According to Diglio, when Lefty responded to questions he got so wound up that he could not stop himself from going on and on with his explanations and justifications. When asked about his relationship with Spilotro, for instance, Lefty began a long rambling monologue: he said he had known Spilotro since Spilotro’s birth, that their parents had known each other, but that since moving to Las Vegas they had nothing to do with each other socially or professionally.
“I recognize,” Lefty testified, “that with all the adverse publicity and the allegations against Tony—and I state to you that I do not agree with them. I have read where Mr. Spilotro was here to watch out for me, over me, and every other thing. I recognized that I was getting into a very sensitive area of gaming, and I became familiar with the control board, the commission, and the business as a privileged industry.
“But then I also recognized my right or my family’s right, the fact that I was married and fortunate enough to have two healthy children, that I better get with it.
“I have tried to do that from the very day that I walked into the Stardust. I think my records, I think the chair”—and here, according to Diglio, Rosenthal looked pointedly at Hannifin—“would agree that my record has been such that I am nearly perfect—or close to perfect.
“I think Tony recognized that. Tony came to Nevada on his own. He has the right to choose to live with his family wherever he wishes. I respect that right. I think he respects mine.
“Tony has avoided Frank Rosenthal and I have avoided Tony, to the point where I cannot recall Tony Spilotro walking into an Argent property. I just can’t. If you ask me, ‘Frank, did you have any arrangement or agreement with Tony about not meeting?’ the answer is absolutely not. I think it was respect, and I appreciate the respect.”
Rosenthal defended himself for five hours; the full hearings took two days. Allen Glick testified too, and he admitted that he hadn’t known all of the details about Rosenthal’s background when he hired him. But, he said, he had been pleased with Rosenthal’s work and would make the same decision today. “If you excluded everybody with something in their backgrounds from getting licensed,” Glick told the board, “you’d probably have to terminate fifty percent of the people in this town.”
“During the second day of questioning,” Jeff Silver, the control board’s chief counsel, said, “it was apparent that Lefty did not have enough answers for the questions we were asking. I asked one of the board members, Jack Stratton, if they were going to deny the poor guy a license anyway, why put him through all these questions? We stopped the hearings.”
On January 15, 1976, after the two days of hearings, the control board made its recommendation to deny Lefty his license.
“When the other two board members voted to deny my licensing,” Lefty said, “Hannifin refused to vote on the record. But after the other two members gave their speeches and asked that the vote be unanimous, he went along.
“After the hearing Hannifin came over and stuck his hand out. ‘I’d like to apologize to you and your family,’ he said, ‘but I did what I had to do.’ I know Hannifin felt bad. He knew I had been dealt a bad deal, but he was just a little school teacher and parole officer by profession, and the governor owned him.
“A week later, my lawyers and I went back to Carson City to appeal the board’s ruling, but it was obvious Echeverria was going to slam us. As soon as my lawyers began to make their arguments, you could see him very ostentatiously put up his arm and look at his watch and yawn. It wasn’t much of an appeal. The commission backed up the control board unanimously.”
“I should have been licensed,” Lefty says. “Hannifin had my file, my entire file, and there was nothing in that file that should have kept me back from being licensed as a key employee. There were guys licensed in town you wouldn’t believe. But that’s not my business. I can’t point to anybody else. I had to convince them that I was okay.
“But meanwhile I had run four casinos. No one had four casinos. No one in town had the kind of floor responsibility I had. If the food was not right at the Stardust or something was happening at the Fremont, I had to be there. I had people trained to call me at all hours. Many’s the time I’d have to get up and go back to one of the casinos at three in the morning.
“I remember I kept hearing that the short-order cook at the Stardust was serving terrible stuff. The complaints got to my office. They said that he didn’t scramble the eggs. He’d just send them out wet, no matter what the waitresses and customers wanted.
