“Let me ask you this question. Is it Minnesota or Fats?”
Lefty Rosenthal was back. He was back like a barnacle. On February 4, 1977, only two months after Rosenthal walked in and reclaimed his office from Carl Thomas, the Nevada Supreme Court reversed Pavlikowski’s ruling—but Lefty stayed put. The court ruled that there were “no constitutionally protected rights” in cases involving gambling licenses and that “gambling does not carry the same rights as other occupations”; it went on to say that if Rosenthal wanted to remain in his gaming post, he would have to apply for licensing as a key employee. Rosenthal was prepared: he resigned as head of the casino and was immediately appointed by Glick as Argent’s food and beverage director. The post paid $35,000 a year, $5,000 less than the $40,000 salary the Gaming Commission considered the minimum for key employees.
Rosenthal then embarked on an all-out campaign to get a license. What had started out over a year earlier as a simple suit over Rosenthal’s right to a gaming permit escalated into a full-scale war between Lefty and the state’s politically powerful licensing czars. If Rosenthal succeeded in challenging Nevada’s gaming laws, he could call into doubt the state’s right to license anyone in the gaming industry. He and Oscar Goodman went into federal court and claimed he had been denied his constitutional right of due process; he vowed to go all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. He flew off to Florida to try and reverse his legal problems in Florida and North Carolina since both issues had come up at his hearing. He hired Erwin Griswold, formerly dean of Harvard Law School and U.S. solicitor general, to represent him in federal district court.
Eventually Rosenthal and lawyer Oscar Goodman accumulated over three thousand pages of hearings—as well as charts, visual aids, and two pamphlets, “Gaming Agencies’ Efforts to Deprive Frank Rosenthal of Livelihood” and the biographical “Lifetime of Betting and Being an Oddsmaker and Handicapper.”
One judge who was asked to read all six volumes of hearings before handing down a ruling refused absolutely to do so. “I can’t read this any more than I can read three Sears catalogs and the Old and New Testaments,” said Judge Carl Christensen.
Rosenthal was no longer just bothersome and litigious. He was dangerous. He was all over the place. Like many men who come noisily to public life—like Donald Trump and George Steinbrenner, to take two other examples—he began to crave the spotlight. He believed that his title change might circumvent his licensing difficulties. At the Tropicana, the entertainment director was a man named Joe Agosto, whose actual responsibilities had nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment: he was in charge of the skim at the casino. A known associate of Nick Civella, Agosto was an ex-con but his entertainment-director title effectively shielded him from the necessity of a key-man license.
But just in case charges arose that Rosenthal’s title was just a cover for what he was really up to—running the casino as usual—Lefty threw himself into his new job description. He announced that he would be the host of a talk show that would promote the Stardust and, of course, its food and beverages. And he began to write a column for the Las Vegas Sun.
From Frank Rosenthal’s column:
Women’s Lib.… Thought I would take a run over to the Las Vegas Country Club for lunch with Argent Executive Vice President Bob Stella. Looking for the change of pace and possibly a story or two. My attention was immediately focused upon the ladies of Las Vegas.… Phyliss La Forte (very style conscious, formerly of New York, bionic eye for high lines and super curves … a very elegant young lady in or out of her tennis suit).… Sandy Tueller (the doctor’s wife), a mighty fine woman, tennis accentuated, and very proper, stylish too.… Barbara Greenspun (the epitome of fashion par excellence). The publisher’s wife is a genuine “knockout” (Taste of perfection). Slack ensemble, lavish dresses, blouses, and more, a genuine New York Fashion plate. An enormous wardrobe. Barbara Greenspun may very well be one of the finest dressed women from coast to coast. My professional eye (my wife Geri concurs) and you can take that to the bank. To the remaining ladies of the club, my apologies. The professional eye (Geri) advises that you’re all out of sight, and I’m running out of space.
