B009HOTHPE EBOK (35 page)

As to the staff ripping us off, one night Marty said to me, “C’mon, Paul, watch this.” He goes over to the bar and orders a drink. “The guy doesn’t know me,” he says, “so let’s see what happens.” Marty puts down a twenty-dollar bill, the bartender takes it, gives us the change but doesn’t ring it up the tab on the cash register. In other words, he just pocketed it. At this point, Marty tells the guy, “I’m one of the owners. Don’t let me ever catch you doing that again.”

We could have made a fortune in that joint if we’d paid more attention and watched it, but nobody really did. That’s what happens when you don’t keep your eye on the ball. Anyway, nobody got hurt, and everybody turned out okay.

There was a lot going on at Jubilation. I’ll never forget the night the bookie “Fat Herbie” Blitzstein’s kid got married at Jubilation; Herbie got remarried there, too. Tony Spilotro, the mob enforcer, was sitting there. I knew only too well who he was. I’d been in Vegas since the early sixties. I knew the whole scene—who the players were and what part they played in Vegas’s underworld. But I also knew not to get involved with these types and to keep my mouth shut. But you can’t help bumping into these characters when you own a joint in Vegas and it becomes the hot place to hang out. Here I had been this young kid just out of Canada who had made it, working their joints, selling their records on the jukeboxes, keeping my nose clean, and now here I was again with my own club, running into these guys again.

The kid’s wedding was supposed to be over at midnight, but everybody was still going strong. They turned all the lights up in the joint, but nobody was going anywhere. Some of the guests were drinking that Cordon Bleu cognac like there was no tomorrow, everybody was having a good time—Tony Spilotro and his crowd, too.

Spilotro and Lefty Rosenthal, the mob’s point man in Vegas, were at Jubilation three or four nights a week. They were there almost every day that meant anything, Tuesday on through Saturday. When he was there Tony was always a perfect gentleman. He was a professional killer, a vicious guy, but he knew how to behave. He was a lot more articulate when he wanted to be than he made out when he was with his lowlife friends. He and Lefty Rosenthal would bring all those showgirls with them. The feds were always there watching them. They weren’t supposed to talk to each other—the mobsters and the Feds. They never socialized, but they hung out in the same places, often at adjoining tables.

The G-men and the Outfit guys all knew each other—mobsters and FBI guys. They loved it. They got to ogle the girls from the Lido de Paris and all that. Tony and Lefty would arrive with ten or twelve showgirls from the Lido, all five-ten, gorgeous girls, with their theatrical makeup and identical beautifully toned bodies—they all looked exactly alike, the ultimate blond pleasure model. Lefty and Tony would be drinking champagne and eating like everybody else and Lefty would be picking up the tab. The FBI would be at the next table. This one FBI agent, William Roemer, was assigned almost permanently to the Vegas mob detail—that was his job, observe Tony. “That was the best detail I ever had,” he joked. He wrote a famous book,
Roemer: Man Against the Mob
. Roemer was the government’s guy in Vegas, let’s put it like that. The whole country knew Roemer’s name from this gig, the only visible G-guy that everybody knew. He became famous on the basis of his detail in Vegas.

The relationship between the feds and the local police was a peculiar one. It was a very weird dance. Ralph Lamb, the Vegas chief of police, hated Tony Spilotro so badly! Lamb was after him like white on rice. But the FBI had that town wired—they had precedence, and they didn’t want the local police messing up their investigation. Tony would walk out of Jubilation about 5:30 in the morning. His car would arrive, and then an FBI car would pull right in behind him. If, say, he invited you to go somewhere with him you’d be nervous to get in the car, not only because of who he was, but also because the feds were right on his tail.

“No, no, don’t worry about them,” Spilotro would say. “The only reason I’m alive is because of them. If it was not for them, I would be dead in five seconds. These fuckin’ local cops would have killed me a long time ago. They whacked Frank Blue, Frank Blustein. Shot him outside his car—twenty-three times they shot him. They said he ran a red light or something. You shoot someone twenty-three times for running a red light?” Some say Frank Blustein happened to be eating one of those big sandwiches on a roll—like a Subway sandwich wrapped in tinfoil—just sitting in his car at a stoplight and the cops thought it was a gun. Others—including the detectives and mobsters who saw him that night—said he did have a gun, that he was paranoid, and thought he was being robbed. There are a lot of different accounts of the Frank Blue story, but when you drove around Vegas in those days with Illinois plates—meaning you’re from Chicago and probably a connected guy—he wasn’t—it obviously wasn’t all that good for your health.

