Casino

by Nicholas Pileggi

  “I was home about thirty minutes when the phone rang. It was Joey Cusumano.

  “‘Are you all right?’ he asks.

  “‘Yeah, are you?’ I said right back.

  “‘Thank God. Thank God,’ he says. ‘Is there anything you need, Frank?’

  “‘Not a thing, Joe,’ I said, ‘but if I do, you’ll be the first one I call.’

  “And I’m on the bullshit with him, because I knew Tony Spilotro was right there with him. Cusumano’s on the phone, but it’s Tony asking the questions. But by then my nerves had calmed down. I’m trying to go over things. You know. The pain wasn’t so strong at this time. The morphine was still there. I was trying to replay what happened and tried to figure out who did it.”

  The explosion was big news. The newspapers and TV news shows led with it for days. There was immediately speculation as to whether Spilotro had had anything to do with the bombing and whether the bad blood between the two old friends over Spilotro’s affair with Lefty’s estranged wife might have ignited the bomb.

  FBI agent Charlie Parsons told the press that Spilotro and the Chicago mob probably were behind the murder attempt. He suggested the lingering bitterness and hard feelings between Spilotro and Rosenthal over Geri were probably responsible for the bombing.

  Parsons said he even made Rosenthal an offer to become a government witness: “Lefty, the mob can’t take a chance you won’t talk. Now they must kill you. Can you take the chance they won’t? Come with us. We’ll protect you and your children.”

  Joseph Yablonsky the FBI Las Vegas chief, said Rosenthal’s escape was a “miracle” and that “the hit man probably came from out of town—although there are persons in Las Vegas capable of constructing such a device.”

  The day after the explosion, Lefty recalls that local cops and federal agents kept knocking at his door with questions. Lefty was concerned about what the police were doing to protect him and his family, but the cops only wanted to know about his relationship to Spilotro and whether the two men were feuding. Lefty said Parsons even offered him carte blanche in the federal witness program.

  “After what organized crime has done to you,” Parsons insisted, “you owe them no loyalty.”

  Metro intelligence chief Kent Clifford put it even more bluntly: “Lefty,” he said, “you’re a walking dead man and you will receive no police protection unless you provide us with intelligence information.”

  Rosenthal responded to Clifford by calling the sheriff and newspapers to complain about Clifford’s threat—pointing out that as taxpayers accused of no crimes, he and his family were entitled to police protection no matter what the intelligence chief felt about him personally.

  The next day, Clifford’s threat to Lefty was blasted in the Vegas editorials, and SheriffJohn Mc-Carthy publicly apologized for Clifford’s remarks. He said Rosenthal was entitled to police protection regardless of his personality or his lack of cooperation in assisting law enforcement officers. Editorials, both in the newspapers and on TV, took up Lefty’s battle, pointing out that Lefty’s young children and housekeeper could very well have been in the car at the time and that all citizens are entitled to protection under the law.

  Kent Clifford had performed a feat Lefty Rosenthal had been unable to do in years—get him some favorable press.

  Media and police attention to the incident was so intense that Lefty decided to hold a news conference in his own home and lay to rest some of the more provocative and dangerous innuendos and stories that were getting into the papers. He received about a half dozen reporters in his silk pajamas. He still had some bandages visible on his forehead and left arm.

  During the forty-five-minute interview session, Lefty said that the feds and local cops had “strongly suggested” the car bombing was engineered by Spilotro. While he knew that the bombing “didn’t come from the Boy Scouts of America,” Lefty said, he refused to accuse anyone he knew of such an act.

  He said he would be “very, very unhappy and very, very angry” if it turned out that his longtime friend Tony Spilotro was responsible. Lefty said he did not believe it and that it “would be a very unhealthy situation for all of us. I don’t even want to entertain that thought.

  “I don’t really consider him a friend of mine anymore,” Lefty continued, “but I am not prepared at this time to believe Spilotro was responsible. I am not willing to believe that he would have the ability to do such a thing. I had no reason to feel that either myself or any member of my family was in danger, and I conducted my life no differently than anyone else. Obviously, I was wrong. I am not going to turn on Spilotro. I don’t feel the need to do this. It is not my way of doing things.”

