Gambling man's explosive past inspired Hollywood - 18th October 2008

Lefty Rosenthal, 1929-2008

IT WAS the turbulent life and near-death experience with a car bomb of Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal, the one-time Chicago bookmaker who ran four Las Vegas casinos, that inspired the movie Casino.

Rosenthal, who has died in Miami Beach at 79, was barred from casinos because of alleged mob ties. He is credited with bringing sports betting to Las Vegas in the 1970s; Sports Illustrated called him "the greatest living expert on sports gambling".

As a casino boss, Rosenthal demanded the best in customer service. Once, when Rosenthal was walking through the Stardust Hotel and saw a cigarette butt on the casino floor, he picked it up - then fired the person responsible for cleaning the area. He ordered his casino security men to crush the right hand of a card cheat he had caught. "We used a rubber mallet," Rosenthal recalled. "Metal hammers leave marks, you know - and he became a lefty."

A tall and lanky man with what a journalist described as "a glare that makes him look like a menacing Fred Astaire", Rosenthal's response to how he stayed in such good shape was: "By keeping my mouth shut."

Rosenthal, who during his Las Vegas heyday also hosted his own local TV talk show featuring celebrity guests such as Frank Sinatra and Muhammad Ali, was a man with a past. Born to a Jewish family in Chicago, Frank Lawrence Rosenthal became a professional gambler as a young man, betting on football, basketball, baseball and boxing.

In a Senate hearing on gambling and organised crime in 1961, he invoked the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination 38 times, including when asked if he was left-handed. In 1962 he was convicted of trying to bribe an amateur athlete. After arriving in Las Vegas in 1968, Rosenthal launched a betting parlour. Wiretapped by the FBI, he was indicted on federal bookmaking charges but a judge threw it out on a technicality.

In 1969 Rosenthal had married Geri McGee, a former topless showgirl. The couple later divorced, after she had an affair with Rosenthal's boyhood friend, Anthony "Tony the Ant" Spilotro.

At his wife's urging, Rosenthal got a job in a casino. He was working as a floor manager at the Stardust casino in 1974 - "The only guy below me was the shoeshine man" - when he was appointed to a $250,000-a-year executive position with the Argent Corp, which controlled the Stardust, Hacienda, Fremont and Marina hotel-casinos.

But in 1976 the state gaming commission ruled Rosenthal was unsuitable for licensing, partly on grounds of alleged organised crime associations. He always denied any charges of mob involvement or skimming profits from the casinos he managed.

On October 4, 1982, Rosenthal had just finished dining at a Tony Roma's restaurant in Las Vegas when he climbed into his Cadillac Eldorado. When he turned on the ignition a bomb exploded, ripping the car apart and blowing him out of it. Authorities had warned Rosenthal a year earlier that they had heard of plots to kill him.

After that, Rosenthal moved with his children to California, then Florida. In 1988 the Nevada Gaming Commission listed him in the state's "black book" of people barred from casinos.

Rosenthal's life story was told in Nicholas Pileggi's non-fiction book, Casino, which inspired the director Martin Scorsese's 1995 movie of the same name, starring Robert De Niro as Sam "Ace" Rothstein, Sharon Stone as his wife and Joe Pesci as his mobster pal.

When the book and movie came out, Rosenthal was managing his nephew's bar in Boca Raton, Florida. "Let me tell you this," Rosenthal said of the movie, "I'm not Bob, and he's not Frank."

In Florida, he also ran a sports betting website and served as a consultant for offshore casinos.

Lefty Rosenthal had two children with McGee, who died at 46 from a drug overdose.

Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times

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