You couldn’t have a better bodyguard than the FBI. They didn’t want Spilotro killed, either—that was the big joke. This was in 1975. At six the next morning the FBI would still be there outside his house. That was one thing they left out of the movie
Casino
.

The FBI had the town bugged: hotel rooms, home phones, etc. One evening I called my dad up and in a mock mobster’s voice said to him, “Hey, Andrew, Tony Spilotro here. Last night I was in your place. What’s with the warm champagne, eh? What kind of joint you runnin’ there?” He actually thought it was Tony! My dad answered very courteously and cautiously, saying if there were any complaints he had he should take it up with Bobby or Marty. Something like this would totally throw my dad; he’d never been around people like that. I’d called him from my home and the next thing I know I get a call from two FBI agents and next thing I know they turn up at my door. They come in, show their badges. “We monitored a call Tony Spilotro made from your house.” “You got to be kidding,” I said. “Spilotro was never in my house. That was me, it was a practical joke.” I did my impersonation for them and they were satisfied with my explanation, but warned me about the dangers of impersonating mobsters—they didn’t have too much of a sense of humor about that. But it shows you the extent of the surveillance they had everywhere in Vegas. I thought that was amazing. I called back my dad who wasn’t all that amused, either. He said, “Son, one thing you never want to be is in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

If you saw the movie
Casino,
the way the Mafia was portrayed in that swanky club with the showgirls, the high rollers, the flashy dressers—that was Jubilation. The town needed a place like that and we did very well with it. It was very modern—had a lot of glass, a very high ceiling, two restaurants, one upstairs, one downstairs, and a huge dance floor. We had great sound and great lighting. Ahead of its time for the city. Eventually we sold it in ’84 and they renamed it the Shark Club. It was named the Shark after Jerry Tarkanian the famous basketball coach (that was his nickname). It became a sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll kind of place. And then they sold it again in 2003 to a time-sharing company.

My father began having trouble at the end of our time at Jubilation. The stress got to be unbearable for him. Behind my back he was still smoking, which he knew I was not pleased with. He had had a couple of strokes and after that he retired and then had open heart surgery. If my mother was the instigator of my dreams, it was my father’s steady sweet and reasonable nature that kept me from running off the rails many times in my life. Whenever I felt I was getting too out of control or too full of myself, I could always feel his benign hand on my shoulder, reminding me how lucky I’d been and that it was my duty to honor that good fortune by not throwing it away carelessly. My mom was very solid and steady but my dad was tough when he had to be—in his own way.

I can’t tell you how important my father’s influence on me has been. Mom was strong but my dad was uncompromising in his own way, too. He became such a hero in my hometown because he stood up for the things he believed in. He was a born diplomat, but he’d never back down from the things he believed were right. That’s why in Ottawa it wasn’t Paul who was the famous Anka, it was Andy. He ran all these different organizations. He was head of the school patrol, he was president of the Humane Society, and on and on. He was a hero—and he was
my
hero. He was the rock in my life and when he died on April 6, 1993, it was a crushing blow to me. I also have his wedding ring, which I keep in a box along with my mother’s.

*   *   *

It’s a myth that mobsters ran the casinos day to day in Vegas. These guys couldn’t get licenses from the gaming board to save their lives. No, their strategy was to hire Jewish bookmakers to run their casinos. They’d bring in a bookmaker from Dallas, a bookmaker from Seattle, a bookmaker from New York or Chicago. Two reasons: (a) the bookmakers were thrilled to be legitimate at last and not be doing stuff they could get arrested for, and (b), these bookmakers would become a natural merchandising network because they would know every player in every city. The mob would put up the money and they’d let a bookmaker buy 1 percent or 2 percent of the casino. The guy would move his family to Las Vegas, they’d hand him a phone, and have him dial up his old contacts and invite guys he knew from his old city to come and stay at their hotels to gamble. It was a very successful formula pioneered by the Sands and the Riviera. So when you look at the original ownership in the 1950s of these old casinos it’s a combination of Jewish bookmakers and savvy connected Jews, the kind of guys who ran speakeasies during prohibition, guys who were tired of being pinched by the DA on his latest reform movement. By this time these guys were in their fifties and sixties, and here was a chance to immigrate to Las Vegas and be legitimate members of the community. It was an arrangement that suited both sides: promote Las Vegas and no longer be an illegal person. When you look at the Riviera, the Dunes, the Sands, and the Flamingo, that was the story. Forget Bugsy Siegel and the 1940’s—that was an aberration, it was some crazy scheme to sell the Flamingo and the place closed the second night. His friends killed him—for whatever reason.

