Casino

by Nicholas Pileggi

  “During the ride Lefty hardly said a thing. He just sat there real glum. I guess Lefty wasn’t used to losing.

  “Lefty was weird. You couldn’t read him. Tony loved to hang around him, because even then Lefty was one of the best handicappers in the country, bar none. We’d be hanging around on a Friday night before putting down our bets. Tony would ask Lefty, ‘What about Kansas?’ And Lefty would just say, ‘I have no opinion.’ Then Tony would ask him, ‘What about Rutgers–Holy Cross?’ And Lefty would say, ‘No opinion.’

  “Now Tony’s got this list of college games printed with the odds as long as a supermarket tape, and he’s going down it game by game, and he’s throwing every one of them at Lefty, and Lefty’s standing there, leaning against the bar, drinking his Mountain Valley water, watching some fight rerun on the TV, and he’s just no-opinioning Tony to death.

  “Finally, Tony blows up. He grabs the list and shoves it in Lefty’s hands. ‘Here, you pick ’em. Pick ’em yourself.’

  “Without hardly taking his eyes off the fight, Lefty takes Tony’s list, makes two quick little pencil marks on it, and hands it right back to Tony.

  “Tony looks at the list. Lefty keeps looking at the TV. ‘Hey!’ Tony says. ‘What is this? I’ve got a hundred plays here. Every college basketball team in the country is playing this weekend, and you give me two picks?’

  “Now everybody in the joint is very quiet. You don’t want to get in between these two. Lefty turns to Tony like Tony is some kid and says, ‘There are only two good picks.’

  “‘Yeah, yeah,’ Tony answers him. ‘I know all that, but what about Oklahoma–Oklahoma State? What about Indiana–Washington State? Jeezus, look at that spread.’

  “‘Tony, I gave you the two good picks on the sheet. Forget the rest.’

  “Now Tony gets hot and he starts waving the sheet in Lefty’s face. ‘Two picks out of a hundred? This is the way you bet?’

  “Lefty looks down at Tony like he’s a bug. ‘I assumed you wanted to win,’ he says.

  “‘Of course I want to win, but I want to have some fun, too. Why don’t you loosen up for once, for Chrissake?’

  “‘How much are you betting?’ Lefty asked.

  “‘Couple of grand, whatever … What are you betting?’

  “‘I’m wagering more than that,’ Lefty says. Lefty almost never said he ‘bet’; he was always ‘wagering,’ ‘having an opinion,’ or ‘taking a position.’

  “‘More than what?’ Tony jumps on him. ‘You’re only playing two fucking games. What the hell did you bet?’

  “‘You don’t want to know,’ says Lefty.

  “‘I do wanna know.’

  “‘You going to make it good if I lose?’

  “‘C’mon, tell me. I just wanna know. I told you, didn’t I?’

  “Lefty gets close to Tony and he says very quietly under his breath, and I’m right there between them watching his lips as he says the words, ‘We were down for fifty each.’

  “There would be the day when Tony bet fifty and sixty thousand dollars on a football or basketball game, but not back then. We were still in our early twenties. Lefty was about thirty. He was betting for himself and some pretty big people, outfit people, and we all knew who they were.

  “‘Oh, excuse me,’ Tony says, grabbing the list and going down it game by game again. ‘I forgot who I’m talking to. I shouldn’t even be alive, I’m betting nickels and dimes over here.’

  “And just as Lefty turns back to the TV, Tony asks him, ‘What about West Virginia? They got that seven-foot kid from Africa. How the hell can they lose?’

  “‘I have no opinion on that,’ Lefty says, without even turning around.

  “Now Tony blows it. He rolls up the betting sheet and starts bopping Lefty over the head with it. ‘If I lose, you prick,’ Tony yells, ‘you’re gonna buy us all dinner.’

  “We’re all on the floor laughing, including Lefty, and Tony turns to us and says, ‘The prick’s got me thinking negative.’”

  5

  “I respectfully decline to answer the question, as I honestly believe my answer might tend to incriminate me.”

