Casino

by Nicholas Pileggi

  Geri earned between $300,000 and $500,000 a year hustling chips and partying with high rollers. She made about $20,000 a year as a dancer at the Tropicana, and that job provided her with a work card, issued by the Las Vegas Sheriff’s Office, showing that she was gainfully employed. Having a work card kept her from being harassed for hustling in a casino by Las Vegas vice cops and hotel security.

  “Everybody loved Geri because she spread money around,” said Ray Vargas, a former valet parker at the Dunes Hotel. “She hung around with another knockout back then. Evelyn. Geri was a blonde. Evelyn was a redhead. They were doing great.

  “Geri knew you had to take care of people, and she did. I mean, everybody in Las Vegas who’s got any brains is on the hustle. Nobody lives off their paycheck parking cars or dealing cards. That’s the thing about Las Vegas. Everybody sharp who lives there is on the make. That’s why they’re there.

  “And Geri got along because she gave everybody a few bucks whenever she scored. If she needed uppers to keep some butter-and-egg desperado awake, she got them. Mostly she got the johns to spring for the money, but what did I care? She always got me the money, and I needed it. My valet parking concession back then cost me fifty grand a year that I had to kick back to the casino manager just for letting me lease the place.”

  Las Vegas is a city of kickbacks. A desert city of greased palms. A place where a $20 bill can buy approval, a $100 bill adulation, and a $1,000 bill canonization. There are stories of dealers getting thousands of dollars in tips from lucky high rollers, and even comped high rollers are expected to make a laydown bet of a couple of hundred or thousand to repay the house for its courtesy. Las Vegas is a city where everyone takes care of everyone else. Maître d’s at the big shows not only pay for their jobs but often give the men who hire them a percentage of their weekly tips. Smart girls like Geri tipped everyone in sight. She cast her money on the waters and expected it to come back tenfold.

  “Geri was in love with money,” Frank Rosenthal says. “To her, a night was a waste if she didn’t go home with cash in her pocket. In the beginning, she treated me like I was a fucking square. One of her suckers. I was on the clock.

  “I had to give her a two-carat heart-shaped diamond pin just to get her to start dating me. When we’d be out, she’d ask me for money for the powder room lady. I’d usually give her a hundred-dollar bill. I expected her to bring me back some change, but she never did. She never brought me back a penny.

  “I mentioned it to her once and she said she lost it playing blackjack on the way back to the table. I knew she was lying. I didn’t care about the money. I just didn’t want her playing me for another one of her suckers. She had a Rolodex filled with their names. She knew guys all over the country. Clients. They’d call her up when they were coming to town. They were like friends. Some she drank with. Some she gambled with. Some she took on dates, and there were some where she went all the way. It all depended on what was there for her. If she didn’t think she was going to see you again or make some money, forget it. You were gone.

  “In those days, Geri was working all the time. She was carrying her whole family. She had a mother and daughter and sister and two nephews living in the house to support. She also had an ex-boyfriend who was the father of her kid. She was carrying him, too, especially after he got pinched for pimping in Los Angeles.” Marmor’s pimping charges were later dismissed.

  Geri McGee and her sister, Barbara, grew up in Sherman Oaks and went to Van Nuys High School with Robert Redford and Don Drysdale. Their father, Roy McGee, worked in gas stations and tinkered. Their mother, Alice, had been hospitalized for mental illness; when she was well, she took in ironing.

  “We were probably the poorest family in the neighborhood,” says Barbara McGee Stokich. “We baby-sat, raked leaves, fed people’s chickens and rabbits. It wasn’t much fun. When we were little kids we got all our clothes from the neighbors. Geri hated it more than anything.

  “Geri started going out with Lenny Marmor in high school. He was the sharpest guy in school. He wore sunglasses indoors. Geri was only fifteen. She and Lenny used to dance together by the hour. Ballroom dancing. She was a great dancer. She only had to watch you do a step once and she could do it.

  “They won silver cups and prizes dancing in contests all over the Valley and at the Hollywood Palladium. Geri won bathing suit contests and little modeling jobs. Nobody in the family liked Lenny, but he was always hanging around, acting like he was her agent. She didn’t want us to see him in his dark glasses.

