Casino Movie True
- CASINO From Nicholas Pileggi, author of Wiseguy —the #1 bestseller that became Martin Scorsese’s Academy Award–winning film GoodFellas—comes the brilliantly told true story of love, marriage, adultery, murder, and revenge, Mafia-style. The shattering inside account of how the mob finally lost its stranglehold over the neon money-making machine it created: the multibillion-dollar.
- 19 Interesting Facts About the Movie Casino. Aiden Mason 4 years ago. When you make a film as unbelievably good as Goodfellas, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with repackaging it.
We are familiar with this famous movie that told us the story of mob life in this thriving, young city that has always been rumored to harbor such evil doings. According to Cullotta, the tough guy that made his way to Las Vegas in the late 70s and the one who’s life this movie is loosely based upon, “It’s about 75% to 90% accurate. They got to juice it up. It’s a movie. Real life is boring. Movies, that’s what they do, they juice them up. I was the technical consultant on the movie. Nick Pileggi did a tape on me. If it wasn’t for me, there would be no book ‘Casino’, and there would have been no movie ‘Casino.’”
The Casino movie true story reveals that Sam and Ginger Rothstein's real-life counterparts, Frank and Geraldine Rosenthal, had a daughter named Stephanie and a son name Steven. Geraldine also had a daughter from a previous relationship with her high school love, Lenny Marmor (James Woods' character in the movie).
His role was portrayed in the movie by Frank Vincent. However, this is just one story that was told about this growing desert town. The real story began when the mafia began their tyranny of the desert town long before the era in which the film depicts.
The mafia’s control over this gambling city began way back when:
1947 photo of the outdoor swimming pool at Bugsy Siegel’s Flamingo Hotel.
According to UNLV Associate History Professor, Michael Green and author of the ‘History of the Silver State’, “The state of Nevada legalized gambling and reduced the residency requirement for divorce; both of which were designed to get people to come here, like the place, and stay here and invest. But if they didn’t, at least they would spend some money while they were here.” Also, “World War !! Was a key turning point thanks to a lot of military bases being built in Nevada and the surrounding states. Also, in 1941, the first hotel on the strip opened – the El Rancho Vegas – on April 3. It had about 65 rooms so it wouldn’t exactly fit in today. The El Cortez opened the same year, downtown, and that may have been the first Lansky/Siegel property. It’s also in 1941 that Nevada legalized off-track betting which made the race wire very profitable, and that’s really what excited the interest of Lansky and Siegel. The hotel business followed.”
This was the place that practically started the Vegas mafia.
This including skimming from profits which led to the ultimate murder of Siegel himself for doing the skimming! Michael Green says that things moved quickly after that, “The Thunderbird is built soon afterward and that’s tied to Lansky. The Desert Inn is being started. . . In comes Moe Dalitz and the Mayfield Road Gand from Cleveland, and you do have, at this point – a proliferation of mob ownership and investment.”
Kefauver vs. Crime 1951:
The mob continued to infiltrate the Las Vegas area by purchasing land for cheap, specifically the road to Los Angeles. Green also points out, “ These were professionals at running casinos, at gambling. They’ve been involved in these activities for a long time. It was not as if there was a group out her training them. We did not have a hotel college then. These were the guys with experience. That certainly helped them – they knew how to run these operations. The truth is, the mob here in the ‘50s would be, compared with the mob of Frank Cullotta’s era, boring, because they didn’t have burglary rings and killers running around. These were business people.”
Another thing that pushed the mob to its iconic status was the lack of investigations of the backgrounds of the casino owners. Also, then gambling was legalized in Nevada, it was stated that the county would police their own turf which turned out to be inadequate in managing the magnitude of the operation. This only helped the mobsters take control over everything. This was easy to overlook though because the mafia was making a lot of money for the state.
So, it turns out that the skimming operation, as portrayed in the movie ‘Casino’ was real. However, this operation had its mishaps which often led to greed, murder and mismanagement.
