Mobster Frank Rosenthal helped build a casino empire — then watched it all slip away in a storm of violence and betrayal.
Bettmann/Contributor/Getty ImagesFrank Rosenthal adjusts his tie while refusing to answer questions before a Senate subcommittee on gambling and racketeering. Washington, D.C. Sept. 7, 1961.
In the 1995 film Casino, director Martin Scorsese and star Robert De Niro gave us the fictional story of Sam “Ace” Rothstein, a mob-affiliated casino operator who always knows just how to manipulate odds and maximize profits on behalf of the murderous gangsters he works with.
The real-life Frank Rosenthal All Main Characters Were Based On Real-Life Counterparts Every main character you see in Casino is based on a real-life individual. Sam Rothstein is based on Frank Rosenthal, Nick Santoro is based on Anthony Splitotro, Ginger McKenna is based on Geri McGee and Phillip Green is based on Allen Glick. Dec 30, 2020 When it comes to epic mob movies director Martin Scorsese outdid himself with Casino. It tells the true story of Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal and Anthony “The Ant” Spilotro and how the Chicago Outfit dominated gambling in Las Vegas and is based on the research and eventual book Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas by Nicholas Pileggi. Lefty was running four casinos at the same time, while the story of the movie only resembles around the Tangiers. The Teamsters, after heavy pursuit by the mob did in fact fund the casino. This part is quite accurate. The lion performers hired in the movie were based on Siegfried and Roy. Nov 20, 2020 Based on the true (if embellished by author Ben Mezrich) story of the MIT Blackjack Team that beat the house for nearly a decade, 21 turns an interesting math and business story into a sort of.
But if Rothstein and his violent Las Vegas adventures seem too outrageous to be true, take note that this character was based on Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, a real-life gambler and gangster every bit the smooth criminal the movie made him out to be.
The Road To Las Vegas
Born in Chicago on June 12, 1929, Frank Rosenthal spent many of his early days at the horse track with his father, who owned several horses, learning everything he could about racing. Moreover, of course, he learned about a crucial part of the sport: gambling.
As he grew older, Rosenthal’s interest in and knowledge of gambling extended beyond horse racing and into other sports like football and baseball. The young gambler learned, as he later said, that “Every pitch. Every swing. Everything had a price.”
By the time he was a young adult, he was heavily involved in the mob-controlled illegal gambling scene in Chicago.
Working for the Chicago Outfit in the mid-1950s, Rosenthal had a talent for setting the perfect odds for sports betting. He manipulated the odds just enough to entice gamblers to bet while also keeping the odds just where they needed to be so that the bookies could be sure that they’d come out ahead no matter what happened.
A whiz with numbers possessed of a Rain Man-like ability to calculate odds, Rosenthal was also a meticulous researcher who would get up early in the morning to study some 40 out-of-town newspapers in order to gather all the information he needed to make the odds just right.
Of course, Rosenthal also wasn’t above taking steps to make sure that he got the results he wanted, and by the early 1960s, he found himself in trouble for fixing games. In 1962, he was convicted of bribing a college basketball player to shave points during a game in North Carolina.
The year before, he’d been dragged in front of a Senate subcommittee on gambling and organized crime due to his now-nationwide underworld reputation as an oddsmaker and match fixer. During the proceedings, he invoked the Fifth Amendment a whopping 38 times, even when asked if he was left-handed — hence his nickname, “Lefty” (some sources claim that the nickname simply comes from his being left-handed).
Around this same time, Frank Rosenthal moved to Miami, where he and other Chicago Outfit members continued to participate in illegal gambling operations and even engage in violent assaults on their rivals. As part of these so-called “bookie wars,” Rosenthal came under suspicion in several bombings of rivals’ buildings and cars.
Feeling the heat — and surely understanding that Sin City was the place to be if you were a big-time gambler — Frank Rosenthal set out for Las Vegas in 1968.