  BY THE LATE 1950s, before the horror of drugs had invaded the country, illegal gamblers were considered public enemy number one. The FBI had started nationwide roundups of known gamblers. Federal laws were passed that made it an offense to transmit sports scores or race results over interstate lines. The Kefauver Crime Committee hearings—one of the first television inquisitions—also made it hot for the local sheriffs and county commissioners who had allowed bookies, layoff men, and illegal casinos to operate in their territories for a price. Even Chicago, the home of Capone, a community where the police had had difficulty closing down even one of Al’s forty thousand speakeasies, was beginning to apply pressure on the city’s bookmakers. In 1960, Lefty Rosenthal had his first pinch as a bookmaker. His name suddenly appeared on various lists of KGs—known gamblers—churned out for the press by the Chicago Crime Commission.

  In 1961, at the age of thirty, Lefty Rosenthal moved on.

  “I decided to go out on my own,” he says. “Stop making money for other people. I felt it was time to start playing for myself. I moved to Miami. My father had gone down with some of his horses, and it seemed like it was the right thing to do.

  “I was going to play small. I had five thousand of my own to invest and two guys took a piece of me at five thousand dollars each. I had a fifteen-thousand-dollar bankroll. I said we’ll start with two-hundred-dollar plays, then double plays at four hundred dollars, and all out at a thousand dollars.

  “By the end of the college basketball season, with two weeks to go, we had moved our fifteen-thousand-dollar bankroll up to seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

  “I had friends in different parts of the country. We used to back each other up. I’d help them and they’d help me.

  “One day I got this call from a pal in Kansas City. He said that he didn’t think Wilt Chamberlain, who played for Kansas City at the time, was going to play that night.

  “Chamberlain was the team. If he didn’t play, they didn’t win. I asked why. He said he didn’t know, but somebody, maybe a nurse, said that Chamberlain’s balls had somehow swollen up so big that he could hardly walk.

  “My pal said he was sure of his information, but I checked around and found out that Chamberlain’s doctors agreed about his condition.

  “I took the lead early. I had nothing to lose, because I could always switch my bet later in the week. I went as far as I could go against Kansas, prior to the announcement that Chamberlain would not play.

  “I gave my pal who called me with the tip a free five-thousand-dollar bet on the game. Chamberlain never missed a game except this one.

  “Also, when I made the bet, I told the bookmakers what I heard. That’s the professional courtesy. You keep your bookmaker informed. You know these men. You talk with them all the time. Of course, first you make your bet and then you tell him what you’ve heard. It’s the right thing to do in the profession. Sometimes they listen and sometimes they don’t. In my case, they started to listen. It gave them an opportunity to lay off some of the Kansas money.

  “On a bet like that we—my partners and myself—were all trying to get down as much as possible. We were calling bookmakers all over the country. We had special phones installed in my apartment.

  “Retired telephone company guys would fix our phones so we had speed dialing before there was speed dialing. When we pounced on a game and made our bets, it would take only three or four minutes for that information to go across the country. No exaggeration. That’s all it took.

  “I’d punch the phone and get Washington, New Orleans, Alabama, Kansas City, just about everywhere except places like North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming. I could place my bets all over the country. The bookmakers knew my code name. They knew, if I lost, I paid.

  “You have a settlement number with a bookmaker and they had their own credit rating
system. They didn’t need D and B. They’d size you up.

  “Say they decide I’m good for twenty-five thousand dollars. That meant I could be into them for twenty-five. We’d bet back and forth, and when we came up with the twenty-five thousand dollars, we’d pay off. Either you send a courier to me or I’d send one to you.

  “My partners and I had it set up like a business. We had beards who would make bets for us so as not to alert the line. We had couriers. Gofers. We all had different jobs in the operation. You’d tell the courier, ‘Here, take this to Tuscaloosa.’ Couriers usually wanted to be part of the organization. They were hang-around people. They’d get a piece of the pie. It was a trade-off. I was the guy who studied. I was the handicapper.

