by Paul Anka
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 pill
s and shots to Presley and Michael Jackson never got pinched. Different times.
Jake Freedman was a classic character from the old wild and wooly days of Vegas. He was from Dallas, an immigrant from Russia or Poland. He came to the U.S., settled in Texas, and learned how to speak English with a Texan accent, a little Jew with a Texas drawl on top of a Yiddish accent. He was five-foot-four and he would stand on a box to shoot craps. He would dress up in cowboy suits like Roy Rogers did, all costumed in nudie glitter getups. He’d say, “Howdy pardner! Ya doin’ ok, ya ol’ galoot? Good luck to ya!” This is almost straight out of Yiddish vaudeville, but it was taking place daily in Las Vegas in the ’50s. I wish I’d been old enough to witness it. What a scream that must have been!
* * *
Sammy Davis Jr. was an inspiration to me from a very young age, from when I started collecting records. When I heard his Decca recordings in the mid ’50s, where he did imitations, it motivated me to do the same thing. I saw Sammy when I was a teenager and he came to Canada with the Will Mastin Trio. I would see him perform at the Gatineau nightclub on the Quebec side and I was always mesmerized by him.
When I hit Vegas and started working the Sands Hotel, I was obviously very overwhelmed that I was actually in his company. Through the subsequent thirty years that I knew him, I would see the change in the man as I did with Sinatra—less so with Dean Martin—who never liked to hang out that much into the late hours of the evening. Keep in mind I was younger than all of the Rat Pack members and slowly got included into their crowd. I toed the line, acknowledging their seniority and being wary of their partnership with the mob. As Sammy explained to me later on in our relationship, very early in his career he had asked for money from the mob, which he needed not only back then, but actually all through his life. So he was under control of the boys. Frank liked him and protected him as best as he could even though they had two major breakups in their friendship. The second one was the most severe. Frank was aware, as we all were, that Sammy was into cocaine and ongoing sexcapades that had gone to a new level. As Sammy would later graphically explain to some of us that he was close to, including Sinatra and the rest of the group, he became absolutely obsessed with the world of porno. All of us knew it and saw it because we all worked at Caesars. Whenever he performed there, there were always a bunch of porn stars in attendance in the audience and backstage.
I remember around 1972 a group of us were in England. I was doing some shows there, and Sammy was there, too. They really embraced Sammy, the English—that was a special place for him. At dinner Sammy said, “After the show tonight, I want to run a movie at this private movie house,” something he had done many times before at home and on the road. Everyone said, “Let’s go!” We went down some stairs to a screening room. There were about thirty or forty of us, and no one knew what we were going to see. We get in there, sit down with our bags of popcorn—we had the whole place to ourselves—and the lights go down, and on comes … Deep Throat!
Everybody was sitting there in shock. You have to understand that our mutual friends, Gary and Maxine Smith, whom I have known for years and who are very dear friends of mine and my wife’s were watching this hard-core porno movie with their jaws dropping—as were Anne and I. Gary was one of the top television producers, and at the time produced Sammy’s television shows. Anne and I and Sammy’s wife, Altovise, all socialized together, but we hadn’t actually seen this raw side of his secret life. Sammy really got into porno stuff with a vengeance later on, by having sex parties with porn stars like Marilyn Chambers and Linda Lovelace and her husband. They would have foursomes with Sammy and Altovise.
But at a certain point we sensed that his marriage to Altovise had taken a different more sordid turn. He had met Altovise a few years earlier, when she’d been one of the dancers in his previous shows in England. They dated for a while and then got married. He was also seeing another dancer, Lola Falana, but it was his infatuation with porn star Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat, which was beyond belief. Linda Lovelace had spectacular sexual prowess. She was able to perform fellatio on a man to the point where his penis would totally disappear inside her mouth and down her throat without causing her to gag. At the time it caused a huge public sensation. Sammy became obsessed with her. She shared his bed, with Altovise’s consent, and Altovise eventually joined them.
Frank knew what he was up to; we all knew. We were a tight group of people—you just can’t keep those things quiet. I would just go hang out with Sammy after his show; keep in mind I lived two blocks from Caesars. Over drinks he became very open about his sexual life. He invited me to go to strip shows with him. I declined, not that I was a prude … far from it. It just wasn’t my scene, and my kids and Anne were at home. Frank was hardly a prude himself but he found Sammy’s new porno fixation disgusting and didn’t forgive him for years. Sammy would tell me in his droll delivery that fellatio was as far as he went with Linda Lovelace. “Eatin’ ain’t cheatin’,” as he put it.