  “Our dad really did not like Lenny. He tried to break them up. He went to talk to the school principal. My father always wanted to become a cop. One time my father got so mad at Lenny that he went to Lenny’s house and beat him up.

  “But Lenny was slick, and he convinced Geri that his own dad was cruel to him. He made Geri feel sorry for him right from back there when they were juniors in high school. So Geri started seeing Lenny on the sneak.

  “In 1954, when Geri graduated, our aunt Ingram, my father’s sister, who inherited a lot of money when her husband died, offered to send Geri to Woodbury Business School, which is where she had sent me two years earlier. But Geri didn’t want to go to Woodbury. She wanted to go to UCLA or USC. Our aunt refused. She wouldn’t do more for Geri than she did for me. So Geri said, ‘No thank you. I don’t want Woodbury. It’s not right for me,’ Instead, she got a job as a clerk in Thrifty Drugs. She didn’t like it. Then she got a job as a teller in the Bank of America. She didn’t like that either. Then she got a clerical job in personnel at Lockheed Aerojet. The manager there really liked her. She got him to hire me to do steno for the engineers. I could take a hundred and eighty words a minute.

  “She had an apartment and Lenny moved in, and he started taking her to Hollywood parties to meet people, and she kept on dancing and posing in bathing suit contests.

  “In 1958, their daughter Robin was born, and Lenny talked Geri into moving to Las Vegas. He could talk her into anything. He used to say he was a professional pool shooter. He used to say he was a car salesman. But the truth is, I don’t remember him ever working. He stayed in Los Angeles, but he said she could make real money in Vegas. Our mom moved out there with her to help keep an eye on Robin.

  “When Geri first got to Las Vegas around 1960, she was a cocktail waitress and showgirl. Our dad would visit once in a while, but he got very upset when he saw what Geri was doing. It was very tough on Dad. He could see what was going on, but rather than lose a daughter, he had to accept her way of life.

  “She was already seeing Frank in 1968, when I had to move in with her after my husband walked out. Geri was very generous with me. I couldn’t have made it through that time without her. She had everything. She had blue-chip stocks. She had saved her money. But she knew it wouldn’t last. She said she was over thirty. She talked to me about how it couldn’t last.

  “One day she and I were talking to a friend of hers named Linda Pellichio. Geri was telling us about the different men who wanted to marry her. There were men from all over who wanted to marry her. Guys in New York and in Italy. But she felt she couldn’t leave. She had Robin and Mother and Lenny and our father. She wondered about whether she should marry Lenny. She told us that he had been after her about their getting married, but I told her Lenny had just been arrested in Los Angeles for pimping and that’s why he wanted to get married all of a sudden. I told her Lenny only wanted to marry her because she had the money to keep him out of jail and pay his lawyers. But she knew that all by herself. She looked at me and Linda. ‘What should I do?’ she said. Linda Pellichio had the answer. I’ll never forget it. ‘Marry Frank Rosenthal,’ Linda said. ‘He’s very rich. Marry him, get his money, and then divorce him.’

  “Geri said, ‘I can’t marry him. He’s a triple Gemini. All dualities.’ Geri believed in horoscopes. ‘Gemini is the snake. You’ve got to watch a snake.’

  “Geri was also going out with Johnny Hicks at that time. She adored Johnny Hicks
and he would have married her, except he had very rich parents. They owned the Algiers Hotel, and they didn’t want him to marry her. He would have lost everything. The way it was, Johnny had a ten-thousand-dollar-a-month trust fund. I think he would have married her if he could.

  “She started talking more and more about getting married. She didn’t want to live the way she was living anymore. She said to me that she was going to find somebody to marry.”

  Lefty Rosenthal had been married briefly in his twenties. He was skittish about getting married again. Geri did not exactly look like the sort of girl you took home to Mama. She hardly seemed like someone who would ever settle down; every date was an adventure. “When we started going out,” says Lefty, “she had been going with Johnny Hicks. He was about ten years younger than Geri. He came from a substantial family. They had owned the Algiers Hotel and the Thunderbird Casino. He liked to play the tough guy. Hung around downtown with a crew that used to beat up hookers. That kind of guy.

