Casino

by Nicholas Pileggi

  “She grabs ahold of the glass with her hand. She holds it in her hand. I saw what was coming, so I leaned over and told Glick that I didn’t want to upset him, but could he try and convince Geri to put down the drink, because if she didn’t, I was probably going to have to do something that I would regret for the rest of my life.

  “I told Glick, ‘Allen, if she touches that drink, I’ll have to knock her on her ass.’

  “Glick got white. ‘If she stonewalls me,’ I told him, ‘she’s going down.’

  “Glick says, ‘Geri, will you do me a favor and listen to your husband?’

  “She released the drink and turned to me under her breath and said, ‘You sonofabitch, I’ll get even with you for this.’ You can imagine what a great party that turned out to be, but I don’t think anyone knew. Geri was a great actress and a drunk. She held it. She didn’t stumble around.

  “When I married Geri I heard all the stories. But I didn’t give a fuck what she did. ‘I’m Frank Rosenthal,’ I said, ‘and I can change her.’”

  “They had lots of terrible fights,” Barbara Stokich says. “They were both very strong willed and refused to back down. He used to threaten to take Steven away because of her drinking, but then they’d make up and he’d buy her a nice piece of jewelry.

  “I remember she told me after one of their fights that she would rather die than give up booze. She loved it whenever Frank had a glass of wine. He’d relax. She’d relax. I know, Frank started drinking just to please her, but he had ulcers and he couldn’t really drink.”

  “One day Tony had been to my house for a meeting,” Lefty said. “He was about to leave, and he was dialing the phone to have one of his guys pick him up. Geri was about to take Steven and Stephanie somewhere, and she volunteered to give him a lift.

  “Tony asked me if it was okay, and I said, ‘Sure, go ahead.’ I didn’t think another thing about it.

  “Then a week or so later, Tony called me up. He said he wanted to meet me. He was very serious. We made a date for about midnight or one in the morning. I picked him up at a certain corner and we began to drive around. We used to do this a lot before the heat got too tough.

  “He said he had a story to tell me. Something he was really disturbed about. Something he’d seen when he’d been in the car with Geri and the kids. I didn’t know what he was going to say. He was so solemn. Here’s a guy who has done all kinds of things, and he’s upset. I’m driving with my heart in my mouth. I’m swallowing muscle.

  “He said that he’d gotten into the car with Geri and the kids, and Steven started picking on Stephanie. Kid stuff. Nothing serious. Then all of a sudden, Stephanie cried out, ‘Mommy, help! Mommy, help!’ Tony glanced into the backseat and saw that Steven was punching Stephanie really hard.

  “‘Geri,’ Tony said, ‘can’t you stop that?’

  “‘It’s not serious,’ Geri said.

  “Stephanie is screaming in the backseat. Tony turns around, and Steven has Stephanie on the floor in the back of the car and he’s hitting her with his fists. Finally, Tony said, he had to force Geri to pull over and stop the fighting.

  “Tony made me swear not to give him up to Geri, but he said he had to tell me what he saw. He said it was sick. It was like Geri was getting pleasure out of seeing her own kid get hurt.”

  One night, Rosenthal took Geri to a dance at the country club. She looked beautiful. She was charming. “I was so proud of her,” Lefty said. “She attracted attention wherever she went. She was that much of a knockout. It’s one of the problems with marrying a ten, or even a nine. They’re dangerous.

  “Anyway, we’re at the club, and a young executive I had hired, a smart, good-looking kid, walked up and complimented me on something. I don’t even remember what. Then he turned to Geri and he said, ‘Mrs. Rosenthal, you are the most gorgeous woman I have ever seen.’

  “She thanked the kid. I smiled. I thanked him too. Sometimes Geri did that to people. She came on just a little bit. She encouraged him. Still, that kid had some balls. I fired him the next day.”

  13

  “He didn’t have a clue about what they were doing or how they were doing it.”

