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IN THE EARLY 1960S, Las Vegas was in the middle of a major building boom. No new resorts opened, but many of the Strip’s hotels added rooms, and throughout the town apartments, shopping centers, and houses were springing up almost overnight. This was a city moving ahead, and those who stopped risked being left behind.
With 465 rooms in 1962, the Sands was one of the smaller resorts on the Strip, with about 50 rooms in a cluster of non-descript two-story buildings. The Stardust, which had opened in 1957, had by this point more than a thousand rooms. The Tropicana had added 150 rooms to its original 300 and was considering expanding again. The Sahara had added the first of its high-rise towers and was building a second, even taller, one. The Dunes had already expanded once and was in the process of adding its own tower, the Diamond of the Dunes.
Late in 1962, the Sands’ owners, licensed and unlicensed, agreed that their hotel needed to grow. They hired Julius Gabriel, a Las Vegas architect, to design a room expansion that would keep the Sands current. The new addition, named the Aqueduct, was to be larger, housing 83 rooms and suites. It looked different from the other hotel wings, with a concave curve centering on a swimming pool echoing, perhaps, Miami’s Fontainebleau, with its own putting green as well. Three stories high, it was clad in pink and white tile and concrete.
Rather than compete on volume, the Sands opted to go upscale, offering the kinds of accommodations that no other resort could. The expansion’s ten biggest suites averaged 1,600 square feet each, huge for the time. The top ones had private swimming pools. These were rented to the public for the sky-high sum of $115 a night. By comparison, a decent room could be had elsewhere on the Strip for $10 per night.
Twelve “Petite Suites” had a king-size bedroom and queen-size living room separated not by a wall, but by a step up and drapes. Depending on their theme, the suites had fixtures like Italian marble tabletops, Spanish chandeliers, and Moorish décor. The bathrooms, which had sunken Roman tubs and separate showers, even had bidets—perhaps the first rooms in Las Vegas to boast this European custom.
At $1.1 million to build and another $500,000 to furnish, Aqueduct was, Jack Entratter announced, “perhaps the costliest public accommodation in America.”
The Aqueduct suites were about more than gold tiles and Moorish carvings. Maids were available 24 hours a day, ready to do more than just clean rooms—they were expected to pack and unpack for guests as well. To keep room service trays out of sight and to preserve the wing’s posh image, special closets were built into the hallways to allow them to be stowed.
Guests didn’t have to worry about walking the considerable distance from the casino to their room; a brand-new Buick Riviera stood ready to transport them around the clock.
Opening in April 1963, the Aqueduct suites and rooms were the first phase of an even more ambitious expansion plan. This was no time to stand still: Across the street, the Sans Souci was being reborn as the Castaways, a Polynesian-themed, 488-room resort hotel and casino. The Clark County Board of Commissioners approved an even bigger potential rival: a $10 million, 1,000-room hotel casino, which Sacramento builder Jack W. Greene planned next to the Castaways. While Greene’s dream never materialized (he and his partners would be suing each other within the year as the project collapsed), at the time it appeared that the Sands was in danger of being overshadowed.
The second phase of the Sands’ growth promised to reinvent the resort for the new Las Vegas. Other hotels were going vertical, with the Desert Inn, Stardust, Sahara, and Riviera planning new high-rise expansions. All told, casino owners were spending $50 million to add capacity. It was time for the Sands to go upward: Its new rooms wouldn’t be put in a two- or even three-story building, but in a tower on top of its casino building.
Going further, the resort’s footprint ground floor space tripled. The casino would be doubled in size, while the Copa added an upper tier of tables and booths, giving it 120 more seats. At the same time, the backstage facilities and dressing rooms were expanded. The Copa Lounge would be replaced by the Celebrity Theater, a 350-seat terraced venue with a stage capable of revolving and moving up and down.