  “I was betting twenty thousand dollars and thirty thousand dollars a game. Then, in the final two weeks of the season, with all this machinery working so smooth, we lost a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I took a real couple of hits. Still, we closed the year with four hundred thousand dollars in wins on the fifteen-thousand-dollar investment and called it quits for the season.

  “But in the end, the odds are built against you. You have got to walk and balance a delicate line. When I was a kid in Chicago I always heard them say, ‘In the winter, the bookies go to Florida and the players eat snowballs.’

  “Still, things were okay. My father and I had bought a few yearlings together. In fact, I started spending more of my time at the track. We had thirteen horses down there. We had to pay attention. It cost us about seven thousand dollars a month just to feed them. I was practically living at the track. I just loved being there.”

  About this time, Lefty says, he had a visit from a man known as Eli the Juice Man. Eli the Juice Man had a store in Miami, where he shipped oranges and grapefruits all around the country. He was really the middleman for the Beach, the guy who collected money to provide immunity along Miami Beach. He suggested to Rosenthal that it would be in his interest to pay him $500 a month.

  Rosenthal says he told Eli he wasn’t doing anything illegal—he was handicapping and working with racehorses. “I told him if I was booking I’d be happy to accommodate him, but I wasn’t booking. I was strictly a player now,” Lefty said. “A week or so later, Eli the Juice Man came back and asked if I had changed my mind. This time I wasn’t very cordial. So, one word led to another, and I told him to go fuck himself. I made the mistake of telling him to take his best shot. He did. On New Year’s Day the cops broke down my door and arrested me.”

  The arrests were made by the North Bay Village Department’s Chief Martin Dardis and Sergeant Edward Clode from the Dade County Division of Public Safety. Lefty was sitting on his bed in blue pajamas watching a game that afternoon when he was interrupted by the two-man raiding party. He turned what should have been a routine arrest into a disaster.

  The police were no sooner in the door than Lefty started yelling that they were only there because he had refused to pay off Eli the Juice Man. “What’s the matter,” he said. “You didn’t get your piece? Is that why you’re here?”

  His accusation of Chief Dardis was an unpardonable breach in the Kabuki ritual attached to cop-and-crook etiquette.

  “After that,” Lefty now admits, “I was fair game.”

  Chief Dardis later testified: “When I went into the bedroom, Mr. Rosenthal was seated on the bed. He had a telephone in one hand and a small black book in the other. The search warrant was read to him by a deputy sheriff, at which time I took the telephone from him and I asked the person on the other end who was talking. I said I was Lefty.

  “He said, ‘This is Cincinnati.’ He said, ‘You have ten and ten on Windy Fleet, and I will take four and four of it.’ We later learned that Windy Fleet was a horse running at Tropical Park that afternoon. It came in second.”

  A couple of weeks after his arrest, Lefty said, he got into a traffic dispute with two men who turned out to be federal agents. He said he and the agents were on a side street near Biscayne Boulevard. Lefty had been on his way to a popular restaurant nearby. He knew they were agents because he had just been ticketed for failing to signal a right turn by the local cops. The agents had been tagging along right behind the police and started cursing him while he was being given the ticket. Lefty said the cops giving him the ticket acknowledged they were FBI agents.

  “One night I was driving down a very dark road in Miami and a couple of agents were behind me,” said Rosenthal. “This actually happened; I swear to you it happened. And it’s a real dark road and it’s very narrow, and this car’s closing in on me. And they pull me over and I stop. And the two agents identify themselves, and they start giving me some shit, and I gave it right back to them. One of them was a real big guy. We were in this wooded area. He got out of the car and pushed me off, physically pushed me off to the side, and he said, ‘We finally got you. We are going to take you into the fucking woods and beat you to a pulp.’ And he looked like he meant it. As he’s talking, who’s driving the other way on that street by mere accident? So help me God—Tony Spilotro. He sees my car. He pulls over. He gets out of the car. He challenges both of the fucking agents. He went nose to nose—and he’s only five two or five three. He says, ‘You two gutless sonofabitches, you ain’t gonna do nothing to him.’ So help me God.

