“He didn’t have a clue about what they were doing or how they were doing it.”
Allen Glick was now the second-largest casino owner in Las Vegas. He shuttled between Las Vegas and his home in La Jolla—a Norman-style mansion with tennis court and pool and a car collection that included a Lamborghini and a Stutz Bearcat with mink carpets and upholstery—in a Beechcraft Hawker 600. His office, on the Stardust penthouse floor, was decorated in purple-and-white, and there he sat, giving interviews about his brilliance as a businessman. He even told the press about his ability to keep still, barely moving, for extended periods. “I’m highly disciplined,” he said.
Down the hall, Frank Rosenthal was the town’s most important gambling executive—no matter what his job title. He had negotiated a $2.5 million contract. He planned to introduce a sports book at the Stardust, and he appeared before the state legislature as an expert witness. He was the first to allow women blackjack dealers on the Strip, and he doubled the blackjack drop in a year. He hired Siegfried and Roy and their white tigers away from the MGM Grand by offering to build them a dressing room designed to their specifications; he threw in a white Rolls-Royce as a bonus. “The truth is I had bought the Rolls for Geri,” Lefty said, “but she preferred the little Mercedes sports car, and it was just sitting in the garage, so I gave it to them.” The two flamboyant magicians became the hottest and longest-lasting act in Las Vegas history.
But life in the Argent Corporation was far from peaceful. Instead of being lionized by the press, Glick was ridiculed as a conduit for Teamster money. Instead of being saluted for his innovative casino management, Rosenthal was constantly diverted by problems over his licensing. Crisis followed crisis. Glick and Rosenthal must have hoped that things would settle down and get better once the crisis of the day was solved—but there was always a new crisis the next day. The constant friction between the two men was the least of it. Rosenthal had been selected by the mob as the man to run the casinos, but his combativeness over his licensing problems attracted far more scrutiny than anyone wished. Allen Glick had been chosen as a mob front because he was thought to be squeaky clean; but even squeaky clean people have pasts. In 1975, Glick’s San Diego real estate operation filed for Chapter 11, and Glick defaulted on a $3 million loan he had used to buy the Hacienda. Then a former real estate partner of Glick’s turned up to threaten the entire setup at Argent.
The only thing that was working well was the skim. And for a long time, for the mob bosses back home, that was all that mattered. For years, skim money had been coming from the Stardust and Fremont casinos; the reason the mob needed a straight-arrow naif like Allen Glick in place was to keep the money coming.
The practice of skimming—the illegal siphoning off of casino cash, cash that is not reported as tax or as corporate income—is probably as old as the first casino count. In the late forties and fifties, after Bugsy Siegel opened the Flamingo, the skim was used to secretly repay the original mob boss investors, who wanted their dividends in cash to avoid FBI and IRS problems.
There are dozens of ways to skim a casino, and most of them were in place long before Glick and Rosenthal took over. There were ticket skims, food and beverage kickbacks, theft from the count room. But amazingly, the slot machines had been largely untouched because of a serious logistical problem: the difficulty of hauling coins. One million dollars in quarters, for instance, weighs twenty-one tons. But as slot machines were becoming a larger and larger part of the casino gross, there had to be a way to get at that money.
So George Jay Vandermark was hired to run the slot machines at the Argent. Vandermark was perfectly qualified for the job: he was known as the greatest slot cheat who had ever lived. According to Ted Lynch, an acquaintance of Vandermark’s, “Jay would take four months off a year and just go up and down the state opening slots. All he had to do was look at a machine and it would give up the drop. He loved doing it. I’ve seen him open ice machines at gas stations just for the pleasure of seeing the quarters roll out.”
Vandermark was so well known as a crossroader and slot machine cheat that he was listed in Bob Griffin’s Black Book, a who’s who of casino cheats used primarily by casinos. In fact, when one of the Fremont casino executives first saw Vandermark walk into the casino, he attempted to have Vandermark thrown out; he reversed himself when he was told that Vandermark was his new boss.
One of the first things Vandermark did after taking over at Argent was to eliminate the controls that safeguarded the proper reporting of all cash pouring into the casino count room. He centralized slot supervision of all four Argent casinos and had the coins hauled from the Fremont, Hacienda, and Marina to the Stardust, where they were counted daily.
Vandermark also cut down on the number of auditors who were supposed to double-check that the wrapped and stacked coins corresponded in weight and value to the number of loose coins that had originally entered the count room.