In dining, a new gourmet restaurant, the Regency Room, replaced the Garden Room, which was reborn as the Garden Court adjacent to a new Terrace Room. A barber shop, beauty salon, jewelry store, and his-and-her clothing boutiques would add to the resort’s amenities. The convention facilities, too, were to be dramatically expanded, with a convention hall capable of hosting as many as 2,000 people at once. It could be configured as a movie theater, performance venue, or as many as nine individual meeting or dining rooms. After the new hall opened in September 1965, it hosted a typically diverse array of groups, from the Ford Motor Company to the National Bituminous Concrete Association to ABC-TV’s Board of Governors.
All told, the Sands was investing $9 million to reinvent itself—twice what it had cost to build the resort in 1952. And it wasn’t going to be ahead of the curve when it finished, either. The Dunes would have a 24-story tower, 1,000 total rooms, and a 15-story neon sign that cost $100 a day to keep lit. Just to keep up meant the Sands had to grow—quickly.
The 17-story Sands tower, Entratter told the press, would bring the hotel to 777 rooms. The tower itself was to be a cylinder rising into the sky; its rooms would be wedge-shaped, with a window-wall looking out. The top-floor executive suites would boast 20-foot ceilings.
Architect Martin Stern, Jr. designed the ambitious expansion. He was one of the chief figures behind the Strip’s increasingly vertical skyline. Stern, who had worked as a commercial architect in Los Angeles, first came to Las Vegas in 1953 to create an expansion for the Sahara. He designed a second expansion there three years later and, in 1959, the Sahara’s first tower. He then planned the Sahara Tahoe, his first ground-up casino commission, before being asked to expand the Sands. After the Sands, Stern would go on to design the International and MGM Grand, two Kirk Kerkorian-owned casinos that defined resort design for a generation among a series of expansions and new properties, mostly in Las Vegas, Reno, Tahoe, and Atlantic City.
The project called for extending the Sands’ main building farther south to accommodate new casino and retail space and to serve as the base for the new tower, and adding convention space to the north. To accommodate the convention space and back of the house facilities, the Sands bought the Kit Carson motel. Spreading the Sands’ footprint to the south presented one logistical challenge: Two of the existing low-rise hotel buildings, Belmont and Arlington, stood in the way. Instead of demolishing them and simply building a larger tower to make up for the 100 or so rooms that would be lost, the Sands’ bosses decided to move them about 50 feet to the south, taking the place of a parking lot that formerly stood between them and Churchill Downs.
Work started in September 1964, with the demolition of most of the Kit Carson motel and the Terrace Room, the jacking up and sliding south of the Belmont and Arlington buildings, the demolition and infill of the Terrace Pool, and the construction of a climate-controlled promenade that re-used heating and cooling units salvaged from the Kit Carson. Then came the construction of the convention space and Copa addition. By November, work on the tower had begun. In January, work on the casino itself started, with care taken to ensure that customers could still gamble without interruption. By May, work on the restaurants commenced.
To handle the greater traffic the new rooms and space would bring, Stern dramatically expanded the casino entrance, giving it a round colonnade with a 35-foot ceiling. The hotel got its own lobby and lounge, with an expanded new porte cochere able to accommodate eight cars simultaneously unloading passengers and luggage.
Stern didn’t do much to update the décor: Earth tones still dominated, giving the new Sands a visual link with the old, but his new layout pointed the way to the future of casinos. Originally, the main casino building was separate from the rooms; guests, as a matter of course, would walk outside or be ferried in a golf cart or even a Buick to get to their bed. In Stern’s new design, though, 400 of the hotel’s rooms were connected to the casino and convention facilities by an air-conditioned promenade. Casino resorts were growing up.
“All the warm decor and features of the Sands have been retained,” Jack Entratter said. “Although there is a new and fashionable look to the Sands Hotel rising skyward, there is still an integrated design with all the charm of the existing facilities.”
