New memoir ‘The Bookie’ highlights the mobsters and characters in Las Vegas sportsbooks 

Early in his career at Las Vegas casino sportsbooks, when mobsters were an intimidating presence around town, Art Manteris confronted Sammy Spiegel.

One evening in the early 1980s, while working by himself at the Barbary Coast sportsbook on the Strip, Manteris let Spiegel know he owed money on previous basketball bets.

The entire situation could have gotten Manteris “in a real jackpot,” he told The Mob Museum.

Spiegel, who served as Tony “The Ant” Spilotro’s driver, was known to demand his own betting odds at the Stardust sportsbook instead of the posted numbers. Back then, Spilotro was the Chicago Outfit’s street enforcer in Las Vegas. In the 1995 movie Casino, Joe Pesci portrays a character based on Spilotro.

Spiegel, a Spilotro lookalike, couldn’t set his own odds at the Barbary Coast, but he liked betting there anyway. The former Barbary Coast, later a Caesars Entertainment property named the Cromwell, is now being renovated and rebranded as the Vanderpump Hotel in collaboration with reality television star Lisa Vanderpump.

During the Mob era, the Spilotro crew took basketball-betting advice from street handicapper Frank Masterana, another of the Runyonesque characters in Las Vegas during those days. Ultimately, Masterana was added to the state’s Black Book, banning him from entering Nevada casinos partly because of his relationship with Spilotro, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

“They said I was with Tony,” Masterana said. “It wasn’t like I had a choice. In those days, you were either with Tony or you quit breathing.”

At the Barbary Coast, Manteris realized he had made a mathematical error on 16 basketball bets Spiegel had placed for “a dime” ($1,000) each. When everything later was totaled, it turned out Spiegel had shorted Manteris $1,100. Spiegel didn’t see it that way. “My numbers matched up,” he said, ending the conversation.

Manteris’ boss, Jimmy Vaccaro, covered the shortage out of his own pocket. That gesture “might have saved my job,” Manteris said.

‘Real mobsters’

Manteris’ memoir, titled The Bookie: How I Bet It All on Sports Gambling and Watched an Industry Explode, was released earlier this year. Proceeds from the book are going to Blood Cancer United and the World Wildlife Fund.

Written with journalist and author Matt Birkbeck, the book examines Manteris’ four decades on the inside at Las Vegas casinos. Those included the Fremont, Stardust, Barbary Coast, Caesars Palace and Las Vegas Hilton (now the Westgate). Manteris also managed the sportsbooks at the Station Casinos properties in the Las Vegas Valley. 

Born in 1956, Manteris grew up in a Pittsburgh suburb around gamblers and sports bettors, including his older brother, Jimmy, a street bookie, and his uncle, Jack Franzi, later a prominent Las Vegas handicapper sometimes known as “Pittsburgh Jack.”

After moving to Las Vegas in late 1978, Manteris encountered a much smaller town than it is today but one in which underworld operatives were tougher than expected. Growing up in Pennsylvania around gamblers, Manteris thought he knew what bookmakers and mobsters were like, “and that stuff didn’t bother me,” he said.

But then he got to Las Vegas. “When I came to town, especially during my time at the Stardust and then over at Caesars in the mid-’80s, then I saw what real mobsters were,” Manteris said. “They were the real deal.”

The Stardust has since been demolished, replaced by Resorts World Las Vegas, which opened in June 2021. Caesars Palace is still in operation.

By the time Manteris went to work at the Stardust, its Mob-installed operator, Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, was gone, but some of his people were still around. According to Manteris, the place was a nightmare. Stardust employees were manipulating betting slips to steal from the sportsbook. One room there was plastered with hardcore pornography. The explicit images were put there by a goatee-wearing worker nicknamed “Bobby the Beard.”

Wanting out of there, Manteris left the Stardust but not without learning “some very valuable lessons,” he said. “I’m grateful that I spent time there,” he said, “but most of the lessons that I learned, I was able to use to prevent from happening at the many books that I ran after that.”

In Las Vegas at that time, mobsters and their associates seemed to pop up everywhere, pressuring bookmakers, looking for an advantage. When Manteris was at Caesars Palace, one of Spilotro’s runners, a local known as “Fast Eddie,” tried to strike up a friendship.

“I was told a couple of times that we can do some good things together, and we can help each other,” Manteris said.