Frank Rosenthal, Casino King
Upon arriving in Las Vegas, Lefty Rosenthal initially ran a betting parlor alongside a boyhood friend from Chicago who acted as his enforcer: Anthony “Tony the Ant” Spilotro (called “Nicky Santoro” and played by Joe Pesci in Casino).
Bettmann/Contributor/Getty ImagesAnthony Spilotro sits in a Las Vegas courtroom in connection with two old homicide cases. 1983.
Spilotro had a long rap sheet filled with violent crimes. In Chicago, he’d long been a killer for his organized crime bosses and authorities believed he may have killed at least 25 people. As the movie depicts, he even once boasted of squeezing a man’s head in a vice until his eyes popped out and then slashing his throat. Unverified and perhaps apocryphal reports still claim that Las Vegas’ murder rate went up by 70 percent after Spilotro arrived in town.
And now this violent killer was in Las Vegas to help the Chicago Outfit keep an eye on their gambling interests, which meant he’d be right by Rosenthal’s side.
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Also by Rosenthal’s side was his new bride, Geri McGee (played by Sharon Stone as “Ginger McKenna” in the film, above), a former topless showgirl he’d met not long after moving to town and married in 1969. It was McGee who encouraged Rosenthal — whose betting parlor had come under fire on federal bookmaking charges (ones that he beat on a technicality) — to take a casino job.
So in 1974, Frank Rosenthal began working for the Stardust. Given his talent for gambling and his organized crime connections, he quickly rose through the ranks and was soon running the Stardust and three other casinos, all of them believed to be under the control of the Chicago Outfit.
This meant that each casino needed a squeaky clean frontman that would appear to be running things while Rosenthal was actually the boss behind the scenes. And Rosenthal was often quick to make it clear to such frontmen just who was really in charge.
As Rosenthal told one of his nominal “bosses” in 1974:
“It is about time you become informed of what is going on here and where I am coming from and where you should be… I have been instructed not to tolerate any nonsense from you, nor do I have to listen to what you say, because you are not my boss… When I say you don’t have a choice, I am just not talking of an administrative basis, but I am talking about one involving health. If you interfere with any of the casino operations or try to undermine anything I want to do here, I represent to you that you will never leave this corporation alive.”
And there was indeed plenty of ruthlessness in Rosenthal. As the film depicted (below), his security caught a man cheating and so he ordered them to break his hand with a hammer. “He was part of a crew of professional card cheats, and calling the cops would do nothing to stop them,” Rosenthal said in an interview later. “So we used a rubber mallet… and he became a lefty.”
But as ruthless as he could be, Rosenthal was also as meticulous and sophisticated in his approach as he ever was — and not just in terms of the gambling itself. He hosted a local television show featuring celebrity guests and even counted the blueberries in the kitchen’s muffins to make sure that there were always 10 in each.
Of course, he truly did make his mark in revolutionizing the casino’s gambling operation by moving heavily into sports betting and hiring female dealers. All in all, Frank Rosenthal’s moves helped send the Stardust’s profits soaring.
However, all good things must come to an end — especially when the mob and millions upon millions of dollars are involved.
Frank Rosenthal’s Fall From Grace
While the Stardust was thriving, Frank Rosenthal was having trouble with the authorities.
Though he was secretly running several casinos, he had no official gaming license (his past meant that he surely wouldn’t have been able to get one). And because of this as well as his known contacts in organized crime, the Nevada Gaming Commission was able to bar him from having anything to do with gambling in Las Vegas in 1976.
Meanwhile, authorities indicted Spilotro and a dozen other mobsters who’d been making serious money off of these casinos. What’s more, Rosenthal also found out that Spilotro had been skimming money that even his mob bosses weren’t aware of, causing a falling out between the two old friends (see the film’s dramatization below).
Furthermore, Rosenthal learned that Spilotro had been having an affair with McGee. Though she and Rosenthal had two children together, this infidelity and her drug abuse contributed to their marriage failing in 1980.