  ALLEN GLICK WAS now the second-largest casino owner in Las Vegas. He shuttled between Las Vegas and his home in La Jolla—a Norman-style mansion with tennis court and pool and a car collection that included a Lamborghini and a Stutz Bearcat with mink carpets and upholstery—in a Beechcraft Hawker 600. His office, on the Stardust penthouse floor, was decorated in purple-and-white, and there he sat, giving interviews about his brilliance as a businessman. He even told the press about his ability to keep still, barely moving, for extended periods. “I’m highly disciplined,” he said.

  Down the hall, Frank Rosenthal was the town’s most important gambling executive—no matter what his job title. He had negotiated a $2.5 million contract. He planned to introduce a sports book at the Stardust, and he appeared before the state legislature as an expert witness. He was the first to allow women blackjack dealers on the Strip, and he doubled the blackjack drop in a year. He hired Siegfried and Roy and their white tigers away from the MGM Grand by offering to build them a dressing room designed to their specifications; he threw in a white Rolls-Royce as a bonus. “The truth is I had bought the Rolls for Geri,” Lefty said, “but she preferred the little Mercedes sports car, and it was just sitting in the garage, so I gave it to them.” The two flamboyant magicians became the hottest and longest-lasting act in Las Vegas history.

  But life in the Argent Corporation was far from peaceful. Instead of being lionized by the press, Glick was ridiculed as a conduit for Teamster money. Instead of being saluted for his innovative casino management, Rosenthal was constantly diverted by problems over his licensing. Crisis followed crisis. Glick and Rosenthal must have hoped that things would settle down and get better once the crisis of the day was solved—but there was always a new crisis the next day. The constant friction between the two men was the least of it. Rosenthal had been selected by the mob as the man to run the casinos, but his combativeness over his licensing problems attracted far more scrutiny than anyone wished. Allen Glick had been chosen as a mob front because he was thought to be squeaky clean; but even squeaky clean people have pasts. In 1975, Glick’s San Diego real estate operation filed for Chapter 11, and Glick defaulted on a $3 million loan he had used to buy the Hacienda. Then a former real estate partner of Glick’s turned up to threaten the entire setup at Argent.

  The only thing that was working well was the skim. And for a long time, for the mob bosses back home, that was all that mattered. For years, skim money had been coming from the Stardust and Fremont casinos; the reason the mob needed a straight-arrow naif like Allen Glick in place was to keep the money coming.

  The practice of skimming—the illegal siphoning off of casino cash, cash that is not reported as tax or as corporate income—is probably as old as the first casino count. In the late forties and fifties, after Bugsy Siegel opened the Flamingo, the skim was used to secretly repay the original mob boss investors, who wanted their dividends in cash to avoid FBI and IRS problems.

  There are dozens of ways to skim a casino, and most of them were in place long before Glick and Rosenthal took over. There were ticket skims, food and beverage kickbacks, theft from the count room. But amazingly, the slot machines had been largely untouched because of a serious logistical problem: the difficulty of hauling coins. One million dollars in quarters, for instance, weighs twenty-one tons. But as slot machines were becoming a larger and larger part of the casino gross, there had to be a way to get at that money.

  So George Jay Vandermark was hired to run the slot machines at the Argent. Vandermark was perfectly qualified for the job: he was known as the greatest slot cheat who had ever lived. According to Ted Lynch, an acquaintance of Vandermark’s, “Jay would take four months off a year and just go up and down the state opening slots. All he had to do was look at a machine and it would give up the drop. He loved doing it. I’ve see
n him open ice machines at gas stations just for the pleasure of seeing the quarters roll out.”

  Vandermark was so well known as a crossroader and slot machine cheat that he was listed in Bob Griffin’s Black Book, a who’s who of casino cheats used primarily by casinos. In fact, when one of the Fremont casino executives first saw Vandermark walk into the casino, he attempted to have Vandermark thrown out; he reversed himself when he was told that Vandermark was his new boss.

  One of the first things Vandermark did after taking over at Argent was to eliminate the controls that safeguarded the proper reporting of all cash pouring into the casino count room. He centralized slot supervision of all four Argent casinos and had the coins hauled from the Fremont, Hacienda, and Marina to the Stardust, where they were counted daily.

  Vandermark also cut down on the number of auditors who were supposed to double-check that the wrapped and stacked coins corresponded in weight and value to the number of loose coins that had originally entered the count room.