But after that, whether it was Meyer Lansky or confederates of Meyer Lansky’s, the Flamingo, like the rest of these places, was run by guys who’d been on the fringe of gambling illegality in other cities and who wanted to make a better life out there in Vegas. Very few Italians ever came on the property. There was never any violence. “We don’t want no blood there,” said Chicago mob boss Tony Accardo. “It’s bad for tourist business.” This idea that the Mafia ran the casinos is bullshit—they could be partners, but they couldn’t come to Las Vegas. The mob guys stayed home in Chicago and Kansas City. They’d tell these old bookmakers, “You’re gonna own this casino. We can we put up a little money but we expect to get 20 percent out of it. You take the money in cash and give it to us when you see us.” And it was small money back then.

Steve Wynn is one of the most polished guys in the world and he got to where he is today without any mob connections. But, naturally, if you work in Vegas you get to know connected guys. One time Steve was at a charity event with my friend Carl Cohen, who ran the Sands. Steve was running the Golden Nugget at the time and asked Carl, “How much money did the Sands make in the era of the Rat Pack?” And Carl told him one of the funniest stories about the perception and reality of the amounts of money that actually got skimmed.

The casino bosses used to play gin at the Desert Inn Country Club. They had a card room there and they would go over in the afternoon and play gin. And Hank Greenspun from the
Las Vegas Sun
would be there. They’d have the TV on in case some sports event came on—they would bet on everything. One time during the Senate hearings on organized crime (they were investigating mob rule in Vegas), Senator Estes Kefauver comes on the TV and he’s grilling one of the honchos from the Dunes—we’ll call him Harry Gold. “Mr. Gold, isn’t it true that you and your associates at the Dunes and the Sands Hotel and Riviera have skimmed hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars from your casinos in Las Vegas and this money in fact is supporting the spread of organized crime in the USA?” Ridiculous setup question. Gold knows he isn’t going to have to testify, and he says, “On advice of my attorney I’m going to take advantage of the protection of the fifth amendment.…” But the senator’s grandstanding, so he ignores this; it’s his chance to graze on his ass with these rhetorical questions. “Mr. Gold, is it not true … now is it not true, Mr. Gold, that instead of turning the money collected from the money owed in markers that you all keep that money and don’t report it?” He’s going on and on, mentioning these millions Harry Gold is supposedly skimming. Suddenly these three guys playing gin jump up and shout at the TV, “You dirty son of a bitch, we never got that kind of money! Hell, we only skimmed like ten grand a day.”

That figure was about right. In the old days, it was around ten grand a day. About 3.6 million a year. They showed about $600,000 to $700,000 in profit and they would make a few $100,000s extra with the holidays and special events. That gave the owners somewhere between 5K and 15K a month to play with—it was money for girls, and money to go to other joints and shoot craps and then the next day a runner would take money from that guy’s box to pay off his markers so Major Riddle’s money would go to the Sands, Harry Gold’s money would go to the Dunes, Aaron Weisberg’s money would go to the Flamingo, Jake Freedman’s money would go over to the Dunes, and so on.

Vegas and the mob and all that money they were skimming became legendary. It was obviously serious enough money for the Chicago and Kansas City Outfits to keep their hands in the till but how much money was actually in the cage back in those days? In the old days the casinos made, say, five million a year. Not a lot of money. Still, they were all raking off personal fortunes—it was all in cash, no taxes.

There had always been high rollers, but sometime in the late 1970s to early 1980s, the really monster players came along. When this trend started, all these Asian gamblers came in. They had the highest betting limit in the world at the time. The old betting limits were miniscule in comparison to the standard bets you see going on in those days with these guys from Beijing and mainland China at the Wynn, Steve Wynn’s resort and casino in Vegas. These guys were betting twenty-five to a hundred thousand a shot. Who had ever heard of a limit like that? That was off-the-street cold.