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The writer was blowing through an awful lot of money, the boys in the pit saw. It wasn’t unusual for customers to lose big, but the writer was losing so outrageously that it became a topic of conversation in the dealer’s lounge.
“Writing must pay a lot better than dealing,” was the consensus.
But it didn’t. At least not for this writer, not yet.
Mario Puzo had loved gambling since he was a kid. Growing up poor, to an immigrant Italian family in Hell’s Kitchen, New York, he was introduced to the allure by Christmastime card games. He later recalled cheating his brothers “with childish simple-mindedness,” dealing himself the ace of spades from the bottom of the deck to win their Christmas envelopes. He didn’t do it for gain (Mario would buy them presents with the money), but because he had to win.
For Puzo, gambling was a mystical experience.
“What non-gamblers do not know is the feeling of virtue when the dice roll as one commands, he later wrote. “And that omniscient goodness when the card you need rises to the top of the deck to greet your delighted yet confident eyes. It is as close as I have ever come to a religious feeling. Or to being a wonder-struck child.”
Puzo graduated to double-dealing poker to the rough crowd that congregated in his neighborhood streets. His first exposure to Nevada gambling came in 1939 when, as a teenager doing a stint in a Lovelock, Nevada Civilian Conservation Corps camp, he lost his $23 bankroll in Reno. After catching sleep on a backroom table reserved for bust-outs like himself, he caught a ride back to Lovelock on a freight car.
“No money in my pockets, no worries in my head,” he later reminisced.
Following his World War II military service, Puzo took a job as a file clerk in the New York Veterans Administration, where fellow clerk Salvatore “Sally Rags” Ragusin introduced the aspiring writer to the sports and horse-betting demimonde. After a few gambling adventures together, the two went their separate ways, as Sally Rags pursued a career as a professional sports bettor and Puzo graduated from writing for pulp magazines to publishing two critically acclaimed but slow-selling novels.
Frustrated by the commercial failure of 1965’s The Fortunate Pilgrim, a highly personal tale of an Italian immigrant family in pre-war Hell’s Kitchen, Puzo agreed to write a novel about organized crime, one that would sell a lot of copies, even if it wasn’t great literature.
“I was forty-five years old and tired of being an artist,” he later wrote of his decision. “Besides, I owed $20,000 to relatives, finance companies, banks, and assorted bookmakers and shylocks.”
Hearing that his onetime friend was now a writer, Rags reconnected with Puzo, convincing him to take a Las Vegas gambling trip over New Year’s Eve 1967/68 to get color for his in-progress novel, which touched on Las Vegas. Rags, who was booked at a sold-out Caesars Palace, used his connections to get Puzo a room at the Sands. The writer was impressed, but Rags was apologetic.
“I’m sorry that’s the best I can do, but it’s a busy weekend,” he confessed. “The place has really gone downhill in the past year—me and my friends never stay there anymore. But it was the only place with rooms available.
That “Gambler’s Halloween” (as Puzo termed New Year’s in Las Vegas), Rags and his friends were at Caesars Palace.
“A few years ago, this would have been at the Sands,” he told Puzo. “We used to joke that if the Sands burned down on New Year’s Eve, J. Edgar Hoover would have to lay off half the FBI.”
Puzo got his color for The Godfather, and a profile of Rags for the February 25, 1968 New York Times Sunday Magazine to boot, but that was not his only trip to Las Vegas. He spent a great deal of time at the Sands, losing badly at roulette and vacuuming up all manner of mob stories for his novel (which he wrote entirely from “research” rather than personal experience with the Mafia).
An earlier stay overlapped with that of David Janssen, then at the height of his fame, playing Richard Kimble in The Fugitive. The television star was drunk, playing blackjack poorly, and causing trouble. Pit boss Ed Walters put a call into Carl Cohen, as everyone did when a situation demanded delicacy.
“Eddie,” Cohen told Walters when he arrived, “when I get through with him, he’ll think he won an award.”
Cohen went over to Janssen, conversed with him sotto voce. Janssen and his gofer got up from the table.
“Eddie, we’re going to get something to eat,” he called to Walters.
“Carl, that’s unbelievable,” Walters said to his boss. “He was screaming at everyone who tried to calm him down.”
“Well, sometimes you gotta be nice, sometimes you gotta be...not so nice.”
“But what did you say to him?”
Cohen smiled at the small knot of casino personnel that had gathered.
“I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.”
