“You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”
In 1971, when Frank Rosenthal went to work at the Stardust, the hotel-casino was for sale. “It was owned by the Recrion Corporation, which also owned the Fremont,” said Dick Odessky, who was the director of public relations at the Stardust, “and the big shareholders were looking to sell it. They’d run the price of the stock way up, and they were all looking to get out. But the Securities and Exchange Commission had gotten suspicious and forced them to sign a consent decree not to sell their shares.
“It was like sitting there with a great big steak and not being able to eat it. If anybody tried to sell stock he would have been in big trouble with the court. So the only way the shareholders could get their money out was to sell the entire company.
“Del Coleman [the chairman of Recrion] represented the big investors, and there was tremendous pressure on him to sell out and make a killing.
“Even after Al Sachs took over as president of the Stardust, the pressure to sell the company continued. And right around this time, Allen Glick came along.”
Allen Glick was tougher than he looked. In 1974, when the thirty-one-year-old San Diego real estate developer suddenly became the second-biggest casino operator in Las Vegas history, many of the state’s gaming regulators and casino owners were astounded. Glick’s impact on the town until then had been minimal. He had arrived in Las Vegas only a year earlier, when he and three partners obtained a $3 million loan to develop a parking lot for recreational vans on the site of the bankrupt Hacienda Hotel casino at the low-rent southern end of the the Strip.
Glick’s look and style—he was short, balding, and owlish—belied his tenacity. Few around him knew that the youthful, studiously mild-mannered Glick—who spoke so softly that he was sometimes barely audible—had spent two years hanging out of a Huey helicopter in Vietnam, where he won a Bronze Star.
“Vietnam taught me that life was short,” said Glick. “I remember writing to my brother-in-law that I didn’t think I was coming back. So when I did get back, I decided I didn’t want to do what I didn’t want to do. First, I really didn’t want to be a lawyer. I had a bachelor’s from Ohio State and a law degree from Case Western Reserve, but the thing I knew was that I didn’t want to practice law. Second, I wanted to live in San Diego instead of Pittsburgh, where I was raised. A friend of my sister’s got me a job doing some legal work for American Housing, the largest multifamily builder in San Diego, and Kathy and the kids and I drove out there. That started my education in real estate.
“By February of 1971, after about a year at American Housing, I teamed up with Denny Wittman, a nice, wild guy, in a real estate development that involved large tracts of land and commercial building.
“I was first introduced to Las Vegas in 1972. Denny Wittman had heard there was a sixty-acre site at the southern end of the Strip that could make a great mobile home park. The only problem with the property was that the bankrupt Hacienda Hotel was sitting on it and the casino had three IRS tax liens against it. I don’t know why, but I just had an idea that instead of tearing everything down for a parking lot, maybe we could raise the money and revive the hotel and casino. But Denny Wittman didn’t want to invest in a casino. He was a religious guy. He had a problem with it, so he begged out.
“At the time I personally had twenty-one thousand dollars to my name, but with smoke and mirrors and Denny helping us inflate the value of everything our little development corporation owned, we were able to raise the three million dollars from the First American Bank of Tennessee, where we had been doing business before and had friends.
“I had to get a Nevada Gaming Commission license as the owner of a Las Vegas casino, and there I was, at twenty-nine or thirty, chairman of a Las Vegas casino. Within a day, everyone in town had a deal for me.
“About five months later, Chris Caramanis, who ran an air charter service the hotels used, said that the King’s Castle in Lake Tahoe was also in bankruptcy, having been foreclosed by the Teamster pension fund, and he suggested we raise the money and take over King’s Castle the way we did the Hacienda.
“That was how I met Al Baron, the assets manager for the Central States Teamster Pension Fund. Chris introduced me to him. I thought I was going to meet a banker type in charge of the assets of a multibillion-dollar pension fund. Instead, I meet this gruff, cigar-chomping guy who looks at me and says, ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ Al was very annoyed at the time because a deal that had been put in place to take the bankrupt King’s Castle off the Teamsters’ hands had just fallen apart.
“When he was told that I had raised the cash to buy the Hacienda, he asked, ‘Do you have any money?’
“I said, ‘No, but I might be able to borrow it.’
“Baron was so anxious to get the bankrupt King’s Castle off the Teamsters’ books that he said he would be back through Las Vegas in two weeks and I should submit a proposal.