When one auditor complained to Vandermark that he was being cut out of a critically important fiscal safeguard, he was told that it was none of his business.
The auditor later told the Gaming Control Board that he immediately went upstairs to complain to Argent treasurer Frank Mooney that he suspected Vandermark was stealing. According to the auditor, Mooney simply told him: “Do the best you can under the circumstances.”
Among the innovations Vandermark brought to the Stardust was to rig the slot machine meters to falsely record one-third more in wins than were actually being paid out.
It was a brilliant stroke, because when the slot machines were emptied and the coins taken to the count room, the electronic scale used to weigh the coins had been rewired to underweigh the coins by one-third.
Vandermark now had one-third of the entire slot machine coin count available to skim, since the slot machines had been rigged to indicate that players had taken that amount home with them as wins.
But there was a problem: how to remove tons and tons of coins from the tightly guarded count room, let alone the casino. But Vandermark had a solution: he created auxiliary banks on the floor of the casino, where the skimmed coins were exchanged for paper money by slot machine change clerks. The auxiliary banks circumvented normal casino procedure: the paper bills were never taken to the cashier’s cage to be counted in with the rest of the casino’s paper money. Vandermark had small metal doors built into the side of the auxiliary banks so that after the clerk had slid the bills into a locked compartment inside the bank, Vandermark’s men could open the door from the outside and take the bills away in large manila envelopes.
The manila envelopes from the auxiliary banks in each of the Argent casinos were then taken to Vandermark’s office. Then the money was handed over to special couriers who made regular trips transporting the cash between Vegas and Chicago, where it was distributed to Milwaukee, Cleveland, Kansas City, and Chicago.
The Argent skim was blatant. No one sneaked around in the middle of the night with cash hidden under his shirt. People who worked in the count room and cashier’s cage knew all about it. On one occasion, after the electronic scales were rewired, the switches were installed in back so that by flipping them the scale would underweigh the coin count by either 30 percent or 70 percent. During a particularly hectic day, one of Vandermark’s guys flipped the wrong switch, and suddenly the scale was underweighing the coin count by 70 percent. Vandermark suddenly noticed how high the final count had become and realized what had happened. He screamed, “You dumb son of a bitch, you’re gonna get us all in trouble. We can’t steal that much.”
The more experienced casino executives, who suspected that some kind of skim was in place, were experienced enough to understand that it was not in their interest to pursue such matters.
They well knew that even an unintended implied threat to security of the skim could be fatal.
Edward “Marty” Buccieri, a distant cousin of Fiore Buccieri, was a pit boss at Caesar’s Palace. An ex-con and former bookmaker, he had met Allen Glick when Glick first tried to buy the King’s Castle in Lake Tahoe in 1972. Buccieri introduced Glick to Al Baron and Frank Ranney, the Teamster fund officials who later became instrumental in Glick’s purchase of the Stardust in 1974. In 1975, after the skim had begun pumping out shopping bags of cash to the mob bosses who had arranged for the loan, Buccieri began harassing Glick. He wanted a finder’s fee, and he asked for $30,000 to $50,000. “Buccieri had been pissed at Glick for years,” Beecher Avants, the Metro homicide chief at the time, said. “Buccieri told anyone who listened that he first got Glick the pension fund loans and then Glick aced him out. Here was Glick owning four casinos, three hotels, jet airplanes, houses all over the place, while Marty’s standing on his feet in the pit at Caesar’s for an eight-hour shift.”
One afternoon in May, Glick and Buccieri met at the Hacienda Hotel. Once again Buccieri raised the question of a finder’s fee. The conversation escalated, and Buccieri grabbed Glick by the throat and threatened him. They were separated by security guards.
“I remember Glick coming back to Stardust afterwards,” Rosenthal recalls. “He was red in the face. All excited. ‘I need to see you,’ he says. ‘It’s an emergency. Do you know Marty Buccieri?’ I didn’t know the guy. I knew his name at the time, but I didn’t know him personally. I knew he was a distant relative of my friend Fiore Buccieri, maybe third cousins or something. But I had never met him.
“Glick’s all upset. Very unusual for him. He says, ‘Frank, I’ll never let this happen again. And you have to help me.’