Cohen’s finesse of Janssen was, naturally, the dealer’s gossip for the next few days. One roulette dealer excitedly told the tale to Puzo, still losing happily. He was already soaking up plenty of details for the book—he’d learned about “Superman,” a well-endowed Havana performer, from a dealer who’d worked for Lansky there, and plenty of other anecdotes, legends, and just-barely-believable stories that brought life to his story of a mob dynasty.
Puzo, of course, put Cohen’s words in the mouth of his Don Vito Corleone, the mob godfather modeled at least partially on Carlo Gambino, who was himself familiar with the Sands. He’d come out to check on his investment but was spooked by the phones. When someone in his suite picked up their extension, a light went on the phone in his room. Was someone listening in? He and his bodyguards were moved to the 6th Street home of a pit boss, who got to stay in the Sands suite for his troubles.
All of those great stories didn’t change the fact that Puzo was $17,000 in the hole, and Carl Cohen was not going to let him return to New York without making good on his losses. Playing roulette for six to eight hours a stretch, Puzo quickly blew through his bankroll. Hearing that he was under contract to write a surefire best-seller, Jack Entratter himself authorized extending him credit. But, as Puzo kept losing and word got to the Sands that he wasn’t exactly careful with his money (he’d run through the first $100,000 of his $410,000 advance in three months), Cohen decided that enough was enough.
Producer Bob Evans, a Sands gambler and friend, came to the rescue, paying off Puzo’s marker so that the writer could finally leave Las Vegas. The price was that Paramount got the rights to make a Godfather movie for much less than Puzo could have held out for.
“I needed the cash,” Puzo later wrote. “Let me say now that the fault was mine. But I never held it against Paramount that they got The Godfather so cheap.”
After he had made his first million from The Godfather, Puzo returned to Las Vegas. In November 1969, when Puzo’s book had already climbed the best seller list, gossip columnist Earl Wilson included an item about him. Puzo, he said, “a dedicated gambler who loses $ by the buckets, is writing his next novel about Las Vegas. It’s a subject he knows very well.”
Puzo had already written about Las Vegas—before The Godfather’s release, he wrote a gambling guide for the Christmas issue of Holiday magazine—but the Las Vegas novel never happened. He did, in 1976, publish a non-fiction book, Inside Las Vegas, that delved into the history and current set-up of the gambling town. It was Puzo’s love letter to the city.
By the time Inside Las Vegas came out, Puzo said he had stopped gambling. But he admitted that he was as hooked as anyone else, albeit on a smaller scale. He wasn’t the kind of guy to win $100,000 and then lose it all. Those men, he said, were almost affectionately known as degenerate gamblers.
“But in my very worst days I was only a mildly degenerate gambler which gives me an understanding, I think, of the syndrome,” he wrote. “It’s not that you want to lose what you have won. It’s just that you cannot believe it’s possible to lose. When winning you are convinced God loves you.”
Puzo stopped gambling, he confessed, because he’d been cut off by every casino in town.
“I hereby affirm and swear,” he wrote, “that I owe a fortune in markers to the casinos, every penny of which they won fair and square.... But the day they cut off my credit and made me pay cash for chips was the day I broke my gambling habit.”
The conclusion of his article about Sally Rags was, perhaps, Puzo’s elegy to the fleeting success that is all the best any gambler can hope for.
“Sally Rags, expert gambler though he be, sweet guy and all, was never going to find his long-sought-for ‘middle,” he wrote. “Like everyone else, he would have to settle for a small and temporary edge.”
What was true for gamblers was true for casinos. By the early 1970s, it was clear that the Sands, which ten years earlier had seemed destined to rule Las Vegas forever, had only enjoyed a small and temporary edge.
***
HOWARD HUGHES HAD COME to Las Vegas to get far from the madding crowd, but he also wanted to be an emperor. He could twist governors, senators, perhaps even presidents to his will. And at first he seemed to get his way: Frank Sinatra left the Sands almost immediately, though he remained an irksome presence down the street at Caesars Palace. He was able to buy a major chunk of Nevada’s gaming industry without having to make an appearance in front of the Gaming Commission—the presence of his proxies and a personal phone call with Governor Paul Laxalt were enough to waive that requirement. Just before Sinatra’s teeth met Carl Cohen’s fist, Hughes announced plans to build a massive, space-age airport to the west of town that would accommodate the coming age of supersonic jumbo jets. Las Vegas would become the new gateway to the entire American Southwest. For a man of Hughes’ wealth, few things were impossible.
