Interference (35 page)

On May 16, 1962, after nearly a year of being arrest-free, Rosenthal was indicted in New York for being a coconspirator in
a scheme “relating to ‘fixing' basketball games across the country from November 20, 1957, through March 17, 1961,” according to court documents that cited “over 72 overt acts.” Rosenthal's alleged coconspirator was convicted; Rosenthal was not.

In early 1963, Rosenthal went to work for Sam Green, the president of Multiple Sports in Miami, which published “a weekly sheet of games and schedules, as well as provided a telephone/line service to its customers, relaying the latest odds as they changed,” according to a federal memorandum. “Sometimes those odds would change 2 or 3 times a day … Frank Rosenthal was solely responsible for setting the line and its changes.”

Soon after, while working with Green and Multiple Sports, Rosenthal was picked up by the Miami Reach police for disorderly conduct. At the time of his arrest, he was in the company of a man named Anthony Spilotro, who had become Rosenthal's young protégé. The case was dismissed against Rosenthal.

The following June, Rosenthal was arrested by Maryland state police officers outside Washington, D.C., along with local gambling czar Joe Nesline, who was investigated in the 1967-68 sports-gambling probe in Washington, and New York mobster Charles “the Blade” Tourine for gambling violations. The charge was later reduced to disorderly conduct. Rosenthal pleaded guilty and forfeited his $100 bond. Interestingly, at the time of the arrest, Rosenthal and Nesline gave the same Washington address as their residence.

Between 1964 and 1966, Rosenthal was arrested four more times for disorderly conduct, failure to make criminal registration, gambling, and “open profanity,” but all these charges against him were dismissed. During that same period, he was listed in the U.S. Senate Subcommittee Hearings on Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics as an associate of several top organized-crime figures, including Anthony Joseph DiChiarinte and Spartico Mastro, both of whom were narcotics dealers.

In 1965, Multiple Sports was shut down after the FBI raided its offices. However, neither Rosenthal nor his boss, Sam Green, were prosecuted. That same year, Rosenthal was ejected from Miami's jai-alai gambling community because he was termed to be a “bookmaker, sports fixer, undesirable.”

Rosenthal and Green were called to testify before a federal grand jury in Miami in June 1967 but both refused to answer
questions. They had been implicated in a series of local bombing attacks. No charges were filed against them.

However, soon after Rosenthal's appearance before the grand jury, he suddenly left Miami and returned to Chicago. He also started spending a great deal of time in Las Vegas. Then, he cited his employment as “personal handicapping.” According to a Justice Department memorandum, “While in Chicago, he [Rosenthal] maintained close ties with Tony Spilotro, supposedly assisting him in setting up the bookmaking network which had been [recently] disrupted by law enforcement officials. He also maintained ties with Green, even to the point of calling Green from Spilotro's Chicago phone.”

In 1968, Rosenthal officially moved to Las Vegas and received a work permit from the Clark County sheriff's office. He opened and became the general manager of a legal bookmaking business, Rose Bowl Sports Book—although, according to federal records, hidden interests in the Rose Bowl were held by Boston bookmaker Elliot Paul Price, and Price's mentor, Jerome Zarowitz, a former executive at Caesars Palace who was convicted of attempting to fix the 1946 NFL championship game and spent twenty months in prison.

Zarowitz and Price had been present at an October 1965 meeting in Palm Springs, which has become known as the “Little Apalachin Conference.” Also present at the meeting were Meyer Lansky's Mafia messenger, Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo, and Tony Salerno. Another convicted Miami bookmaker, “Fat” Ruby Lazarus, was in attendance as well.

Federal prosecutors alleged that among the topics of the meeting was the division of ownership for Caesars Palace, which had been financed in part by a $10.5 million loan from the Teamsters' Central States Pension Fund.
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Another major topic was the underworld's layoff operations on the East Coast. Lazarus was called to testify before a federal grand jury in Los Angeles and took the Fifth twenty-five times, refusing to answer questions about the meeting.