“When he came back, I gave him the proposal and he got angry. ‘I’ve got no time to read this,’ he said. All he wanted was for me to raise the money for a mortgage and get the Teamsters out.
“Anyway, the deal never went through, but shortly after, I got involved in developing a large government office complex in Austin, Texas, that would house Internal Revenue, congressional offices, and various government agencies. This was a larger deal than we could finance with our usual bank loans, so I thought, let me call Al Baron. I called him three times, left messages, and he never called me back. Finally, after four days, his secretary said that I shouldn’t bother calling him again.
“I said fine, but I wanted him to know that the government had contacted me and I needed to talk to him. He called back in three seconds. When I told him that I had been contacted by the government about developing a huge government building complex, he started cursing me up and down. He used every foul word and image you could imagine.
“But in between his cursing I must have gotten across that this was a federal government project and a great opportunity, because he finally said, ‘Okay, you sonofabitch, fuck, submit the loan package.’
“Baron and the Teamsters loved this government deal I had brought them because it was totally legitimate and because Denny Wittman, our Austin partners, and I did all the work, and the Teamsters were the government’s landlords.
“Then came the Recrion deal. I had heard that Recrion was for sale and that Morris Shenker, the owner of the Dunes, was in negotiation to buy the company from Del Coleman. It turned out that Shenker was offering Coleman only forty-two dollars a share. My accountants had gone through the numbers and realized that you could borrow whatever you needed to buy the Stardust and the Fremont and still have money left over to cover your costs.
“It was the deal of a lifetime. I immediately called Del Coleman in New York to set up a meeting. I grabbed the red-eye and met him in his town house on East Seventy-seventh Street first thing on a Friday morning. Del Coleman was a very sophisticated man, and I believe he was married or engaged to a famous model at the time.
“I told him I wanted to buy him out. I told him I already owned the Hacienda Hotel and casino and that my development company supported me in an offer which I knew was at least two dollars a share higher than Shenker had offered him. I said I needed some time to raise the money, but I was certain I would have no trouble doing so.
“Coleman said up front that he was already in negotiation with Morris Shenker. Actually, attorneys were typing up the papers at that very moment, but I didn’t know that. He said if I had money to put up he would be obligated to tell the shareholders, which meant I would be in a position to make a public offer.
“He said if I was serious I could have until noon Monday to come in with two million dollars in a nonrefundable cash payment, and he would give me a hundred and twenty days to raise the rest of the money. I agreed to the deal, but I gulped. I had to give Coleman two million dollars cash by noon Monday, and even if I could raise it, here it was Friday afternoon and the banks were closed over the weekend. I called Denny Wittman. I said I had to borrow two million dollars. He knew what was involved and he offered to let me use two five-hundred-thousand-dollar CDs our company had in the First American Bank in Nashville, Tennessee. He then said maybe I could get a million-dollar letter of credit from the same bank, where we had a very good relationship.
“I called Steven Neely, the bank president, and told him what I needed. ‘You’re crazy,’ he said. I told him it was the deal of a lifetime.
“‘If you’re serious, you gotta get down here tonight,’ Neely said. I hung up and called the airlines and found that there were no more flights heading anywhere near Nashville that would get me there in time.
“I took a car to Teterboro airport in New Jersey and chartered a Learjet to get me there. I had no money, but I gave the charter service a credit card, and thank God I had enough credit to cover the trip.
“When I landed in Nashville, Neely saw me get off the Lear and asked me where I got the plane, and I said a friend lent it to me. I didn’t want to say I had just melted my credit card. We went to his house and worked all night setting up the holdings and collateral for the letter of credit.
“Wittman flew in the next day. He pledged everything I needed, and the bank gave me the letter of credit, and it was all completed by Sunday morning. I flew back to New York.
“I called Coleman from the airport. ‘Del, I’ve got your money now and I don’t want to wait until Monday morning.’
“‘You’ve got two million dollars?’ he said.
“‘It’s in my briefcase,’ I said.
“I went over, we filed the escrow papers for the money, and Coleman said on Monday morning he would notify the SEC and stop trading in Recrion stock.
“I flew back to San Diego on Monday morning, got there before dawn, and began putting together lists of possible investors. I called Al Baron, because the Teamsters held the mortgages on the Stardust and Fremont, plus I knew they had liked the government office development I had brought them. I thought they might want to get involved in the package.