  Lefty said he wanted to find out “who did it and make sure it doesn’t happen again … but I have no thought of revenge. If I say I’m looking for revenge, then I’m as low as they are.” He did not feel the bombing was a message or a warning. “I don’t know the motive for this first attempt. I’m going to do everything I can to stop them. I’ll do what I have to do to protect myself and my kids.”

  There are two serious theories about who tried to bomb Frank Rosenthal. The first—which the FBI believes—is that it was Frank Balistrieri. Balistrieri was actually known as the Mad Bomber owing to his habit of blowing up his adversaries. And an FBI wiretap in Balistrieri’s office a few weeks before the bombing had recorded Balistrieri telling his sons that he believed that Frank Rosenthal caused their problems. He promised his sons that he would “get full satisfaction.”

  The second theory, popular with the Metro cops, is that Spilotro did it.

  “Geri flew into town after the bombing,” Lefty said. “She said she wanted to take care of me. Protect me. But the flame was out in me. She said, ‘You know I can change.’

  “She tried to give me her phone number that day, but I said I didn’t need it. She could always reach me.”

  24

  “Foul play is not ruled out.”

  GERI ROSENTHAL MOVED to an apartment in Beverly Hills. “She was running with a bad crowd,” Lefty said. “Lowlifes. Pimps. Druggies. Bikers. She had a boyfriend who was a musician and he was beating her up a lot.

  “She was living a tough life. She came to Las Vegas for the holidays. She’d come into town if the kids had swim meets. She’d come in for parties. The kid stuff. That sort of thing. I never looked forward to it, because I never knew what she would do. One time, I was taking her back to the airport, and she started screaming that she wanted more money. I could see she was already loaded. She was bringing back messages from her sicko pals. ‘Get more money out of the creep.’ Oh yeah. I know what they wanted her for. I threatened to dump her luggage right out on Paradise Road if she didn’t shut up. She looked at me real hard and didn’t say another word.

  “Another time my son was looking out the window when she arrived and he commented on how thin she looked. When she came in the door I could see what he meant. She was like a rail. She had lost so much weight. She was all speed and pills.

  “Malnutrition. She was living on pills.

  “I said, ‘Look what you’re doing to yourself.’

  “She went right past me and upstairs and got into the bathtub as though she still lived in the house. Her attitude was that she was still Geri Rosenthal.

  “After we were divorced I offered her a hundred thousand dollars to change her name, and she said, ‘You must be kidding me.’ She used the name for whatever she could get. ‘Don’t you know who I am? Who my husband is?’ That sort of thing. She used the fantasy for protection.

  “I’d get calls from bars at one in the morning and she’d say things like, ‘Tell this sonofabitch to leave me alone.’

  “One night I got a hysterical call from a public phone. She’s crying. ‘Would you believe this sonofabitch beat the shit out of me?’ she says.

  “At this time Geri was going with a younger kid. He addressed me as ‘Mr. Rosenthal’ whenever we had spoken over the phone.

  “I had already told hi
m to behave himself. ‘You understand you’re dating my children’s mother,’ I said.

  “‘Yes sir, Mr. Rosenthal,’ he said at the time.

  “Now Geri is calling from a booth. She says she’s bleeding and that this kid had beaten the shit out of her. I asked what I could do and she says call him. Make him stop. He will be at this number in about an hour.

  “I take the number and now I’m up. I sit around looking at the clock for an hour. It takes a long time for the hour to pass, and then I dial the number, and who answers? Geri.

  “‘Hi!’

  “What the fuck? ‘Are you nuts?’ I asked her. ‘I thought this guy was beating you up? What are you doing there? Why did you go back?’

  “‘Oh,’ she says, ‘I’m okay.’

  “‘Let me talk to the punk,’ I tell her.

  “‘It’s okay,’ she says. ‘I can handle it.’

  “It later turned out she had this apartment and they were living there, and he threatened to break up with her and she got hysterical and decided in her drunkenness to get me to threaten the kid into not leaving her.”