In January 1966, the Sands celebrated the dedication of its new tower and expanded space with a series of performances by Frank Sinatra, backed by the Count Basie Orchestra, in the Copa Room, with a special dedication dinner party for VIPs on January 7. We have an idea of what the night would have sounded like thanks to Sinatra at the Sands with Count Basie and the Orchestra, featuring arrangements by Quincy Jones, recorded at the end of the group’s four-week stint and released on Sinatra’s Reprise label.
That weekend, while it celebrated a new beginning for the Sands, marks the last triumph for the original casino. The Sands was on the cusp of a new era.
***
WHILE THEY WERE PLANNING their expansions, the Sands’ managers were checking up and down the Strip: What were the Desert Inn, the Dunes, the Sahara, the Flamingo, the Tropicana doing? Those were their competitors. But their real enemy was Bobby Kennedy.
Starting in 1961, Kennedy authorized the use of hidden microphones—“bugs”—to procure intelligence that informants had been unable or unwilling to provide. He and his organized crime squad suspected that the mob was skimming thousands from Las Vegas casinos each month but were unable to uncover any actual evidence of the practice. While they were picking up a fair amount of gossip about petty rivalries among the casino managers and reputed mobsters behind the skim, they had been unable to penetrate the count rooms and procure actual proof that this was happening.
The usual method of flipping low-level criminals to build cases against their higher-ups proved virtually useless in Las Vegas. Those involved, through either loyalty or fear, owed more to each other than the federal government. Developing an undercover agent into a figure with enough trust to be allowed into the inner circle could take years, if not decades. The only way, Justice was convinced, to learn the truth about the mob and skimming was microphone surveillance, abbreviated in FBI-speak as “micsur.”
For more than a decade, federal investigators had been probing organized crime and were hot on the trail of several mob bosses, including Sam Giancana of Chicago. The Bureau identified another axis of organized crime that ran through New York, New Jersey, and Los Angeles. The key figure here was Doc Stacher, who resided in Los Angeles but who had come up in New Jersey. In early April 1961, the Bureau bugged his room at New York’s Hotel Pierre for a week. The G-Men then switched their focus to his rooms at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel where they installed microphones that remained in service indefinitely.
Stacher, living up to his nickname of “the Brain,” was well aware that he was being watched. One summer day, seeing two suited agents sweltering while watching him from a balcony while he lounged poolside, he waved them over.
“Put on some shorts and get in the pool with me,” he suggested. “You’re never going to learn anything about me from all the way up there.”
Carl Cohen, investigators believed, was Stacher’s chief contact at the Sands. To get to Stacher, they launched an intelligence-gathering campaign directed at Cohen. On August 9, 1962, the Los Angeles Field Office installed a bug in Cohen’s apartment on North Doheny Drive in Beverly Hills. Despite having already cultivated two informants in the field, agents were no closer to proving that Cohen was funneling money to Stacher, though they were optimistic that bugging Cohen’s apartment, which a “reliable source” had assured them was the site of many high-profile meetings, would finally provide proof.
That optimism was misplaced. Cohen did not talk business in his apartment, any more than Stacher did at the Beverly Wilshire—at least when he knew that cops might be listening in. Knowing that he was “hot,” Cohen then sold the apartment’s furniture and abandoned it.
The investigation then switched its focus to Las Vegas, where the FBI field office had, in the previous year, begun its own aggressive electronic eavesdropping operation. Agents there created a business front called the Henderson Novelty Company, which ostensibly provided a “musical rental service.” Instead, Dean Elson, the head of the office, leased 25 phone lines from the Central Telephone Company that were billed to the Henderson Novelty Company and paid for in cash. They used those phone lines to install listening devices on telephones and via hidden microphones in offices at the Fremont, Desert Inn, Stardust, and Dunes. Trying to penetrate the Sands, though, agents chose a homier target.