From The Frank Rosenthal Show:
PAM PEYTON: Mr. Rosenthal, I’ve got some more letters again this week, to ask you.
FRANK ROSENTHAL: Okay, we’re ready.… I’m ready for whatever you’ve got.
PAM PEYTON: You don’t have to. You don’t have to do it.
FRANK ROSENTHAL: I’m ready, Pam.
PAM PEYTON: Okay. You handled last week’s questions very well, I must say. You know.
FRANK ROSENTHAL: Whatever you’ve got, I’m ready for.
PAM PEYTON: Okay, this is another strong one.
FRANK ROSENTHAL: Okay.
PAM PEYTON: Here it goes. “Dear Mr. Rosenthal: It looks to me like you and the gamers have buried the hatchets and seem to be much more passive and content. Am I reading the situation accurately?” J.M., of Las Vegas, Nevada.
FRANK ROSENTHAL: Pam, you dasn’t bury the hatchet with the gamers. To bury the hatchet would be to ask for an ambush. What you must do, you must stand up and be very conscious of their position. They are men that are dedicated to a proposition to chase me from here to Chicago. And I doubt very much if they’re going to get it on.
PAM PEYTON: And Timbuktu?
FRANK ROSENTHAL: We’re going to hang in there right with them, and when they bury the hatchet, so will I. But I don’t see that coming.
PAM PEYTON: They’ve certainly been giving you a hard time.
FRANK ROSENTHAL: Yeah, they’re tough. But so what? You know, we’re here. Here we are.
PAM PEYTON: Life goes on, right.
FRANK ROSENTHAL: We’re right here.
PAM PEYTON: This is a really good question here. I’m really quite fond of this one.… “Dear Mr. Rosenthal: You might think this to be a foolish question.” It’s a long question too, I might add. “But I would wonder if a fellow who just recently moved to Las Vegas less than three months ago could possibly find a nice attractive female by frequenting Jubilation? You seem to know your way around, especially at Jubilation. And some people I have met tell me that you know all the good-looking girls in town. How about giving a lonesome newcomer to this area some advice, either by a written response or during your telecasting? It would be greatly appreciated. Certainly by a couple of other single friends of mine that are in the same boat as I am. I’m really not that fussy, and have a good appearance, and hope to make Las Vegas my permanent home. But, Frank, the women in this town, at least in my short experience, seem to be difficult to come by.” This by R.L., of Las Vegas, Nevada.
FRANK ROSENTHAL: It sounds like an autobiography.… Well, on the serious side …
PAM PEYTON: Do you want me to repeat it?
FRANK ROSENTHAL: No.… I do know many of the very lovely dancers in Las Vegas. I’ve had the pleasure of being the entertainment director for the Stardust Hotel. And certainly, you get the pleasure to meet many beautiful young ladies like yourself. But Pam, I’m married, and the fellow who writes the letter … I mean, what can I tell him? If he wants to come down to Jubilation and take a look around here, they’re all here tonight.
PAM PEYTON: There’s a lot of nice girls here. This guy’s crazy. He must not be bothering to talk to any of them.…
FRANK ROSENTHAL: If he’s lonely, he won’t be lonely around Jubilation. I’ve got to tell you.
PAM PEYTON: This is true. Here’s another letter. “Dear Mr. Rosenthal: Will the departures of former Gaming Commissioners Claire Haycock and Walter Cox … have any effect on your licensing situation or your legal strategy?” By J.B., of Las Vegas, Nevada.
FRANK ROSENTHAL: No, I don’t think so, Pam. I think the Gaming Commission is loaded up.… I think it’s kind of stacked.
PAM PEYTON: It’s kind of As the World Turns.
FRANK ROSENTHAL: As the World Turns, right. Before you ask another question, we’re going to take a short commercial break. We’ll be right back with the very, very fine adagio team of Sharon Tagano and David Wright.