Life in the ‘Casino’ era:
The ‘60s and ‘70s brought forth a new wave of gangsters, including Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal played by Robert De Niro in ‘Casino’ as Sam “Ace” Rothstein who was a mastermind at gambling. He’s the one who took the time to learn all of the stats and the conditions of those that he was betting on. For example, he knew all about the sports and athletes such as whether or not who was sick and who wasn’t. He was tight with the trainers who let him know who had a cold or even a tooth ache! This information was key for him to profit off of his gambling efforts.
The former associate of “Lefty” was Frank Cullotta grew up with another man who made his way into the mob scene. His name was Anthony “Tony” Spilotro and he was sent to Vegas by the Chicago mafia to help control their interests in the casinos there. Joe Pesci’s character in ‘Casino’ was loosely based on Tony’s life.
“Tony” was tied to at least two dozen murders.
However, in the movie ‘Casino’ the only life long friendship that was portrayed was between “Tony” and “Lefty” played by Pesci and De Niro’s characters. However, according to Cullotta, “I know Tony didn’t grow up with this guy, but they say he’s a childhood friend. That’s bullsh*t. Tony probably met “Lefty” somewhere around in the ‘60s, because I know in 1961, when I first met “Lefty,” he was by Tony’s house and he was gambling. They were playing gin. And Tony beat him out of a lot of f*cking money and if this was his good friend. . . I know Tony and he wouldn’t gamble with good friends. Tony was close to “Lefty” but he didn’t grown up with him like I did.”
Cullotta and several associates were known in those days as the “Hole in the Wall Gang” because they were known for going through the walls of homes, banks and other places to burglarize them. According to Cullotta, “We didn’t just go around burglarizing any house. We used to have information. We did it on tips. Information from insurance agents, people that worked in casinos – friends of friends that knew friends have money and, of course, we game them 10-20% of whatever we made.” In the process murder played a role in Las Vegas. However, much of this began to come to an end when The Federal government began to probe into the mob dealings in the city. That’s when the game began to end.
Tony Spilotro’s grave.
In 1960, the Black Book was created to keep gangsters off casino premises. These new regulations aimed at banning certain people from the casinos and they were named in this Black Book. During this decade, Bobby Kennedy, brother of president J.F.K., was tasked with dismembering the organized crime that was still going on in Vegas. This led the passage of the Corporate Gaming Act in 1969 which changed the law so that only key stockholders and executives were able to be licensed to own a casino. Before this, anyone who owned part of a casino could be licensed. However, the mob was strong enough to find a way around this and so the RICO act was passed in 1970 which “allows prosecution and civil penalties for certain acts (including illegal gambling, bribery, kidnapping, murder, and money laundering performed as part of an ongoing criminal enterprise.” It had been used to gather whole groups of criminal empires at a time. Years of trials and testimonies followed.
Tony Spilotro Chicago Perp Walk.
Professor Green talks about the fall of the mobsters saying, “Back in the ‘70s, these mobsters were at discos, they were at restaurants, and by ‘97, the last remnants were at a used car dealership. I think that speaks to how far down they’ve gone.” Eventually, the system beat them.
These day, Cullotta says, “I think there’s thieves out here. I doubt there’s organized crime, outfit or syndicate out here. I don’t see that here. I don’t feel it. I don’t hear anyone talk about it. It’s definitely not in the casinos. All the corporations are in the casinos now. There’s no more organized crime in these casinos at all. I’m sure there’s some guys that still do it, but they’re not high-rollers. They’re not big guys.” They are all gone.
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Mobster Frank Rosenthal helped build a casino empire — then watched it all slip away in a storm of violence and betrayal.
Bettmann/Contributor/Getty ImagesFrank Rosenthal adjusts his tie while refusing to answer questions before a Senate subcommittee on gambling and racketeering. Washington, D.C. Sept. 7, 1961.
In the 1995 film Casino, director Martin Scorsese and star Robert De Niro gave us the fictional story of Sam “Ace” Rothstein, a mob-affiliated casino operator who always knows just how to manipulate odds and maximize profits on behalf of the murderous gangsters he works with.