“When I told Al Baron what I had done and that I was now going to bid on the Recrion stock, he said, ‘Listen to me, I’m giving you the best advice you’ve ever had—walk away from this thing. Call the deal off. You have no idea what you’re doing. You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.’ He said there was no way he was going to get involved in the mess I was creating. Looking back, I realize he gave me all the red flags he could.
“Since the Teamsters looked bad, I had investment people try and find me other sources of money. One of the L.A. people came up with a guy named J. R. Simplot, an Idaho investor, who was interested. I went to meet him. He was very low key. He was wearing a two-hundred-dollar suit. He said he had some hotel interests and he would give me the money, except he wanted fifty-one percent of the deal.
“I had no idea who he was. When I got back to the office I called Kenny Solomon at the Valley Bank and asked him to check out somebody named Simplot. He said he didn’t have to check him out. He said Mr. Simplot could give me the sixty-two-point-seven million dollars just by writing a check on his personal account. Simplot was the largest potato grower in the United States, and there probably wasn’t a McDonald’s french fry that didn’t come through him.
“But I wasn’t interested in giving up control of the company. So I called Al Baron back and said that in the morning he was going to hear that I was a partner with J. R. Simplot and that we were going to buy out Recrion and take over the Teamsters’ interest in the Stardust and the Fremont.
“Baron said, ‘Don’t do anything until I call you back.’ He calls me back. He says, ‘Come to Chicago for a meeting.’
“‘Why should I?’ I said. ‘Are you going to give me the loan?’ He said he still didn’t know.
“The next day I flew to Chicago to the pension fund office, where I met Al Baron. ‘Now that you’re in the ball game,’ he said, ‘you’ve got to come up to bat.’ He then explained how the system worked.
“He said you had to know a pension fund trustee, because only trustees could make loan proposals. He said the trustees then turned the proposals over to the asset manager for due diligence, and then the applications went to an executive committee, which might or might not recommend, and then the proposal went to a vote of the full board.
“Baron then took me on a tour of the building and introduced me to Frank Ranney, who was coming back from lunch with Frank Balistrieri. Baron told me that Ranney was the Teamster trustee from Milwaukee and a member of the three-man executive committee that oversaw all loans west of the Mississippi, which meant Las Vegas.
“Baron said that Balistrieri could be my link to Frank Ranney. Balistrieri was a very quiet, very dapper man. He said he would be happy to help and the next time he was in Las Vegas we would meet.
“The next time I met Balistrieri he came into the Hacienda. We discussed the loan and the application package and he said he would help me. He told me that after I submitted the loan package in Chicago, I should drive over to Milwaukee, where I could meet his sons. I didn’t exactly know how or where Balistrieri fit in, but the things I didn’t want to think about I didn’t want to think about, and Baron had said Balistrieri was my primary link to Frank Ranney, the trustee and member of the executive committee pushing my loan.
“After I submitted the package I went to Milwaukee, where I met his two sons, John and Joseph. They were both attorneys. Balistrieri said that he would like his sons involved in the operation in some way. He said Joseph had helped him run dinner theaters and was very knowledgeable about entertainment and might serve that kind of function at the Stardust. I didn’t commit myself. I always said we could discuss it once I closed the deal on the place.
“When I got home I called Jerry Soloway. He’s an attorney with Jenner and Block, a firm I had used. I asked him to check on a guy named Frank Balistrieri. I told him what I knew and hung up. I was due at the offices of the Gaming Control Board. Shannon Bybee, one of the board members, had said he had a ‘funny feeling’ about my buying one of the largest companies in the state after having been there only one year, and asked if I would do him the favor of taking a lie detector test. My lawyer said it was uncalled for and unnecessary, and Bybee agreed, but he said he would sleep better if he knew I was totally clean. I knew I was clean, so I wound up taking the kind of two-hour test they use on capital crime cases, and I passed like a breeze. That’s what convinced Bybee and got me the gaming license I needed to be able to buy the place.
“A couple of days after taking the lie detector I get an emergency call from Jerry Soloway. He sounded hysterical. He wanted to make sure Frank Balistrieri was the right name. I said yes. He said, ‘What are you doing with him?’