Meanwhile, Frank Rosenthal’s whole world was falling apart as authorities continued to interrogate him about his connections with Spilotro and his involvement in all manner of illegal activities that had taken place inside his casinos. He tried repeatedly to get the gaming license that would enable him to freely and legally return to work inside a casino, but was never approved.
Things only got worse in October 1982. Rosenthal left a local restaurant and got into his car. Moments later, it exploded. Rosenthal was thrown from the car, but his life was saved by a metal plate underneath his seat that just happened to be a feature of that particular model and was able to shield him just enough from the bomb’s blast from below. He suffered only minor burns and a few broken ribs.
Authorities never figured out who set the bomb, and Rosenthal always insisted that he never knew either, but most suspect that the mob had done so as a way to get revenge and clean house after the news broke that Rosenthal’s friend, Spilotro, had been skimming mob profits.
Lefty Rosenthal survived, but McGee and Spilotro did not. McGee was found dead in Los Angeles a few weeks after the bombing due to a mysterious collapse that was officially ruled a drug overdose (details remain fuzzy). Spilotro was found beaten to death and buried in an Indiana cornfield in 1986.
But Rosenthal emerged unscathed and took his two children to California and then to Florida, where he worked as a nightclub manager and ran an online betting site before dying in 2008 at the age of 79.
To the end, Rosenthal had mixed opinions about the movie based on his Las Vegas career but felt that it was largely accurate (but insisted that he never funneled casino profits illegally to the mob). And in a sense, that says a lot about the wild life of Frank Rosenthal. After all, how many people could have their life story turned into a hit movie with few, if any, embellishments needed?
After this look at Frank Rosenthal, discover the true story of Henry Hill as well as other real-life Goodfellas like Tommy DeSimone and Jimmy “The Gent” Burke.
Martin Scorsese is among the most well-known movie directors in the world. He has many award-winning movies to his name and has become one of the most respected people in Hollywood. He directed the highly successful movie called “Casino” back in 1995.
The movie starred notable faces such as Robert DeNiro, Sharon Stone, and Joe Pesci among others. According to the movie producers, production was based and inspired by the story of Frank Rosenthal.
You may or may not have known Frank Rosenthal. In the 1970s and the 1980s, Frank Rosenthal also referred to as “Lefty” operated the Hacienda, Fremont, and Stardust casinos in Las Vegas. Rosenthal was an already established mobster and was hired by the infamous Chicago mob as the manager of the casinos.
A background on Frank Rosenthal
Here is a quick background of the star of the movie. After his birth on June 12th, 1929 in Chicago, Rosenthal, and his father spent many days at the horses’ track. Apart from learning about horse racing as a sport, he developed a keen interest in gambling.
Rosenthal expanded his knowledge of gambling outside horse racing and into baseball, football and other popular sports. As he developed into a young adult, he was involved in Chicago’s main mob-controlled and illegal gambling industry.
In the mid-1950s, Rosenthal was a master at setting up great sports odds for gambling. He manipulated the game in such a way to entice gambling fans to stake wagers. However, at the same time, he kept the odds at a level that convinced bookies that they would win.
He researched widely in newspapers and other sources of information. He armed himself with so much knowledge that his odds were right most of the time. While he got his desired results, he might have a bit more than he could chew in the process.
By the early 1960s, he got in trouble with the authorities for fixing matches. In early 1962, Rosenthal was arrested, tried, and convicted. There was evidence that he bribed a basketball player in North Carolina to shave points during a game.
After just a few years, Rosenthal used his influence to get out of jail and go back to controlling the betting scene once again. By 1974, he started working at Stardust, thanks to his wide connections in organized crime and raw talent for gambling.
After impressing the owners of the casino, he was placed in charge of two others – Hacienda and Fremont, all of them belonging to the Chicago Outfit. While Rosenthal was the boss playing the cards behind the scenes, each casino had a seemingly clean frontman.
