Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal
Born: June 12, 1929, Chicago
Died: October 13, 2008, Miami Beach, Florida
Nicknames: Lefty
Associations: Tony Spilotro, Allen Glick, Geri Rosenthal, Oscar Goodman, Joey Aiuppa, Nick Civella, John “Jackie the Lackey” Cerone, Fiori “Fifi” Buccieri, James “Turk” Torello
Frank Rosenthal is best known as the central figure in a massive skimming operation run by Midwestern organized crime families with hidden interests in four Las Vegas casinos in the 1970s, a story depicted in the 1995 movie Casino. Brash and ruthless, Rosenthal oversaw the theft of millions in cash from the Stardust Hotel at the behest of the Chicago Outfit and with the aid of his boyhood friend, Mob enforcer Anthony “The Ant” Spilotro, until Nevada authorities forced him out in 1978.
Born in 1929 in Chicago, Rosenthal shared his father’s fascination with wagering, even laying parlay card bets while in grade school. Blessed with a talent for mathematics, he got a job assisting Mob-connected illegal bookmakers in Chicago at age 19.
His first arrest came in 1953 near Chicago for possession of illegal parlay cards. He developed a reputation in Chicago’s underworld in the late 1950s, while working for the Kaplan Sports Service, as a “professional” gambler, expert in handicapping horse races and setting betting lines for college and professional sports.
In 1960, Rosenthal, by then known by the nickname “Lefty,” moved to Miami, where he obtained a racing license from the state of Florida and bought some racehorses. But that year, Rosenthal’s activities related to bookmaking took a more sinister turn. On March 20, Rosenthal and cohort David Budin were indicted for allegedly offering $500 to a player for the New York University basketball team to influence the score of a March 11 game against West Virginia during the NCAA tournament in Charlotte, North Carolina. Then the two were charged with traveling to Michigan that September to request a defensive player for the University of Oregon football team to take $5,000 and allow the University of Michigan to score more than 8 points when the betting spread on the game was 6 points.
Still another troubling fate awaited Rosenthal. On New Year’s Eve 1960, state and local law enforcement officials raided his Miami apartment, where they discovered an elaborate phone system used to relay illegal betting information. He was arrested for operating an illegal gambling establishment.
Details of the raid and Rosenthal’s arrest prompted the Florida State Racing Commission in March 1961 to yank his license and bar him from entering Florida racetracks and pari-mutuel betting sites. His new infamy also attracted the attention of the U. S. Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management, known as the McClellan Committee, investigating organized crime’s ties to illegal gambling. On September 8, 1961, Rosenthal, honoring a subpoena, arrived to testify before the committee in Washington, D.C. A defiant Rosenthal refused to answer the committee’s questions, invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 37 times.
The following year a warrant was issued out of North Carolina for Rosenthal’s arrest on bribery charges, but he dodged authorities in Miami and became a fugitive. Finally captured and remanded to North Carolina in October 1963, he pleaded no contest to the felony charge, was convicted and paid a $6,000 fine. From 1963 to 1965, he was a sports handicapper for the Multiple Sports and News Service in Miami. U.S. marshals arrested him for alleged interstate gambling in 1965 and 1966.
While in Miami as an illegal bookmaker in the mid-1960s, Rosenthal indulged in new criminal activities for the Mob. An article in Life magazine in 1967 described him as a “loan shark” and “walking computer” who in 1965 negotiated an $18,000 loan from Cosa Nostra to Richard Duncan Pearson. Pearson got a hold of the Delong Ruby, part of a famed jewelry heist of the New York American Museum of Natural History in 1964 by Jack “Murf the Surf” Murphy and Allan Kuhn. The museum gave in and paid a $25,000 ransom for the gem, which Pearson used to retire the Mob loan and pay a broker’s fee to Rosenthal. But then Pearson hatched an idea to burglarize a jewelry store and asked Rosenthal to loan him $1,000 cash to do it. Pearson got caught, and police found cash on him loaned by Rosenthal that had serial numbers matching the museum’s ransom money. Rosenthal was not charged (Pearson was sentenced to 10 years) but he was “humiliated” by news reports of his blunder, and Miami locals called him “Lefty the Dunce.”
In this climate in 1967, Rosenthal, under the Mob’s watch, resorted to intimidating rival bookies and others in Miami by ordering bombings of their property. According to a criminal court deposition in Miami in 1982, Ricardo Morales Navarette, a former CIA contractor in Cuba and demolitions expert, said he developed a friendship with Rosenthal, who told him he represented organized crime in Chicago. Morales said Rosenthal paid him to blow up Alfie’s, a newsstand with a bookie joint in the back, and a car and boat owned by John Clarence Cook, a well-known jewelry thief whom the Mob was pressuring to commit burglaries for them in Las Vegas. Rosenthal also had Morales explode a bomb in the front yard of a Miami police officer. Rosenthal wanted to “show his power” in the area as an associate of Chicago mobsters and to impress New York’s crime families, Morales said. He also said he witnessed Rosenthal and Cook meeting with Tony Spilotro in Miami in 1967.
Rosenthal was called before a grand jury investigating the Miami bombings and refused to give up any information. He was never charged, but he decided to skip town, along with his Mob associations, for Las Vegas in 1968. Rosenthal invested in the Rose Bowl Sports Book on Las Vegas Boulevard South, later managing the place as an analyst and handicapper until 1971 for an annual salary of $30,000, according to the FBI.
