vegas by Hank Greenspun who owned the Las Vegas Sun, and the idea appealed to Hughes on account of the tax situation. He arrived and settled into the Desert Inn Hotel. At some point Moe Dalitz sent word to the Hughes people that he wanted Hughes out of the penthouse because he needed it for gamblers, some high rollers were coming in. And that’s when Hughes decided that rather than move, he’d buy the place. Dalitz was receptive because the government was looking into him for tax evasion even though he was in tight with a lot of local political people. Whatever transpired, Dalitz was later acquitted on those tax evasion charges but he could see which way the wind was blowing. Who knows what goes on? Hughes got his license to operate, no problem. The word went around that Hughes got taken but he either didn’t know or care, and, in any case, he still needed the mob to operate the casinos.
Moe Dalitz, however much a vicious thug he was, was well liked around town and did a lot for the city. He built the hospital in Vegas. I’d see him driving around in his yellow Studebaker. He was dapper, tallish, soft spoken—in appearance, a gentleman. His real name was Morris but everybody called him Moe. Moe was a very important casino developer/operator, and had the endorsement of senators and governors, key to a guy like him is that they could never nail him for anything. He was connected to the mob in Chicago, but was a member of the Las Vegas country club, fitting right in with the Vegas gentry, if there is such a thing. It was not unusual to see him eating alone at his regular table. He spoke very softly, and loved to tell jokes.They tried to pin him to the Detroit mob, but he seemed to be a mild-mannered business guy. There was a very soft side to him—he didn’t come on strong, like a movie mobster. He was responsible for a lot of the growth in Vegas from the 1960s right up into the ’80s, and made a lot of people very wealthy through shopping centers, the development of supermarkets, and hotels. He made millionaires of a lot of people. Everybody around town loved him. He was an important figure in the transition of the old to the new Vegas. He was close to Jimmy Hoffa and in that way was linked to the Teamsters, in connection with money coming into Vegas. As suave as he was, though, there was a real scary side to him as seen in the infamous confrontation between him and Sonny Liston at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Liston gets into an argument with Dalitz and threatens him. Dalitz tells him, “Whatever you do, you better kill me now because I’ll make a few phone calls tonight and you’re gonna die very slowly.”
By 1960, the strip in Vegas with its flashing neon had become lit up like a pinball machine. From 1960 and on, when I was in my full stride there the who’s who in show business converged on Vegas. But, if you look through the press archives of the 1950s through the 1970s you’ll find that no other celebrity has been written about like Frank Sinatra. The public even loved him for his outbursts—his temper tantrums only illuminated his image and gave more sizzle to his celebrity. He took no shit from anyone. He was a people’s star. We all wanted to emulate him but knew we couldn’t. He was the boss.
When Sinatra heard Don Rickles had been rapping him on stage, saying rude things about him—which is Don’s style, of course—he decided to play a trick on him. Now, Don was the guy of the hour, see; we all
heard about this outrageous act where he insulted people and went to a midnight show in the lounge at the Sahara after one of the Rat Pack shows. Frank wanted to teach Don a lesson in a semifriendly way—but, nevertheless, send him a message. We all sat ringside in this lounge before Rickles came out. There were about twelve of us, including Sinatra, Dean Martin, Joey Bishop, Jilly Rizzo, his bodyguard, Sammy, and me. Frank sent Jilly to the newsstand to buy newspapers and we hid them under the table. Announcer comes out, “Ladies and gentlemen, Don Rickles.” Don walks on; Frank says, “Now!” and we all picked up the newspapers and opened them and started reading them at the table ringside while he was trying to do his act. Don sweats a lot, but that night he really sweated. Imagine a tight room of three hundred people and here’s Sinatra and all his pals down front reading newspapers. He had good reason to sweat. Sinatra had previously had some wannabe mobsters beat up two comedians who had made fun of him. Don’s trying to be professional but the scene is unnerving him. Finally he makes a joke that hits home, we all laugh and everyone relaxes and we can enjoy the show. I’ve known and loved Don and his wife, Barbara, for years and, forget the stage persona, he’s a loveable Teddy Bear.
