Casino

by Nicholas Pileggi

  Glick said that after meeting with the pension fund lawyers upstairs, he went to Dorfman’s second-floor office where Dorfman informed him that Lefty’s job would go to Carl Wesley Thomas. Thomas was a politically connected and experienced forty-four-year-old casino executive. It was a surprisingly pleasant suggestion.

  Carl Wesley Thomas was one of the most highly respected casino executives in Nevada. In his conservative business suits and his steel-rimmed glasses, Carl Thomas looked more like a Carson City banker than a Las Vegas casino boss. He had moved to Las Vegas in 1953 and had risen, in ten years, from blackjack dealer in the Stardust to minority partner at the Circus Circus casino, which was owned at the time by Jay Sarno, one of the great casino impresarios. In addition to Circus Circus, the town’s first kiddie-friendly casino, Sarno built Caesar’s Palace, the most successful casino in Las Vegas history. Sarno was a great friend of Allen Dorfman’s and had used Teamster pension fund loans to build both casinos.

  Gaming officials throughout the state breathed a sigh of relief when they heard that Carl Thomas was going to replace Frank Rosenthal at Argent. There was no question among them that Allen Glick had made a brilliant, purifying choice for his troubled corporation.

  What Glick did not know about Carl Thomas—what almost no one in the state knew about him—was that in addition to his impeccable reputation as the first of the new breed of Nevada casino executives, Carl Thomas was also the greatest casino skimmer in America at the time.

  He and the tiny crew of casino executives he took everywhere had devised such deft methods of siphoning millions of dollars out of casinos that no one ever even suspected there was money missing. Sometimes Thomas and his guys skimmed for the owners; sometimes they skimmed for the secret owners; and sometimes they skimmed the money for themselves.

  Carl Thomas had learned at Circus Circus, where skimming the casino was part of his job. The practice had started under Sarno even before Thomas got there and had been established to repay the fees on the Teamster pension fund loans. Back in the early 1960s, the skimming of casinos was a relatively common practice, and Thomas proved so able and discreet that he soon became casino manager. During this period, Sarno introduced him to Allen Dorf man, who was in Las Vegas at least once a month, on the prowl for entrepreneurs looking for Teamster loans to build new casinos.

  Thomas and Dorfman became good friends, and in 1963, Dorfman invited Thomas to Chicago for his fortieth birthday party. There were about three hundred guests at the party, many of them from Las Vegas, but in the middle of the affair, Allen Dorfman made a special point of introducing Thomas to Nick Civella. Civella, Thomas learned, was one of the men to whom the skim was delivered, and Thomas soon found himself meeting secretly with the mob boss whenever Civella came to town.

  “Let me tell you a little bit about skims,” said Frank Rosenthal. “There is no casino, in this country at least, that is capable of defending itself against a skim. There are no safeties. You can’t prevent a skim if a guy knows what he’s doing. On the other hand, there’s two kinds of skims. One is what we call bleeding. And that’s horseshit. You’ve got a guy who’s a twenty-one manager. He’s going to knock out his three hundred dollars, four hundred dollars a night. That’s bleeding a casino. That only takes two people—the manager and a runner, the guy who runs the chips back and forth from the cage to the games. Now when you get into the organized skim, you’re talking about something very, very sophisticated. You couldn’t do it in my day unless the whole casino was corrupted. This isn’t a question of standards, rules, and regulations set down by the control board and the commission. Because those fellows, they didn’t have a clue. An organized skim calls for at least no less than three people. At a high level. You cannot do it without. You just can’t do it. If there’s a way, I’d like someone to tell me how, because he would have an exclusive patent on it.”

  Dennis Gomes, the twenty-six-year-old chief auditor for the control board, had learned from informants who worked at the Stardust that there was something going on with the slot count. Gomes had always been curious why Argent would have ever hired anyone as notorious as Jay Vandermark to run the slot machine operations. It was not unusual for casinos to hire crossroaders, card mechanics, and dice cheats. What better way was there to catch a crossroader than to use other crossroaders familiar with the routines? But it was very unusual, perhaps even foolhardy, to put a world-class crossroader like Jay Vandermark in a position of fiduciary responsibility.