I will remake you in my image, Hughes whispered to Las Vegas, and all I ask is your devotion.
But Hughes wasn’t the only one with big plans in Las Vegas. Kirk Kerkorian, who had worked his way up from very little to amass a fortune in aviation, was taking a third look at the casino business. He’d invested a bit in the New Frontier and lost it all in 1955. A few years after that, Jay Sarno approached him with plans to build Caesars Palace on a piece of land Kerkorian owned across from the Flamingo. After seeing how well Caesars was doing, Kerkorian decided that he wanted to own the casino, not the land.
In 1967, Kerkorian started construction on the International, a resort that shifted the paradigm of casinos in Las Vegas. Earlier hotels had been a cluster of mostly low-rise buildings with, in later years, towers attached (the Riviera, which was a high rise from day one, is an outlier). Architect Martin Stern, Jr., fresh off planning the Sands’ expansion, sketched a monstrous high rise with 1,500 rooms in three wings, radiating in a Y-shape from a central shaft. It would feature fast service and a 2,000-seat showroom that would showcase artists who had not played Las Vegas before. The casino, showroom, and restaurants were, as in the Sands redesign, housed in a low, wide building that served as the tower’s base. This still serves as the basic model for casino design to this day.
Hughes naturally took umbrage. He was the visionary, he was the one taking Las Vegas from sawdust to spacecraft. For the man who set air speed records to be upstaged by a mere grubstaker—this was humiliating.
Unable to buy or scare Kerkorian off, Hughes tried to starve him out. And the Sands was his weapon of choice.
On January 25, 1968, he announced that he was on the verge of reinventing the Sands, which would eclipse in every possible way Kerkorian’s hotel.
The $150 million, 4,000-room addition would make the Sands—by far—the world’s largest resort hotel. The International was poised to take that honor, but the New Sands, at 4,777 rooms, would be over triple its size. In a personally handwritten note disseminated by his staff, Hughes detailed the particulars. The expansion, which would be “a complete city within itself,” would have a 24-hour shopping mall on one massive floor, and another floor with a range of family recreation like the world’s largest bowling alley, a similarly sized billiards and pool facility, an ice skating rink, and rooms for chess, bridge, skeeball, and table tennis. A movie theater would be “equipped with projection equipment and sound equipment so modern it has not even been shown yet to the public in literature or trade publications.” The bowling and pool tables would be similarly advanced. The resort would also have indoor and night-time golf facilities based on electronically calibrated shots—basically Golden Tee, twenty-some years early.
“I should not have devoted so much time to these novelties which will soon be commonplace,” Hughes reassured his subjects, “but I wanted to make it clear that this is an ambitious undertaking—aimed at providing the most complete vacation and pleasure complex anywhere in the world.
“The resort, so carefully planned and magnificently designed, that any guest will simply have to make a supreme effort if he wants to be bored, whether he is a sophisticated VIP of Jet-Set type, or one of the children of a family spending their vacation with us.”
All of this would be housed in multiple buildings, constructed from a corrosion-resistant steel alloy, which would enable it to rise as high as 50 stories, dwarfing its surroundings. It would be adjacent to the existing Sands and visually different.
“They are not the same architecture as the present buildings, but do not result in an unpleasant conflict,” Hughes claimed.
With the Sands turning away thousands of people a month, and a survey indicating that the Sands brand was well known across the world, Hughes believed that the hotel, which would also include convention facilities, would easily fill up. It would utilize technology his team was already researching that would allow guests to check in electronically and use cards, rather than keys, to access their rooms.
“I maintain,” Hughes concluded, “a hotel can be big and still keep the degree of service and luxurious treatment which has made Las Vegas famous. Anyway, this is the objective of all our careful planning.”
Las Vegans were, of course, impressed, but soon began to ask what was in it for them. Contractor R. C. Johnson estimated that it would take 3,000 men to build such a project over a period of 18 months, bringing substantial paychecks to town. Johnson, who had been the contractor for the Sands tower, thought that as much as $75 million would be spent on labor.
Within a few days, Al Freeman reported that dozens of requests for comment, many of them from overseas, had come into his Sands office. The Clark County School District, in the process of requesting a bond issue to finance new school construction, began fretting that, should work on the Sands begin, it would not have sufficient space to accommodate the children of construction workers and hotel employees. School Superintendent James Mason estimated that the Sands project alone might translate into over 23,000 new students who would require 19 new schools.