Caesars Palace was sold to Lum's, Inc., the restaurant chain, in October 1969. Lum's retained Zarowitz, who was making over $300,000 a year, despite his criminal background. In May 1970, after Zarowitz refused to obtain a license through the Nevada Gaming Commission, he was forced to resign by public-relations-minded casino executives. However, investigations of the sale of
Caesars Palace to Lum's yielded Zarowitz $3.5 million of the $58 million purchase price, even though Zarowitz was not listed as owning a single share of stock.
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Price, an associate of Boston Mafia boss Raymond Patriarca, had been bankrolled by Beckley after experiencing financial difficulties. Another Beckley associate, Marty Kane, was Rosenthal's chief assistant at the Rose Bowl Sports Book. And former Sklaroff associate Reuben Goldstein later became Kane's runner.

Kane told me that he ran the Rose Bowl in Rosenthal's absence. “I worked there because I was doing Lefty a favor. He was kind of sick. He had ulcers, and he asked me to go in there. I'd get information on games. When Lefty couldn't show up, I would run the place. Otherwise, I was just another clerk.”

Apparently, the remnants of the Beckley/Sklaroff network had shifted to the new Rosenthal network. Thus, to all intents and purposes, the entry of Rosenthal, Zarowitz, Price, Kane, and Goldstein into the Rose Bowl's bookmaking business sent a signal to law-enforcement officials that the outlaw line had officially moved from Miami to Las Vegas. It was a move that could not have been accomplished without the consent of the underworld's nine-member national crime commission.

On December 12, 1970, while working at the Rose Bowl Sports Book, Rosenthal, Price, Zarowitz, and several others were arrested for their roles in an interstate-gambling operation. Among the federal raids in twenty-six cities in eleven states—which Attorney General John Mitchell had called “the largest coordinated gambling raids ever”
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—agents hit both the Rose Bowl Sports Book and Caesars Palace, where more than $1.5 million in hundred-dollar bills was found in lockboxes registered in Zarowitz's name. The money had been the alleged yield from an illegal bookmaking operation.

The government charged that, among other things, Rosenthal had obtained information that would have changed the point spreads of college and professional football games. Instead of releasing this information to the public, Rosenthal gave it to only his favorite customers. Those arrested were indicted in January 1971.

But the indictments against Rosenthal and company were dismissed on November 5, 1975, by U.S. District Judge Roger Foley because the wiretaps that had been used to collect the evidence against them had been obtained before the government
had exhausted normal investigative procedures. Also, the authorization for the wiretaps had been botched by the Mitchell Justice Department.
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While under indictment, Rosenthal, who had undergone major surgery for the removal of his stomach ulcers, had been hired as the Stardust hotel/casino in Las Vegas as a blackjack floorman. However, the Nevada Gaming Control Board insisted that Rosenthal submit an application to be licensed. Instead, Rosenthal was taken off the casino floor and placed in the hotel's public-relations department, a job that did not require licensing. At the time Rosenthal was hired, the Stardust was owned by a reputed front man for Los Angeles mob attorney Sidney Korshak, who was still the top mouthpiece for the Chicago Mafia.

Meantime, Rosenthal had remained the mentor and the closest friend of Chicago Mafia soldier Anthony Spilotro, who became the enforcer of the outlaw line.

Rosenthal later testified, “I have known Tony Spilotro as his mother conceived him [
sic
], which happens to be the exact truth … Tony Spilotro over the many, many years of our junior and adult life has been a very personal, close friend of mine.”

In an interview with my associate, William Scott Malone, James Fratianno, a Mafia-boss-turned-federal-witness, said, “Tony Spilotro bets big on football games, and Lefty Rosenthal is his very, very close friend. [Rosenthal] tells him which teams to bet. He bets maybe twenty, thirty thousand [dollars] on a game, maybe more. It all depends what team they are betting on.”

Spilotro was a feared and ruthless man who wielded considerable power in Las Vegas and in Southern California. Credited with at least twenty-five brutal gangland murders, including one in which he was said to have crushed his victim's head in a carpenter's vise, Spilotro soon became among the most feared Mafia figures in America.

Spilotro was the fourth of six sons born to Patsy Spilotro (their father), the proprietor of Patsy's, a favorite hangout for members of the Capone mob on Chicago's West Side. The restaurant failed soon after Patsy's death in 1953. Tony Spilotro was a roughneck and a punk in high school; he beat up other students and even teachers with equal indiscretion. He was thrown out of school in 1955 when he was in the tenth grade and never returned.