The Frank Rosenthal Show began in April 1977 and appeared erratically thereafter at eleven P.M. on Saturday night for two years. At one point, the local television columnist Jim Seagrave of the Valley Times, writing about its unpredictable irregularity, referred to it as the Where’s Frank? show, but Seagrave got hooked early: “There seems to be something about Frank Rosenthal that makes his guests want to tell the truth,” he wrote after the show’s debut. “Maybe it’s those steely, narrow eyes, hypnotic and penetrating. Or perhaps it’s his deliberate, carefully measured manner of speaking, like that of a judge handing down a sentence. Most likely, it’s his overall demeanor, which radiates schoolmaster’s sternness and impatience for frivolity.”
Rosenthal’s first guests were Allen Glick and the Doumani brothers, who owned an interest in four Las Vegas hotels. Fred Doumani announced to Rosenthal that Nevada was becoming a police state, an opinion that was dutifully covered in the Monday newspapers. As a rule, the show contained a series of plugs for various Argent hotels, nightclubs, and performers from the Lido Show; interviews with handicappers Joey Boston and Marty Kane on that week’s upcoming games; drop-ins by near greats like Jill St. John and O. J. Simpson; and the occasional appearance of a genuine superstar, like Frank Sinatra. Rosenthal introduced everyone in the vernacular made famous by that equally unlikely host Ed Sullivan: the women were “very lovely,” the bands were “very, very fine,” the dancers were not just “very, very fine” but “highly trained” and “very flexible, very pretty, very long legged,” the performers at the Stardust were “very, very talented.” The show was amateurish and self-serving, but it had a strange addictive quality, and before long it was the top-rated local show, when it was on.
FRANK ROSENTHAL: Let me ask you this question.
MINNESOTA FATS: Yeah?
FRANK ROSENTHAL: Is it Minnesota or Fats?
MINNESOTA FATS: I was born and raised in New York, and I live in Illinois, but the director of The Hustler, Robert Rossen, wanted Minnesota Fats. He says it was a most illustrious name. And that’s what he wanted on the marquee. And they wrote a big article in Illinois, where I live. I married a Miss America from Illinois. I’ve been around there for forty-some years. And so the state of Illinois wrote a big article about a most illustrious name. And that’s what it was all about.
FRANK ROSENTHAL: If you had to do it all over again, how would you do it?
MINNESOTA FATS: If I had to do it all over again, there’s be no way on earth I’d do it any other way. I hung in poolrooms and saloons ever since I was two years old. Never had a bad day in my life.
Laughter. Applause.
MINNESOTA FATS: I was with the most gorgeous creatures the world has ever known. Drove limousines when millionaires was jumping out of windows. You could catch millionaires with a net in 1930. With a net, on Broadway.…
FRANK ROSENTHAL: The part I like the best is the fact that your stardom in pool has brought you good romances.
MINNESOTA FATS: Romance? I had the finest romances on earth. Jane Russell was one of my sweethearts.
FRANK ROSENTHAL: No kidding?
MINNESOTA FATS: Long before she met Howard Hughes.
FRANK ROSENTHAL: Really?
MINNESOTA FATS: Mae West still sends me Christmas cards on Christmas. And Hope Hampton was a friend of mine. A girlfriend. She was a belly dancer in 1890. And Fatima. Fatima danced for me at the sultan’s palace in Istanbul and then again in Cairo, Egypt, at Shepheard’s Hotel. I’ve had a pretty good life, you know. I’ve been everywhere on earth. I was at the North Pole twice last year. For Sports Illustrated. I entertained a bunch of top scientists. Eighty-three below. I was there in my summer suit. All them suckers had bear rugs on.… I had a guy took me thirty miles in a dogsled. I couldn’t lift the coat that he was wearing. And there I was in a silk mohair suit. I never was cold in my life.
FRANK ROSENTHAL: Where do we go from here? Oh boy oh boy.
Applause.