  “Now Tony and I grew up together. I used to say I knew him from the time he was conceived. We frequented the same places in Chicago. But the relationship really grew more from North Miami. Tony would come down there about three times a year, and the first person he’d get hold of is me. Tony’s first love, really, was gambling. Tony felt, in those days, he could not make a play without me. That to make a bet on anything would be disastrous unless he had my opinion. And he would call me all the time. He could hound me to death for an opinion. He was habitual. You’re talking about alcoholics when it came to gambling and Tony.

  “One night we’re having dinner on Biscayne Boulevard in an Italian restaurant with about six or seven people. All guys. There’s Tony, all his guys, and me. And there were some rough hombres at that table. And for some reason, one of them had a real hard-on for me. He didn’t like Frank Rosenthal, for whatever reasons. And he insulted me at the table. About three or four minutes went by. Tony says he’s going to go to the men’s room. And he gets this kid off to the side. Before they even get to the men’s room, what he fucking told this guy! Holy shit. The language. ‘You son of a bitch. I will cut your fucking head off if I ever, ever hear you even look at him like that again. You go back to that fucking table and tell him you’re sorry, you son of a bitch.’ So the kid comes back to the table and he apologizes. He says, ‘You know, I shouldn’t be drinking. I’m drinking. I didn’t mean it. Would you forgive me?’ I said, ‘Sure, no problem.’”

  In 1961, the newly appointed Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, started looking into the connections between the mob, illegal gambling, and the Teamsters Union.

  The FBI already knew most of the players. They knew more about what was happening within the mob than many of the mobsters. Frank Rosenthal’s connections to the Chicago outfit were well known. In Miami, he had been spotted in the company of Chicago street bosses like Turk Torello, Milwaukee Phil, Jackie Cerone, and Fiore Buccieri. The bureau believed that in addition to betting in Miami, he was also booking bets. His arrest by the local police raised his profile high enough to guarantee a friendly visit from the feds asking him to become an informer in exchange for immunity—he refused—and subsequently a subpoena from the McClellan Subcommittee on Gambling and Organized Crime arrived.

  Senator McClellan did not see any charm in the roguish guys and dolls with their buffed nails who paraded before him accompanied by high-priced lawyers who’d provided them with neatly-printed cards containing the Fifth Amendment.

  The committee had lined up several cooperating witnesses who would testify to the mob’s power in illegal gambling and their influence in the sports world, where it was not uncommon for athletes and coaches to be offered cash to shave
points or throw games.

  Lefty got a lawyer and flew to Washington and found himself being accused of attempting to bribe Michael Bruce, a twenty-five-year-old University of Oregon halfback, who said that when he and his team went to Ann Arbor for an important game with the University of Michigan, he met with Lefty and another gambler, David Budin, a twenty-eight-year-old former basketball player, gambler, and card hustler, who later turned out to have been a paid government informer.

  Bruce said the meeting took place in a hotel room and that he was offered $5,000 to make sure that his team—who were the underdogs—lost by eight points instead of six. Bruce said he pretended to accept Lefty’s offer but immediately reported the incident to his coach.

  Lefty has denied that he ever tried to bribe anyone. But when he took the stand before the McClellan committee, his lawyers advised him that if he answered one question—even an innocuous one—he would have to answer everything he was asked or be held in contempt and very likely jailed. His appearance before the committee was a fiasco.

  THE CHAIRMAN: Are you known as Lefty?

  MR. ROSENTHAL: I respectfully decline to answer the question, as I honestly believe my answer might tend to incriminate me.

  SENATOR MUNDT: Are you left-handed?

  MR. ROSENTHAL: I respectfully decline to answer the question, as I honestly believe my answer might tend to incriminate me.

  THE CHAIRMAN: Mr. Rosenthal, according to this transcript of your testimony on the 6th day of January this year, 1961 [in the bookmaking arrest] … you were asked one question that says, ‘You are also known as Lefty.’ And your answer was, ‘Yes, sir, it is a baseball nickname.’ Is that correct?

  MR. ROSENTHAL: I respectfully decline to answer the question, as I honestly believe my answer might tend to incriminate me.