  Gomes was certain Argent’s slot operation was being skimmed. But he needed help. As the board’s chief auditor, he was in charge of a handful of accountants who kept routine tabs on casino tax payments and fees. Nobody at the control board was even looking for second and third sets of books. Dennis Gomes did not even have an investigative auditor who could use the casino’s own figures to unmask fraud or worse. The control board had never bothered to fill that position.

  Gomes decided to change all that, and he put an ad in the California Law Journal. “I just did it,” he said. “To this day I don’t know why.”

  Dick Law, a bored twenty-eight-year-old CPA and a non-practicing attorney, answered the ad. Law, who had been a philosophy major in college, thought the job would be a challenge. He was hired.

  Law and Gomes began digging into the Argent slot machine books and compiling and cross referencing the data and the lists of people and jobs with the names of organized crime figures.

  “Everything we found,” Gomes said, “led to something else.”

  Gomes and Law started making unannounced audits of the Argent casinos. They found a number of small-scale scams—two-person arrangements in which a casino slot employee with a slot key would rig the machines to hit jackpots for a second person, an outsider, who would simply walk up and win the money.

  Then Gomes began monitoring the auxiliary banks on the Stardust casino floor and comparing the number of plays shown on the machines with the totals listed by the Argent auditors. Huge discrepancies began to emerge. Clearly the only purpose for such banks was to circumvent sending the slot machine cash into the count room and cashier’s cage, where it could come under the scrutiny of people not in on the skim.

  Gomes and Law became even more suspicious when they discovered that Argent’s other casinos, the Fremont and Hacienda, sent their slot revenue to the Stardust for tabulation, despite the fact that they had their own count rooms.

  On May 18, 1976, Gomes, Law, and two Gaming Control Board agents walked into the Stardust cashier’s cage and demanded to see the books. The cage employees were stunned.

  “We waited until five o’clock,” Gomes said, “because we knew that the control board would be out of town. We had snitches inside who had told us there was a special fund set up and that they were siphoning slot money out of the casino.

  “When we went in we asked for the special fund. The shift boss turned white and said he didn’t know anything about any ‘special fund.’ He called the slot manager at home. The slot manager said he didn’t know anything about a special fund either. I got on the phone and said, ‘Listen, you asshole, I don’t care what you call it, I want to see where the money that isn’t kept in the coin room is kept.’

  “We finally got to two steel cabinets behind the change booth. We asked for a key and they finally found one, but it only opened one side. It was filled with coins. Somehow, nobody could find the key for the other side. Finally, I told the slot manager he better get me a key or we were going to drill it open.

  “‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘Drill it open.’

  “So we drilled it open and inside we found stack upon stack of hundred-dollar bills. And when we checked, we found that the coins were nowhere to be found in the general ledgers. It was all skim, and it was being held there until the change girls converted it to paper at the auxiliary banks.”

  One of the Fremont employees later told Gomes that the Toledo Company scale fixer who had quit the scale company and gone to work for Vandermark at the Fremont, had
gotten a call from Vandermark shortly after the raid at the Stardust and was told: “Clean it up. They’ve hit the Stardust.”

  As a result, the Fremont’s auxiliary bank was dismantled and the parts stored in the hotel’s basement before Gomes’s four-man raiding party could finish their work at the Stardust and ride downtown to the Fremont.

  “While all this was going on we kept trying to reach Jay Vandermark,” Gomes said. “Vandermark had been in the casino when we arrived, but at the first sign of trouble he had ducked out through the kitchen and was hiding out at Bobby Stella’s house.”

  Vandermark spent the night at Bobby Stella’s house, and the next morning flew to Mazatlán, Mexico, under an assumed name. Anyone who inquired after him at the Stardust was told that he had gone off for a few weeks’ vacation.

  The raid of the Stardust uncovered the biggest slot skim in the history of Las Vegas and sent the hotel into complete chaos. Glick at first called the charges of skimming nonsense and then charged that he was the victim of “embezzlement by ex-employees.” The Gaming Control Board agreed: “We are not talking about skimming,” one of the control board members said, “because for that we would have to show that management participated. We are looking for the possibility of embezzlement.”