Sinatra ruled supreme. Even with rock ’n’ roll and with the British music scene just off shore, Frank was the most popular and controversial figure around. Whenever he was there, he submerged himself in Las Vegas like it was his own private hot tub. Keep in mind, he had been singing in Vegas as far back as 1951 at the Desert Inn when there were only four hotels on the strip at that time.
There was a certain kind of electricity that prevailed when Frank, the Rat Pack, and their famous celebrity audience were in town. The showgirls, the call girls, and all the hot women were put on hold, especially when they heard Jack Kennedy was coming. There was a pungent sexual frisson in a town that small in size when those guys hit Vegas, and they would hit town often, and all of us benefited from it in one way or another. And then just put all of those mob figures in the mix, especially Sam Giancana, who brought Judith Campbell Exner into the scene, a 10-out-of-10 beauty, who Sinatra got involved with. Ultimately Frank introduced her to Kennedy and that had a lot to do with JFK getting elected. Keep in mind that Giancana delivered the state of Illinois to Kennedy. Everybody knew the Mafia boss from Chicago was someone not to be messed with. He was a small, short guy, my height, was always smoking cigars in beautiful suits, and had a violent MO. He had interests all over town. He was seen around town with one of the MaGuire sisters, Phyllis, a beautiful all-American looker with a lot of hit records. I covered one of her records, “Sincerely,” in the late ’60s, a single originally covered by The Moonglows.
But the bottom line is, Sam was a murderer. Frank had worked for him many times in his nightclubs. I guess he felt indebted to him because there was a time when he couldn’t get work and Sam hired him.
The clan, the Rat Pack—call them what you will—were in full stride. Oddly enough Sinatra constantly verbalized to all of us that he was not happy with the way the media depicted him as the leader of the so-called Rat Pack. Be that as it may, it was always a great fun event to sit and watch all of them together on stage. There was nothing like it. They all loved getting up on stage at night just to have a lot of fun. It was as loose as a goose. But from the all-night drinking sessions to the steam-room scenes, I realized how punishing it was on their bodies to keep up such a routine. The drinking, the smoking, staying up till three, four, or five in the morning. It wreaked havoc on their voices and their lives.
The big moment of change for all of us in Vegas—and it tied into a specific event actually—was when Howard Hughes came in Thanksgiving of 1966. It all changed. All the old mobster world courtesies went out the window. Even though the mob guys out of Cleveland and Chicago still ran the casinos on a day-to-day basis, you could see a big change coming. For whatever reason, or whatever Hughes’s alliances were, overnight he made it into a corporate atmosphere. Bob Maheu, who was Hughes’s right-hand guy, came in and bought up everything and that changed the atmosphere forever afterward.
Meanwhile Hughes is upstairs in the Desert Inn—or so we hear. We never see the guy. He’s the ghost in the penthouse controlling everything, the invisible man pulling all the strings and very soon we start feeling the change in the town. We knew when Hughes was in town because of the nutty TV programming. You’d get back to your room, turn on the TV at two in the morning and Ice Station Zebra would be playing. At 5:00 A.M. it would start showing all over again. There was limited programming on TV anyway, but this was ridiculous. It was on almost every night. In the beginning nobody could figure out what was going on. People were asking, “What the hell is going on?” Eventually we figured out what was going on. Howard Hughes had bought a local TV station—it was just a fifty-by-fifty-foot clapboard shack run by a couple of guys—and any given week he was in Vegas, you’d see Ice Station Zebra showing continuously. Hughes loved that movie. What probably appealed to Hughes about the movie was the frantic search for a traitor out to sabotage the mission. He was very paranoid. For instance, the Silver Slipper burlesque theater had a fifteen-foot-tall woman’s high-heel shoe as part of their sign and Hughes believed there was a photographer hidden in the toe, taking photographs of him in his bedroom from there.