“I told Jerry I had been out to dinner with him. That he had been to see me at the Hacienda. That I had been in restaurants with him. That I had been to his home, met his sons, been to their law firm.
“Soloway went crazy. He said I couldn’t be seen with Balistrieri. He said Frank Balistrieri was identified by the FBI as the Mafia boss of Milwaukee. He said my gaming license could be jeopardized with my just being seen talking to such a notorious organized-crime figure.
“I told Jerry he had to be wrong. I had met Balistrieri in the Teamster pension fund offices. He had just come back from lunch with Frank Ranney, one of the pension fund’s trustees.
“He said he didn’t care where I’d met Balistrieri, the man was the organized-crime boss of Milwaukee.
“I didn’t sleep very well that night. The first thing I thought was, what would have happened had Jerry told me this before I took the lie detector test? Then I remembered I had been talking to Balistrieri just about every day on the phone discussing the progress of the loan arrangements. I had also been seen with him all over the place.
“On the other hand, I didn’t feel there was anything I could do. What was I going to tell him? I know you’re the head of the Mafia in Milwaukee, so don’t help me get the loan? I was now very, very wary, but I felt I could maneuver it.
“The next time he called me, he was happy. He said we had gotten the approval of the executive committee for the sixty-two-point-seven-million-dollar purchasing loan, but Ranney had said there was a debate about the second part of the loan for sixty-five million dollars. Bill Presser, the Cleveland trustee, was resisting the second part of the loan. We needed the additional money to renovate and expand the Stardust.
“Balistrieri said he wanted to meet me in Chicago about the second part of the loan. I was terrified of being seen with him. But I wanted the loan application to go through. He said he wanted to meet me at the Hyatt Hotel near O’Hare Airport. I went. When I got to his room he said that the executive committee was now considering the second part of my loan—the first twenty-million-dollar installment to begin the renovations. The rest would come a little later, and that would be used to expand the Stardust and build a luxury guest tower. This had all been worked out and agreed to in principle, since the properties needed extensive work to stay competitive with the market.
“Bill Presser was still opposed, Balistrieri said, and there were only two weeks left to pass the entire loan package. I see now that he was building up the pressure.
“Then he reminded me about the promise I had made about his sons getting jobs with the new corporation, and I said that we’d work it out as soon as the deal went through. Balistrieri then asked me to go with him to Milwaukee and see his sons.
“I agreed. The next day we met in his sons’ law offices, and Balistrieri said he would like to have something formalized. Balistrieri then left the room and his sons, Joe and John, discussed an agreement, actually an option agreement, in which for twenty-five or thirty thousand dollars, I don’t even remember, they would have the right to buy fifty percent of the new company if and when I decided to sell.
“‘Without this,’ one of the sons said, ‘you’re gonna get turned down tomorrow.’
“I asked if we could talk about it later, after the deal.
“They said no.
“I’d already sworn to the Gaming Control Board that I had no partners. I knew the Balistrieris would never get licensed.
“I said I’d like to do it, but I’d signed with the state that I had no partners. They suggested I postdate the option.
“I asked if they thought they could get licensed, and they said they both felt licensing would be no problem for them. I began to sense these people were living in a fantasy. They didn’t seem to know who they were or what baggage they carried. Or they didn’t know that I knew and were simply carrying off a charade. Whatever it was, I felt like Alice in Wonderland.
“I said that I would sign it, but they had to promise they wouldn’t do anything with the option. They agreed.
“That night I changed my mind. I called Joe and said I can’t go through with the option agreement. If the control board comes back and finds out about it, everything will be jeopardized. I’ll lose it all.
“I said if the deal was contingent on the option, as much as I would hate to, I would have to step away from the deal. I said I respected his dad and was grateful for what he had done, but I couldn’t jeopardize everything I had, including the Hacienda. I said I didn’t have a problem with retaining them as lawyers—I eventually retained them as counsels for fifty thousand dollars a year—but that option could destroy everything.
“A few minutes later, he calls me back. He says, ‘My dad is going to call you and say he’s “Uncle John.” He wants to talk to you.’ Uncle John! He had never used code names before. Why? I didn’t know and I couldn’t even act surprised, because I didn’t want them to know I knew who they were.
“Balistrieri called, identified himself as Uncle John, and said, ‘You can’t back out.’
“I said, ‘I can’t do it the way it is.’