“I asked him what happened, and he goes on to tell me about Marty grabbing him by the throat and shoving him. I asked him why Buccieri would do such a thing, but Glick just wanted to describe what happened. He gave me some horseshit answer as to why, but it wasn’t very clear. Later I sensed it was because Buccieri thought he’d been stiffed.”
A week after the incident, Buccieri was about to start his car in the Caesar’s Palace employee parking lot when two men armed with .25-caliber automatics with silencers shot him five times in the head.
“I went to talk to Glick about the murder,” said homicide chief Beecher Avants. “Glick had one of those very opulent offices with a lot of mirrors. He had the latest electronic stuff all over the place. Shelves with books and plaques all over. Electronic stock market quote machines. Expensive lamps, bowls filled with flowers. It was a chairman’s office. There was no place you could sit where you couldn’t see yourself in a mirror. Glick was one of those very small guys who hid behind a very big desk.
“Glick said that he had had a ‘disagreement’ with Buccieri, but he denied that Buccieri had attacked him physically.
“As he talked, Glick sat very still. Very controlled. You’d get a businessman’s answer to everything you asked. He was like a zombie. A nonperson. And the mirrors all around the room were reflecting the same nonperson. After a while I began to wonder which of these guys was the real Glick.
“Lefty was a different story. Lefty’s office didn’t have any mirrors. It was absolutely spotless. There was nothing on his desk at all. Behind the desk he had this poster with a great big ‘NO!’ taking up the top nine-tenths of space and a little ‘yes’ crammed down at the bottom.
“Lefty was standing behind his desk, and the only thing moving was this pencil, which he kept fiddling with. Lefty was one of those guys who didn’t want to tell you anything, but he always had to let you know that he knew a lot more than he was ever letting on.”
Beecher Avants and the homicide division spent months attempting to pin the Buccieri murder on Tony Spilotro, whom they had spotted a week before the murder talking to Teamster pension fund officials in the Tropicana coffee shop. Meanwhile, the FBI knew within days that Frank Balistrieri in Milwaukee had ordered the murder. According to a top informant in Milwaukee, Balistrieri had become convinced that Buccieri was a rat, and he went to the bosses in Chicago for approval for the hit. The murder was assigned to Spilotro and his crew. According to the informant, Spilotro angrily insisted to Balistrieri that Buccieri was not an informant; but he carried out the assignment anyway. He imported two shooters, one from California and one from Arizona. None of them was ever charged with the murder.
The FBI had most of it right. What they had no way of knowing at the time, but found out later, was that Marty Buccieri was killed because he posed a threat to Glick, and Glick was the mob’s front man. A threat to Glick was seen as a threat to the bosses and the skim. Since preserving the sanctity and safety of the skim would never be given as the reason for killing Buccieri, the erroneous story that he had become a government informant was leaked within the mob by the bosses who ordered it. Even Spilotro, the man assigned the murder by Chicago, never knew the real reason behind Buccieri’s murder.
Six months after Buccieri’s death, on November 9, 1975, a wealthy fifty-five-year-old woman named Tamara Rand was shot five times in the head and killed in the kitchen of her house in the Mission Hills section of San Diego. It was a professional hit. The killers used a .22-caliber with a silencer; there was no sign of forced entry and nothing was missing. The body was found by Rand’s husband when he got home from work.
“The morning after the murder, I began getting calls from the press,” said Beecher Avants of Metro homicide. “It turned out that Tamara Rand had just been to Las Vegas and had an argument with Allen Glick.
“Shades of Marty Buccieri! You can’t have an argument with this man and not wind up somehow getting yourself killed. It turned out Rand had claimed to be some kind of a limited partner of Glick’s and had gone to court to ask for a piece of the Stardust.
“She was a tough lady. She had flown into town in May to file her suit, and when she got back to San Diego she told her niece that she had had an argument with Glick. She also said that she had been threatened—but exactly who had threatened her was not clear. Her niece said she shrugged the threat off: “She was more interested in getting all her ducks in order for the lawsuit.”
Glick had been quietly fighting Rand’s claims that she was a partner in the Stardust for years, but her sudden mob-style murder pushed an obscure financial-page dispute onto the front page.
Glick found out that Tamara Rand had been murdered when he got off the Argent jet in Las Vegas and was greeted by reporters and TV cameramen asking his reaction to the murder. After expressing shock, he jumped into an Argent limousine and fled the scene. The next day the Argent public relations department issued a statement saying that while Glick had known Rand and had fond memories of her as a friend, he had no other comment.