  When one auditor complained to Vandermark that he was being cut out of a critically important fiscal safeguard, he was told that it was none of his business.

  The auditor later told the Gaming Control Board that he immediately went upstairs to complain to Argent treasurer Frank Mooney that he suspected Vandermark was stealing. According to the auditor, Mooney simply told him: “Do the best you can under the circumstances.”

  Among the innovations Vandermark brought to the Stardust was to rig the slot machine meters to falsely record one-third more in wins than were actually being paid out.

  It was a brilliant stroke, because when the slot machines were emptied and the coins taken to the count room, the electronic scale used to weigh the coins had been rewired to underweigh the coins by one-third.

  Vandermark now had one-third of the entire slot machine coin count available to skim, since the slot machines had been rigged to indicate that players had taken that amount home with them as wins.

  But there was a problem: how to remove tons and tons of coins from the tightly guarded count room, let alone the casino. But Vandermark had a solution: he created auxiliary banks on the floor of the casino, where the skimmed coins were exchanged for paper money by slot machine change clerks. The auxiliary banks circumvented normal casino procedure: the paper bills were never taken to the cashier’s cage to be counted in with the rest of the casino’s paper money. Vandermark had small metal doors built into the side of the auxiliary banks so that after the clerk had slid the bills into a locked compartment inside the bank, Vandermark’s men could open the door from the outside and take the bills away in large manila envelopes.

  The manila envelopes from the auxiliary banks in each of the Argent casinos were then taken to Vandermark’s office. Then the money was handed over to special couriers who made regular trips transporting the cash between Vegas and Chicago, where it was distributed to Milwaukee, Cleveland, Kansas City, and Chicago.

  The Argent skim was blatant. No one sneaked around in the middle of the night with cash hidden under his shirt. People who worked in the count room and cashier’s cage knew all about it. On one occasion, after the electronic scales were rewired, the switches were installed in back so that by flipping them the scale would underweigh the coin count by either 30 percent or 70 percent. During a particularly hectic day, one of Vandermark’s guys flipped the wrong switch, and suddenly the scale was underweighing the coin count by 70 percent. Vandermark suddenly noticed how high the final count had become and realized what had happened. He screamed, “You dumb son of a bitch, you’re gonna get us all in trouble. We can’t steal that much.”

  The more experienced casino executives, who suspected that some kind of skim was in place, were experienced enough to understand that it was not in their interest to pursue such matters.

  They well knew that even an unintended implied threat to security of the skim could be fatal.

  Edward “Marty” Buccieri, a distant cousin of Fiore Buccieri, was a pit boss at Caesars Palace. An ex-con and former bookmaker, he had met Allen Glick when Glick first tried to buy the King’s Castle in Lake Tahoe in 1972. Buccieri introduced Glick to Al Baron and Frank Ranney, the Teamster fund officials who later became instrumental in Glick’s purchase of the Stardust in 1974. In 1975, after the skim had begun pumping out shopping bags of cash to the mob bosses who had arranged for the loan, Buccieri began harassing Glick. He wanted a finder’s fee, and he asked for $30,000 to $50,000. “Buccieri had been pissed at Glick for years,” Beecher Avants, the Metro homicide chief at the time, said. “Buccieri told anyone who listened that he first got Glick the pension fund loans and then Glick aced him out. Here was Glick owning four casinos, three hotels, jet airplanes, houses all over the place, while Marty’s standing on his feet in the pit at Caesar’s for an eight-hour shift.”

  One afternoon in May, Glick and Buccieri met at the Hacienda Hotel. Once again Buccieri raised the question of a finder’s fee. The conversation escalated, and Buccieri grabbed Glick by the throat and threatened him. They were separated by security guards.

  “I remember Glick coming back to Stardust afterwards,” Rosenthal recalls. “He was red in the face. All excited. ‘I need to see you,’ he says. ‘It’s an emergency. Do you know Marty Buccieri?’ I didn’t know the guy. I knew his name at the time, but I didn’t know him personally. I knew he was a distant relative of my friend Fiore Buccieri, maybe third cousins or something. But I had never met him.