By April, when Hughes was pushing for state approval to buy the Stardust and Castaways, he declared that he intended to also spend $400,000 modernizing the Desert Inn’s rooms and $4 million on a new entertainment venue at the Frontier.
The Department of Justice ultimately rejected Hughes’ purchase of the Stardust on antitrust grounds, though Hughes was so busy in the spring and summer of 1968 that he might not have been too bothered. First came a frenzied effort to halt the Atomic Energy Commission’s 1.3 megaton nuclear test—code-named Boxcar—at the Nevada Test Site. Hughes offered to personally pay the costs of relocating all atomic testing to Alaska, and even tasked Maheu with delivering $1 million to President Lyndon Johnson as an inducement to stop the test. Then came an abortive attempt to buy the ABC television network.
In the end, the New Sands was to prove just as quixotic as Hughes’ attempts to buy the Stardust, stop atomic testing, build a supersonic jetport, or buy a television network. Perhaps more so, since outside Hughes’ handwritten announcement, no actual work on the $150 million project was ever done.
But even without moving a spade of dirt, the New Sands’ true purpose might have been accomplished. The announcement stole the thunder of the International’s February groundbreaking, making the black-tie affair, in which Nevada Senators Howard Cannon and Alan Bible joined Kerkorian in ceremonially turning earth after a fireworks show, sixth-page news. The Sands announcement also made it more difficult for Kerkorian to raise capital, although it didn’t stop the International from continuing.
Hughes abandoned the New Sands by late 1968, setting his sights instead on buying the incomplete Landmark, a boondoggle that had languished, nearly complete but unopened, for years. The tower, almost as tall as the International, was catty-corner to Kerkorian’s hotel. Hughes bought the Landmark in early 1969 (the Justice Department didn’t object to Hughes buying an unopened casino with three dozen creditors), though its opening within days of the International’s was a debacle.
The Sands, however, soldiered on.
***
AS THE HUGHES EMPIRE solidified its hold on the Sands, there were fewer high rollers to be found, but money continued to flow through the casino at a respectable but not remarkable rate. Once the Hughes team had fastened its new controls atop the Sands casino, it seemed content. The Copa lost one of its longtime stars when, in December 1969, Dean Martin agreed to leave the Sands for the Riviera, where he received a large ownership share, the title of entertainment consultant, and a $200,000 per week salary. In a few years Sammy Davis, Jr. would depart for Caesars Palace, leaving the Copa without a single member of Sinatra’s Clan to perform.
It was a new Las Vegas, one where Elvis Presley—practically laughed out of town after an uninspiring April 1956 stint at the New Frontier—now reigned. While Governor Laxalt and the Chamber of Commerce were over the moon with the newfound respectability Hughes and others were bringing to Las Vegas, there were some dissenting voices.
As early as January 1968, journalist and commentator Bob Considine wrote with some misgivings about the changes in Las Vegas. He’d been away for four or five years, but found Las Vegas remarkably different. Previously, the second floor of a hotel was its top floor. Now, he was typing his “On the Line” syndicated column from the 18th floor of the Sands, and that wasn’t the highest spot on the Strip.
It was a taller town, but a quieter one. “The jingle-jangle,” Considine wrote, “seems much more muted than I remember it. Maybe they’re using softer nickels in the slot machines.” Whereas gambling once provided 80 percent of hotel income a few years back, Considine claimed it now only constituted half. That was an exaggeration (Strip casinos on average got more than 60 percent of their revenue from gaming well into the 1990s), but Considine was not wrong in saying that gambling was becoming less important for the Strip’s new bosses. And, make no mistake, it was a new class of boss calling the shots in Las Vegas.
“I have yet to see a broken nose, a cauliflower ear, or hear a ‘dese’ or even a ‘dem,’” Considine lamented. “Where did the Old Guard go? Back to Detroit? Cleveland? Miami? Where they went, they went away richer.”
Las Vegas was now a great convention town, where guests were just as likely to go fishing on Lake Mead as gamble the night away. Much had been gained, to the delight of the Chamber of Commerce, but, Considine felt, much had been lost.
“I miss the days,” he wrote, “when the place was filled with newsmen covering the big atomic bang ups of Yucca Flat....the all-night vigils in the often freezing desert...the first thread of dawn...the countdown by someone with the voice of God...the bracing of yourself...then the whole world, weird and shaking in scalding lightning and thunder.”