  “Geri had been going around with him before I got there. They’d go out, and if somebody tried to pick up Geri or came on to her a little, Hicks liked to beat them up. Badly.

  “He liked to kick people when they were down. A real tough-guy street fighter.

  “One night I’m with Geri in Caesars. We’re there with Bert Brown, a gambling friend of mine, and Bobby Kay, the midget who ran the Galleria in Caesars. Out of nowhere, Geri says, ‘Let’s go over to the Flamingo.’ She says she wants to dance. She knows I don’t dance, but she wants to go dance anyway. That’s what it was like dating Geri. Okay? Okay.

  “We get over there and we’re sitting at a table on the aisle, and who walks in but Johnny Hicks and three or four guys, and one of them is this really good club fighter named Bates. As Hicks walks by my table I see that he gives me a bad look. He knows I’ve started dating Geri seriously. She’s with me now. No more bullshit. By the look of him I know there’s gonna be trouble, but there’s nothing I can do.

  “Now instead of staying seated and not starting a problem, Geri decides she wants to dance. I said, ‘You know I don’t dance, Geri.’ So she gets up and starts dancing with Bert Brown.

  “It’s all fine until I see Hicks get up and tap her on the shoulder. Bert Brown backs off. I can see Geri and Hicks are talking, but I can’t hear them.

  “Now Geri starts dancing with Hicks. Suddenly, I see, he puts his hands on her shoulders to sort of shove her roughly.

  “I lose it. I remember I just started toward him. I remember flying and colliding with him and we both went down onto the floor. He was stronger than I was and he wrestled me around and got on top, and he got his hands and fingers and began tearing at my face. Some security guys and his own pal Bates got him off me and held him back. As he was being pulled off me, he kicked out and just missed my head by an inch.

  “I was crazy. I went back to the Trop, where I was living, and went into my bag and got a gun. I was going to find the sonofabitch and kill him. You can see I was out of my mind.

  “I went looking for Hicks. I had been bleeding badly from the face. Bobby Kay and Geri are pleading with me, but I don’t care. Pretty soon Elliott Price and Danny Stein, from Caesars, slowed me down, and they took me back to my apartment and I calmed down.

  “What did I expect? Here I am going with one of the best-looking gals in the whole goddamn state, if not the country. So help me God!

  “She was. Boy!

  “I was a fucking idiot. Naive. You know? And I’m saying to myself, ‘What am I doing with this woman? How did I get her?’

  “You know, during this period, she once made a crack to me. It was very interesting. We were getting ready to go to bed. She was looking at me with a little smile. ‘You’ve never been with anybody like me, have you?’ she says, smiling. ‘Have you?’

  “I know she’s right, but I asked what she means. ‘Someone like you?’

  “‘You know exactly what I mean,’ she says. ‘You’ve never been with anyone like me. Anyone that looks like me. Have you?’

  “‘Well, I’ll tell you the truth, Geri,’ I said. ‘No, I haven’t.’

  “I thought about her right there and I knew she was right. I couldn’t believe it was all mine. I had never been to bed or made love to somebody who looked like her.

  “And she just looked at me and kept smiling.”

  Frank and Geri were married May 1, 1969, by Justice of the Peace Joseph Pavlikowski.

  “There was never any question,” Lefty says. “I knew Geri didn’t love me when we got married. But I was so attracted to her when I proposed I thought I could build a nice family and a nice relationship.

  “Before we got married we talked about the fact that you can build or create a form of love, admiration, respect. What is love? I talked to her about that. But I wasn’t fooled.

  “She married me because of what I stood for. Security. Strength. A well-connected fellow. A well-respected fellow. Would probably make a good father. And she was getting older. She didn’t want to chip-hustle anymore. Fuck around with her players. She wanted to be respectable. Quit her job at the Tropicana.

  “When I was dating her, some of my friends warned me about her. They said, ‘Listen, this girl will fucking empty you out. You don’t know her background.’

  “See, I was considered a square guy then. I was. And these were people who, I think, cared for me. And they were trying to tell me, ‘Don’t do it.’ They’d see me with her all the time. I was really involved with her.