  “Glick’s all upset. Very unusual for him. He says, ‘Frank, I’ll never let this happen again. And you have to help me.’

  “I asked him what happened, and he goes on to tell me about Marty grabbing him by the throat and shoving him. I asked him why Buccieri would do such a thing, but Glick just wanted to describe what happened. He gave me some horseshit answer as to why, but it wasn’t very clear. Later I sensed it was because Buccieri thought he’d been stiffed.”

  A week after the incident, Buccieri was about to start his car in the Caesar’s Palace employee parking lot when two men armed with .25-caliber automatics with silencers shot him five times in the head.

  “I went to talk to Glick about the murder,” said homicide chief Beecher Avants. “Glick had one of those very opulent offices with a lot of mirrors. He had the latest electronic stuff all over the place. Shelves with books and plaques all over. Electronic stock market quote machines. Expensive lamps, bowls filled with flowers. It was a chairman’s office. There was no place you could sit where you couldn’t see yourself in a mirror. Glick was one of those very small guys who hid behind a very big desk.

  “Glick said that he had had a ‘disagreement’ with Buccieri, but he denied that Buccieri had attacked him physically.

  “As he talked, Glick sat very still. Very controlled. You’d get a businessman’s answer to everything you asked. He was like a zombie. A nonperson. And the mirrors all around the room were reflecting the same nonperson. After a while I began to wonder which of these guys was the real Glick.

  “Lefty was a different story. Lefty’s office didn’t have any mirrors. It was absolutely spotless. There was nothing on his desk at all. Behind the desk he had this poster with a great big ‘NO!’ taking up the top nine-tenths of space and a little ‘yes’ crammed down at the bottom.

  “Lefty was standing behind his desk, and the only thing moving was this pencil, which he kept fiddling with. Lefty was one of those guys who didn’t want to tell you anything, but he always had to let you know that he knew a lot more than he was ever letting on.”

  Beecher Avants and the homicide division spent months attempting to pin the Buccieri murder on Tony Spilotro, whom they had spotted a week before the murder talking to Teamster pension fund officials in the Tropicana coffee shop. Meanwhile, the FBI knew within days that Frank Balistrieri in Milwaukee had ordered the murder. According to a top informant in Milwaukee, Balistrieri had become convinced that Buccieri was a rat, and he went to the bosses in Chicago for approval for the hit. The murder wa
s assigned to Spilotro and his crew. According to the informant, Spilotro angrily insisted to Balistrieri that Buccieri was not an informant; but he carried out the assignment anyway. He imported two shooters, one from California and one from Arizona. None of them was ever charged with the murder.

  The FBI had most of it right. What they had no way of knowing at the time, but found out later, was that Marty Buccieri was killed because he posed a threat to Glick, and Glick was the mob’s front man. A threat to Glick was seen as a threat to the bosses and the skim. Since preserving the sanctity and safety of the skim would never be given as the reason for killing Buccieri, the erroneous story that he had become a government informant was leaked within the mob by the bosses who ordered it. Even Spilotro, the man assigned the murder by Chicago, never knew the real reason behind Buccieri’s murder.

  Six months after Buccieri’s death, on November 9, 1975, a wealthy fifty-five-year-old woman named Tamara Rand was shot five times in the head and killed in the kitchen of her house in the Mission Hills section of San Diego. It was a professional hit. The killers used a .22-caliber with a silencer; there was no sign of forced entry and nothing was missing. The body was found by Rand’s husband when he got home from work.

  “The morning after the murder, I began getting calls from the press,” said Beecher Avants of Metro homicide. “It turned out that Tamara Rand had just been to Las Vegas and had an argument with Allen Glick.

  “Shades of Marty Buccieri! You can’t have an argument with this man and not wind up somehow getting yourself killed. It turned out Rand had claimed to be some kind of a limited partner of Glick’s and had gone to court to ask for a piece of the Stardust.

  “She was a tough lady. She had flown into town in May to file her suit, and when she got back to San Diego she told her niece that she had had an argument with Glick. She also said that she had been threatened—but exactly who had threatened her was not clear. Her niece said she shrugged the threat off: ‘She was more interested in getting all her ducks in order for the lawsuit.’”