“One day I got up at four in the morning and went to the restaurant. I sat down and ordered scrambled eggs and told the waitress she was fired if she told the cook I was placing the order. When they came out they were wet. I got up and went into the kitchen and fired him on the spot. Boy, did I get trouble from the union for that.
“But I couldn’t tolerate incompetence. I was very rigid. Stupid. I think it came from years of handicapping. From years of gathering information eighteen hours a day, poring over fifty pounds of papers a day, talking to sources all over the country. It’s a kind of obsessional business, and I see now that I took those same work habits into a more social environment.”
The commission’s refusal to license him was supposed to be the end of Lefty Rosenthal at the Stardust. Lefty was to be out of gaming. No more masquerades behind different job descriptions like public relations director or food and beverage director. He was given forty-eight hours to clear out his desk. And he did. On January 29, 1976, Lefty moved out of his newly refurbished office at the Stardust and went home. The next day control board investigators learned that his $2.5-million ten-year contract was still in effect.
PART THREE
Crapping Out
15
“Fuck it. Drill it open.”
LEFTY ROSENTHAL HAD no intention of either quitting or giving up. He established a war room at home and embarked on a dual campaign—first, to continue to exert as much influence as he could over the casinos, and second, to start a series of legal battles with state gaming authorities to challenge the power of the state to even issue gaming licenses. These highly publicized and increasingly bitter court cases went on for years. They seemed to take on a life of their own. From local courts to state courts to state appeals courts to U.S. district courts to U.S. appeals courts and all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, Lefty led a parade of legal maneuverings. He won some. He lost some. When he won, he moved back into his offices at the Stardust. When he lost, he moved out.
“Lefty loved it,” Murray Ehrenberg, his Stardust casino manager, said. “He handicapped his lawsuits the way he handicapped football games. He started reading. He started researching. He started driving his lawyers crazy. He was in his element.”
It started out simply. In January of 1976, when Lefty was first ordered out of the Stardust, he continued to run the casino. Murray Ehrenberg and Bobby Stella were still in place. He hooked up the red telephone between his bedroom and the Stardust pit. Before his dismissal, thousands of dollars of Argent money had been spent to hook his home to the casino’s electronic system, including the Eye in the Sky surveillance cameras; he was able to watch every table game in the Stardust on television sets in his house.
“We knew he was watching,” Shirley Daley, a retired Stardust waitress, said, “because all of a sudden Murray or Bobby would start criticizing you about the kinds of petty stuff that could only have come from Lefty—like if a waitress took too long to bring up the drinks, or if a dealer didn’t call out for the pit boss when he changed a hundred-dollar bill.”
“He was supposed to be out,” Ehrenberg said, “but he was still giving the orders. One night, I remember, Lefty called all of us to his house. There must have been fifteen cars parked outside. Gene Cimorelli. Art Garelli. Joey Cusumano. Bobby Stella Sr. Every casino boss in the joint was there.
“What happened was that I had caught one of the blackjack dealers stealing about sixteen hundred dollars, and I wanted to fire him. But Bobby Stella wanted
me to let it go. I didn’t want to give the guy any grief, just tell him to get lost. But Bobby went to bat for him. We were standing around in the living room while Lefty listened to both of us. We had pit bosses and shift bosses there because they had seen it happen. After listening to everybody, Lefty went along with me. Bobby got very upset. He didn’t want the guy to be fired, but Lefty slapped him right down.
“Lefty said, ‘Bobby, do you want to talk to the animals?’ Bobby knew what Lefty meant. Bobby used to run crap games for Momo Giancana. He shut right up.”
Allen Glick became so concerned about Lefty’s meetings with the casino staff that he confronted them. “They all denied it or said the visits were purely social,” Glick says. “Finally I hired a private detective agency to follow them. I wanted to see how often these ‘social meetings’ took place.
“Right after I got a report back from the private investigators, I got a call from Frank Balistrieri. He was very agitated. He said he wanted to meet with me. I was surprised, because during this period, obviously, I had had very limited contact with him. He said it was so important that he was coming to Las Vegas personally. He said he’d call me as soon as he got to town.
