24.

“Foul play is not ruled out.”

Geri Rosenthal moved to an apartment in Beverly Hills. “She was running with a bad crowd,” Lefty said. “Lowlifes. Pimps. Druggies. Bikers. She had a boyfriend who was a musician and he was beating her up a lot.

“She was living a tough life. She came to Las Vegas for the holidays. She’d come into town if the kids had swim meets. She’d come in for parties. The kid stuff. That sort of thing. I never looked forward to it, because I never knew what she would do. One time, I was taking her back to the airport, and she started screaming that she wanted more money. I could see she was already loaded. She was bringing back messages from her sicko pals. ‘Get more money out of the creep.’ Oh yeah. I know what they wanted her for. I threatened to dump her luggage right out on Paradise Road if she didn’t shut up. She looked at me real hard and didn’t say another word.

“Another time my son was looking out the window when she arrived and he commented on how thin she looked. When she came in the door I could see what he meant. She was like a rail. She had lost so much weight. She was all speed and pills.

“Malnutrition. She was living on pills.

“I said, ‘Look what you’re doing to yourself.’

“She went right past me and upstairs and got into the bathtub as though she still lived in the house. Her attitude was that she was still Geri Rosenthal.

“After we were divorced I offered her a hundred thousand dollars to change her name, and she said, ‘You must be kidding me.’ She used the name for whatever she could get. ‘Don’t you know who I am? Who my husband is?’ That sort of thing. She used the fantasy for protection.

“I’d get calls from bars at one in the morning and she’d say things like, ‘Tell this sonofabitch to leave me alone.’

“One night I got a hysterical call from a public phone. She’s crying. ‘Would you believe this sonofabitch beat the shit out of me?’ she says.

“At this time Geri was going with a younger kid. He addressed me as ‘Mr. Rosenthal’ whenever we had spoken over the phone.

“I had already told him to behave himself. ‘You understand you’re dating my children’s mother,’ I said.

“‘Yes sir, Mr. Rosenthal,’ he said at the time.

“Now Geri is calling from a booth. She says she’s bleeding and that this kid had beaten the shit out of her. I asked what I could do and she says call him. Make him stop. He will be at this number in about an hour.

“I take the number and now I’m up. I sit around looking at the clock for an hour. It takes a long time for the hour to pass, and then I dial the number, and who answers? Geri.

“‘Hi!’

“What the fuck? ‘Are you nuts?’ I asked her. ‘I thought this guy was beating you up? What are you doing there? Why did you go back?’

“‘Oh,’ she says, ‘I’m okay.’

“‘Let me talk to the punk,’ I tell her.

“‘It’s okay,’ she says. ‘I can handle it.’

“It later turned out she had this apartment and they were living there, and he threatened to break up with her and she got hysterical and decided in her drunkenness to get me to threaten the kid into not leaving her.”

At 4:35 A.M. on November 6, 1982—about one month after Lefty’s car was bombed—Geri Rosenthal began screaming on the sidewalk in front of the Beverly Sunset Motel, at 8775 Sunset Boulevard, and stumbled into the motel lobby, where she collapsed.

A motel clerk called police, but when they arrived with an ambulance, she was in a coma. She never recovered. She died three days later at Cedar Sinai Hospital. She was forty-six. The hospital said doctors found evidence of tranquilizers, liquor, and other drugs in her system. There was a large bruise on her thigh and smaller bruises on her legs.

The story made the Los Angeles and Las Vegas papers, which reported that she had died of an apparent drug overdose and rehashed the recent events of her stormy marriage, her affair with Spilotro, her looting three safe deposit boxes of over a million dollars, and Lefty’s car bombing. It was a story made for the tabloids and the cops. Captain Ronald Maus of the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office told the Los Angeles Times, “We’re interested because of her past connections and the possibility of any organized-crime intrusions.” Dr. Lawrence Maldonado, who pronounced her dead, said, “Foul play is not ruled out.”

“The way I found out was I got a call from Bob Martin’s wife, Charlotte,” Lefty said. “She said, ‘Frank, I’ve got bad news. My furrier just called and said Robin was in the store picking up Geri’s furs. Robin said that Geri had passed away.’

“I called the furrier immediately. I said my name is Frank Rosenthal. He knew who I was and he started thanking me for all the business I had given over the years. I said, ‘Listen, is Robin Marmor there?’ ‘Yes, she’s here to pick up Geri’s furs. She says her mother is dead.’