  “Some of them knew her for a couple of years. I knew her for a couple of months. But I was smarter than they were, I thought. I was the handicapper. I was this, I was that.

  “And I could mold Geri. I don’t give a fuck if she drinks too much. So what? I’ll stop that in one day. I didn’t know about alcoholism. How would I know about it? I never drank. All I knew about was handicapping and handicapping and handicapping. That’s all I knew.

  “At the wedding she got up and went to a public phone booth to make a call. When I went out to see if she was okay, I could hear her talking to Lenny Marmor. I could hear her telling him she had just married Frank Rosenthal. As she spoke, I saw that she was crying. I could hear her saying, ‘Lenny, I’m sorry. I love you. This is the best thing I can do.’ She’s saying good-bye to the love of her life. She hung up the phone and she saw me. She told me it was something she had to do. I told her I understood that, but the past was now the past. We were now married. Life would be different. I took the drink out of her hand and we walked back into the wedding.

  “So, we got married. Tremendous. It was a hell of a night. Maybe five hundred people. Her family. My family. Friends. Caviar. Lobsters. Cristal champagne for five hundred people. They erected a chapel in Caesars Palace. I have no idea what the bill was. My wedding was comped.”

  8

  “He’s not like a son; he is my son.”

  LEFTY ROSENTHAL WAS forty-one. He had had enough of life as a freelancer. He was running a betting and booking office called the Rose Bowl and he had been arrested six times in a four-month period. He was tired of eighteen-hour days and continuous harassment by John Law. It was time to pack it in. Get a steady gig. Settle down. Of course, Las Vegas may be the only city in the world where settling down means going to work in a casino.

  “In 1971 the pressure got to the point where Geri asked me to quit gambling and get a regular job,” Rosenthal said. “Lend some respectability to the family now that we had a son. She wanted us to live a normal life. Geri felt squeezed out. She said Steven felt squeezed out. I felt I owed it to her to at least try to live a regular life for a while. She said, ‘Take the same energy you’re using betting every week and use it inside a casino.’ I said okay and filled out a few applications. I had some friends at the Stardust and I got a job as a floor man. That’s one step above a dealer. I got sixty dollars a day. I pulled an eight- or nine-hour shift. I was in charge of watching four blackjack tables.”

  The Stardust Hotel and Casino was built i
n 1959. It was the first high-rise casino hotel on the strip, and according to the Feds it had passed through several owners connected to the Chicago mob. It was famous mostly for having the largest sign in Las Vegas—with 932 electric bulbs in the A alone—and for being the home of the Lido Show. It was considered a grind joint—a place where players lost slowly and steadily, rather than spectacularly; the high rollers went to Caesars and the Desert Inn.

  “The guy they assigned me to my first night was Frank Cursoli, the blackjack manager,” said Rosenthal. “Bobby Stella, a Stardust vice president who I knew from Chicago, took me over to Cursoli and introduced me. Cursoli gave me a few fucking crazy words about casinos and I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.

  “Then, on my first night, I started getting paged over the loudspeaker. I couldn’t pick up the page from where I was located, but I saw Cursoli’s ‘Who the fuck is this guy?’ look, and he asks Bobby Stella: ‘Who is this guy? What’s this bullshit with the paging?’

  “And Bobby says, ‘Take it easy. Take it easy. You don’t know who he is. Relax.’ In other words, Bobby’s trying to get it across to Cursoli that I’m not the average hire.

  “When I asked Cursoli about taking a break—my ulcer was beginning to act up—he gave me a fucking look. ‘I’ll let you know,’ he says, like I’m an imbecile. I walked back to my station really pissed off. I wasn’t used to having to beg somebody when I felt like a glass of milk.

  “I saw Bobby Stella walking around. I got his eye. He walked over to the pit. I said, ‘Hey, is this guy nuts, Bobby? What’s his problem?’ ‘Relax, relax,’ Bobby tells me and then he goes over to Cursoli and gets me a fifteen-minute break.

  “At the end of the first shift, when my wife picked me up I couldn’t stand up. My legs ached. I said, ‘Geri, that’s it.’