“We met in a suite at the MGM Hotel. Balistrieri was there along with a man I didn’t know. I could tell he was nervous when I walked in. He said this was a difficult trip for him to make. It was something he didn’t want to do, but something he was asked to do, because of how well he knew me.
“He said that I had committed an act that he and his associates not only frowned upon, but it was about the worst thing in his estimation that I could do. ‘But for me,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t be here. You would have been killed.’ He said if I ever did anything like what I’d done again, he could not guarantee my safety.
“I still didn’t know what he was talking about until he tossed the private detective’s report on the table. It turned out that the detectives I had hired to watch the meetings at Lefty’s also worked for Tony Spilotro, and they had given Spilotro copies of everything they had given me.”
Within a few weeks, the control board caught on to Lefty’s midnight meetings and Eye in the Sky peekaboo maneuverings, and they said that Argent’s own gaming license was in jeopardy if Lefty continued to flaunt the control board’s ruling. As a result, Lefty began to concentrate most of his energies on the legal battle for reinstatement.
In February of 1976, he and his lawyer, Oscar Goodman, brought a federal suit against the Nevada Gaming Commission charging that it was an unconstitutional body and that its decision against him was arbitrary and capricious.
He then brought another suit against the control board in Las Vegas District Court, challenging the board’s power to deny him the right to make a living. Lefty said his record in Nevada was clean and he had long ago paid whatever debt he owed to society. His plan was to legally challenge the Gaming Commission and force it either to give him his license or ease up on its enforcement, just as he had forced Hannifin and the control board members to ease off back in 1971, when Shannon Bybee had wanted to yank his work card.
Gaming Commission chairman Pete Echeverria was outraged that Lefty would challenge the gaming authorities in court. He said that Lefty should never be licensed, as far as he was concerned. “In my three and a half years with the state Gaming Commission,” Echeverria said, “I have never found an applicant whose background was so repugnant.” Echeverria said Lefty was denied licensing because of his “notorious background and associations, and just because you pay a debt to society, that doesn’t entitle you to a Nevada gaming license.”
Oscar Goodman fought back, claiming that Echeverria and the control board “violated just about every concept stated by the due process clauses.”
Goodman said, “Frank Rosenthal is a modern-day Horatio Alger. He is without peer in the industry.” He said that Rosenthal had been told about the charges against him only six days before the hearing convened.
“Mr. Rosenthal did not have an opportunity to face one live witness,” Goodman said. “He faced reports that were fifteen years old. The time has come in Nevada that somebody in Mr. Rosenthal’s position is entitled to fairness.”
With Lefty now spending more time at home, life around the house became very tense. Lefty and Geri harped at each other all day long; their already fragile relationship fluctuated between plate-tossing brawls and icy standoffs during which they barely spoke. Geri’s drinking—which she always denied was a problem—made matters worse.
“Frank had always been very generous,” Geri’s sister, Barbara Stokich, said. “Now he started to complain about everything she did. She didn’t cook his lamb chops right—he had a special way he liked her to do his lamb chops. She didn’t pay enough attention to the kids. Geri was no bargain, but Frank could be very trying too.”
“Geri started putting on a show,” Lefty said, “and I didn’t like it. If there was a birthday party for one of the kids, for instance, it wouldn’t be at home like in the past. Now she’d have it at the Jubilation or the country club, and it would be outrageously lavish. I enjoyed the family moments, because they were about my family, but I didn’t enjoy the phony lavishness.”
Their most strenuous battles usually resulted in either Lefty or Geri slamming out of the house.
“When Lefty was partying everyone in the town knew about it,” Murray Ehrenberg, his casino manager, said. “The word got around. Lefty was out with this one and that one, and Geri would hear about some dancer getting a ten-thousand-dollar bracelet or even a car, and there would be hell to pay.