A true depiction of Ruthlessness in the Film
Rosenthal was quick to show the nominal bosses of the respective casinos that he was the overall boss. He bullied, threatened, and even physically assaulted employees just to assert his influence. In one incident, Rosenthal caught one of the casino employees cheating. He ordered the employee’s left hand to be broken with a heavy rubber mallet.
Unlike Native American Casinos his approach to running the business was not always ruthless. Lefty was sometimes sophisticated and meticulous. He occasionally would host celebrity guests on a local TV show. He would check the muffins in the kitchen to ensure that there were just 10 blueberries in each.
Before Rosenthal’s influence in the industry, there were no female dealers. The movie depicts him as the revolutionary in the industry, where he hired females to ostensibly attract and keep gamblers. This, in turn, increased the casinos’ profits and kept the owners happy.
From grace to grass in spectacular fashion
They say that not all good things live forever. Martin Scorsese’s film manages to depict this fact. Trouble started when profits started to soar, with millions of dollars changing hands every month. This would surely bring the attention of the authorities.
Rosenthal had been a genius for too long. He was running several underworld casinos without a gaming license. His infamous past meant that he could not qualify for a license. In 1976, the Nevada Gaming Commission determined that he should not operate, oversee, or otherwise be involved in gambling.
At the same time, law enforcement officers arrested and charged a dozen of Rosenthal’s closest colleagues in the business. This included mobster Spilotro, who was embezzling the establishment money that the owners were unaware. Rosenthal was not amused when he found out.
The film shows a dramatic turn of events between the two old friends, now turned adversaries. Rosenthal came to know that Spilotro was having a sexual affair with his girlfriend, McGee behind his back. The woman had sired two children with Spilotro in the past before their union fell apart in 1980. It had failed because of her infidelity and drug addiction.
Interrogation with authorities escalates
Spilotro was by now-convicted for being a mobster, swindler, murderer, and illegal gambling operator. Rosenthal’s connection with the now incarcerated Spilotro caused more trouble, with authorities intensifying their interrogations.
There were all sorts of illegal activities taking place at the casinos, and police were milling around throughout. All this time, Rosenthal repeatedly tried to get licensing for his gambling and operating casinos. None of his attempts was successful. This failure was tied to the fact that he was already wanted for suspected swindling, murder, and conspiracy.
In 1982, things got worse for Rosenthal. Here, the movie shows in spectacular fashion, how Rosenthal’s wit and genius were overpowered. He had a meal at a local restaurant and walked out to his car then drove off.
Moments later, the car exploded into flames from an explosive that had been fitted underneath. The explosion forced him off the car. Miraculously, he did not suffer any grave injuries. As fate would have it, a metallic plate shielded the bomb from exploding on Rosenthal. In the aftermath of the explosion, we only see several broken ribs and minor burns.
It turns out that the car model was particularly designed with this feature. Movie critics and observers are quick to applaud Rosenthal for predicting such as event and protecting himself by having the car redesigned.
Police and investigators never figured out the person who planted the bomb in the car. Rosenthal was also not sure who had done it. However, he suspected that the establishment, which he worked for, was behind the matter. People suspected that the Chicago Mob wanted to kill Spilotro, after learning of his embezzlement of funds.
Death of the main characters
While Lefty Rosenthal survived the onslaught of the Mob, his associates, Spilotro and McGee perished. A few weeks after the car bombing, McGee mysteriously collapsed in Los Angeles.
Authorities stated that she had a drug overdose that took her life. Details remain scanty. In 1986, Spilotro was beaten by a mob to death. His body was buried in a cornfield in Indiana.
Casino Movie Based On A True Story
Later, Lefty fled with his two children to California. Later, he would move to Florida, where he found a job as the manager of a nightclub. He also successfully operated a betting company. Rosenthal died in 2008 aged 79.
When asked to comment on the movie, Rosenthal expressed mixed opinions. On the one hand, he stated that the production of the movie accurately depicted his life. On the other hand, he denied funnelling the casinos’ proceeds to the Mob.
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