Things got nutty pretty fast, not just because Hughes was so eccentric—and he was—but because he had some peculiar employees like Walter Kane, who refused to follow the old codes.
When a guy like Howard Hughes came in he operated strictly through intermediaries. Walter Kane was one of his right-hand men and took over the job of entertainment director from Jack Entratter and therefore had all this power. He not only worked for Hughes, word was he acted as a pimp for him, too; he got the women, he screened them. He was the perfect guy for this job because Walter was gay, so no threat to Hughes in the female department. Kane fancied himself as a kind of superagent who would dispense with all the other talent agents in town. He’d come in with a list of performers. “We wanna get this guy and that guy and bring what’s-his-name in.” He’d treat the agents funny because it was a new regime and Kane was changing the rules. Word soon got out around town that this guy Kane was looking to make direct deals, cutting out agents from the picture. What Walter tried to do was go around these agents and go directly to people like Debbie Reynolds or Wayne Newton, who became his buddy down the road. By making deals directly, he cut all these agencies out of their commissions and they weren’t too happy about that. There were some loyal entertainers who wouldn’t be a part of this because they’d had the same agents for years, and the agent had taken care of them.
My agent Jim Murray had a showdown with him. He was nervous that Kane was going to steal his clients, like Debbie Reynolds, and Kane wasn’t being truthful about it, although he was making deals behind his back. Back then Jim was a pretty heavy drinker. I think it was about two in the morning after a few double bourbons on the rocks that he showed up at Walter’s door—Jack Entratter’s old place—and said, “What are you trying to do, going around me and hustling my clients?” “What do you mean?” Kane said, stalling for time. Jim wasn’t going to let him get away with that. Kane was wearing a nightgown with one of those Santa Claus type hats on his head. Jim got so mad he grabbed him by the throat and said, “You’re lying to me, and you’re lying to Debbie, you son of a bitch,” and he got him up against the wall. And then out of the room next door came another Hughes employee, a guy named Perry Lieber, who must have been Walt’s boyfriend, with the same hat and the same nightgown. And he starts yelling at Jim, “Don’t worry, don’t worry.”
You know Walter was kind of a devious guy and that’s when all this kind of shit started in Vegas—when you didn’t have the mob guys with their code of behavior, a whole way of life in Vegas ended. It was the new bureaucratic regime where you had all these rules and lists, and functionaries were running around with clipboards, all obeying the great eye in the sky over there at the Desert Inn. A cold, new impersonal wind was b
lowing—the mood changed, the people changed, and an era was over. All that funny stuff began with that new regime—the Mormon clique. It wasn’t only among Hughes’s group—Parry Thomas, the banker who advanced loans to many of the casinos was also a Mormon. There was a weird connection to the influx of Mormons in Vegas and Washington—to this day they have a strong presence in Washington.
The mob guys didn’t put up any resistance when Howard Hughes moved in—in fact, they welcomed it because there was a lot of heat on them and Hughes becoming a casino owner took the pressure off them. And in actuality, they still ran the place. They were still running the casinos, still ripping them off with all the games they played with the money. Blatant stuff, outrageous stuff. But it took the feds years to figure it out. There’d be two legitimate crap tables and one that was fixed, siphoning off the money but hiding behind the fact that Hughes owned it.
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I’ve seen all the transitions the Rat Pack went through in that environment, so many nuances. Back when I first went to Vegas, it was mob driven, totally. It was a whole different atmosphere than present-day. A handshake meant something. Loyalty was the code of the day—unlike today. It’s a different world with these younger guys where you can shake their hand but you’d better have twenty white-shoe law firms read the fine print.
It’s an era that is totally gone now. There never has been anything like it, and never will be again. It was a time of incredible buzz, of fashion, everyone on display, egos to the max. Frank ruled. He was feared from Hollywood to Vegas to New York, know what I’m saying?