“The furrier was named Fred something. I said, ‘Fred, you don’t give her a fucking thing. Do you understand me?’

“‘Yes sir,’ he says. And I hung up.

“I called the morgue. Yes, there was a body. She was dead.

“I got the M.D.

“I finally got a call two days later from Robin.

“Robin says, ‘Mom’s dead.’ Like that. ‘Mom’s dead.’

“I pretend I don’t already know. I get some details from her. She’s making some arrangements for the funeral. I said let me get back to you. When I did we had a dispute over where Geri would be buried. I wanted it to be in Las Vegas, next to her mother, who had died. Robin and Len Marmor wanted her buried in Los Angeles. Finally Robin made the arrangements for the burial and chapel.

“I talked to the kids and told them both what had happened. They were able to comprehend. I asked if they wanted to attend the funeral and Steve said, ‘Please, I don’t want to.’ Stephanie said: ‘We’re not going.’

“The speculation around was fifty percent that I had her killed and the other fifty percent that the mob had her killed,” said Lefty. “They’re all wrong. I spent about fifteen thousand dollars on an investigation. I got the details.

“I believe she was overdosed.

“They killed her. They did it to her—the people around her. They knew she was a wealthy woman. She was getting five thousand dollars a month from me in alimony. She had all her jewels. But when police checked her apartment, everything was gone.”

“At first they thought Geri might have been murdered because she knew too much about the outfit,” Frank Cullotta said. “But that was all bullshit.

“What probably happened was that some of her druggie biker friends got the idea that Geri would inherit a fortune from the insurance if she suddenly became a widow. So first they tried to blow up Lefty, and when they missed, they knew they were in trouble, especially if Geri pieced their move together.

“That’s why they killed her. Just four weeks after Lefty’s car explosion. What a coincidence. And what was she doing wandering around that miserable area on Hollywood at four thirty in the morning? She wasn’t. She was in a car with her killers, her pals, the guys who tried to blow up Lefty, who were now pumping her fill of pills and booze.

“All they had to do was stop the car, let her out on the street, and drive off.”

“They murdered my sister,” Barbara Stokich says. “Somebody gave her an injection of something.

“Geri took a million in jewels when she left Frank. He had to talk to her to get back his money, but she kept the jewels, and they were all missing.

“She wanted to go back to Frank after she started living in Los Angeles. She missed the luxury. The protection. Safety. She liked calling him ‘Mr. R.’

“After Geri died, my dad visited the places she had shopped. One of Geri’s friends said she had been going to a psychologist for two months and was almost okay.

“Geri got five thousand dollars a month from Lefty, plus the credit cards and the Mercedes. But she didn’t like to be alone. She went out to bars and drank all night. Meanwhile Lenny was married when Geri got back, and a black guy who she knew beat her unmercifully. To get her money and jewels.

“We found out she died because my husband, Mel, and I were visiting Dad and the landlord called. Some friends of his had seen an obit on Geraldine McGee Rosenthal and they wondered if it was my sister. We called Robin and she kept saying she didn’t have time to talk to us. Finally Robin said the funeral was in two days. My sister had been in the hospital and in the morgue for a week, and nobody had told us.”

Geri was buried in Mount Sinai Memorial Park, 5950 Forest Lawn, in a private ceremony. Lefty and the two children did not attend.

“I didn’t want to put the kids through that,” he said.

In January of 1983, the L.A. County coroner said that death was accidental, an apparent lethal combination of cocaine, Valium, and Jack Daniel’s whiskey.

Papers on file in Los Angeles Probate Court said:

The deceased died leaving no real property but left personal property consisting of numerous coins located in safety box #107, First Interstate Bank, Maryland Square Office, 3681 South Maryland Parkway, Las Vegas. The coins were ordered appraised by the court and valued at $15,486.

The 125 coins included, among others, $4000 in silver dollars; $1200 in 1887 silver dollars; $133 in Stardust Casino gaming tokens; $6000 in 1887 silver dollars; $100 in 22 Indian Head pennies; Liberty Quarters, Shield nickels, and a 1797 large cent.

Half the coins in the box went to Lefty, under the terms of the divorce agreement; the other half was divided evenly among her three children: Robin, Steven, and Stephanie. According to court papers, Geri’s heirs received $2,581 each.

It was close to the end for everyone. Lefty’s explosion and Geri’s death were followed by indictments, convictions, and more death.

