Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal’s gambler’s luck may be changing-again. Having been banished from Las Vegas casinos, cuckolded by his wife and a mobster who was his pal, and blown up by a car bomb, Rosenthal today lives and works in affluent obscurity in Boca Raton.
But now Hollywood is making a film based on Rosenthal’s turbulent life as a brilliant gambler and casino boss who worked and played with the mob. And Rosenthal’s not sure what it will mean.
Called “Casino,” the film stars Robert De Niro as Sam “Ace” Rothstein-Rosenthal’s character. Sharon Stone portrays his unfaithful wife and Joe Pesci the mobster pal who shattered his career and marriage.
While the intense De Niro has the look of a gambler with mob ties, the dour Rosenthal, as he sits chain-smoking and sipping from a bottle of Evian in Croc’s Bar & Grill in Boca Raton, seems more like a tax auditor. The only hint of yesterday’s Vegas flamboyance is a silver pinky ring on the 65-year-old ex-gambler’s right hand.
“Those were different days,” Rosenthal says of the years when the FBI kept tabs on him. “I’m imperfect, I’ve made mistakes. (But) I have few regrets.”
As director Martin Scorsese’s cameras recreate his life before he got to Boca Raton, the soft-spoken Rosenthal isn’t sure how “Casino” will affect the life he lives today as manager of Croc’s, which he runs for his nephew. But it makes Rosenthal uneasy. “I’m a private person,” he says.
That’s likely to change when “Casino” is released in the fall, and the life and times of Lefty Rosenthal unfold in living color on the big screen. “This is a movie, not a biography,” Rosenthal says of the script. “Creative people have added and subtracted.”
Still, one thing is certain: The film is a saga of gambling and gangsters. Rosenthal grew up in Chicago in the 1930s, during Al Capone’s heyday. When Rosenthal was a young man, he became a professional gambler, betting on basketball, football, baseball and boxing.
“You like something and you get into it,” Rosenthal says. “I was studying all phases of gambling in my late teens. It’s no different than anything else, like a doctor, a lawyer or a writer.”
Mentored by Hymie the Ace
As a young man in postwar America, Rosenthal’s mentor was a gambler named Hymie the Ace who taught him that a man had to get up early to beat the odds. “My feeling is, you eat, drink and sleep your profession,” Rosenthal says.
So he arose at dawn to spend hours studying the sports pages of about 40 out-of-town newspapers for information he used to make bets, or handicap the odds for syndicate bookmakers.
Rosenthal came to know a great many people who also were known by police working Chicago’s organized crime. Among his friends, for example, was a youngster named Anthony Spilotro-played in Scorsese’s film by Pesci. Spilotro could be a very good friend-or a very bad enemy. And as the years passed and Rosenthal grew older, he would come to learn both sides.
“We were like this,” Rosenthal says today, pressing two fingers together. “Tony was a natural leader. He was not a `dese’ and `dose’ guy. He had good manners. We hit it off. . . . I didn’t pry into his business, and he didn’t pry into mine.”
It was only a matter of time before organized-crime investigators began asking Rosenthal what he knew about people like Spilotro and his associates. Rosenthal remained mum. In 1961, for example, he invoked the 5th Amendment 38 times in a Senate hearing on gambling and organized crime.
But it became a risky business for Rosenthal to earn a living-what with all the prosecutors and police who too often viewed him as less than a standup citizen. So he moved to Las Vegas in 1968, where wagering was wide open and a professional gambler could lead a respectable life.
On a roll in Las Vegas
Gambling was Rosenthal’s first love. In Las Vegas, he met his second,, a striking blond and one-time topless showgirl named Geri.
“Geri was a very statuesque woman,” Rosenthal says. “She was charming.”
They were married in 1969. They moved into an expensive house on a golf course and had two children, a girl and a boy. Rosenthal figured he was on a roll. But as any old tracksider will tell you, luck always changes.
The FBI wiretapped Rosenthal’s betting parlor and indicted him on federal bookmaking charges. Bad luck. Then the judge threw out the indictment on a technicality. Good luck. Next, Rosenthal’s old pal Spilotro blew into Las Vegas, which seemed like OK luck, despite all the talk among federal crime fighters who claimed-but never proved-that Spilotro had killed as many as 25 people. There was the story, for example, that Spilotro had once bragged of squeezing a rival mobster’s head in a vise “until his eyes popped out” before fatally slashing his throat.
Word around town was that Spilotro had come to Las Vegas to look after his Chicago associates’ casino interests. Spilotro’s wife, Nancy, and Rosenthal’s wife became fast friends. Geri Rosenthal urged her husband to get a casino job. He did, at the Stardust Hotel and Casino, which seemed like bad luck at first.
“The only guy below me was the shoeshine man,” Rosenthal says. “I almost quit the first day.”
