Casino

by Nicholas Pileggi

  Glick had been quietly fighting Rand’s claims that she was a partner in the Stardust for years, but her sudden mob-style murder pushed an obscure financial-page dispute onto the front page.

  Glick found out that Tamara Rand had been murdered when he got off the Argent jet in Las Vegas and was greeted by reporters and TV cameramen asking his reaction to the murder. After expressing shock, he jumped into an Argent limousine and fled the scene. The next day the Argent public relations department issued a statement saying that while Glick had known Rand and had fond memories of her as a friend, he had no other comment.

  The newspapers found their comment elsewhere. They discovered that a couple of months before her murder, Rand had escalated her civil actions against Glick by filing criminal fraud charges against him. And she had won an important and dangerous victory in court: she and her attorneys were given access to corporate documents pertaining to the Teamsters pension fund loan.

  A week after the murder, the San Diego Union reprinted a letter Rand had written seven months before she was killed, detailing her relationship with Glick. It was not flattering. It accused Glick of living like royalty, of flying friends to football games in the company plane, of surrounding himself with a “parade of toys.”

  The publicity surrounding the murder—capped by an article in the Los Angeles Times reporting that Glick was one of several people being questioned in connection with it—forced Glick to appear before reporters at the Stardust executive offices to issue a statement countering the allegations.

  “For the past two weeks, and in recent days,” Glick began, “I have been the subject of one of the most malicious characterizations based upon utter falsehoods, devious innuendos and criminal-sounding inferences for no other reason than news sensationalism.

  “I feel compelled to respond to these unconscionable attacks, not only because of the emotional stress caused my family, but out of respect for the over 5,000 Argent employees and my many associates and friends.

  “To allow these recently publicized falsehoods to go unanswered by me would be a betrayal to the integrity of my family, my friends and the Argent Corporation.

  “Two weeks ago a woman was found dead in her home in San Diego. Mrs. Rand was a past business associate of mine and most recently party to a lawsuit filed against a company I was active in, as well as me personally.

  “The characterization and innuendos that I was connected with or had any knowledge of this terrible tragedy is an irresponsible and unethical practice of a public media [sic].

  “To infer that a business disagreement would in any way be related to a savage murder is contemptible. I am appreciative that certain members of Mrs. Rand’s family have come forward to personally express their indignation at the false accusations.

  “To associate me or any department or employee of my company with so-called ‘organized crime’ is false.

  “The truth is I have never been convicted or guilty of crime greater than a traffic violation. The truth is that Argent operates three Las Vegas hotels and four casinos. The truth is that I was unanimously approved for licensing to operate these hotel casinos after an exhaustive and extensive investigation…. The truth is that I have tried to live a low-keyed social life based on a wholesome family relationship.

  “Instead of recognizing these truths,” Glick went on, “there have been continuous distortions by certain members of the news media.

  “I have no newspaper, magazine or television station to openly use in a response to combat these false allegations, but I do have one fact on my side which cannot be distorted, maligned, nor falsified when it be known—that is the truth that Allen R. Glick has never, nor will ever be associated with anything other than what is lawful.”

  According to the FBI, Tamara Rand was murdered to protect the skim; her murder was ordered by Frank Balistrieri. When Mrs. Rand won the right to subpoena documents relating to the Teamster loan to Glick and Argent, it was clear to Balistrieri the law case had to be stopped.

  So Balistrieri took another trip to Chicago. This time he told the outfit bosses that Tamara Rand was on the verge of jeopardizing the entire setup. If the Teamsters’ books on the Argent loan were to be subpoenaed, it was only a matter of time before individuals were subpoenaed. Rand was going to bring Glick and everyone else involved with the project down.

  A Milwaukee informant later told the FBI that Balistrieri told the Chicago bosses, “We don’t want any grief. We’ve got to keep the genius with a clean image. He will be messed up if she gets her lawsuit going.”