Spilotro, nicknamed the Ant because of his muscular five-feet-three frame, got started in the business by running errands and collecting money for Chicago mobster Sam DeStefano with whom he was working when he had met Rosenthal. Later, Spilotro became a registered bail bondsman for the Cook County criminal court in Illinois. Soon he was a top juice collector, and he rose in prominence because of his ruthlessness. After he allegedly murdered DeStefano, he went to work for another Chicago Mafia leader, Felix Alderisio, until he moved to Miami to become a runner for Rosenthal.

In 1971, with Rosenthal's help, Spilotro moved to Las Vegas with his wife and son. He quickly became the most feared loan shark on the Strip. At the height of his power, he directed a forty-man goon squad. In the 1970s, it was widely thought that he was behind a string of syndicate slayings in which the victims were killed by several shots to the head from a .22 caliber pistol with a silencer held at close range. At that time, according to law-enforcement officials, Spilotro reported to Joseph Lombardo, a top capo with the Chicago Mafia.

Although Spilotro had been arrested for bookmaking, loan-sharking, and three times for murder, he had never spent more than twenty-four hours in jail. His only conviction was for filing a false mortgage application.

In the NFL, problems were brewing within the Oakland Raiders. Managing general partner Al Davis and the team's major stockholder, Wayne Valley, had gone to war with each other after Raiders wide receiver Warren Wells, already convicted of attempted rape and placed on probation in September 1969, was arrested again in February 1971, this time for driving while intoxicated and illegal possession of a handgun. The following September, he was arrested for a third time after he beat up a woman, who then stabbed him.

Davis went to Valley and asked him to use his influence on the judge, who was a personal friend of Valley, in Wells's case. Wells was released—but not for ten months. Davis reportedly left the clear impression with the other Raiders players that Valley would have acted more promptly had Wells been a white man. Valley was furious with Davis over the rumor and decided not to renew Davis's contract in 1976.
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Davis then went to Ed McGah, the third Raiders partner
who had not been a party to the Davis/Valley dispute. Davis convinced McGah to sign him to a twenty-year contract at an annual salary of $100,000. McGah also gave Davis broad powers over the operation of the team. The contract was signed in July 1972, but Valley didn't find out about it until February 1973 and immediately filed suit. However, Valley lost the case and sold his interest in the Oakland team. Consequently, Davis bought another 15 percent of the club.

Embroiled in the struggle to maintain control of the Raiders, Davis might have been surprised to know that his future would soon be intertwined with those of Lefty Rosenthal, Tony Spilotro, and the new man in Las Vegas: Allen R. Glick.

28 Façades of Legitimacy

ALLEN R. GLICK HAD been an unknown thirty-two-year-old, La Jolla-based real estate executive.
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Overnight, he became the second-largest casino operator in Nevada, behind Howard Hughes's Summa Corporation
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and would bring the largest hotel sports book to Las Vegas. While Lefty Rosenthal provided the brains for the new legalized sports-bookmaking operation, as well as the outlaw line, Tony Spilotro was poised in the shadows as his muscle.
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Spilotro was so quiet that Glick told me, “I never dealt with Spilotro, never was he on any of my payrolls. I never met him.”
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Born in Pittsburgh and the son of a scrap-iron dealer, Glick won a Bronze Star Medal in Vietnam, where he served as an aerial observer and artillery adviser aboard a helicopter. A graduate of Ohio State University and Case Western Reserve University Law School in Cleveland, he never actually practiced law, although he was a member of the bar in Pennsylvania and California.

Out of college, Glick became a close friend of Joseph Philip Balistrieri, the son of Frank Balistrieri, the boss of the Milwaukee Mafia, which is within the Chicago Mafia's sphere of influence. In 1969, Glick and his wife moved to a suburb of San Diego, where he began working as a $750-a-month assistant in multifamily projects with the American Housing Guild.

In mid-1971, Glick went to work for Saratoga Development Corporation of La Jolla. The company had been founded in 1965 by Dennis Wittman, a financial adviser to Carroll Rosenbloom.

By September 1972, Glick had become a 45 percent owner of the business. “I acquired an interest in Saratoga for $25,000 and the obligation of guaranteeing all corporate projects and being an executive of the company,” he says. Immediately, Glick became a millionaire since the company was worth an estimated $10.5 million.