He’d tell me about all this weird stuff he was into. He had another life eventually, beginning at the end of the sixties and on through the seventies, where Sammy, at a certain hour, would gravitate to that porn crowd. It was the drugs and sex and all of that. His whole thing was, “Shit, I’m only living once; I want to do what I want.” It was a very, very strange situation and Sammy was just off the wall with that.
As time went on, Sammy’s kinky sex habits got kinkier. He became obsessed with Linda Lovelace and got very close to her, and also her husband, Chuck Traynor, who had a sadistic relationship with her. (She later claimed he beat her and forced her into porn movies at gunpoint.) He got into threesomes with them. They’d come over to his house. Sammy’s wife got involved with Traynor.
After the midnight shows, Sammy had a whole other life from the rest of us. He got seriously into drugs. Frank and he didn’t talk for a long time because Sammy got heavily into coke and Frank didn’t approve. They didn’t make up until years later. The wives got them back together, got Sammy off the blow, and got him back to his old self.
He just enjoyed life. Curiosity about everything. Explored everything. He was completely open about his sexuality, and got into his bisexuality. He loved England, went over there a lot, and was very open with an eclectic group of people he hung out with. He would confide these things to me, how cool it was to be involved with two women, with guys. He’d say, “Hell, man, I’m living my life the way I want to. No restraints, no hang-ups. It’s my time and I’m gonna do it the way I want to.”
Through the years I would see him change—more booze more drugs—but I must tell you he was probably the most talented guy I have ever seen. Loveable, socially easy to be with, and the best friend you would ever want. He loved to cook. I would see him not only at Caesars Palace but in other cities, where he carried suitcases of utensils with him. We’d eat and hang and talk shop as men will do. He would tell me how much fun he was having and the escapades of his sex life.
One thing that massively upset him was the famous photograph of him hugging Richard Nixon. The backlash that caused was huge. On one occasion in Vegas, I sang with him at a charity concert for sickle cell anemia, and after the concert we sat in the coffee shop at the Sands Hotel and talked about all the things that bothered him. He was very down. He had been very hurt that his own people, his black brothers and sisters, now perceived him as being white, as an Uncle Tom, and as Frank Sinatra’s court jester.
Furthermore, he always had money problems with loans from the mob but by the ’80s he was in more trouble than ever with the IRS. “I don’t give a shit about the IRS,” he’d say. “I don’t have a head for numbers—just broads and booze.” And physically he was in bad shape. He would complain about his hip, which he later had to have operated on. I heard much of this from my physician, Dr. Ed Kantor, who became my doctor when I came to the West Coast, but beyond that, he’s one of my best friends and one of the most respected, renowned throat specialists worldwide. He was my throat doc
tor, as well as Sinatra’s and Sammy Davis’s. A truly loved human being. He and Dr. Robert Koblin, my cardiologist, have kept me in check as to the lifestyle I live. Koblin himself has been a friend for years, again another one of the greatest guys I have ever known.
Anyway, at dinner one night, I told Dr. Kantor that I had heard rumors about Sammy’s condition. He told me what he could: that Sammy was having throat trouble, which was something that Sammy had already confided in me in Vegas. We all saw it getting worse and eventually he was diagnosed with throat cancer. From that point on, it all got very sad. He began to miss shows. Everyone tried to keep quiet about it, but then the inevitable happened: unable to work he was sent home. Sammy died in May 1990. It was a very sad ending for someone who brought so much joy to so many.
I kept in touch with Altovise and saw her a few times when I was performing on the road. I started doing a piece about Sammy built around the song I wrote for him, “I Am Not Anyone.” I’d recorded it with him for Michael Curb for Curb Records. Curb was a very astute record executive. After Sammy’s failure at Motown, he took Sammy under his wing and gave him the song “The Candy Man,” which became a huge hit for Sammy in 1972.
Sammy’s passing was devastating for me. My love and admiration for him went back to the first glimmers I had of becoming a performer. He motivated me do my first nightclub act at the Copa. As a tribute to him, I used “Mr. Wonderful” (written by Jules Stein from the Broadway show that Sammy was in) as my opening song.
Nine
IF DONALD TRUMPS WHO WYNNS?