The hundreds of Justice Department wiretaps resulted in the indictments—and eventual conviction—of the major mob bosses who were involved in skimming the Stardust and Tropicana Hotels.

Weak links were cut. On January 20, 1983, Allen Dorfman, sixty, was shot and killed as he walked out of a suburban Chicago restaurant. Dorfman had just been convicted along with Joey Lombardo, Joe Aiuppa, Jackie Cerone, Maishe Rockman, and Teamster president Roy Williams for using the Teamster pension fund to try to bribe Nevada senator Howard Cannon to get favorable trucking legislation. This was Dorfman’s second felony conviction in connection with the pension fund, and the judge had guaranteed him a long prison sentence.

Dorfman had just left the restaurant with Irwin Weiner, the sixty-five-year-old insurance broker and ex-bail bondsman who had originally hired Tony Spilotro as a bondsman in Chicago years ago. Dorfman had stopped off at a video store and gotten a copy of the film Inadmissible Evidence to watch that night at home. The film tells the story of a man wrongly accused of mob connections by the press.

Weiner told police he heard two men come up behind them and say, “This is a holdup!” and that when he ducked he heard shots being fired and didn’t really see what happened. The gunmen escaped. The murder was never solved.

On March 13, 1983, Nick Civella died of lung cancer. He had been released from the Springfield, Missouri, Federal Detention Medical Center two weeks earlier so he could “die in dignity.”

Joe Agosto was convicted in a check floating scheme that had allowed him to pour money into the Tropicana’s meager coffers to enhance the skim. On April 12, 1983, Agosto decided to become a government witness. His testimony—along with DeLuna’s notebooks—resulted in convictions and stiff sentences: Carl Civella and Carl DeLuna got thirty years each; and Carl Thomas got fifteen years. Frank Balistrieri got thirteen years.

Joe Agosto died of a heart attack a few months later. The second phase of the Argent case—which charged some of the same defendants with diverting nearly $2 million in Argent money to the skim—needed a good witness. The government gave Allen Glick immunity, and he took the stand.

On trial in this case were the Chicago bosses Joe Aiuppa, seventy-seven, and Jackie Cerone, seventy-one; the Cleveland acting boss, Milton Maishe Rockman, seventy-three; and the Milwaukee boss, Frank Balistrieri, sixty-seven, and his lawyer sons John and Joseph. A conviction would almost certainly mean the elderly bosses would die in prison.

Glick took the stand and testified for four days, laying out in great detail how he had encountered Frank Balistrieri and how he had gotten his loan. He also spoke about being forced to sign over a 50 percent option on the corporation to Balistrieri’s sons in return for $25,000. He testified about being forced to promote Frank Rosenthal and about being threatened by Nick Civella in a darkened Kansas City hotel room and by Carl DeLuna in Oscar Goodman’s office in downtown Las Vegas.

Glick was a devastating witness. He was precise and incapable of being ruffled. He projected total honesty. Carl Thomas had become a government witness as well, in the hope of obtaining leniency on his fifteen-year sentence in the Tropicana case. He testified about the skim and about the mob’s influence over the Teamsters. The feds also got Joe Lonardo, the seventy-seven-year-old Cleveland exunderboss, who testified that he had served as a courier with Rockman and explained how Glick’s loan had been arranged and who had profited from it.

Even Roy Williams, after having been handed down a fifty-five-year sentence in the Cannon bribery case, decided to cooperate with the Argent prosecution. He was wheeled into the courtroom clinging to an oxygen tank and testified that he had received $1,500 a month in cash from Nick Civella for seven years in return for his vote to give Glick the pension fund loan.

During the trial, Carl DeLuna had enough. He pleaded guilty before a verdict was even returned. He was already facing thirty years in the Tropicana case. What else could they do to him? Give him another thirty years? And why remain in court and watch the prosecutors showing blowups of his note cards to the jury while 21, 22, Stmp, and Fancy Pants watched incredulously at the wealth of damning detail DeLuna had managed to cram onto those tiny cards.

Frank Balistrieri was already facing a thirteen-year sentence for an unrelated case. He, too, pleaded guilty.

Tony Spilotro, who had been indicted in the Argent case along with everyone else, mostly on the basis of the phone calls he made to Stardust executives pleading for jobs and comps, was severed from the case because of his heart condition. Government doctors determined that Spilotro was not using his health as a ruse, and he was given time to have the necessary bypass surgery. He would be tried later.