  The word “embezzlement”—rather than “skim”—was worth millions of dollars to Allen Glick: the casino’s license would have been revoked if the control board had decided that Argent’s management had participated in the skim.

  The control board did issue a subpoena for Vandermark, even though there wasn’t the remotest possibility that a man who had fled under an assumed name and was hiding somewhere in Mexico was likely to turn up.

  “After the raid,” Dick Law said, “it was apparent that everyone knew what was going on at Argent, but no one wanted to do anything about it. The investigations followed. I tried connecting Argent and Glick to the mob. I knew it was there. I had accumulated every check ever written to Glick’s Saratoga Development Corporation. I had a wall-high stack of documents. It was clear to me that Glick might have known about the skim.

  “But what did Glick do? He kept up the facade that he did not know about the skim, and he even insisted upon applying for the insurance that covered the loss against embezzlement. I think he eventually collected something.

  “Meanwhile, the control board kept asking me where my report was and I kept giving them bits and pieces while I tried to tie up the mob and Argent. I knew it was there. I just had to prove it.”

  Carl Thomas began to work at the Stardust a couple of months before the casino was raided by Gomes and Law. “It was complete chaos,” he later recalled. Thomas discovered—to his amazement—that in addition to Vandermark’s slot machine count, there were a dozen different skims going on, and he dutifully reported all of them to Civella.

  “I was appalled at what was happening,” Thomas later said. “I wanted to tighten everything up. I told Nick it was like having a bucket with twenty holes going every way. They had a prepaid advertising contract of three hundred thousand dollars—you paid for the advertising before you actually got it…. The food and beverage was a joke…. Race and sports bookmaking was a shambles…. It looked to me there could have been anywhere from four hundred to five hundred thousand a month missing out of the race and sports bookmaking alone…. Some room clerks were taking reservations and when a person paid in cash for the bill, they’d pocket the money and destroy the record that the person had even stayed there.”

  Thomas also told Civella about a casino theater ticket scam, where the cash for at least six hundred tickets a night was being stolen because the seats assigned to those tickets had never been listed as even existing on the theater’s blueprints or construction plans. Thomas suggested they stop all the money leaks, and Civella agreed with everything he recommended—except for the theater seat ticket scam. “Let the theater alone,” he told Thomas.

  “As far as skimming the money was concerned,” Thomas continued, “I wanted to take the money out of the boxes, the cash money—no fill slips, no food and beverage, no entertainment; just one way, out of the money boxes. Nick thought it was a good idea. He said everything takes time.

  “Next I asked Allen Dorfman to come in. I said there was a major problem and it was just a matter of time before there would be another huge investigation like the slot investigation going on…. Sometimes I couldn’t work for the FBI agents running all over the place…. We had agents in there constantly. I asked Dorfman, number one, how did I get in that mess, and how could I stop it? And he said the same thing, time will take care of it.

  “Dorfman also agreed as to the method of skimming I proposed. Using the cash boxes may be old-fashioned, but there are no records. There is nothing you have to sign. Just take cash. You walk out with it. It is not like signing a contract and getting a kickback—I had never done anything like that. Plus, with money coming out of a box you have pretty good control of it. It may be two men involved, period…. Every table has a box. It is put into a steel container. At the end of the shift the security guard puts a key in the steel container and pulls out the box and takes the box to the count room. The boxes are there until the count team comes in the following day and counts the money. If you have a key, you can pull the box out, open the drawer, take the money out, and lock it back up. There is no record. No fill slip.”

  In the six months that Thomas ran the Argent casinos, he was able to put his men in place and establish the skim at the Fremont and Hacienda, but he never gained control of the Stardust. He tried firing the people Lefty had hired, but Lefty resisted.

  “Tony Spilotro was the guy who first spoke to me about Carl Thomas taking my job,” said Lefty. “He was trying to make points with Allen Dorfman and wanted my vote. I didn’t know Carl very well, and when I asked Tony why, he said, ‘This is a favor for me.’ I didn’t think Thomas was qualified enough. I thought he had too much bullshit and not enough knowledge.