Cohen, like Jack Entratter, lived at the Sands. He and his wife, Frances, occupied an apartment in the Rockingham building. Given his hours, such a short commute was sensible; Cohen was generally in the casino from late afternoon until past midnight, and was usually present for the count that concluded all three shifts. So, on February 19, 1963, agents surreptitiously entered his apartment—“trespassed” was the strictly technical term—and installed two listening devices: one in the living room, one in an adjacent room that served as a gym.
The Bureau’s timing was awful. The Cohens chose to have their apartment remodeled at just that moment, so that for the next month all the agents heard were hammers and saws. Then, shortly after they moved into the renovated apartment, Cohen departed for Mt. Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, where he sought treatment for his chronic heart condition.
Finally, on May 3, agents began to get the goods on the Cohens’ domestic life. Cohen told an unknown caller that he was getting ready to take a swim and catch some sun. As work continued on the apartment, Frances ordered lunch from room service. The same thing that she had for breakfast: toasted bagels, lox, cream cheese, toasted English muffins (well done), and coffee. Possibly incensed at the idea of second breakfast, the FBI agent listening in typed “This is lunch?” on the transcript. Frances then showed her guests the gym, demonstrating each piece of equipment, and called out to ask Carl, in another room, if he had a towel. He did, and soon left for the pool. Twenty-five minutes after Frances called room service, her lunch arrived, and she spent the next three hours gossiping with her guests and talking about dinner plans.
The following morning, agents listened as Mr. and Mrs. Cohen discussed their adventures in modern dentistry, a conversation that culminated in them comparing how many teeth they had remaining. Mrs. Cohen, apparently, won that round when she revealed to her husband that she only had nine of her own teeth in her bottom gum. Perhaps inspired by the sad fate of her departed seven lower teeth, she then began working out in the gym. At 2:37 p.m., Frances had friends visit, and the agents found it impossible to understand anything as they all talked over one another. At 3:55 p.m., an unknown male, presumably a hotel employee, came to the apartment, and agents clearly made out Frances relaying orders about the hotel’s critical infrastructure.
“This chair is hardly stuffed,” she complained. “It feels like I’m sitting on iron. It’s a lovely chair, but I wish it had more stuffing.”
There were no more pertinent conversations recorded that day, or on the following days, unless you were to count the Cohens discussing their dog, Frances working out, Frances talking with her friends, Carl saying that he was going to the pool, or Frances watching television. On May 12, though, agents learned of major dissension in the ranks at the Sands.
“We ordered these steaks well done, and they’re still walking around,” Frances protested to room service. Unable to get a satisfactory answer, she handed the phone to her husband, who had just started watching television.
“Get two well done steaks up here,” is all he said before hanging up.
Two days later, a memorandum from Dean Elson, Special Agent in Charge of the Las Vegas office to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, admitted that “no significant information” had been developed from the eavesdropping. Still, he requested a 60-day extension for the bug because in Las Vegas, you never know.
The assistant director recommended in a May 27 message that, despite the continuing lack of pertinent information, the surveillance be extended.
“Even though we have been endeavoring to penetrate the Sands Hotel Operation for a number of years, this is the first highly confidential source we have been able to establish,” he wrote. Even though the source may not produce as anticipated, it was worth continuing.
“A source in contact with Sands personnel is especially desirable since informants have reported that Sands Hotel officials have a contact in the Justice Department, and we know that certain information has apparently been leaked to Nevada gamblers. Cohen himself made a trip to warn [redacted, but probably Stacher] that he was ‘hot.’”
Those with a naïve faith in the powers of their government would have been dismayed had they read Cohen’s FBI file. The greatest police agency in the free world, with over 16,000 staff at its command, had for years been unable to learn the secrets of a gambling house on the Las Vegas Strip. Worse yet, it wasn’t entirely sure that the agency itself hadn’t been breached by its targets.