When the guilty verdicts were handed down, it was no surprise, and neither were the stiff sentences: Joe Aiuppa, the seventy-seven-year-old Chicago boss, and his seventy-one-year-old underboss, Jackie Cerone, got twenty-eight years each. The seventy-three-year-old Maishe Rockman got twenty-four years. Carl DeLuna and Carl Civella received sixteen years, to run concurrently. John and Joseph Balistrieri were acquitted of all charges.

Nineteen eighty-three was a turning point in the history of Las Vegas. The Tropicana and Argent cases were wending their way through pretrial hearings and on to trials and eventually to convictions. The last Teamster pension fund loan was paid off. The mortgage on the Golden Nugget was bought by Steve Wynn and paid off with junk bonds. The mob’s main muscle—as far as controlling the financing of casinos—was over.

In 1983, slot machines became the largest casino revenue producer, surpassing all other forms of gaming. Las Vegas, which had begun as a town for high rollers, became a mecca for Americans looking for low stakes and ALL YOU CAN EAT FOR $2.95 buffets.

In 1983, the Nevada Gaming Commission suspended the Stardust’s license because of yet another skim investigation and installed one of their own Gaming Control Board supervisors in Lefty’s old office to run the Stardust. State officials were able to fire or force into early retirement many of the employees who had been a part of the various skims that had been going on for years.

And in 1983 Lefty Rosenthal and his family moved to California.

“I was playing with the stock market a little bit and handicapping a little, strictly as a player,” Lefty said. “But the kids, especially Stephanie, had become a world-class swimmer. She had been pretty good in Las Vegas, and she had entered and won dozens of competitions.

“In an effort to help her pursue that goal—and she was already prepared for Olympic qualifying meets—I moved to Laguna Niguel so they could train and compete with the Mission Viejo Nadadores, one of the top swim teams in the country.”

The Rosenthal house was in Laguna Woods, in Laguna Niguel, a wealthy community about midway between Los Angeles and San Diego. It was one of nineteen houses cut into the lush coastal hillsides, with panoramic views of the ocean, the Crown Valley, and El Niguel County Club. Security for the Rosenthal house included several closed-circuit television monitors controlled by a wall-sized panel in the garage.

For most of 1983, Lefty’s life revolved around the extraordinary feats his children performed as competitive swimmers.

“You see a headline about your child that says ROSENTHAL WINS TWO MORE GOLDS, and there can’t be a moment of greater pride,” Rosenthal said. He still has the clippings.

“Stephanie was really in a class of her own. She was just a marvelous athlete. With a level of tolerance for pain that was … I can’t describe how … I can’t tell you how much pain she took. I used to watch her train. I took her to both the morning and afternoon practice sessions. That was at four thirty in the morning and three thirty in the afternoon. You know, I just loved it. And I would watch my daughter train. And I saw the veins popping, and I saw her eyes were red, and she practiced in sleet and rain and cold. I was just in tremendous awe of what she was willing to sacrifice to get where she was at. You know, I really had great respect for her.

“Because no matter how talented you are, you need to have that endurance, that strength, that stamina. You know, to win. And Stephanie wanted to fucking win. You know, you’re not going to beat that girl. She would not let you beat her.

“And this is not some proud poppa talking. This is the handicapper talking. She was the best. I mean, she kicked ass wherever she went. Oh yeah.

“I mean ribbons, medals, trophies. And Steven, unfortunately, had to be a part of that. And I didn’t understand how deep the resentment became. They were just kids. He’s only thirteen and she’s ten. He was hurt a lot because I had to give Stephanie a hug. I had to put my hand on her head. I had to give her a kiss. I had to shake her hand. I had to cheer her on.

“And her brother would be in the same meet and would finish up the street. And what can you do? You know, sometimes I would say, ‘Hey, Steve, okay. You need to train harder.’ But Steven resented all of us. Us meaning me and Stephanie.

“Steve was a talented swimmer. More so than Stephanie, technically. That’s the truth. Coaches around the country, his own coach, used to say, ‘Frank, if you get that kid off his ass and we can get him to train, ain’t nobody going to touch the guy. This guy’s better than Stephanie.’

“But he lacked the willingness to get out there and take the pain. To train. To go fifteen thousand meters per day. To run. To do dry land exercises. To lift weights. He wasn’t willing to pay the price. Consequently, when Steven went into competition, he wasn’t prepared. And he’d get his ass kicked.