That was the Las Vegas that Al Freeman had done as much as anyone to create—one where the detonation of a weapon of mass destruction was something to cherish, something to get nostalgic about over a decade later (above-ground tests ended in 1962, though underground testing continued for another three decades). And, as early as January 1968—scarcely three months after Cohen’s right to Sinatra’s mouth ended an era in Las Vegas, just a half-year after Hughes bought the Sands—it was gone, forever.
Considine was right in perceiving a shift in the class of casino managers; the Sands would get a new leader who, three years earlier, might not have been hired as a host. In May 1969, General Nigro was promoted to serve as Maheu’s deputy. To replace Nigro at the Sands, Maheu hired Joseph Aspero, of Worcester, Massachusetts. Aspero, who had a law degree from Boston University, had served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives before being elected five times as a member of the Worcester County Commission.
Aspero had never worked in the hospitality industry in any capacity. Still, he thought that his move to Las Vegas, to run one of the city’s most storied casinos, was an interesting challenge not that far out of his wheelhouse.
“I am still dealing with people and finances,” he said, “which is what I have always done.”
Casino executives had always come from diverse backgrounds, but it is hard to imagine what in Aspero’s previous career had prepared him to manage the Sands. His biggest qualification seems to have been that his wife Lena and General Nigro’s wife, Ann, were sisters. Nigro himself would leave the Hughes organization in early 1970 to head Del Webb’s Nevada casinos, which at the time included the Mint, Sahara, and Thunderbird in Las Vegas and the Sahara Tahoe.
The post of Sands president had always been something of a figurehead. Freedman was a glorified greeter who, as years went on, was increasingly distant from decision making, and Entratter would never question Cohen’s dominance of the casino or Doc Stacher’s behind-the-scenes decision-making. But Jack Entratter and Carl Cohen, with their decades of experience, were hardly going to report to Aspero as subordinates, so their responsibilities evolved. Entratter was ostensibly in charge of entertainment for all Hughes resorts, and Cohen in charge of all casino gaming. Both continued to live at the Sands and retained their vice presidencies at the hotel but were far less involved.
In the summer of 1970, Las Vegas seemed to be settling into a routine. Hughes had bought six casinos, a television station, two small airports, and plenty of real estate, but didn’t seem to be buying more. No visible progress had been made on the space-age supersonic terminal or the ambitious New Sands (nor would any progress be made). Bob Maheu was the Hughes organization’s most visible representative, with Nigro taking a prominent role alongside him.
That all changed on November 25, the night before Thanksgiving. Just as suddenly as he had arrived, Howard Hughes left Las Vegas. And, despite the immense power Hughes held, no one outside his inner circle had any idea he was gone at first. Maheu was concerned that he had been kidnapped. He had become increasingly distant from Hughes over the preceding months, but had received no precise indication that he was on the outs with “the Man.”
A week later, the Las Vegas Sun reported that Hughes had “vanished.” With Hughes’ departure came an immediate power shift in his Las Vegas operations. Chester Davis and Bill Gay, two Hughes executives who Howard had apparently empowered to speak for him, fired Maheu. They ensconced themselves on the top floor of the Sands’ tower and began moving accountants into the Hughes casino cages to assume control of the money and files. Maheu counterattacked with a restraining order barring the Davis/Gay faction from the casinos, which was answered by a restraining order barring Maheu and his loyalists from the casinos.
At 1 a.m. on the morning of December 7, Nevada Governor Paul Laxalt was summoned to a Sands penthouse suite where he, Clark County District Attorney George Franklin, Jr., and Gaming Commission Chairman Frank Johnson were met by Bill Gay. Gay then produced a phone. On the other end was Howard Hughes, safe and sound in the Bahamas.
“I’m feeling fine,” he assured Governor Laxalt, confirming that he did indeed sign the paperwork authorizing Maheu’s ouster.
“What’s all the fuss?” he jokingly asked the governor. “All I’m trying to do is fire a couple of guys and go on vacation.”
While litigation between Hughes and Maheu would drag on for several years, it was now settled: Maheu was out.
When the dust settled, Davis and Gay had devised a series of interlocking corporate umbrellas that put Hughes’ Nevada properties under the control of Sands, Inc. Hotel Properties, Inc., and Harolds Club, Inc. (Hughes had recently bought the storied Reno gambling hall). Although the Sands had its own shell company, Sands, Inc., it remained under the control of the Houston-based Hughes Tool Company. Carl Cohen became a vice president and director of Hotel Properties Inc., removing him further from the Sands.