  No one was ever indicted for Rand’s murder.

  And the skim went on.

  It is estimated that Vandermark managed to skim between $7 million and $15 million out of Argent between 1974 and 1976, a sum that does not include what was skimmed from the Stardust’s Race and Sports Book, credit department, or food and beverage accounts. There was no department under the control of the corporation’s financial reserves that wasn’t infiltrated by associates of the bosses back home.

  For the men who arranged the loans, the casino skim was the equivalent of striking oil. The money came pouring out every month. In Glick’s first year of operation, between August of 1974 and August of 1975, Argent reported a net loss of $7.5 million. This was startling news to Glick, since the corporation’s total revenue was up $3.4 million, to $82.6 million during the same period. Glick was so out of the loop that he attributed the Argent casino losses to additional interest payments that hadn’t been anticipated, higher depreciation and amortization costs, advances to subsidiaries, and even increased operating costs and expenses. “He didn’t have a clue about what they were doing or how they were doing it,” Bud Hall says.

  14

  “If you excluded everyone with something in their backgrounds from getting licensed, you’d probably have to terminate fifty percent of the people in this town.”

  “AFTER I WAS fired at the Stardust, I got a job writing a column for the Valley Times, and I used my columns to drive Lefty and Glick crazy,” Dick Odessky, the Stardust’s ex–public relations director, recalls.

  “I didn’t make much money, but I had a load of fun. Here was this hundred-million-dollar corporation, one of the biggest in Las Vegas, surrounded by controversy.

  “By the end of 1975, after just one year in operation, their chairman of the board was being questioned about his connections to two mob murders and whether he had the mob’s influence in getting the Teamster loans, and the guy he had hired to run the casinos was so afraid he couldn’t pass the test to get licensed that he was masquerading in any job title he could while pulling all the strings behind the scene.

  “I still had lots of friends in the company, and there were lots of leaky faucets. One day I got a call from a woman who said Rosenthal walked into the pit and pointed to everyone around and fired them.

  “She had given me good stuff about Argent and Frank before, but it had all been uncheckable. Now I had something I could check, and when I did, I found out that it was true.

  “Lefty had done just what the woman said he’d done. It didn’t make sense. That could have been enough for the control board to force him to go up for licensing. But he didn’t seem to care. That’s how bold and secure he felt about his position.

  “Still, there were some guys on the control board who were on his case. In fact, two of them came by and wanted to know about my relationship to Frank. I told them that I didn’t have any. I had been fired.

  “‘What about when he worked for you?’ they asked.

  “I told them he never worked for me. It was ludicrous.

  “Then they showed me some cards that identified Frank Rosenthal as an assistant to the director of public relations. Since I was in charge of PR they assumed that he had worked for me. Instead, he had just had the cards printed up, thinking that would take care of everything.

  “The agents went back with their report, but typically, nothing came of it.

  “On another day I was tipped
off that two control board agents were questioning Bobby Stella in the Stardust when he stopped them and said they’d have to talk to Rosenthal. He took them upstairs to see Lefty.

  “The story I heard was that when the agents got to Rosenthal’s office and started asking him the questions, Lefty stopped them.

  “He asked his secretary to dial a number, and after talking for a few minutes, handed the phone over to one of the agents.

  “‘Commissioner Hannifin wants to talk to you,’ Frank said, handing them the phone.

  “The agents were shocked. Phil Hannifin was their boss. He was one of the strictest control board members. He refused to allow his agents to call him after office hours no matter how urgently they felt they might need his attention, and here was the man they saw as the biggest unlicensed gambler in town able to call Hannifin at home.

  “Hannifin got on the phone and started screaming at the agents. He reminded them that there was an order at the control board that no agents were allowed to go into the Stardust without first clearing it with him personally.

  “Hannifin chewed the agents out, and it made them so furious that they spread the rumor that Lefty’s personal connection to Hannifin was allowing him to operate without a license.