That was possible, though it was equally likely that “the Professor” Stacher had deduced that the two suited men wilting in the sun each day as they watched him at the Beverly Wilshire pool were law enforcement agents and had communicated this to his friends, suggesting that they be discreet in everything they said—they already knew, from decades of habit, to write nothing. By this point, he was vigilant about the threat of bugging, even telling his nephew that a workman who repaired the nephew’s heating unit had placed a bug in it. Only an idiot would talk openly about skimming—or anything more substantive than their dinner plans—knowing that the FBI was listening. Joseph Stacher and Carl Cohen were not idiots.
So while FBI agents insisted that microphone surveillance was the most powerful weapon they could bring to bear against the evils of organized crime, they had to admit that it wasn’t exactly paying off. At the Sands in the summer of 1963, as the pressure from the attorney general mounted, their last, best hope was a pair of microphones that, to date, had produced only chatter about fitness equipment, steaks, and dental misfortunes.
Elson put off the lack of information gleaned from the bug in Cohen’s apartment to its interminable renovation, but it was another renovation project that brought the FBI’s eavesdropping program to light. In October 1962, via a Central Telephone employee, the FBI bugged the phone on Ed Levinson’s desk in his Fremont Hotel office. A few months later, Levinson decided that he wanted to move his phone. Installer Al Kee came in on his day off to do the work. While relocating the telephone, he discovered the bug and immediately notified Levinson. They were able to trace the line back to the switchboard and learned that it had been leased to the Henderson Novelty Company.
Levinson discovered the wiretap on April 28. Whether that had anything to do with Cohen’s reticence to talk business in his own home is unknown, but on June 25, FBI agents finally heard something worth recording: an unknown voice saying “1-2-3-4” while testing telephone equipment, apparently looking for bugs. The agents immediately deactivated both listening devices. The office debated whether to break into Cohen’s home again to retrieve their bugs, but fearing that they might walk into a trap, declined. All was quiet for two weeks, when a local citizen that agents had been grooming as a potential informant asked a single question.
“What are you doing to Carl Cohen?”
The agents denied all knowledge of anything to do with the Sands boss.
“He found three bugs in his apartment, and a tap on his phone. Were you behind it?”
Over the summer, other bugs were discovered at the Stardust and Dunes, and at the home of the Stardust’s Johnny Drew.
As the wiretaps became front-page news, the FBI refused to comment. Sheriff Ralph Lamb denied that his office was behind the bugs. Some suggested that they were the work of rival gaming operators.
On September 4, Cohen’s attorney Harry Claiborne (who had surely built a wing of his house on fees accrued from the Sands by this point) filed suit against the Central Telephone Company, charging that the company had “purposefully, willfully, and maliciously” furnished telephone lines connected to the bugs in Cohen’s suite, knowing full well that the lines would be used to eavesdrop and record conversations without Cohen’s knowledge. Claiborne cited a Nevada law that clearly declared that such unauthorized intrusions of privacy to be prohibited. He was asking for $750,000 in damages.
Newspaper reports of the lawsuit combined it with the recent discovery of bugs in Major Riddle’s Dunes office.
On a related note, a confidential informant told his FBI handler that he was present at a September meeting with Sands personnel. Among other things, they discussed Sinatra’s ongoing struggles with the Gaming Control Board.
“I don’t care what happens to him,” someone said. No one disagreed.
“He’s been nothing but a problem for years,” someone else volunteered.
So it was decided, Frank was out.
Also at this meeting, it came out that Cohen, by paying “a large sum of money” to a phone company employee, had been able to learn everything about the FBI’s electronic surveillance.
The informant was, however, unable or unwilling to reveal who the employee was, how much he had been paid, or any real details.
SAC Elson was not entirely convinced that the meeting had taken place, much less that their informant had been present. While he had long considered the possibility that the “hoodlum element,” with their vast wealth, might compromise the wiretapping program, he didn’t believe that any of the three phone company employees his office had worked with would be so venal.
“I do not feel,” he wrote to Hoover himself, “that any of these three individuals could be bought off with any sum of money.”
