Casino

by Nicholas Pileggi

  Tony opened a gift shop at Circus Circus called Anthony Stuart Ltd., and Nancy often worked there. Tony spent most of his time in the poker room at Circus or at the Dunes lending busted dealers money at loan-shark rates. It wasn’t long before just about every dealer at the two casinos owed him money.

  His loan-sharking, shakedowns, and crooked card games soon attracted so much attention that the Spilotros’ Ozzie and Harriet act fell apart. Tony moved a cement block next to the rear wall of his house so he could look over the fence and see if he was being tailed that day. He usually was. Agents caught him partying late into the night with the youngest and most naive girls who hit town. Meanwhile, Nancy was arrested for drunken driving; on that occasion, she listed Geri’s name—not Tony’s—as the person to call in case of emergency.

  Tony wasn’t in town two weeks before the Feds had him on a wire. The FBI in Chicago had alerted Las Vegas that he was on the way. They tailed him to one of his first meetings, in the middle of the desert, where he was asked to help get a connected meat company into all the big hotels. They then tailed him to a meeting with the leaders of the local culinary union. Later, those union officials had meetings with the main buyers at the casino hotels, and by the summer, all the hotels were buying their meats from the company.

  “We’d pick him up every three or four months on general principles,” said Las Vegas Metro Detective Sergeant William Keeton, “and bring him in on a complaint, and he’d grouse that people were just setting him up for a pinch, and then we’d let him go.

  “But Tony liked publicity. He was a volatile type. Cocky. He could also be charming. The Chicago Crime Commission had sent us a picture of a guy whose head Tony had supposedly put in a vise. Every once in a while I’d look at it to remind myself about how dangerous he was. The guy’s head was wedged to about five inches wide, and then Tony had put lighter fluid on his face and set it on fire. The eyeballs were bugging out.

  “In September of nineteen seventy-two we picked him up on a nineteen sixty-three Chicago homicide warrant. He was being held without bail—normal in a homicide case—awaiting extradition back to Chicago. I guess Tony didn’t want to spend the night in jail, because the next thing we know is that Rosenthal shows up in court at a bailing hearing for Spilotro. It wasn’t the smartest thing Lefty could have done, but I guess he didn’t have any choice.”

  “Tony was only in town about a year when I got a call from him,” said Frank Rosenthal. “He was in jail. ‘You gotta vouch for me. You gotta do this for me,’ he says. ‘I need you as a character witness on a bond.’

  “It turned out to be in connection with a homicide in Chicago back in nineteen sixty-three. I said, ‘Holy shit, Tony, I’m working in the casino, I’m up for licensing.’

  “I’m trying to get it across that it might not be the best move for me to go down to court and put myself on the line for him in a homicide bail hearing. It would be a red flag for the Gaming Control Board.

  “‘I need it bad,’ he says. ‘You gotta do it.’

  “So, I went down to court. I vouched for him and he got out on ten thousand dollars bail. Tony swore to me he wasn’t involved in the case. He was very convincing. The next day I scoured the papers to see if my name appeared in connection with the case. I was lucky. It didn’t.”

  “They took Spilotro back to Chicago to stand charges,” said FBI agent Bill Roemer. “When he was arraigned, he pleaded not guilty and said that he had no idea where he was on the day of the homicide. He said he knew President Kennedy had been assassinated a week later, and he was going to use that date to try and reconstruct where he was on the day of the Foreman murder.

  “He was very cute. He said he was going to ask his family to search through their records. He said he hoped they might find something that could prove he was not at the murder scene.

  “Then, about a month before the trial, one of Tony’s two codefendants, Crazy Sam DeStefano, gets shot and killed in his garage. Two fast shotgun blasts. Sam’s wife and bodyguard just happened to leave about thirty minutes earlier to go see relatives.