Lefty was now a star. And Geri felt increasingly ignored. “She’d get loaded and go off for a few days, and Lefty would stew about where she went,” said ex–FBI agent Mike Simon. “She’d come back and he’d accuse her of seeing Lenny Marmor. She’d deny it. That was the basis of their relationship, accusation and denial.”
“All Lenny had to do was snap his fingers and she’d run,” Lefty said.
At one point, Rosenthal became so angry at Geri and Lenny that he got involved with a young woman who was a friend of Marmor’s. Her name, believe it or not, was Pinky.
“The girl was about twenty or twenty-one, and I went after her to try and put Lenny Marmor down,” Lefty confessed. “This girl was number one with Marmor. And I told Geri, ‘I’ll show you how I can bring this bitch here.’ And I did. I got the girl to come to Las Vegas. And then I met her in California.
“I was trying to start up a little romance. I guess it was a little silly at the time. She was gorgeous. But when I called her from the hotel in Los Angeles, the first thing she said was, ‘You need to send me a thousand.’ Oh yeah. And I did. And then naturally, after a couple of dates, she’s looking for twos and threes.
“I talked to the girl about Lenny. Initially, I thought I had her bullshitted. But I didn’t. She had me conned. Every word I said was either recorded or memorized, and she took it right back to Marmor. Believe me, this guy had a way with certain types of girls. He honestly did. He had her locked up.”
At one point Rosenthal became so frustrated at his wife’s continuing attachment to Marmor that he told her Marmor had been killed.
“Geri went wild,” Lefty said. “She panicked. She ran to the phone and called Robin.
“‘Where’s your father?’ Geri’s screaming at Robin. ‘Get your father! Find him!.’
“Then she sat and waited about an hour for Robin to call back. I didn’t say a word.
“When Robin called back she told Geri that he was all right. Geri turned to me. ‘You sonofabitch,’ she said, ‘why did you do that?’
“I said, ‘You’ll never know.’ But the reason I did it was so that I’d be able to see for myself how much she still cared for him and not for me. He was still in her heart.”
In the later part of 1976, Geri also became reacquainted with her old beau Johnny Hicks. Hicks was working as a floor man at the Horseshoe Casino and was conveniently living in a condominium right across the street from the Rosenthal home. “She was always after him,” said Beecher Avants, homicide chief of the Las Vegas police department.
One afternoon Hicks left his apartment and was shot five times in the head. Steven Rosenthal, Geri and Lefty’s eight-year-old son, came upon the crime scene on his way home and told his mother and father that something had happened outside. Geri and Steven went out to see what the police cars were doing on their usually quiet block and found out that Hicks had been shot. “We tried to talk to Geri,” Beecher Avants said, “but she told us, ‘Go fuck yourself. I’m not talking to you.’”
“She came back to the house furious,” Lefty said. “In her mind she thought I had something to do with the thing. That was crazy. But she always felt I had him killed.”
Lefty Rosenthal’s mind was not on his domestic problems. He had four casinos to run, on top of which he had to pretend he wasn’t running them at all. And he had a television show. After only a few months on the air, the show was so successful that Rosenthal decided to move it from the television studio he had been using to the Stardust Hotel itself. “For the first time in the history of Las Vegas,” the press release said, “a regularly scheduled television show will emanate live from a casino.” The show was not truly regularly scheduled—it had appeared only about five times in its first five months; but the announcement was fraught with promise: Frank Sinatra would make his talk show debut on the first show. Jill St. John and Robert Conrad would also appear. A special studio was built at the Stardust, and a thousand people turned up to watch the show taped at 7:30 P.M. on August 27, 1977. They cheered as Sinatra gave his opinion on a subject of more than routine interest, blasting the NCAA for placing the University of Las Vegas basketball team on a two-year probation.