“‘Are you sure?’ he asks.
“I said, ‘Yes, and I’ll just have to take the consequences.’
“‘You disappoint me,’ Balistrieri said. He sounded very sad.
“His son Joe then calls back and says they’ll rip up the option and we’ll work something out after the deal goes through.
“I told him not to rip it up, but to send it back to me. I had already shredded my copy and I didn’t want another copy floating around and finding its way to the control board.
“‘You don’t trust me?’ Joe said, almost hurt.
“I told him it wasn’t a matter of trust. It was business. He said he would send me the copy, but of course he never did.
“A week later or so the loan went through. It got a full-board approval. The board’s discussion of my loan took no more than two minutes. At the end, Bill Presser, the Teamster boss from Chicago, who had been the most reluctant of the trustees, said, ‘Good luck,’ and that was that.
“I had gotten the sixty-two-point-seven-million-dollar Teamster loan in sixty-seven days.”
On August 25, 1974, over 80 percent of the Recrion shareholders tendered their stock to Allen Glick’s company, Argent. The company name was an acronym for Allen R. Glick Enterprises and, of course, meant “money” in French, a language in which no one connected with the deal was fluent.
“I was euphoric,” Glick recalled. “Joe Balistrieri called and said his father was coming into Chicago and wanted to have a celebration dinner.
“I said I didn’t think it would be a good idea, but Joe insisted. He said, ‘You can’t tell my father no.’
“I didn’t even want to be seen in an out-of-the-way restaurant with him, but we wound up in the Pump Room at the Ambassador Hotel in Chicago. He was well known in the place. Waiters, captains, they all came over. He was ordering Dom Pérignon. All through dinner I’m thinking, if the FBI was tailing him tonight, my life in Las Vegas is over.
“Toward the end of the dinner he said if I had any questions concerning the loan—especially the additional sixty-five million dollars for renovations and expansion—I should talk to him and only to him. I shouldn’t try and discuss anything about what we had done with other trustees or union officials. He said the two of us had established a successful pattern that’s the pattern that should remain established.
“Then, as we were leaving, Frank said to me, ‘You’ve got to do me a favor, Allen. There’s a guy living in Las Vegas; he’s working for you now. It would be helpful if you give him more recognition. He can help you.’
“‘Who?’ I said.
“‘I can’t tell you now,’ he said.
That was the end of the evening.
“One week later I got a call from Uncle John. He said he wanted me to meet the guy he had mentioned to me. I was in La Jolla, and Balistrieri said, ‘He’ll come to see you there. I want you to give him a promotion. More money. Okay?’
“I asked, ‘Who is it?’
“He says, ‘His name is Frank Rosenthal. If you don’t like him, you can call me up and I’ll straighten him out.’ He said there were people on the fund who would look very favorably on the rest of my loan application if I were to promote Rosenthal. When I hesitated just a little, I could hear the tone of his voice change. He sounded annoyed. After I agreed, he asked me to meet with Rosenthal as soon as I could.
“I phoned Rosenthal right after I talked with Balistrieri. He said that he was expecting the call.
“Rosenthal came to La Jolla. He came to my home. He told me that Al Sachs was a moron. He told me that there was a lot of potential in the company. He was very good. Plus, he was very smart. He may be the devil—which I personally think he is—but he’s very smart.
“I told him I knew about his expertise in gaming and that I would appoint him as my assistant or as an advisor. At first he was very conciliatory. He said he understood and he would do as I said and that he appreciated the promotion and that he would do his very best.
“He asked me to acknowledge his promotion through a memo, and asked me for a raise. I gave him the memo and the raise.
“The next day I checked with the chairman of the Gaming Commission. I learned that Rosenthal was a genius with numbers, a master handicapper. He knew all the casino games. I also learned he would probably never get a license.”
Frank Rosenthal returned to Las Vegas with a new job description and a raise from $75,000 to $150,000 a year. He immediately began to make changes in the operations of the casino. “Almost all of the executives viewed him as the man with all the authority,” Glick said. “He was supposed to clear everything with me, but he didn’t. At the outset, when I questioned him about these things, he wasn’t disrespectful. But every day I would hear that he had taken a little more power. I heard that when he walked through the casino, dealers used to jump to attention. He would fire a dealer for not standing with his hands folded before him, even at an empty table. He hired whoever he wished. He changed certain purveyors. Without clearing it, he changed the car rental company, the advertising company, and he tried to bring in his own ticketing agency for the Lido Show.