The newspapers found their comment elsewhere. They discovered that a couple of months before her murder, Rand had escalated her civil actions against Glick by filing criminal fraud charges against him. And she had won an important and dangerous victory in court: she and her attorneys were given access to corporate documents pertaining to the Teamsters pension fund loan.
A week after the murder, the San Diego Union reprinted a letter Rand had written seven months before she was killed, detailing her relationship with Glick. It was not flattering. It accused Glick of living like royalty, of flying friends to football games in the company plane, of surrounding himself with a “parade of toys.”
The publicity surrounding the murder—capped by an article in the Los Angeles Times reporting that Glick was one of several people being questioned in connection with it—forced Glick to appear before reporters at the Stardust executive offices to issue a statement countering the allegations.
“For the past two weeks, and in recent days,” Glick began, “I have been the subject of one of the most malicious characterizations based upon utter falsehoods, devious innuendos and criminal-sounding inferences for no other reason than news sensationalism.
“I feel compelled to respond to these unconscionable attacks, not only because of the emotional stress caused my family, but out of respect for the over 5,000 Argent employees and my many associates and friends.
“To allow these recently publicized falsehoods to go unanswered by me would be a betrayal to the integrity of my family, my friends and the Argent Corporation.
“Two weeks ago a woman was found dead in her home in San Diego. Mrs. Rand was a past business associate of mine and most recently party to a lawsuit filed against a company I was active in, as well as me personally.
“The characterization and innuendos that I was connected with or had any knowledge of this terrible tragedy is an irresponsible and unethical practice of a public media.
“To infer that a business disagreement would in any way be related to a savage murder is contemptible. I am appreciative that certain members of Mrs. Rand’s family have come forward to personally express their indignation at the false accusations.
“To associate me or any department or employee of my company with so-called ‘organized crime’ is false.
“The truth is I have never been convicted or guilty of crime greater than a traffic violation. The truth is that Argent operates three Las Vegas hotels and four casinos. The truth is that I was unanimously approved for licensing to operate these hotel casinos after an exhaustive and extensive investigation.… The truth is that I have tried to live a low-keyed social life based on a wholesome family relationship.
“Instead of recognizing these truths,” Glick went on, “there have been continuous distortions by certain members of the news media.
“I have no newspaper, magazine or television station to openly use in a response to combat these false allegations, but I do have one fact on my side which cannot be distorted, maligned, nor falsified when it be known—that is the truth that Allen R. Glick has never, nor will ever be associated with anything other than what is lawful.”
According to the FBI, Tamara Rand was murdered to protect the skim; her murder was ordered by Frank Balistrieri. When Mrs. Rand won the right to subpoena documents relating to the Teamster loan to Glick and Argent, it was clear to Balistrieri the law case had to be stopped.
So Balistrieri took another trip to Chicago. This time he told the outfit bosses that Tamara Rand was on the verge of jeopardizing the entire setup. If the Teamsters’ books on the Argent loan were to be subpoenaed, it was only a matter of time before individuals were subpoenaed. Rand was going to bring Glick and everyone else involved with the project down.
A Milwaukee informant later told the FBI that Balistrieri told the Chicago bosses, “We don’t want any grief. We’ve got to keep the genius with a clean image. He will be messed up if she gets her lawsuit going.”
No one was ever indicted for Rand’s murder.
And the skim went on.
It is estimated that Vandermark managed to skim between $7 million and $15 million out of Argent between 1974 and 1976, a sum that does not include what was skimmed from the Stardust’s Race and Sports Book, credit department, or food and beverage accounts. There was no department under the control of the corporation’s financial reserves that wasn’t infiltrated by associates of the bosses back home.
For the men who arranged the loans, the casino skim was the equivalent of striking oil. The money came pouring out every month. In Glick’s first year of operation, between August of 1974 and August of 1975, Argent reported a net loss of $7.5 million. This was startling news to Glick, since the corporation’s total revenue was up $3.4 million, to $82.6 million during the same period. Glick was so out of the loop that he attributed the Argent casino losses to additional interest payments that hadn’t been anticipated, higher depreciation and amortization costs, advances to subsidiaries, and even increased operating costs and expenses. “He didn’t have a clue about what they were doing or how they were doing it,” Bud Hall says.