But if Rothstein and his violent Las Vegas adventures seem too outrageous to be true, take note that this character was based on Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, a real-life gambler and gangster every bit the smooth criminal the movie made him out to be.
The Road To Las Vegas
Born in Chicago on June 12, 1929, Frank Rosenthal spent many of his early days at the horse track with his father, who owned several horses, learning everything he could about racing. Moreover, of course, he learned about a crucial part of the sport: gambling.
As he grew older, Rosenthal’s interest in and knowledge of gambling extended beyond horse racing and into other sports like football and baseball. The young gambler learned, as he later said, that “Every pitch. Every swing. Everything had a price.”
By the time he was a young adult, he was heavily involved in the mob-controlled illegal gambling scene in Chicago.
Working for the Chicago Outfit in the mid-1950s, Rosenthal had a talent for setting the perfect odds for sports betting. He manipulated the odds just enough to entice gamblers to bet while also keeping the odds just where they needed to be so that the bookies could be sure that they’d come out ahead no matter what happened.
A whiz with numbers possessed of a Rain Man-like ability to calculate odds, Rosenthal was also a meticulous researcher who would get up early in the morning to study some 40 out-of-town newspapers in order to gather all the information he needed to make the odds just right.
Of course, Rosenthal also wasn’t above taking steps to make sure that he got the results he wanted, and by the early 1960s, he found himself in trouble for fixing games. In 1962, he was convicted of bribing a college basketball player to shave points during a game in North Carolina.
The year before, he’d been dragged in front of a Senate subcommittee on gambling and organized crime due to his now-nationwide underworld reputation as an oddsmaker and match fixer. During the proceedings, he invoked the Fifth Amendment a whopping 38 times, even when asked if he was left-handed — hence his nickname, “Lefty” (some sources claim that the nickname simply comes from his being left-handed).
Around this same time, Frank Rosenthal moved to Miami, where he and other Chicago Outfit members continued to participate in illegal gambling operations and even engage in violent assaults on their rivals. As part of these so-called “bookie wars,” Rosenthal came under suspicion in several bombings of rivals’ buildings and cars.
Feeling the heat — and surely understanding that Sin City was the place to be if you were a big-time gambler — Frank Rosenthal set out for Las Vegas in 1968.
Frank Rosenthal, Casino King
Upon arriving in Las Vegas, Lefty Rosenthal initially ran a betting parlor alongside a boyhood friend from Chicago who acted as his enforcer: Anthony “Tony the Ant” Spilotro (called “Nicky Santoro” and played by Joe Pesci in Casino).
Bettmann/Contributor/Getty ImagesAnthony Spilotro sits in a Las Vegas courtroom in connection with two old homicide cases. 1983.
Spilotro had a long rap sheet filled with violent crimes. In Chicago, he’d long been a killer for his organized crime bosses and authorities believed he may have killed at least 25 people. As the movie depicts, he even once boasted of squeezing a man’s head in a vice until his eyes popped out and then slashing his throat. Unverified and perhaps apocryphal reports still claim that Las Vegas’ murder rate went up by 70 percent after Spilotro arrived in town.
And now this violent killer was in Las Vegas to help the Chicago Outfit keep an eye on their gambling interests, which meant he’d be right by Rosenthal’s side.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KJ7l4gy4oo[/ebed]
Also by Rosenthal’s side was his new bride, Geri McGee (played by Sharon Stone as “Ginger McKenna” in the film, above), a former topless showgirl he’d met not long after moving to town and married in 1969. It was McGee who encouraged Rosenthal — whose betting parlor had come under fire on federal bookmaking charges (ones that he beat on a technicality) — to take a casino job.
So in 1974, Frank Rosenthal began working for the Stardust. Given his talent for gambling and his organized crime connections, he quickly rose through the ranks and was soon running the Stardust and three other casinos, all of them believed to be under the control of the Chicago Outfit.
This meant that each casino needed a squeaky clean frontman that would appear to be running things while Rosenthal was actually the boss behind the scenes. And Rosenthal was often quick to make it clear to such frontmen just who was really in charge.