“When these things were brought to my attention I would either stop them or rescind them, but he was hard to stay ahead of. While I was unraveling one thing he did, he’d be in the kitchen telling the chefs how to cook.
“I was commuting between my home in San Diego and Las Vegas, and whenever I would get to town I would hear all the stories about what he did while I was away. Then, for a few days, I would have almost daily confrontations with him. I saw him in operation. He was the kind of man who held out his cigarette and expected it to be lit. He could be withering with people. He did not curse. He did not raise his voice. But you’d rather get hit in the mouth than have him harangue you.
“He designed himself an office that Mussolini would envy. It was four times larger than any office in the place. He didn’t like the wood paneling he had ordered and had it all ripped out and replaced. It was all ego. He wasn’t satisfied being a boss behind the scenes; he had to let everyone know it.
“Finally, in October 1974, I called him into my office. I had just arrived from California. It was a Monday. Again, I’d learned that certain things had gone on in the casinos over that weekend, and I felt that this was the time to terminate his position.
“I met him in the coffee shop of the Stardust, which was called the Palm Room.
“I said, ‘Let’s go to the back of the coffee shop. I want to explain a couple of things to you.’
“I told him what I had told him on repeated occasions—that he had to control his activities and that he was supposed to work within the parameters of what I had outlined to him in our meeting in September in California.
“I said that on repeated occasions he had lied to me, that there was subterfuge, and I learned that he had even instructed my secretary to tell him on a daily basis what my movements were, where I was going and what I was going to do. I said that I found that intolerable.
“He looked surprised. He asked if my secretary had told me that. I said yes. And instead of apologizing for spying on me, he said that he was going to fire her.
“That’s when I realized I wasn’t dealing with a normal man. We were in the back of the coffee shop. It was a closed section. He hesitated for a second and then he got up and he walked away from the table. Then he came back to the table. I could see his blood pressure rising.
“He said, ‘I think it is about time that we have a discussion, Glick.’ He referred to me by my last name. He had always called me Allen. But he called me by my last name as in setting the stage.
“He said, ‘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 was placed in this position not for your benefit, but for the benefit of others, and 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.’
“I began to argue with him and he said, ‘Let me just cut you off right here.’ He said, ‘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.’
“I felt like someone had just arrived from an alien planet. I was a businessman and everything I had conducted was in a businesslike manner, and this was almost totally a different subculture. I didn’t know what to make of it. In respect to the conversation that I had had with Jerry Soloway in regard to Frank Balistrieri, I realized that I just entered into a trap.
“I told him I wanted him out of the hotel. He said, ‘I hear what you are saying, but I want you to listen to me carefully again. When I said you will not leave this corporation alive, I meant the people that I represent have the power to do that, and much more. You should take me very serious. You are an intelligent individual, but don’t test me.’
“After I recovered, I was in somewhat of a state of shock. I called Frank Balistrieri and I said, ‘You got me into something I did not bargain for, or I would not have accepted anything like this.’ I said, ‘I felt that the appointment of your sons as corporate counsel was done in a businesslike manner, and I have no problems with that, but I do have problems with this.’
“I related to him the conversation I had with Rosenthal and he was very conciliatory. He said he would get back to me. But just remember, he said, the only one I was to talk to about this matter was him. Frank Balistrieri. If anyone else approached me and I talked to them, I would be doing it irrespective of his wishes. He was very firm. I did not pursue it with him.
“Within a few days Balistrieri called back. He explained to me on the phone that he understood the situation, but at this time there was nothing he could do about it and that I should heed Mr. Rosenthal’s advice and keep him in that position.
“I discussed Rosenthal’s mention of ‘partners,’ and I said that I bought this corporation through my own efforts, acknowledging that he helped me get the pension fund loan, but there were no partners.
“But Balistrieri said, ‘What Mr. Rosenthal told you is accurate.’”
For several months, Glick fenced with Rosenthal. He was afraid to confront him, so he tried to limit his activities. He excluded him from meetings. He tried to keep him out of the loop. He countermanded his orders. He rejected his suggestions. And finally, one night in March 1975, Allen Glick’s wildest nightmare came true. He was having dinner in the Palace Court Restaurant in the Stardust when Rosenthal called. “He said there was an emergency. I had to join him at a meeting. I asked what emergency. He said he couldn’t tell me over the phone, but I had to meet him. I said I’d rather not. I said we could deal with whatever it was in the morning.