Perhaps another employee had come across the FBI’s lines by chance, then. Or perhaps it was misinformation from Cohen. In any event, he would remain alert and inform his superiors immediately if he learned more.
Meanwhile, officials at the Central Telephone Company were concerned, though they initially promised to “hold firm” against Cohen, perhaps even filing a counterclaim for defamation against him. They weren’t entirely resolute, particularly should other hotel owners file suit, or the company continued to take a beating in the press. As can be imagined, the revelation that the phone company helped plant spying devices in the home of a paying customer—one who, thanks to his charitable work, was a leading citizen, no less—did Central Telephone no favors.
The FBI’s floundering surveillance program (by the time Cohen filed his lawsuit, all microphone surveillance had been discontinued) was becoming a political liability as well. The night before President Kennedy’s visit to Las Vegas, Republican Lieutenant Governor Paul Laxalt charged that Nevada was “teeming with federal agents,” the result of Attorney General Kennedy’s “premeditated plan” to make himself “a tin hero” at the expense of the Silver State. The Republican Party would, he guaranteed, not stand for that.
“Our state just wants to conduct its business without Bobby Kennedy’s phone tapping,” he said, protesting federal intervention in the state’s biggest industry. Nevada had gotten its house in order with its own anti-mob efforts, like the Black Book, though Laxalt admitted the list of excluded persons might be incomplete.
“We might suggest some Washington-level names to be added,” he quipped.
Claiborne, for his part, did not directly accuse the attorney general or the FBI of planting the bugs that had been discovered in his client’s home, instead placing the blame solely on the phone company. FBI Assistant Director Courtney Evans speculated that Cohen didn’t want potentially embarrassing recordings the FBI might have to introduce at trial, though he imagined that Cohen, who knew the FBI had heard nothing of value, had already factored this in before filing suit.
Central Telephone, in its October 2 response to Cohen’s civil complaint, denied everything. SAC Elson of Las Vegas advised his FBI superiors two days later, though, that his contacts there were convinced that, should the matter go to trial, the FBI would likely be involved. The company’s legal counsel speculated that Claiborne would subpoena telephone employees and records that would reveal the true nature of the Henderson Novelty Company. Moreover, the telephone company’s insurance agency, which would presumably be on the hook for a $750,000 judgment should Cohen prevail, would undoubtedly insist on transferring as much of the blame as possible to a third party. The Bureau had to start making contingencies, he argued.
With public opinion building behind him, Cohen seemed to have both the telephone company and their secret client over a barrel. But scarcely a week after the company filed its brief denial in court, Cohen had Claiborne withdraw his suit, with prejudice, without any explanation.
Cohen’s withdrawal mystified Dean Elson and everyone in the FBI’s leadership who scrambled to learn why Cohen had abandoned a solid legal action, pressing agents to canvass any and all informants. At first, no one could answer, though by the end of the month one agent was told that Cohen felt he’d achieved enough simply by filing the suit.
“I embarrassed the phone company and the FBI,” he reportedly said. “That’s all I wanted to do.”
Given the costs of hiring Claiborne, that was an expensive moral victory for Cohen.
But the bugs continued to plague the FBI. After Cohen withdrew his claim, Jack Shaw, chairman of Nevada’s Republican Party, accused the Democrat-run federal government of spying on “a large number of our state’s prominent and most respected citizens in the gaming industry.”
Shaw, picking up Laxalt’s earlier criticisms, did what Cohen and Claiborne had not.
“The reports that we Republicans got were that it was the FBI,” he told the Las Vegas Sun.
“I don’t think he knew what the FBI was up to, but Governor Sawyer should be very concerned about this,” he continued. “We need to keep gambling in Nevada controlled by the state instead of the federal government.”
