“Casino (Widescreen 10th Anniversary Edition)” (Martin Scorsese)
I actually didn’t much care for Casino when I saw it many years ago, but apparently it was based on the real life story of Lefty Rosenthal.
On the evening of Oct. 4, 1982, Lefty Rosenthal, the talented professional gambler and gangster-when-necessary who had brought sports betting to casinos in Las Vegas and illicitly run an empire of four hotel casinos, walked out of Tony Roma’s on East Sahara Avenue with an order of takeout ribs. He had just finished dinner with some fellow handicappers, and he was bringing the food home for his two children. When he got into his car, it blew up.
Mr. Rosenthal survived the explosion — later he could not remember whether he had turned the ignition key — but the attempt on his life, for which no one was ever prosecuted, ended his career as one of the most powerful men in Las Vegas. He left the city early the next year and on Monday, at home in Miami Beach, he died. He was 79 and had lived in Florida since the late 1980s.
His death was confirmed by Eric Yuhr, assistant chief of the Miami Beach Fire Department, which removed the body. He did not give a cause.
Mr. Rosenthal’s rise and fall in Las Vegas, which took place over a mere 14 years, was at the center of Nicholas Pileggi’s 1995 book “Casino,” and the subsequent film of the same name, directed by Martin Scorsese, though in the movie, the account was somewhat fictionalized. (Mr. Rosenthal’s character, played by Robert DeNiro, was named Ace Rothstein.) He began his career as a horse player, oddsmaker and studiously disciplined sports bettor in Chicago, where his nonviolent but illegal enterprises were protected by the mobsters he made money for.
[From Lefty Rosenthal, Kingpin in Las Vegas, Dies at 79 – Obituary (Obit) – NYTimes.com]
Mr. Rosenthal is one of those old-timers who were seemingly larger than life:
Frank Rosenthal was born in Chicago on June 12, 1929; his father was a produce wholesaler who also owned horses, and young Frank hung out at the track and devoured the Racing Form. He learned sports betting, he said, in the bleachers at Chicago’s baseball stadiums, Wrigley Field and Comiskey Park, where spectators bet on everything: “Every pitch. Every swing. Everything had a price.”
His nickname, from childhood, was of the simplest origin; he was left-handed. Nonetheless, the story persists that it resulted from his testimony in 1961 in front of a Congressional subcommittee on gambling and organized crime, during which he invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself 37 times, refusing to answer the simplest of questions, including whether he was left-handed.
He was a clothes horse whose closet was said to contain 200 pairs of pants; a whiz with numbers, especially savantlike in figuring odds; a notorious egomaniac who at one time wrote a subliterate gossip column for The Las Vegas Sun; and was host of a late-night talk show on local television, on which he interviewed celebrities like Frank Sinatra, Wayne Newton, O. J. Simpson and Minnesota Fats, and railed against the Nevada gaming commission.
He was an obsessively detail-oriented businessman who made sure that every blueberry muffin coming out of the Stardust kitchen had at least 10 blueberries in it, and, Mr. Pileggi said in an interview Friday, among other innovations, was the first casino operator to seek out and hire women as dealers.