  “It was a serious enough rumor for me to call Hannifin for a comment. He denied that any such thing had ever taken place. He never chewed out his agents, he said, and certainly never in front of Frank Rosenthal in Rosenthal’s office. I gave Hannifin credit for that.”

  While Hannifin refuted the story told by the disgruntled agents, rumors about Rosenthal’s close relationship with Hannifin had a basis in fact. Hannifin’s admiration for Lefty’s gaming expertise was well known. It was Hannifin’s idea to allow casinos to have sports books, and he enlisted Rosenthal in the campaign; in the process, Hannifin became an admirer. “Back then you couldn’t run a race and sports book in a casino,” Hannifin said. “They were usually on the outside, and they had lots of problems. There was past-posting and the state never got a full count. There were two and three sets of books. You’d have a guy with a chalkboard, a phone line, and a lease, and at the first sign of trouble he was gone. I always felt it would be better if we brought the sports book into the casinos and that way we could regulate them. Lefty probably knew more about the sports book than anyone in Las Vegas, and I asked him if he’d help explain the advantages to the state legislature of getting the Gaming Commission to approve sports books. He loved the idea. I had him fly up to Carson City a half dozen times and testify. He was great. He liked getting on the stand and he was brilliant on the subject. He stood up and sold the system.”

  Lefty Rosenthal says, “Hannifin was onto something with bringing the sports books inside the casinos. In 1968, when I first got here, there were only two or three sports books in Vegas where you could bet sports. But there was about to be a revolution. Television was about to start covering sports, and every year after the first Superbowl in 1967, the interest in betting sports quadrupled.

  “Before then, there was no Monday-night football. Most sports books were devoted to horse bettors, and the places looked more like stables than what you see today. They were very inhospitable places. Sawdust joints. Most of them had the old chalkboards. There were no amenities.

  “So when we got the okay, I knew exactly what to do. I had spent my life in those places and knew what they needed. I can’t tell you the hours I spent going over the design, just the hours going over the right kind of seat to buy, the space, height, the boards, the TV screens. I wanted them to be like theaters.

  “But I’m working with people who didn’t know what I was talking about. There had never been a sports room like this before.

  “It was nearly nine thousand square feet with room for six hundred people, including two hundred and fifty individually lighted theater seats with their own desks and dimmer controls for our regular players.

  “We put in a bar measuring nearly a quarter mile of inlaid wood and mirror and the largest projection-lighted board system in the world. We had a forty-eight-square-foot color television screen, and since horseplayers were still our biggest bettors, we had entry boards for five separate racetracks covering a hundred and forty square feet. It was the largest and most expensive system of its kind anywhere, and we had it all. Quinellas, exactas, futures, daily doubles, and parlay betting, along with the regular win-place-show bets.

  “I was in a great position. The sports books began making money for the casinos and, therefore, for the state. In some circles I was golden. I had a shot.”

  Phil Hannifin was genuinely grateful to Lefty Rosenthal for his help. He told him he would vote to license him. And he gave Lefty Rosenthal some sound advice. Keep a low profile, he said. Lay low. You’ll have a better shot at getting your license if you stay in the background.

  But in June 1975, an article about Allen Glick appeared in BusinessWeek—and it was the nail in the coffin. “Glick is the financial end,” Lefty was quoted as saying, “but policy comes from my office.”

  No one could believe it. The Gaming Commission had tried for months to catch Lefty running the Stardust, and he had repeatedly insisted that he was simply the executive assistant, or the public relations person, or the food and beverage chieftain. Whenever an investigator showed up, Rosenthal would vanish from the casino. Now here was proof, in black-and-white: Rosenthal made policy. If he made policy, the consequences were clear: he would have to apply for a gaming license. Naturally, Lefty claimed he was misquoted. No one believed him. “The real question is should he be licensed,” said Robert Broadbent of the Clark County Gaming and Licensing Board. “And if he shouldn’t, why not? And if he is not licensed, and cannot be licensed, should he be there?”