  “Tony had been worried about Crazy Sam. He had tried to get his case severed from Sam’s. Sam had just been given three years for threatening a government witness in a narcotics case, and he had shown up for an earlier court appearance in a wheelchair, wearing pajamas and carrying a megaphone. Tony had been very worried that Sam was going to prejudice the jury. There were also reports that Sam had cancer and his fear of dying in prison was going to get him to double-cross his codefendants, namely his brother Mario and Tony. We heard that Tony had secretly appealed to the outfit’s boss, Anthony Accardo, claiming that Mad Sam was going to take him down.”

  Spilotro beat the case. His sister-in-law Arlene, who was married to his brother John, took the stand. She testified that on the day of the murder, she and her husband and Nancy and Tony had spent the entire day together shopping for furniture and appliances, having lunch, and discussing color schemes. The jury dismissed the charges against Tony.

  “I was there that day,” said Roemer. “When the verdict was announced, Tony raised his arms up in triumph. Then he looked over at a group of us, law enforcement people, where I was seated. Spilotro had a big grin of scorn on his face. His eyes focused for a moment on me.

  “As he exited the courtroom, now a free man, I stepped into the aisle. ‘You’re still a little pissant,’ I said. ‘We’ll get you yet.’ I said it very softly.

  “Tony looked at me and smiled. ‘Fuck you,’ he said.”

  PART TWO

  Taking the Odds

  10

  “You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”

  IN 1971, WHEN Frank Rosenthal went to work at the Stardust, the hotel-casino was for sale. “It was owned by the Recrion Corporation, which also owned the Fremont,” said Dick Odessky, who was the director of public relations at the Stardust, “and the big shareholders were looking to sell it. They’d run the price of the stock way up, and they were all looking to get out. But the Securities and Exchange Commission had gotten suspicious and forced them to sign a consent decree not to sell their shares.

  “It was like sitting there with a great big steak and not being able to eat it. If anybody tried to sell stock he would have been in big trouble with the court. So the only way the shareholders could get their money out was to sell the entire company.

  “Del Coleman [the chairman of Recrion] represented the big investors, and there was tremendous pressure on him to sell out and make a killing.

  “Even after Al Sachs took over as president of the Stardust, the pressure to sell the company continued. And right around this time, Allen Glick came along.”

  Allen Glick was tougher than he looked. In 1974, when the thirty-one-year-old San Diego real estate developer suddenly became the second-biggest casino operator in Las Vegas history, many of the state’s gaming regulators and casino owners were astounded. Glick’s impact on the town until then had been minimal. He had arrived in Las Vegas only a year earlier, when he and three partners obtained a $3 million loan to develop a parking lot for recreational vans on the site of the bankrupt Hacienda Hotel casino at the low-rent southern end of the the Strip.

  Glick’s look and style—he was short, balding, and owlish—belied his tenacity. Few around him knew that the youthful, studiously mild-mannered Glick—who spoke so softly that he was sometimes barely audible—had spent two years hanging out of a Huey helicopter in Vietnam, where he won a Bronze Star.

  “Vietnam taught me that life was short,” said Glick. “I remember writing to my brother-in-law that I didn’t think I was coming back. So when I did get back, I decided I didn’t want to do what I didn’t want to do. First, I really didn’t want to be a lawyer. I had a bachelor’s from Ohio State and a law degree from Case Western Reserve, but the thing I knew was that I didn’t want to practice law. Second, I wanted to live in San Diego instead of Pittsburgh, where I was raised. A friend of my sister’s got me a job doing some legal work
for American Housing, the largest multifamily builder in San Diego, and Kathy and the kids and I drove out there. That started my education in real estate.

  “By February of 1971, after about a year at American Housing, I teamed up with Denny Wittman, a nice, wild guy, in a real estate development that involved large tracts of land and commercial building.

  “I was first introduced to Las Vegas in 1972. Denny Wittman had heard there was a sixty-acre site at the southern end of the Strip that could make a great mobile home park. The only problem with the property was that the bankrupt Hacienda Hotel was sitting on it and the casino had three IRS tax liens against it. I don’t know why, but I just had an idea that instead of tearing everything down for a parking lot, maybe we could raise the money and revive the hotel and casino. But Denny Wittman didn’t want to invest in a casino. He was a religious guy. He had a problem with it, so he begged out.