Rosenthal in 1969 married his wife, Geri (McGee), a showgirl and escort, whom the FBI described as “a longtime known prostitute in Las Vegas.” She was previously married to and had a child with her high school boyfriend, Lenny Marmor, who was arrested for “pimping” in Los Angeles, but the charges were dismissed. Geri would later have an affair with Spilotro before her death from a drug overdose in Los Angeles in 1982.
In March 1971, the FBI received permission to wiretap Rosenthal’s phones, learning within days about dozens of illegal bets taken there. Agents raided the sports book, confiscated large sums of cash and arrested 13 people, including Rosenthal. A federal judge in Las Vegas in 1975 threw out the charges against the book’s employees, claiming the FBI’s wiretaps were not properly authorized.
Meanwhile, Rosenthal had joined the Stardust Hotel in 1974 and by the mid-1970s was earning about $250,000 a year as “executive consultant” – without a Nevada gaming license – to Allen Glick, chairman of Argent Corporation, the ostensible owner of the Stardust, Hacienda, Marina and Fremont casinos in Las Vegas.
Mob chiefs from Chicago (such as Joey Aiuppa, Joseph Cerone and Joseph Lombardo), Milwaukee (Balistreri), Cleveland (James Licavoli, Angelo Lonardo) and Kansas City (Nick Civella) relied on Rosenthal to make sure they got their shares of the “skim”¬ – money embezzled off the top from the casinos’ count rooms before it was counted for tax purposes. Lonardo, who agreed to become a government witness in 1985, would testify that the Cleveland Mob’s share was $40,000 a month, delivered by a courier in Chicago.
While at the Stardust, Rosenthal instituted some innovative management policies. He opened the first race and sports book, including comfortable seating and individual TV sets for players, located inside a Las Vegas casino, launching a trend. More successful profit-wise was his hiring of women as blackjack dealers, another first in Las Vegas.
For the skim, he hired a ringer named Jay Vandermark to serve as slot machine supervisor at the Stardust and other Argent casinos. Vandermark’s skimming scheme undercounted coins by compromising coin-weighing machines.
Glick would insist he knew nothing about those hidden interests (he later passed a polygraph test about it). Rosenthal warned Glick to stay out of his way running things at Argent’s casinos. Glick said that the Mob also threatened to harm his family if he did not cooperate. He was later granted immunity to testify about Argent in a 1983 criminal trial in Kansas City against the mobsters taking part in the skim.
Rosenthal’s influence on the Argent casinos without having a state license finally came to the attention of the Nevada Gaming Control Board and Gaming Commission. After holding hearings in January 1975, the commission determined his authority over the casino meant he had to apply for a license as a key employee. Soon, gaming regulators started finding out about his past activities and arrests as a bookie and sports fixer in Miami and elsewhere.
Rosenthal hired Las Vegas lawyers Harry Claiborne and Oscar Goodman to represent him and had a parade of character witnesses, including Glick himself, testify on his behalf. Still other prominent Las Vegas casino executives and business people wrote letters to the commission praising him. But Jeff Silver, a member of the Gaming Control Board, learned from a former FBI agent about Rosenthal’s history of arrests, his attempts to bribe college athletes, the McClellan Committee hearings and his admitting to bribing police there. Silver also expressed concern about Rosenthal’s association with many unsavory people, such as Aiuppa and Spilotro.
At the board’s hearing on January 15, 1976, Rosenthal denied almost every allegation, from alleged sports and police bribery to illegal gambling. When Silver asked him about the Rose Bowl illegal gambling arrest in Las Vegas, Rosenthal said the business accepted only bets within Nevada. He later accused Silver of “badgering” him, then attacked him personally, saying the board member “speaks with a forked tongue to me” and “laughs at me, and I resent that.”
Unbowed, the Control Board voted 3-0 to recommend against granting Rosenthal a license. On January 22, 1976, the Gaming Commission voted 5-0 to reject his application. Rosenthal remained at the Stardust as food and beverage and entertainment director. He hosted his own late-night televised talk show from the Stardust, with celebrity guests such as Frank Sinatra and O.J. Simpson, and often criticized gaming officials on the air. State regulators believed he still oversaw gaming there and called him forward for licensing as entertainment director in December 1978. He insisted that his work had nothing to do with gaming, but the commission again rejected his license application.
Rosenthal appealed the commission’s decision to Nevada state court where a judge agreed with him, but the Nevada Supreme Court in 1980 reversed that ruling. He filed a civil suit against the commission in federal court but lost there as well. His fight was over.
In 1982, Rosenthal left Tony Roma’s restaurant, on Sahara Avenue in Las Vegas, entered his 1981 Cadillac Eldorado and while about to start the car, a bomb planted beneath it – possibly connected to the tail lights — exploded. A thick metal plate placed under the driver’s side by the manufacturer to balance the car diverted much of the blast, and Rosenthal only received some burns and scratches. A witness noticed a man bending over the rear of Rosenthal’s car about an hour before the explosion, but no one was ever arrested.
Rosenthal left town in 1983 for Southern California and later relocated back to Florida. The Nevada Gaming Commission voted to place him in the state’s Black Book, or List of Excluded Persons, prohibiting him from entering Nevada casinos for life, in 1989. In the 1990s, he consulted on the movie and book Casino about his years in Las Vegas, although he criticized the film version. He continued as a sports oddsmaker online and consulted for some offshore casinos in the mid-2000s. He died at his home in Miami Beach in 2008 at age 79.