Lefty Rosenthal’s alleged sports-fixing past recalled in national sports story

In the 1970s, Mickey Bruce, a former University of Oregon football player, was called to Nevada to testify against Mob associate Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal at a casino licensing hearing. Threatened by Rosenthal’s lawyer, the former collegiate athlete declined, according to his wife, Patsy Bruce.

“He didn’t go because of comments that were made by Lefty’s attorney that if he came to Las Vegas, he would … something about the sand,” Patsy Bruce said. “That they would find him in the desert.”

This account of what amounts to a death threat appeared recently in a story about Rosenthal on The Athletic website. The New York Times owns The Athletic, a well-regarded online sports news and information site.

The story details efforts by Rosenthal and a Brooklyn schoolteacher named Dave Budin, a former college basketball player, to bribe Oregon’s Mickey Bruce with $5,000 in a point-shaving bid involving the Ducks’ 1960 road game against the Michigan Wolverines. Bruce was supposed to help guarantee that Michigan, favored by six points, would win by more than that. The Wolverines won 21-0, covering the point spread by a wide margin, with no evidence that Bruce tried to tilt the outcome. According to The Athletic, Bruce “played his heart out,” even intercepting a pass.

The lawyer who supposedly made the death threat was not named in the story, but during Rosenthal’s later years in Nevada, he was represented by defense attorney Oscar Goodman, a future three-term Las Vegas mayor and popular ambassador for the city.

In a telephone interview, Goodman, reflecting on that era in Las Vegas, said he did not threaten Mickey Bruce.

“I would never even think of something like that,” Goodman said, adding that Bruce didn’t go to Las Vegas to testify probably because he was not properly subpoenaed or ordered to be there.

“I objected to everybody who wanted to testify against Rosenthal,” Goodman said. “He was just one of many.”

Goodman added that it’s “almost silly that someone would make an allegation like that.”

Posted online in May, the story also revisits the Mob era in Las Vegas and delves into Rosenthal’s past as an illegal bookmaker in Florida and elsewhere.

The story notes that Rosenthal was arrested in earlier years but not for attempting to bribe Bruce. “Instead, Rosenthal and Budin faced charges in North Carolina for offering $500 to Ray Paprocky, a basketball player at NYU, to shave points in a 1960 NCAA Tournament game against West Virginia,” the article states.

The story notes that authorities had uncovered “a nationwide network of fixers who conspired to influence hundreds of college basketball games over a five-year period.”

“In all, 37 players from 22 schools were arrested on charges related to point shaving,” the story states. “Rosenthal pleaded no contest and was fined $6,000 for attempting to fix the NYU-West Virginia game, though he later maintained his innocence and said Budin fed his name to authorities in hopes of receiving a lighter sentence.”

In the late 1960s, Rosenthal moved to Nevada, where legal gambling attracted people like him who were betting illegally elsewhere. For a time in the 1970s, Rosenthal, an oddsmaker originally from Chicago, took control of four Argent Corp. casinos in Las Vegas for Midwestern crime families and, according to a 2008 Las Vegas Review-Journal story by Jane Ann Morrison, was a federal informant.

During that period, Rosenthal fought with Nevada gaming regulators in an effort to obtain a casino license, even criticizing them on the air while hosting a television talk show from the Stardust hotel-casino, one of the Argent properties. That period in Rosenthal’s life is dramatized in the 1995 Las Vegas Mob movie Casino, featuring Robert De Niro as a character based on Rosenthal.

The Stardust has since been demolished. In 2021, Resorts World Las Vegas opened at that location on the north end of the Strip near Circus Circus. When the Stardust was still in operation, however, the former Oregon football player, having already testified before a congressional committee about the bribe attempt in Michigan, was asked to speak in Nevada to help end Rosenthal’s attempt at legitimacy there.

But, said Patsy Bruce, “we never went to Las Vegas.”