  At 4:35 A.M. on November 6, 1982—about one month after Lefty’s car was bombed—Geri Rosenthal began screaming on the sidewalk in front of the Beverly Sunset Motel, at 8775 Sunset Boulevard, and stumbled into the motel lobby, where she collapsed.

  A motel clerk called police, but when they arrived with an ambulance, she was in a coma. She never recovered. She died three days later at Cedar Sinai Hospital. She was forty-six. The hospital said doctors found evidence of tranquilizers, liquor, and other drugs in her system. There was a large bruise on her thigh and smaller bruises on her legs.

  The story made the Los Angeles and Las Vegas papers, which reported that she had died of an apparent drug overdose and rehashed the recent events of her stormy marriage, her affair with Spilotro, her looting three safe deposit boxes of over a million dollars, and Lefty’s car bombing. It was a story made for the tabloids and the cops. Captain Ronald Maus of the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office told the Los Angeles Times, “We’re interested because of her past connections and the possibility of any organized-crime intrusions.” Dr. Lawrence Maldonado, who pronounced her dead, said, “Foul play is not ruled out.”

  “The way I found out was I got a call from Bob Martin’s wife, Charlotte,” Lefty said. “She said, ‘Frank, I’ve got bad news. My furrier just called and said Robin was in the store picking up Geri’s furs. Robin said that Geri had passed away.’

  “I called the furrier immediately. I said my name is Frank Rosenthal. He knew who I was and he started thanking me for all the business I had given over the years. I said, ‘Listen, is Robin Marmor there?’ ‘Yes, she’s here to pick up Geri’s furs. She says her mother is dead.’

  “The furrier was named Fred something. I said, ‘Fred, you don’t give her a fucking thing. Do you understand me?’

  “‘Yes sir,’ he says. And I hung up.

  “I called the morgue. Yes, there was a body. She was dead.

  “I got the M.D.

  “I finally got a call two days later from Robin.

  “Robin says, ‘Mom’s dead.’ Like that. ‘Mom’s dead.’

  “I pretend I don’t already know. I get some details from her. She’s making some arrangements for the funeral. I said let me get back to you. When I did we had a dispute over where Geri would be buried. I wanted it to be in Las Vegas, next to her mother, who had died. Robin and Len Marmor wanted her buried in Los Angeles. Finally Robin made the arrangements for the burial and chapel.

  “I talked to the kids and told them both what had happened. They were able to comprehend. I asked if they wanted to attend the funeral and Steve said, ‘Please, I don’t want to.’ Stephanie said: ‘We’re not going.’

  “The speculation around was fifty percent that I had her killed and the other fifty percent that the mob had her killed,” said Lefty. “They’re all wrong. I spent about fifteen thousand dollars on an investigation. I got the details.

  “I believe she was overdosed.

  “They killed her. They did it to her—the people around her. They knew she was a wealthy woman. She was getting five thousand dollars a month from me in alimony. She had all her jewels. But when police checked her apartment, everything was gone.”

  “At first they thought Geri might have been murdered because she knew too much about the outfit,” Frank Cullotta said. “But that was all bullshit.

  “What probably happened was that some of her druggie biker friends got the idea that Geri would inherit a fortune from the insurance if she suddenly became a widow. So first they tried to blow up Lefty, and when they missed, they knew they were in trouble, especially if Geri pieced their move together.

  “That’s why they killed her. Just four weeks after Lefty’s car explosion. What a coincidence. And what was she doing wandering around that miserable area on Hollywood at four thirty in the morning? She wasn’t. She was in a car with her killers, her pals, the guys who tried to blow up Lefty, who were now pumping her full of pills and booze.

  “All they had to do was stop the car, let her out on the street, and drive off.”

  “They murdered my sister,” Barbara Stokich says. “Somebody gave her an injection of something.

  “Geri took a million in jewels when she left Frank. He had to talk to her to get back his money, but she kept the jewels, and they were all missing.

  “She wanted to go back to Frank after she started living in Los Angeles. She missed the luxury. The protection. Safety. She liked calling him ‘Mr. R.’