“But, you know, everybody’s not meant to do that. I didn’t disrespect him for that. I think he should have quit. Become a social swimmer.

“But Stephanie wanted the gold. These were the finest years of my life. I told Stephanie and some close friends, if Stephanie qualified for the nineteen eighty-four Olympics and gets a medal, my fucking life is complete.

“And I don’t give a shit if I get a stroke one minute after. I won’t want to come back. And I meant it. In other words, let me have that one thing. And I said, ‘Stephanie, that’s all want. I want to see it.’

“I told her, ‘I caught a miracle getting out of that car with the bomb. Let me see you win a gold, Stef, and after that, I’m willing to say good-bye.’

“And she understood me. But she was young. She was just, you know, a kid. She had been training since she was six years old. Well, we went to Austin, Texas, where they started the Olympic trials. She was qualified in three events, but during her training period coming up to the time in Austin, I watched her. You know, I’m a handicapper. I use a watch.

“And I figure she’s got two chances, slim and none, and slim was out of town. I was told by coaches, ‘Frank, don’t discourage her. You’re going to kill it. Frank be careful. Frank. Frank.’

“But I would say driving home from a workout, ‘Stef, you’ve got to train harder.’ And she’d say, ‘Dad, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’

“Anyway, I knew before we went to Austin. The main event. The hundred-meter backstroke. My nephew Mark Mendelson wanted to come down from Chicago, but I said wait until she makes the finals before flying down. He went to O’Hare waiting to see if Stef would qualify in the morning to make the finals in the evening. She had to finish in the first eight. There were a hundred and some people that would be swimming in that event. The top eight swim in the finals; the top two go to the Olympics.

“So it worked out that he’d wait at the airport and I’d get a message to him whether to fly down or not. I knew in my heart she didn’t have a prayer. She came to me forty-five minutes before race time. She says her coach said she’d never looked better. I said to myself, ‘Fuck your coach for bullshitting you.’

“He was playing a game with her. He was taking a shot. Maybe she could pull off a miracle. Well, there are no miracles in sports. It’s one on one.

“I remember her time. It was two and a half seconds slower than she’d done six months earlier, when she qualified. She put her head down. I put my head down. Then I ran to the phone and got a message to my nephew, who was waiting at the airport.

“I said, ‘Mark Mendelson, go on home.’”

Lefty went home, too. His $375,000 house in Laguna Niguel had a rock fountain in the entrance, a spa, a gazebo, and a console made of African zebrawood in the bedroom. But when Rosenthal decided to hang wallpaper, he discovered it was impossible because the walls weren’t straight—a defect that also made it impossible to install upgraded doors, new windows and shutters. “The house is falling and creaking and sinking,” Lefty said at the time. “There is a big crack in the back wall, and even the mirror man had trouble because the place is not square. I have asked my general contractor to see whether the place even meets code standards.”

Lefty sued.

He had to, he explained. The builders “were not even accepting my phone calls anymore.”

If Mike Kinz hadn’t been seated high on his tractor, he would never have noticed the bare patch of earth. Kinz had leased a five-acre cornfield in Enos, Indiana, about sixty miles southeast of Chicago; the corn was about four inches high and in a couple of weeks would have grown tall enough to cover the field and obscure the marks on the ground that made it look as though something had been dragged about a hundred feet from the road to the bare patch.

Kinz suspected that a poacher had probably buried the remains of a deer carcass in the cornfield after removing the edible meat. It had happened before. So he called Dave Hudson, the wildlife preserve’s biologist and game warden.

It took Hudson about twenty minutes of digging in the soft, sandy earth before he struck something firm. He looked into the three-foot-deep hole and saw a patch of white skin.

“I scraped off some sand,” Hudson said, “and there were some skivvies.”

Two bodies had been dumped on top of each other in a five-foot grave. They were naked except for the undershorts. Their faces were so badly disfigured that it was not until the FBI lab had had a chance to run through the fingerprints, four days later, that the men were identified as Anthony Spilotro, forty-eight, and his brother Michael, forty-one.

The two had been reported missing nine days earlier by Michael’s wife, Anne, and there was some speculation at the time that the Spilotros, both of whom were facing trials within a matter of weeks, had purposely disappeared. Spilotro had gotten the court’s permission to visit the Chicago area for eight days to visit his family and to have his dentist brother do some work on his teeth.