Mickey Bruce, the son of a lawyer, became a criminal defense attorney, dying of natural causes in 2011 at age 70 at his home Oroville, California. He left an athletic legacy that continues to resonate with Ducks fans. One blog devoted to Oregon football has a story about his encounters with Rosenthal, calling the early 1960s team co-captain “The Incorruptible Mickey Bruce.” The player also won accolades for his on-field performance. Before being injured during the 1961 season, Bruce, a defensive back, led the nation in interceptions with six.

Major sports leagues embrace Las Vegas

During his time in public office and in later years, Goodman, 85, has been credited with helping revive downtown Las Vegas and spearheading efforts to attract sports teams to the valley.

At one time, major sports leagues shunned Las Vegas because of its association with betting, but in recent years the city has become home to the NFL’s Raiders, NHL’s Golden Knights and WNBA’s Aces. A Major League Baseball team, the former Oakland Athletics, is scheduled to begin play in 2028 at a stadium to be built where the Tropicana hotel-casino once stood on the Las Vegas Strip. Until then, the team, now known only as the Athletics, is playing home games at a minor league ballpark in Sacramento.

Meanwhile, legal sports betting and casino gambling have spread across the country in the years since Rosenthal was sparring with gaming authorities and law enforcement officials. Regulated sports betting is legal and live in 38 states and Washington, D.C., and is set to go live December 1 in a 39th state, Missouri. Across the county, legal sports-betting companies have entered into promotional arrangements with major teams that, in some instances, include sportsbook logos on uniforms and at arenas. Legal casinos, either commercial or tribal, are operating in every state except seven, according to the American Gaming Association.

Currently, Goodman, whose wife, Carolyn, later became mayor, appears at dinner events in a steakhouse named for him at the Plaza hotel-casino on downtown’s Main Street.

At these Oscar’s Steakhouse events, Goodman often discusses the Mob era in Las Vegas and some of his former clients, including Rosenthal. 

During a phone conversation, Goodman, recalling those years, said gaming regulators in Nevada hated Rosenthal, who eventually was placed in the Black Book, the state’s List of Excluded Persons banned from entering any Nevada casino. In October 1982, Rosenthal’s car blew up outside a Tony Roma’s restaurant on East Sahara Avenue, injuring him with minor burns. The car bombing has never been solved, though theories suggest that Midwestern mobsters or California outlaw bikers might have had a hand in it.

Goodman said he fought the state for years over Rosenthal’s inclusion in the Black Book, calling it an “unconstitutional vehicle to keep people out of the casinos.”

“And we fought that Mickey Bruce (bribery) allegation along with a lot of others against Rosenthal,” he said.

After publicly fighting with Nevada gaming regulators such as Harry Reid, a future Democratic U.S. Senate majority leader, Rosenthal was denied the casino licensing he sought. Not long after the car bombing, he moved away from Nevada, finally ending up in South Florida, where he died of a heart attack in 2008 at age 79.

Las Vegas polishes image

Goodman said that Las Vegas today has moved beyond the Sin City image of earlier years.

“It sold books and newspapers and dime-store novels, but we’re way past that reputation,” he said. “We’re the gaming capital of the world, the entertainment capital of the world, probably the nicest city in the history of the world. And those old allegations, they’re made and it’s like water off a duck’s back. We don’t even pay attention to it.”

Nicholas Pileggi, the journalist and author who co-wrote Casino with film director Martin Scorsese, also noted the city has undergone substantial change since the days when mobsters ran casinos.

“I’m sure a lot of people did wind up in the desert,” he said over the telephone, “but it became cliché.”

Since those days, the city experienced rapid growth, as mobbed-up casinos gave way to the publicly traded companies now dominating the resort industry in Las Vegas.

“It’s so much bigger than anybody envisioned,” Pileggi said.

Larry Henry is a veteran print and broadcast journalist. He served as press secretary for Nevada Governor Bob Miller and was political editor at the Las Vegas Sun and managing editor at KFSM-TV, the CBS affiliate in Northwest Arkansas. Today, he is a senior reporter for Gambling.com.