“I think it was Lefty’s generosity with his girlfriends that drove Geri the craziest, not the fact that he had girlfriends. It was like all his little presents should go to her, not some lead dancer or showgirl. She’d hear about it at the manicurist. The hairdresser. She’d pick it up from her friends. I mean, it was no secret.
“And I think part of why he did it so openly was to drive her nuts. But then they’d make up and he’d give her another diamond necklace or ring, and things would be quiet for a while.”
When Geri stormed off for a night or a few days Lefty never knew where she went. He always suspected that she went to Beverly Hills to meet up with the man he thought of as her Svengali, Lenny Marmor. He also suspected that she saw her ex-flame Johnny Hicks, the Las Vegas tough guy with whom Lefty had gotten into the brawl on the Flamingo dance floor back in 1969.
Barbara Stokich believes that Geri stayed in the marriage only because of her fear of losing custody of Steven. And, of course, her jewels. Barbara said Geri valued her jewels as though they were children. Whenever Geri was feeling depressed, she would go over to the Las Vegas Valley Bank’s Strip branch and ask to see their three safety deposit boxes.
In the privacy of a small viewing room, Geri could go through her jewels piece by piece. Counting them. Fondling them. Trying them on. Geri had over $1 million in jewelry in the safety deposit boxes. Some of her favorite pieces included a flawless round diamond valued at $250,000; a large star ruby valued at $100,000; a large flawless 5.98-carat pear-shaped diamond ring valued at $250,000; a diamond dinner ring set valued at $75,000; a couple of diamond-and-opal Piaget watches valued at $20,000 each; and a pair of diamond earrings by Fred valued at $25,000.
There was another place Geri went for solace in this period: the Spilotro house. There she and Nancy would drink vodka and share their domestic woes. Geri would complain about Lefty. Nancy would complain about Tony.
Geri also took her complaints to the only man she felt had influence over her husband—Tony Spilotro. She’d meet him at the Villa d’Este, a restaurant owned by Joseph “Joe Pig” Pignatelli. “They’d be at the bar or in a booth,” said Frank Cullotta. “She always drank vodka on the rocks. I’d watch him nod his head and try to reason with her. I’d be across the room watching them and they’d be talking for an hour sometimes, and then she’d get up and leave. I knew how long they talked because I had business with him and I could only go talk to him
after she left.”
In February of 1976, shortly after Lefty had been ousted from his post, the auditors claimed they called Frank Mooney, the Stardust’s secretary-treasurer, to tell him that the slot machine coin-counting scales were off by one-third. Mooney later told the Securities and Exchange Commission he didn’t remember getting such a call, but it was the first signal that there was trouble in the Stardust count room.
At the time, Glick’s attention was focused on raising $45 million in additional Teamster money for his planned renovations and on hiring a replacement for Lefty—the latter a task made considerably easier by the fact that he was told whom to hire. Allen Dorfman, the pension fund’s chief financial advisor, had summoned Glick to Chicago. Frank Balistrieri had told Glick that Dorfman had a replacement for Rosenthal in mind.
Dorfman, an athletic fifty-three-year-old ex-gym teacher, had been left in charge of the pension fund in 1967 when his close friend Teamster president James R. Hoffa was sent to prison. Dorfman had gotten close to Hoffa through his father, Paul “Red” Dorfman, a Teamster business agent who had friends in the outfit and helped Hoffa take over the union.
The younger Dorfman was barred from having any official position in the union because of a 1972 conviction for taking a kickback to arrange a pension fund loan. Still, he controlled the pension fund’s billions in 1976, when Glick went to see him. Through mob associates all around the country, Dorfman secretly controlled many of the fund’s trustees, and he used his Amalgamated Insurance Company as a cover. Amalgamated even occupied the second floor of the pension fund’s Bryn Mawr Avenue building near Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, where it employed about two hundred people and made over $10 million a year just processing Teamster disability claims. Dorfman also handled the insurance for companies seeking pension fund loans.
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