Spilotro was going to be a busy man. He was facing the Stardust skim trial. He was about to be retried in the Hole in the Wall conspiracy case; the first trial had ended in mistrial because of a bribe attempt made to one of the jurors. He was also scheduled to be tried for violating the civil rights of a government witness he was suspected of having murdered. His brother Michael was awaiting trial in Chicago on an extortion sting investigation that showed organized-crime links to sex clubs and prostitutes in Chicago’s western suburbs.

Tony Spilotro’s standing with the Chicago mob had fallen considerably in recent years. “Tony had developed a lot of negatives,” Frank Cullotta says. And wiretaps of Spilotro rapping some of his associates, particularly Joe Ferriola—which were played in court—hadn’t helped. On the night of June 14, when Michael and Tony left Michael’s suburban Chicago home, Michael told his wife, Anne, “If we’re not back by nine o’clock, we’re in big trouble.”

The grave was about four miles from a farm owned by Joseph J. Aiuppa, Chicago’s ex-mob boss, who was at the time in prison on charges that he had skimmed Las Vegas casinos.

“The bodies were not meant to be found,” Edward D. Hegarty, Chicago’s FBI agent in charge, said, “but whoever killed them didn’t count on the farmer coming to apply herbicide.” The brothers died from “blunt force injuries around the neck and head,” said Dr. John Pless, director of forensic medicine at Indiana University, who performed the autopsies. They had both been beaten severely, but there were no underlying fractures or broken bones. They appeared to have been beaten a few feet from the grave. Their clothes were found nearby. The hole had been dug deep enough so the bodies would not have been plowed up by farmers during the next spring.

“The killers must have carried a tremendous grudge,” Spilotro’s old nemesis, ex-FBI agent Bill Roemer, said. “Usually, it’s one hole, two holes, three holes point-blank in the back of the head, probably a twenty-two. It’s quick and the guy doesn’t suffer. These guys were beaten to death. Tortured.”

Today in Las Vegas, the men in fedoras who built the city are gone. The gamblers with no last names and suitcases filled with cash are reluctant to show up in the new Las Vegas, for fear of being turned in to the IRS by a twenty-five-year-old hotel school graduate working casino credit on weekends.

Las Vegas has become an adult theme park, a place where parents can take their kids and have a little fun themselves. While the kids play cardboard pirate at the Treasure Island casino, or joust with knights at the Excalibur, Mommy and Daddy can drop the mortgage money and Junior’s college tuition on the poker slots.

The intimacy of Bugsy Siegel’s 147-room Flamingo Hotel or even Lefty’s early 900-room Stardust has been replaced by the 5,008-room MGM Grand or a series of 3,000- to 4,000-room hotels lining the Strip and shaped like pyramids, castles, and spaceships. A volcano erupts every thirty minutes in front of the Mirage. Right next door on the Strip, a pirate boat appears on an artificial lake six times a day and battles the British Navy.

Only twenty years ago, dealers knew your name. What you drank. What you played. How you played. You could walk right in to the tables and be checked in automatically. A bellman you knew took your suitcase upstairs, unpacked your bags, and filled the room with your favorite booze and ice buckets of fresh fruit. Your room would be waiting for you, instead of you waiting for it.

Today, checking into a Las Vegas hotel is more like checking into an airport. Even the high roller hospitality suites can get stacked up while computers check your credit line against your American Express number for verification that you are who you claim to be.

The Teamsters pension fund has been replaced by junk bonds as the primary source of casino funding; but while junk bond interest rates are high, they’re not as high as what the outfit charged. Casino executives who borrow the money don’t have to meet their stockbrokers in darkened Kansas City hotel rooms at three o’clock in the morning and be told they’re going to get their eyes plucked out.

Tony and Geri are dead and Lefty is gone. Lefty now lives in a house on a golf course in a walled community in Boca Raton. He plays a little, watches his investments, and helps his nephew run a nightclub. Sometimes he sits in a small elevated area in the nightclub and aims a penlight at waiters he believes are not clearing tables fast enough. For years Lefty nursed a hope that he would be allowed to return to Las Vegas, but in 1987 he was placed in the Black Book and was forbidden to set foot in a casino ever again; years of fighting the decision amounted to nothing.

“It should have been so sweet,” Frank Cullotta said. “Everything was in place. We were given paradise on earth, but we fucked it all up.”

It would be the last time street guys were ever given anything that valuable again.