  “But Tony kept pushing. ‘Frank, it’s me, Tony, talking. You understand? This is important to me. This is your buddy talking; I’m asking for a favor.’

  “So I threw in my weight, and Carl got the job replacing me.

  “Anyway, one of my conditions before Carl took over was that he not just go in there and fire my people. I was concerned. I wanted to protect the jobs of good people who I considered to be honorable workers, who I considered honest and loyal to the corporation. And that condition was agreed to by both Spilotro and Dorfman. I even saw Dorfman about it. I knew Dorfman quite well. So I felt comfortable with Carl there.

  “Now, it’s about ten o’clock at night exactly one day after I have left the building, and I get a call from Bobby Stella. He calls me at home. He says, ‘Frank, this guy’s got twelve pink slips ready.’ I said, ‘So what?’ It didn’t dawn on me, and Bobby isn’t all that articulate. I said, ‘Come on, Bobby, speak up.’

  “And he starts, ‘Well, he wants to get rid of so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so …’ I said, ‘What?’ and he just kept going down a list of top people, my key guys.

  “Bobby’s name wasn’t on the list, naturally. Bobby Stella couldn’t be touched. But he gave me the other names and I said ‘Bobby, holy shit! Are you sure of what you are saying?’ And he said he was sure.

  “I said, ‘Okay,’ and I got a hold of you-know-who. Tony. And I raised some shit with him. That’s all I can tell you. We met in a parking area with public phones near a delicatessen. I remember, it was about ten thirty when he showed up. I said, ‘Tony, what the fuck is this? You know, you gave me your word. Here’s a guy who’s going to be firing Art Garelli, Gene Cimorelli, this guy, that guy. He’s no goddamn good. I’m out of there one day and this shit takes place?’

  “Tony was red faced and embarrassed. I said, ‘Tony, get Carl Thomas.’ He gets him on the phone right there. I’m listening in. By now it was about 11:00 P.M., because the delicatessen was closing.

  “Tony said to Carl, ‘I need to see you. I need to see y
ou right away.’ And Carl said, ‘Yes sir.’ And Tony gave him the location where we were at.

  “In about ten minutes Carl pulls up and gets in our car. And that Tony was a real diplomat. I didn’t say a word. Tony says, ‘Listen, you cocksucker’—that’s how diplomatic he was—he says, ‘You cocksucker, are you crazy?’

  “‘Tony, what’s the matter? What’s wrong?’ Carl is saying.

  “‘You ain’t firing anybody, you sonofabitch,’ Tony says. ‘You hear me?’

  “Carl says, ‘Tony, wait a minute. You’ve got a beef with the wrong guy.’

  “‘What are you talking about?’ Tony says.

  “‘Well, there’s a misunderstanding here,” Carl says. ‘I was told to show Frank total respect no matter what he asked for, and whenever I saw him. Anything, anytime. I was also told to do what I wanted, and to bring my own people there.

  “Tony asks, ‘Says who?’

  “Carl says, ‘Says Dorfman.’

  “I could see Tony was shocked. Tony says to Carl, ‘I don’t give a fuck what Dorfman told you. I’ll straighten this out with him. Don’t you touch any of those people, goddamn you. Now, get the fuck out of here.’

  “We got a stay of execution, and my people stayed in their jobs.”

  “During the months I was there,” Thomas said, “Glick was gone most of the time, a couple of trips to Europe. He had a jet he was flying out maybe Sunday night and … back Tuesday morning. I can’t remember a period where he may have been there two weeks in a row.

  “When I was there Glick and I had discussions about Rosenthal. It was one of his pet topics when we had dinner together. He and Rosenthal did not get along. We did not discuss skimming. He didn’t exercise any control as far as skimming went. He never discussed it with me, and I wouldn’t discuss it with him if he asked me.

  “After a while I tried to discuss hiring and firing with him because I couldn’t get anything done, I couldn’t move anybody. His reaction went from confusion to a shrug; he just didn’t do anything about it. By that time I started to realize that Rosenthal was in the picture.