As Rosenthal told one of his nominal “bosses” in 1974:
“It is about time you become informed of what is going on here and where I am coming from and where you should be… I have been instructed not to tolerate any nonsense from you, nor do I have to listen to what you say, because you are not my boss… When I say you don’t have a choice, I am just not talking of an administrative basis, but I am talking about one involving health. If you interfere with any of the casino operations or try to undermine anything I want to do here, I represent to you that you will never leave this corporation alive.”
And there was indeed plenty of ruthlessness in Rosenthal. As the film depicted (below), his security caught a man cheating and so he ordered them to break his hand with a hammer. “He was part of a crew of professional card cheats, and calling the cops would do nothing to stop them,” Rosenthal said in an interview later. “So we used a rubber mallet… and he became a lefty.”
But as ruthless as he could be, Rosenthal was also as meticulous and sophisticated in his approach as he ever was — and not just in terms of the gambling itself. He hosted a local television show featuring celebrity guests and even counted the blueberries in the kitchen’s muffins to make sure that there were always 10 in each.
Of course, he truly did make his mark in revolutionizing the casino’s gambling operation by moving heavily into sports betting and hiring female dealers. All in all, Frank Rosenthal’s moves helped send the Stardust’s profits soaring.
However, all good things must come to an end — especially when the mob and millions upon millions of dollars are involved.
Frank Rosenthal’s Fall From Grace
While the Stardust was thriving, Frank Rosenthal was having trouble with the authorities.
Though he was secretly running several casinos, he had no official gaming license (his past meant that he surely wouldn’t have been able to get one). And because of this as well as his known contacts in organized crime, the Nevada Gaming Commission was able to bar him from having anything to do with gambling in Las Vegas in 1976.
Meanwhile, authorities indicted Spilotro and a dozen other mobsters who’d been making serious money off of these casinos. What’s more, Rosenthal also found out that Spilotro had been skimming money that even his mob bosses weren’t aware of, causing a falling out between the two old friends (see the film’s dramatization below).
Furthermore, Rosenthal learned that Spilotro had been having an affair with McGee. Though she and Rosenthal had two children together, this infidelity and her drug abuse contributed to their marriage failing in 1980.
Meanwhile, Frank Rosenthal’s whole world was falling apart as authorities continued to interrogate him about his connections with Spilotro and his involvement in all manner of illegal activities that had taken place inside his casinos. He tried repeatedly to get the gaming license that would enable him to freely and legally return to work inside a casino, but was never approved.
Things only got worse in October 1982. Rosenthal left a local restaurant and got into his car. Moments later, it exploded. Rosenthal was thrown from the car, but his life was saved by a metal plate underneath his seat that just happened to be a feature of that particular model and was able to shield him just enough from the bomb’s blast from below. He suffered only minor burns and a few broken ribs.
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Authorities never figured out who set the bomb, and Rosenthal always insisted that he never knew either, but most suspect that the mob had done so as a way to get revenge and clean house after the news broke that Rosenthal’s friend, Spilotro, had been skimming mob profits.
Lefty Rosenthal survived, but McGee and Spilotro did not. McGee was found dead in Los Angeles a few weeks after the bombing due to a mysterious collapse that was officially ruled a drug overdose (details remain fuzzy). Spilotro was found beaten to death and buried in an Indiana cornfield in 1986.
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But Rosenthal emerged unscathed and took his two children to California and then to Florida, where he worked as a nightclub manager and ran an online betting site before dying in 2008 at the age of 79.
To the end, Rosenthal had mixed opinions about the movie based on his Las Vegas career but felt that it was largely accurate (but insisted that he never funneled casino profits illegally to the mob). And in a sense, that says a lot about the wild life of Frank Rosenthal. After all, how many people could have their life story turned into a hit movie with few, if any, embellishments needed?
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After this look at Frank Rosenthal, discover the true story of Henry Hill as well as other real-life Goodfellas like Tommy DeSimone and Jimmy “The Gent” Burke.