  Around the same time, Rosenthal made another mistake. “Allen Glick asked me to check out the Hacienda,” he said. “He wanted me to evaluate it from top to bottom. I did, and my report back to Glick was very negative. There was malfeasance and mismanagement. There were glaring violations of the Gaming Commission’s rules.”

  Lefty decided he had to get rid of a Hacienda executive. Lefty didn’t know about the executive’s friendship with Pete Echeverria, chairman of the state’s Gaming Commission. “I should have known, but I didn’t,” says Lefty.

  “When the man was fired he told everyone that Pete Echeverria would take care of Frank Rosenthal good and quick. I heard the threat after the fact. I paid no attention to it.”

  Peter Echeverria was a fifty-year-old attorney who boasted that he had “never rolled a set of dice, played a hand of twenty-one, or put a dollar on a wheel” in his life, but he felt that “gambling was an essential part of our state economy and it should be run like a real straight, honest business.”

  A former state senator who had worked on the State Planning Board, Echeverria had been raised in Ely, Nevada, had graduated from the University of Nevada and Stanford Law School, and had been practicing real estate investment law for twenty-five years when Governor Mike O’Callaghan chose him for the state’s top gaming post in October 1973.

  “I knew that Echeverria was going to be my nemesis, and I got ahold of Phil Hannifin,” Rosenthal said. “I got him in the coffee shop at the Stardust. I asked him about my possibilities going for a gaming license as a key employee. I told him about my past, everything. If it was hopeless, I told him I had no problem in backing off. I’d take another position. I said, ‘I’m talking to you as a friend.’ I said I had a lot of respect for him. ‘Can I go before the control board and get a fair hearing in view of my background?’

  “That’s all I wanted to know. Can I get a fair shake? Now, Hannifin was a tough guy, and he said, ‘Here’s what I’ll tell you.’ He said, looking me in the eye, ‘I’ll vote for you with a clear conscience.’

  “I’m looking at a Christmas present. The key license would allow me to be at the top of the corporation officially. I’d be able to avail myself of stock options. Everything.

  “Hannifin gave me a fifty-fifty
chance at passing. Echeverria had been putting the pressure on Hannifin and the control board to get me to come up for licensing.

  “If I had a shot I had to go for it. The opportunity was too great. Argent hired a private detective firm—all ex-FBI agents—and they received a hundred thousand dollars in front to find out everything they could about me. I wanted to know everything the control board investigators would know if they tried to take me down.

  “The FBI guys did an incredible job. They were tough. They wouldn’t take the assignment unless I gave them my approval that if they came up with anything serious against me, they could take it to the authorities.

  “I began to feel pretty good. Even the Justice Department had finally gotten around to officially dismissing the Rose Bowl charges against us, and they dated back to 1971.

  “I went to Glick and said I was filing for a key employee’s license.

  “But a couple of weeks before the hearing, Hannifin stopped coming by. I didn’t hear from him. I couldn’t get him on the phone. I’d call twice a week and he was never there. One night I got his wife. She said he’d return my call, but he never did. I had a feeling I was going to be double-dealt.

  “The control board hearings were held in Carson City, which was very usual and inconvenient. We had to fly up there with two or three Lears so we could accommodate my lawyers and most of my witnesses, who lived and worked downstate in Las Vegas.

  “The hearings were held in a huge room. I remember watching Linda Rogers, Oscar Goodman’s secretary, wheeling in a cart with stacks of my material on it.”

  The hearings took over two days on the second-floor state office building in Carson City. Lefty was asked about everything—about Eli the Juice Man, about his alleged bribery of the North Carolina football player, about his relationship with Tony Spilotro. “Lefty answered the Commission’s questions at great length,” said Don Diglio, a columnist for the Las Vegas Review Journal, “sometimes at too great a length.”