The new management structure was anything but stable. In July 1971, Al Freeman denied reports of a mass exodus from the Sands, even as former FBI agent Richard Danner (who had run the agency’s Miami field office and worked on Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign before moving to the Hughes organization, where he would be a conduit to the president) had taken over as general manager of the Sands. Though Bucky Harris was stepping down as casino manager to resume his role as credit manager, Freeman insisted that General Charles Baron, a longtime gambling figure who served as a casino greeter, had not quit or been forced out.
Indeed, through the turmoil of the Hughes years, elements of the old guard remained at the Sands, though some moved on. Sandy Waterman relocated to Caesars Palace where, in September 1970, he pulled a gun on an irate Frank Sinatra, who had soured on his agreement to perform at the resort and was angry at Waterman for, predictably, limiting his credit. Jack Entratter himself was rumored to be on the verge of leaving, maybe to buy a restaurant in Hollywood, maybe to focus full-time on talent management (he had personally managed Red Skelton for years), maybe to run another casino. Entratter’s frustrations became an open secret. Losing Sinatra was, at worst, a mixed blessing. But the departures of Dean Martin and many others was unambiguously bad. Entratter had built the Sands on its entertainment. It was now losing on that front.
Working for Frank Costello and later Doc Stacher, Entratter had become accustomed to a large measure of autonomy in his business. Entratter understood that as long as he kept the Sands in the public eye and gamblers filled the casino to see his performers, he had relatively free rein to do as he pleased. He could feel he’d honestly earned the lavish apartment he’d built for himself. Indeed, no one could begrudge it to him, since, in the fifteen years he’d been in charge of the Copa Room, he was the greatest entertainment director in Las Vegas, perhaps in all the country. Entratter enjoyed exceptional privileges, but he delivered exceptional results.
Under Hughes, Entratter found his autonomy eroded, bit by bit. Selling out to the billionaire didn’t make him sad—at the time of the sale he was the owner (on paper at least) of 12 percent of the hotel, and he got a corresponding share of the $15 million sale price. The nearly $2 million he received would, in the late 1960s, be enough to set him up for a comfortable retirement, with plenty left over for his grandchildren. He didn’t have to work another day in his life.
But a man’s work was his life (particularly a man like Entratter, who had been in show business since his teens), and Entratter wasn’t happy sitting back while someone else ran the Copa, particularly since the entertainment empire he’d built up over the preceding 15 years was crumbling.
At the same time, even the accountants couldn’t deny that business at the Sands was down. With five casinos, Hughes’ people should have had entertainment locked up. Instead, they’d lost stars to Caesars Palace, which had taken the Sands’ crown as show capital of Las Vegas, the Riviera, and other casinos. So, in February 1971, the Hughes machine agreed to return to Entratter his duties as chief Copa booker. He would be rubbing shoulders with performers once again. Still, some felt that it was just a matter of times before Entratter left.
But Jack Entratter never left the Sands. On Tuesday, March 9, 1971, he was stricken at the hotel by what was at first believed to be a minor stroke. He was taken to Sunrise Hospital, where his local physician, John Fiore, was soon supplemented by New York’s William Hitzig and Martin Levy of Beverly Hills, who were flown in to attend to Entratter, who was now suffering from a cerebral hemorrhage and related complications. On Thursday, March 11, he died.
Variety lamented his death as severing one of the last links between the early days of Las Vegas and “its present corporate image,” and lauded Entratter’s generosity to anyone who could do the Sands a good turn. Entratter had made the Sands the top spot in Las Vegas for entertainers, and thus the top spot for the general public and gamblers.
Entratter’s Las Vegas funeral brought the Sands’ old guard out in force. Pallbearers included Carl Cohen, Charles Turner, and Al Freeman of the hotel as well as Sun publisher Hank Greenspun. The list of honorary pallbearers bridged Las Vegas power brokers like Parry Thomas and Harry Claiborne, Sands stalwarts (Charles Baron, Charles Kandel, and Bucky Harris), and entertainment stars such as Joey Bishop, Jerry Lewis, Don Adams, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Louis Prima. Dean Martin, though he was now a Riviera executive, was credited as an honorary pallbearer. Frank Sinatra was not. Following a memorial service as Temple Beth Sholom (where Entratter had been a board member and president), Entratter’s body was returned to New York City where, after a Manhattan memorial service, it was interred alongside that of his late wife Dorothy in Knollwood Park.