  “After Geri died, my dad visited the places she had shopped. One of Geri’s friends said she had been going to a psychologist for two months and was almost okay.

  “Geri got five thousand dollars a month from Lefty, plus the credit cards and the Mercedes. But she didn’t like to be alone. She went out to bars and drank all night. Meanwhile Lenny was married when Geri got back, and a black guy who she knew beat her unmercifully. To get her money and jewels.

  “We found out she died because my husband, Mel, and I were visiting Dad and the landlord called. Some friends of his had seen an obit on Geraldine McGee Rosenthal and they wondered if it was my sister. We called Robin and she kept saying she didn’t have time to talk to us. Finally Robin said the funeral was in two days. My sister had been in the hospital and in the morgue for a week, and nobody had told us.”

  Geri was buried in Mount Sinai Memorial Park, 5950 Forest Lawn, in a private ceremony. Lefty and the two children did not attend.

  “I didn’t want to put the kids through that,” he said.

  In January of 1983, the L.A. County coroner said that death was accidental, an apparent lethal combination of cocaine, Valium, and Jack Daniel’s whiskey.

  Papers on file in Los Angeles Probate Court said:

  The deceased died leaving no real property but left personal property consisting of numerous coins located in safety box #107, First Interstate Bank, Maryland Square Office, 3681 South Maryland Parkway, Las Vegas. The coins were ordered appraised by the court and valued at $15,486.

  The 125 coins included, among others, $4000 in silver dollars; $1200 in 1887 silver dollars; $133 in Stardust Casino gaming tokens; $6000 in 1887 silver dollars; $100 in 22 Indian Head pennies; Liberty Quarters, Shield nickels, and a 1797 large cent.

  Half the coins in the box went to Lefty, under the terms of the divorce agreement; the other half was divided evenly among her three children: Robin, Steven, and Stephanie. According to court papers, Geri’s heirs received $2,581 each.

  It was close to the end for everyone. Lefty’s explosion and Geri’s death were followed by indictments, convictions, and more death.

  The hundreds of Justice Department wiretaps resulted in the indictments—and eventual conviction—of the major mob bosses who were involved in skimming the Stardust and Tropicana Hotels.

  Weak links were cut. On January 20, 1983, Allen Dorfman, sixty, was shot and killed as he walked out of a suburban Ch
icago restaurant. Dorfman had just been convicted along with Joey Lombardo, Joe Aiuppa, Jackie Cerone, Maishe Rockman, and Teamster president Roy Williams for using the Teamster pension fund to try to bribe Nevada senator Howard Cannon to get favorable trucking legislation. This was Dorfman’s second felony conviction in connection with the pension fund, and the judge had guaranteed him a long prison sentence.

  Dorfman had just left the restaurant with Irwin Weiner, the sixty-five-year-old insurance broker and ex-bail bondsman who had originally hired Tony Spilotro as a bondsman in Chicago years ago. Dorfman had stopped off at a video store and gotten a copy of the film Inadmissible Evidence to watch that night at home. The film tells the story of a man wrongly accused of mob connections by the press.

  Weiner told police he heard two men come up behind them and say, “This is a holdup!” and that when he ducked he heard shots being fired and didn’t really see what happened. The gunmen escaped. The murder was never solved.

  On March 13, 1983, Nick Civella died of lung cancer. He had been released from the Springfield, Missouri, Federal Detention Medical Center two weeks earlier so he could “die in dignity.”

  Joe Agosto was convicted in a check floating scheme that had allowed him to pour money into the Tropicana’s meager coffers to enhance the skim. On April 12, 1983, Agosto decided to become a government witness. His testimony—along with DeLuna’s notebooks—resulted in convictions and stiff sentences: Carl Civella and Carl DeLuna got thirty years each; and Carl Thomas got fifteen years. Frank Balistrieri got thirteen years.

  Joe Agosto died of a heart attack a few months later. The second phase of the Argent case—which charged some of the same defendants with diverting nearly $2 million in Argent money to the skim—needed a good witness. The government gave Allen Glick immunity, and he took the stand.