But his luck held. Some people found it almost magical the way Rosenthal rose through the ranks at the Stardust, going from a lowly floorman to overseeing gaming at the Stardust and three other casinos for $250,000 a year. Rosenthal became a Las Vegas celebrity, with his own local TV show featuring guests such as Frank Sinatra and Muhammad Ali.
But some naysayers said Rosenthal’s meteoric rise in Las Vegas took a lot more than luck. Federal investigators, for example, claimed it was all due to his close ties to the Chicago mob.
Rosenthal denies all this today. “I went up the hard way,” he says. And his friends in the mob? “I met everybody from A to Z when I was growing up in Chicago, and I make no bones about it,” he says. “But I was never controlled. I was a winning player, and everybody wants to know what that fellow knows.”
A change of fortune
Rosenthal’s luck turned sour in the late 1970s, when the Nevada Gaming Commission began a major investigation into shady Las Vegas casino dealings. When the dust cleared, state and federal authorities found evidence of a widespread mob consipiracy to skim millions of dollars from casinos that Rosenthal oversaw. Eventually, 15 reputed mobsters and their pals, including Spilotro, were indicted in the skimming scheme. Having found Rosenthal too friendly with too many wise guys, the Nevada investigators barred him from every casino in the state. Federal agents asked Rosenthal all kinds of questions.
“I welcomed every one,” Rosenthal says today. “No 5th Amendment. No, `I don’t know.”‘
But as a “private person,” Rosenthal declines to go into any great detail when it comes to his high-rolling years as a casino boss. “Obviously there were things going on,” he says. “There are more tricks in the trade than I can ever describe to you. But I think some of it (the federal inquiry) was exaggerated.”
Most of his troubles with Nevada gaming officials stemmed from his friendship with Spilotro. “In retrospect, his reputation and the fact that we were boyhood friends-there was no way for me to overcome it,” Rosenthal says.
As a witness in the casino-skimming trials, the owner of the Stardust, Allen Glick, provided a view of Rosenthal’s management style. Glick claimed Rosenthal threatened his life when the two tangled over casino operations. According to Glick, Rosenthal warned him: “If you interfere with any of the casino operations or try to undermine anything I want to do here . . . you will never leave this corporation alive.”
Rosenthal denies making the threat.
After he was barred from casinos, Rosenthal says, he became involved in investments and sports betting, while maintaining his friendship with Spilotro. Bad luck. Rosenthal’s wife began abusing alcohol and sleeping with Spilotro, all of which led Rosenthal to file for divorce. How did he feel?
“That’s a private matter,” Rosenthal says. Geri Rosenthal moved to Los Angeles, leaving the two children with their father but taking about $200,000 in cash and nearly $1 million worth of jewelry from Rosenthal’s safe-deposit boxes. Spilotro and Rosenthal remained in Las Vegas, but no longer as friends.
Then came fall 1982 and some very bad and some very good luck. In October, Rosenthal climbed into his Cadillac and turned on the ignition. “I never heard the explosion,” Rosenthal says. “I never knew I had been bombed.” Burned and dazed, Rosenthal crawled from his burning car. “I remember saying to myself, `I want to see (my) kids again,’ ” he says. “I recall I was on fire, certain parts of me.” Rosenthal suffered broken ribs and minor burns.
Las Vegas police and the FBI offered him protection if he would talk about Spilotro and the mob. Rosenthal refused.
“The next morning I took my daughter and son to school. I was going to raise my kids, do my thing and take my chances,” Rosenthal says. The bombing remains unsolved.
More bad luck
A month after Rosenthal escaped death, his ex-wife, Geri, 46, was found dead in a Los Angeles motel. The coroner said her death was an accident, caused by a fatal mix of alcohol and drugs. Rosenthal left Las Vegas for California. His two children were outstanding swimmers, and Orange County had a high school with a championship swim team.
In 1986, Spilotro and one of his brothers were found beaten to death, buried in their undershorts in a shallow grave in an Indiana cornfield. The FBI thinks the mob killed Spilotro because his flamboyant lifestyle and loose tongue made him a liability. Bad luck for Spilotro.
Rosenthal moved to Florida in 1987, a year after Spilotro’s murder. For a time he ran a 900 telephone line on which, for $10, he gave callers his line on upcoming pro football games.
In 1990, Rosenthal’s nephew from Chicago bought Croc’s, an upscale Boca nightspot, for $950,000, and asked his uncle to run the place for him. Today Rosenthal lives in a $413,000 house in a gated community and drives a 1994 Mercedes-Benz.
“Since I’ve been in Boca, I’ve kept a low profile,” Rosenthal says. “I’m a single parent who lives as average a life as anyone in this town.”
That’s likely to change when “Casino” is released. Whether it brings good luck or bad, Rosenthal is waiting to see.