At 11 P.M., the public tuned their televisions to KSHO, Channel 13, to watch the show and instead saw a little cartoon character holding a card that read ONE MOMENT PLEASE. The moments stretched into minutes and more than an hour. The videotaping equipment at the station had broken down. Hours later, the station resumed broadcasting with The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. “We don’t know exactly what happened,” said Channel 13 general manager Red Gilson. “This was a one-in-a-million occurrence. It’s almost an impossibility to have two tape machines break down at the same time.”
Once again Frank Rosenthal was on the front pages of the Las Vegas papers; and the following day he was there again suing the television station for damages in excess of $10,000 and charging that the breakdown had disastrously injured the reputation of The Frank Rosenthal Show. Rosenthal and his staff made noises for several days about taking the show to another television station; one of the local columnists even suggested sabotage. But when no other station took the bait, the show resumed on Channel 13 and became a strange and amazing local curiosity, one that made Rosenthal seem permanently entrenched.
Meanwhile, Lefty’s seemingly endless legal battles with the Gaming Commission continued. The U.S. Supreme Court decided not to review Lefty’s case, and gaming officials once again demanded that Glick fire Lefty from his food and beverage job and stop him from using the Stardust lounge to broadcast his TV show. Lefty and Oscar Goodman immediately sought a restraining order in federal court, and on January 3, 1978, Lefty got a belated Christmas present. Federal District Judge Carl Christensen said that while the Gaming Commission could bar Lefty from getting a gaming license, it could not bar him from working in the Stardust in a nongaming capacity.
Glick, therefore, quickly appointed Lefty the Stardust’s entertainment director, a post traditionally considered far enough removed from the casino operation that it had often been used as a safe haven for those with licensing problems—like Joe Agosto at the Tropicana.
“Nobody in the state believed that one,” Murray Ehrenberg, who remained Rosenthal’s casino manager, said, “so we had agents hanging around watching Frank, me, and everyone else all night long, trying to catch him being the boss. But Frank didn’t have to do whatever he did for everyone to see. We’d talk to him later about this or that. We could be having a sandwich and ask about a guy’s credit. We could be watching his show and he could say he wanted somebody hired or fired. What did it take for him to be the boss? He was the boss.”
Rosenthal’s acquaintances in the mob were as irritated by his celebrity as were his enemies in law enforcement. Joe Agosto, the entertainment director at the Tropicana, who actually supervised the skim there, began to call his boss, Nick Civella, to complain about Lefty Rosenthal; Agosto was concerned that Rosenthal’s mania for publicity would eventually affect Agosto, and both of them would be thrown out of the casino business. At one point, Agosto telephoned Carl DeLuna, the underboss of the Civella crime family; the FBI was listening.
AGOSTO: Nobody can handle any more. He [Rosenthal] is a killer, he’s got a killer instinct, he’s gonna pull everybody into the mud. Now I’m concerned about that. I don’t want any shit to spill over, to make it impossible to live in this fucking town. He’s starting out on the wrong foot now, and somebody … should tell this fucking guy where the stop sign is. I mean if he committed suicide, he should accept the fucking deal, that’s all, don’t put another half-dozen fucking people in the firing line.
DELUNA: Uh huh.
AGOSTO: You know what I mean?
DELUNA: Uh huh.
AGOSTO: Now I mean the thing is getting out of hand. If I was a stranger, if I didn’t know this guy’s friends and I was only here to protect my own little nest—you know what I mean?
DELUNA: Uh huh.
AGOSTO: I would take action myself, without asking anybody permission, you follow me? If I didn’t know better.
DELUNA: What are your fears, Joe? …
AGOSTO: I am afeared of this motherfucker when he cannot take the consequences of his actions. He’s already made threats.… What I’m saying, I feel very strongly about it—there are certain stop signs, certain limitations, where the muddy water splashes on other people’s laps.… I’m afraid now of the oversplash. There is no question that at the least that will happen. The best that will happen is that he will not get indicted, but there is no question that he’s gonna get thrown out of the fucking place, and if he cannot see the sign, he’s gotta be the dumbest son of a bitch I’ve ever come upon in my life.