“Then he said, ‘It’s an emergency and you don’t have a choice.’
“I said, ‘Okay, where is it?’
“He said, ‘Kansas City.’
“I thought that was ridiculous. I told him I couldn’t get there before three or four in the morning. He said, ‘We are going to come and get you, or you are going to come voluntarily.” He said he would meet me at the airport. The corporation had a couple of Lears at the time, and by two thirty or three in the morning I landed in Kansas City.
“Rosenthal was waiting for me with a car at the airport and introduced me to the driver, Carl DeLuna, a really gruff, vulgar man. Rosenthal referred to him by his nickname, ‘Toughy.’
“We then took a circuitous route to wherever we were going, because I noticed that we were passing the same places time and again. It took about twenty minutes. Round and around, and no one is saying anything. Finally we got to a hotel. We go up to the third floor. It’s a suite with a connecting door that is only partially open to a connecting room.
“The suite was pretty dark. As I walked in I was introduced to a white-haired older man named Nick Civella. I had no idea who Nick Civella was. He turned out to be the Mafia boss of Kansas City. I put out my hand to shake and he said, ‘I don’t want to shake your hand.’
“There was a chair and an end table with a light on it. He told me to sit down. I saw Rosenthal leave the room. I was in there with DeLuna and Civella, except I could hear people moving in and out of the room through the interconnecting door of the suite, but that was to my back.
“Civella called me every name under the sun and then he says, ‘You don’t know me, but if it was my choice you’d never leave this room alive. However, due to the circumstances, if you listen, you may.’
“When I said the light was bothering my eyes, he said he could accommodate me by pulling my eyes out. Then he said, ‘You reneged on our deal. You owe us one-point-two million dollars, and you’re gonna let Lefty do what he wants.’
“I was amazed. I said I didn’t know what he was talking about. I meant it.
“He looks at me and says, laying a gun on the table, ‘You’re going to start telling me the truth right now or you’re not leaving this room alive.’
“He asked about my agreement with Balistrieri, and when I said I didn’t have an agreement with Balistrieri, he said, ‘What?’ Kind of surprised. He said he wanted to know about the agreement he had been told I had with Balistrieri.
“I said the only agreement I had with Balistrieri was about hiring his sons, and I told him about the option, but I explained that the option was voided and we were going to work something out now that the deal had gone through.
“Later, I found out that Civella did not know about my deals with Balistrieri—about hiring his kids and their fifty percent option. He thought Balistrieri had been given a one-point-two-million-dollar cash commission for getting me the loan. Since Civella felt he had also helped get me the loan through his trustee—Roy Williams, the Teamster boss of Kansas City and the next president of the entire union—he too was entitled to one-point-two million dollars.
“Balistrieri had told me never to talk to anyone else about our arrangement, but I felt under these circumstances I had no choice. I also began to see why Balistrieri insisted I never talk to anyone else.
“Civella was a tough guy but a smart man. When he asked me questions I could see that he was putting things together. All of a sudden, something rang a bell and he got up. He said I still had a commitment to him and he wanted the money paid.
“When I said that I didn’t know how the corporation could pay him this money, he said, ‘Let Lefty handle that.’
“He said that because he did not like me, he was going to personally see to it that I did not get the additional Teamster loans for renovation and expansion.
“Then he said, ‘Get him outta here,’ and told DeLuna to take Lefty and me back to the airport and ‘drive down to Milwaukee and yank that fancy-pants sonofabitch out of bed and bring him here.’
“This time it only took us five minutes to get back to the airport from the hotel, and all the while DeLuna was griping about how he had to drive all the way to Milwaukee to pick up Balistrieri, as though Balistrieri were a sack of laundry.
“When I met Rosenthal the next morning I told him that I could not accept Civella’s conditions about paying him money and having partners, and Rosenthal said that I was really no longer in a position of authority. He said I could no longer determine my destiny.
“When I told Balistrieri about my meeting with Civella and told him about the threat to cut off our additional loans, Balistrieri said there was nothing he could any longer do to help me. He said the pension fund matters were now out of his hands.”