  “At the time I personally had twenty-one thousand dollars to my name, but with smoke and mirrors and Denny helping us inflate the value of everything our little development corporation owned, we were able to raise the three million dollars from the First American Bank of Tennessee, where we had been doing business before and had friends.

  “I had to get a Nevada Gaming Commission license as the owner of a Las Vegas casino, and there I was, at twenty-nine or thirty, chairman of a Las Vegas casino. Within a day, everyone in town had a deal for me.

  “About five months later, Chris Caramanis, who ran an air charter service the hotels used, said that the King’s Castle in Lake Tahoe was also in bankruptcy, having been foreclosed by the Teamster pension fund, and he suggested we raise the money and take over King’s Castle the way we did the Hacienda.

  “That was how I met Al Baron, the assets manager for the Central States Teamster Pension Fund. Chris introduced me to him. I thought I was going to meet a banker type in charge of the assets of a multibillion-dollar pension fund. Instead, I meet this gruff, cigar-chomping guy who looks at me and says, ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ Al was very annoyed at the time because a deal that had been put in place to take the bankrupt King’s Castle off the Teamsters’ hands had just fallen apart.

  “When he was told that I had raised the cash to buy the Hacienda, he asked, ‘Do you have any money?’

  “I said, ‘No, but I might be able to borrow it.’

  “Baron was so anxious to get the bankrupt King’s Castle off the Teamsters’ books that he said he would be back through Las Vegas in two weeks and I should submit a proposal.

  “When he came back, I gave him the proposal and he got angry. ‘I’ve got no time to read this,’ he said. All he wanted was for me to raise the money for a mortgage and get the Teamsters out.

  “Anyway, the deal never went through, but shortly after, I got involved in developing a large government office complex in Austin, Texas, that would house Internal Revenue, congressional offices, and various government agencies. This was a larger deal than we could finance with our usual bank loans, so I thought, let me call Al Baron. I called him three times, left messages, and he never called me back. Finally, after four days, his secretary said that I shouldn’t bother calling him again.

  “I said fine, but I wanted him to know that the government had contacted me and I needed to talk to him. He called back in three seconds. When I told him that I had been contacted by the government about developing a huge government building complex, he started cursing me up and down. He used every foul word and image you could imagine.

  “But in between his cursing I must have gotten across that this was a federal government project and a great opportunity, because he finally said, ‘Okay, you sonofabitch, fuck, submit the loan package.’

  “Baron and the Teamsters loved this government deal I had brought them because it was totally legitimate and because Denny Wittman, our Austin partners, and I did all the work, and the Teamsters were the government’s landlords.

  “Then came the Recrion deal. I had heard that Recrion was for sale and that Morris Shenker, the owner of the Dunes, was in negotiation to buy the company from Del Coleman. It turned out that Shenker was offering Coleman only forty-two dollars a share. My accountants had gone through the numbers and realized that you could borrow whatever you needed to buy the Stardust and the Fremont and still have money left over to cover your costs.

  “It was the deal of a lifetime. I immediately called Del Coleman in New York to set up a meeting. I grabbed the red-eye and met him in his town house on East Seventy-seventh Street first thing on a Friday morning. Del Coleman was a very sophisticated man, and I believe he was married or engaged to a famous model at the time.

  “I told him I wanted to buy him out. I told him I already owned the Hacienda Hotel and casino and that my development company supported me in an offer which I knew was at least two dollars a share higher than Shenker had offered him. I said I needed some time to raise the money, but I was certain I would have no trouble doing so.

  “Coleman said up front that he was already in negotiation with Morris Shenker. Actually, attorneys were typing up the papers at that very moment, but I didn’t know that. He said if I had money to put up he would be obligated to tell the shareholders, which meant I would be in a position to make a public offer.