Manteris said he was so naive he didn’t take it seriously. By sloughing it off, “it worked,” he said. Spilotro’s people backed off, leaving him alone to do his job the right way. “They stopped bothering me, and there were no threats or anything after that,” he said.

Characters and celebrities

Fast Eddie and Sammy Spiegel weren’t the only characters the now-retired Manteris dealt with. He had run-ins with sports bettor Billy Walters and endured contract negotiations with demanding boxing promoters Don King and Bob Arum.

Manteris was instrumental in bringing major boxing matches to Las Vegas, attracting worldwide media attention. Celebrities were a part of the boxing scene, sometimes creating their own drama, adding to an already electric atmosphere. At one fight, comedian Rodney Dangerfield was seen snorting cocaine in the crowd at the temporary 15,000-seat outdoor boxing stadium on a Caesars Palace parking lot. He later sued Caesars for injuries, claiming his nostrils were burned in a Caesars Palace sauna.

At the sportsbook, managing the odds and protecting the bottom line were top priorities for those in charge like Manteris. This could be a challenge because unexpected (or unrevealed) problems might tilt the outcome of a sporting event—such as the time Buster Douglas knocked out a heavily favored Mike Tyson during a bout in Japan. Tyson had taken prescription medication beforehand for gonorrhea and was lethargic in the ring.

Before the fight, the odds had been so heavy in Tyson’s favor that Manteris didn’t bother to post any, though other sportsbooks did. At one casino, Tyson had been at minus 4,200, requiring bettors to put up $42 to collect a $1 win if Tyson prevailed.

Innovation also was important to sportsbooks. In the mid-’80s, two of Manteris’ team members at Caesars Palace, Chuckie Esposito and Jim Mastroianni, came to him with the creative idea of posting a proposition bet on whether Chicago Bears defensive tackle William “Refrigerator” Perry, weighing about 350 pounds, would score a touchdown on offense during the 1986 Super Bowl against the New England Patriots.

Though Perry had scored three touchdowns during the regular season, Bears coach Mike Ditka, in the run-up to the NFL title game, publicly stated that Perry would not touch the ball again. During the game, however, Perry lined up behind the quarterback and scored on a short run in the Bears’ 46-10 victory.

The Perry touchdown cost the Caesars Palace sportsbook $250,000. Manteris thought he would be fired. Instead, Henry Gluck, chairman and chief executive of Caesars World, phoned from Los Angeles, congratulating Manteris for the global publicity the unusual prop bet generated.

‘Las Vegas will thrive again’

Birkbeck, who wrote the book with Manteris, notes that the Pittsburgh native is an important figure in Nevada gaming history. Manteris has been inducted into the SBC Sports Betting Hall of Fame.

“His career was born during the Mob years, but he maintained his integrity throughout and after it,” Birkbeck said by phone. “Art is historical.”

Many of the Mob-era resorts that existed on the Strip when Manteris arrived in the late ’70s have been demolished. These include the Desert Inn, Riviera, Sands, Stardust, Dunes, Hacienda and Tropicana.

Since the late ’80s, a boom in megaresort construction along the resort corridor has left only a small number of casinos from the previous era still standing. Among those are Caesars Palace, Circus Circus and the Sahara, which remain in operation to this day with original construction.

The changeover to corporate ownership up and down the Strip has led to complaints from long-term visitors who miss the lower food and entertainment prices of earlier years. Tourism figures still are strong but have been in decline.

Nowadays, there aren’t many casino insiders around like Manteris who lived through the transition from old to new Las Vegas. Reflecting on his career and changes in Las Vegas, Manteris said one advantage casinos had in the earlier years is that guest service was better.

Currently, Las Vegas casino guests sometimes “are treated too much like numbers and not personally enough,” Manteris said. One example is the way hotel guests are forced to wait in long lines at the front desk to check into their rooms, Manteris said.

As for the sportsbooks around town, some have “really beautiful video screens and audio systems and great seating,” he said, but too often lack personal touches.

“I do get really disappointed sometimes when I see places a mess, and I see the ticket writers not paying attention to guests or looking the other way and talking when a guest comes to the counter,” he said.

Even though hundreds of casinos are operating now across the country and sports betting is legal in many states, presenting competition challenges for Las Vegas casinos, a turnaround is possible in Southern Nevada, Manteris said.

“Las Vegas today is suffering a little bit,” he said, adding that the “nickel and diming” of customers and the decline in guest services have become real problems.

But those things can be fixed. “Once they get that right,” Manteris said, “then Las Vegas will thrive again.”

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