Without Entratter, life at the Sands went on, uneasily. In January 1972, after a Los Angeles television station broadcast a report that Cohen was lining himself up to be the new owner of the Sands, the hotel called a press conference (to which only print media reporters were invited) in which Cohen and Richard Danner took turns issuing denials.
“I don’t intend to buy the Sands or any hotel,” Cohen insisted. “There are no plans at all to sell the Sands that I know of. And I plan to stay here.”
“There have not been any plans, even remotely for the future, to sell any properties,” Danner added. Indeed, Hughes was notorious for not selling anything he bought. “The man who owns them says, ‘No dice.’”
When asked if The Man himself had in fact weighed in, Danner backtracked, saying that the Hughes Tool Company Board of Directors, speaking for Hughes himself, was behind the statement.
Cohen professed to be slightly embarrassed at the claims that he was unhappy at the Sands, but it was obvious that both Cohen and the Sands were losing ground. Once, the Sands had been on the cutting edge of Las Vegas entertainment. Now, the hotel grabbed headlines for hosting a party that honored the 55th anniversary of Jimmy Durante’s show business career. It was a wonderful opportunity to pay tribute to the 79-year-old Durante, but hardly in tune with current musical tastes. In the age of the Osmonds, the Jackson Five, and Elton John, the Sands was two generations behind.
The Sands suffered another blow in August 1972 when Al Freeman died in his sleep, the victim of a heart attack. Freeman’s health had been precarious since his wartime service (for which he had received five battle stars, a Legion of Merit, three clusters, and a Purple Heart). He was credited for his instrumental role in selling both the Sands and Las Vegas. He had chaired the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce’s promotion committee from 1958 to 1964 and was responsible for the rollout of national advertisements touting the city as a convention destination.
Red Skelton, Danny Thomas, Sonny King, and Sammy Davis, Jr. eulogized Freeman at his funeral, and he was credited for helping to put Sinatra’s Clan (later known as the Rat Pack) together in the Copa. More than ever, it was clear that an era had ended. In his obituary, Review-Journal columnist Don Digilio fondly recalled Freeman’s constant generosity to the press and even regular tourists, crediting him with doing more than he realized to improve others’ lives. He couldn’t help but contrast the current state of the Sands with its glory years.
“There is word out that the Sands Hotel is concerned about losing their big name stars,” Digilio wrote. “Martin is gone. Sinatra quit them, Sammy Davis is leaving, and a few other top flight entertainers are off to other hotels. The Sands Hotel shouldn’t worry about that. They lost their biggest attraction Tuesday when they found Al Freeman dead in his apartment.”
The last of the holdovers from the glory years, Carl Cohen, remained. He’d been rumored to be leaving the Sands for over a decade now, but he professed to be as happy as ever under the Hughes regime, though he was taking more time off to play golf and try to lose weight with Duke University’s rice diet, an aggressive in-patient program designed to combat hypertension. But Freeman’s death, when added to the mounting frustrations of life under Hughes, perhaps pushed Cohen to make a decision.
On January 4, 1973, Cohen announced that he was resigning his position with the Sands and the Hughes organization, effective immediately. He took pains to take the high road.
“We parted the best of friends,” he explained to reporters, “and I plan to take a long rest before I get back into business.”
“Is it true you and Danny Thomas are buying the Sands?”
“No.”
“Are you retiring?”
“I regret leaving the Sands, but I feel the time is right for me to rest a while, and then I’ll be back in business,” Cohen responded. When asked what that business would be, he merely shrugged.
Cohen wasn’t on the sidelines for long. Four months later, he was named senior vice president of the MGM Grand, a massive casino hotel Kirk Kerkorian, who had sold the International to Hilton Hotels, was building. Perhaps not so coincidentally, he would be joining Al Benedict and Bernie Rothkopf, two other Hughes refugees. Cohen would have the number two position in the resort, with much more autonomy than he’d had with Hughes. The behemoth opened that December, with 2,100 rooms, a massive casino, two showrooms, a host of restaurants, and, a familiar name as its opening headliner: Dean Martin.
Two decades in, the Sands was at a crossroads. The hotel had known success and sadness. It remained to be seen whether the Sands could reclaim its former glory.