In November, Democratic Senator Howard Cannon got into the act, referring to Cohen’s wiretapping during John R. Reilly’s nomination hearing. Reilly, seeking a post on the Federal Trade Commission, was currently the head of the Executive Office for United States Attorneys in the Justice Department. This line of questioning did not produce any information embarrassing to the Bureau, but it did show that the matter was not going to be forgotten.
Other casino owners were not as magnanimous as Cohen. In February 1966, Edward Levinson and the Fremont Hotel filed for the second time a $6 million lawsuit against Central Telephone and four FBI employees, including Dean Elson, charging them with invading his privacy. Levinson had withdrawn a previously filed suit, believing that the Justice Department could pressure the IRS into ending its investigation into his taxes. When the IRS refused to call off its investigation, he refiled.
With Levinson represented by well-connected D.C. trial attorney Edward Bennett Williams, the case received national publicity, thanks to syndicate columnist Drew Pearson’s coverage. Cohen joined the suit, requesting $2 million for the FBI’s eavesdropping in his home, while Stardust executive John Drew’s wife filed for $1 million in damages. That September, the Central Telephone Company admitted that it had leased the wiretap lines to the FBI.
Seeking re-election that fall, Grant Sawyer publicly lambasted the FBI for placing a bug “in the bedroom” of Carl Cohen—apparently, it had a better ring than “gym/den.” Pearson’s coverage of the case earlier that year had reported that the Bureau had placed a bug in Carl and Frances’s actual bed, something that the FBI could not publicly deny without admitting that it had bugged his living room and gym.
In early 1968 the civil cases fizzled, and maybe coincidentally the federal government dismissed tax evasion indictments against Levinson and others at the Fremont and Riviera. Still, the cases were heralded as a “major embarrassment” for the FBI, and the first indication of just how widespread federal eavesdropping had become. And a major part of the story started with Carl and Frances Cohen’s apartment at the Sands.
The continuing strain of the federal investigation, as well as Cohen’s long-standing heart trouble, may have contributed to his diminishing role at the Sands. He had already ceded the role of casino manager to Sandy Waterman, who had come to the Sands via Sinatra’s Cal-Neva, but still monitored the daily counts. In the summer of 1964, he began to defer to Waterman and others on matters of procedure.
In that year, he spent increasingly long periods away from the Sands, living at health spas in Miami and North Jersey for extended periods, ostensibly to lose weight. Some of his travels, though, were on behalf of the casino; he attended a Palms Springs golf tournament, likely recruiting gamblers, and traveled with Entratter to New York in the fall to seek additional funding for the in-progress tower expansion. He made several trips to Los Angeles, probably to speak with Doc Stacher, who had been indicted on tax evasion charges the year before and would, the following year, be deported to Israel, effectively ending his influence at the Sands.
Stacher’s tax suit ensnared the Sands. In September 1963, just as Cohen was about to file his lawsuit against Central Telephone, United States District Judge Thurmond Clarke ruled that, as they had sufficient grounds to fear possible self-incrimination, six Las Vegas casino figures were within their rights to assert the Fifth Amendment before a Los Angeles grand jury investigating Stacher. Among the four were Cohen, Sands treasurer Aaron Weisburg, and Charles Kandel and Leo Durr, also casino employees.
A great deal had changed since December 1962 when, on the Sands’ tenth anniversary, Entratter was re-appointed as president and chairman of the board, Cohen was promoted to executive vice president, and Frank Sinatra was made a vice president.
While Cohen and the others managed to avoid being ensnared in the Stacher trial, they certainly felt the government’s pressure. They had made the Sands into the most successful casino in Las Vegas. But Las Vegas was changing, and neither Entratter nor Cohen were getting any younger. Even with a modern expansion, the Sands was a step behind the competition. Turmoil in the behind-the-scenes ownership sparked by Stacher’s departure only exacerbated problems. It seemed likely, as 1966 began, that Cohen, Entratter, or both might leave.
No one, though, could have predicted what was about to happen to the Sands or Las Vegas.