  “He said if I was serious I could have until noon Monday to come in with two million dollars in a nonrefundable cash payment, and he would give me a hundred and twenty days to raise the rest of the money. I agreed to the deal, but I gulped. I had to give Coleman two million dollars cash by noon Monday, and even if I could raise it, here it was Friday afternoon and the banks were closed over the weekend. I called Denny Wittman. I said I had to borrow two million dollars. He knew what was involved and he offered to let me use two five-hundred-thousand-dollar CDs our company had in the First American Bank in Nashville, Tennessee. He then said maybe I could get a million-dollar letter of credit from the same bank, where we had a very good relationship.

  “I called Steven Neely, the bank president, and told him what I needed. ‘You’re crazy,’ he said. I told him it was the deal of a lifetime.

  “‘If you’re serious, you gotta get down here tonight,’ Neely said. I hung up and called the airlines and found that there were no more flights heading anywhere near Nashville that would get me there in time.

  “I took a car to Teterboro airport in New Jersey and chartered a Learjet to get me there. I had no money, but I gave the charter service a credit card, and thank God I had enough credit to cover the trip.

  “When I landed in Nashville, Neely saw me get off the Lear and asked me where I got the plane, and I said a friend lent it to me. I didn’t want to say I had just melted my credit card. We went to his house and worked all night setting up the holdings and collateral for the letter of credit.

  “Wittman flew in the next day. He pledged everything I needed, and the bank gave me the letter of credit, and it was all completed by Sunday morning. I flew back to New York.

  “I called Coleman from the airport. ‘Del, I’ve got your money now and I don’t want to wait until Monday morning.’

  “‘You’ve got two million dollars?’ he said.

  “‘It’s in my briefcase,’ I said.

  “I went over, we filed the escrow papers for the money, and Coleman said on Monday morning he would notify the SEC and stop trading in Recrion stock.

  “I flew back to San Diego on Monday morning, got there before dawn, and began putting together lists of possible investors. I called Al Baron, because the Teamsters held the mortgages on the Stardust and Fremont, plus I knew they had liked the government office development I had brought them. I thought they might want to get involved in the package.

  “When I told Al Baron what I had done and that I was now going to bid on the Recrion stock, he said, ‘Listen to me, I’m giving you the best advice you’ve ever had—walk away from this thing. Call the deal off. You have no idea what you’re doing. You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.’ He said there w
as no way he was going to get involved in the mess I was creating. Looking back, I realize he gave me all the red flags he could.

  “Since the Teamsters looked bad, I had investment people try and find me other sources of money. One of the L.A. people came up with a guy named J. R. Simplot, an Idaho investor, who was interested. I went to meet him. He was very low-key. He was wearing a two-hundred-dollar suit. He said he had some hotel interests and he would give me the money, except he wanted fifty-one percent of the deal.

  “I had no idea who he was. When I got back to the office I called Kenny Solomon at the Valley Bank and asked him to check out somebody named Simplot. He said he didn’t have to check him out. He said Mr. Simplot could give me the sixty-two-point-seven million dollars just by writing a check on his personal account. Simplot was the largest potato grower in the United States, and there probably wasn’t a McDonald’s french fry that didn’t come through him.

  “But I wasn’t interested in giving up control of the company. So I called Al Baron back and said that in the morning he was going to hear that I was a partner with J. R. Simplot and that we were going to buy out Recrion and take over the Teamsters’ interest in the Stardust and the Fremont.

  “Baron said, ‘Don’t do anything until I call you back.’ He calls me back. He says, ‘Come to Chicago for a meeting.’

  “‘Why should I?’ I said. ‘Are you going to give me the loan?’ He said he still didn’t know.

  “The next day I flew to Chicago to the pension fund office, where I met Al Baron. ‘Now that you’re in the ball game,’ he said, ‘you’ve got to come up to bat,’ He then explained how the system worked.

  “He said you had to know a pension fund trustee, because only trustees could make loan proposals. He said the trustees then turned the proposals over to the asset manager for due diligence, and then the applications went to an executive committee, which might or might not recommend, and then the proposal went to a vote of the full board.