Ever since I wrote a column about gangsters I’ve known, I’ve received many requests to write more about them.
Coincidently, a new book about Al Capone has hit the market. “Get Capone,” by Chicago author Jonathan Eig, is one of the best I’ve read. It would make a great miniseries, rivaling one of my favorites, “The Sopranos.”
With the demise of Prohibition and its huge illegal profits from bootlegging, crime bosses were looking for a new frontier. They found it in the parched sands of Las Vegas. Nevada had legalized gambling. And the mob moved in.
I’d first been invited to Las Vegas in 1946 by onetime New York mobster Benny Goffstein, whom I’d met when I was a reporter in Albany and he was circulation manager there for the Hearst newspaper—and incidentally also controlled the numbers racket there.
By 1946, I was working for the Associated Press in Chicago and Goffstein, along with mobster Gus Greenbaum, were opening the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. I couldn’t make the opening, but in 1951, when I was reporting on Hollywood for the AP, Goffstein invited me for a Spike Jones opening.
The 1950s were the heyday for mobsters in
Las Vegas.
They ran every casino and skimmed their profits off the top. It was a lot more profitable than bootlegging.
Goffstein and Greenbaum had taken over the Flamingo after the murder of Benjamin “Bugsy” Seigel. At the orders of mob financial genius Meyer Lansky, Seigel had become a partner of Flamingo founder businessman William “Billy” Wilkerson, owner of the Hollywood Reporter. Seigel ultimately bought out Wilkerson. But Seigel’s cost overruns had so scandalized the mob that he was murdered six months after the hotel’s opening.
By the time I started covering Las Vegas, I’d often run into Meyer Lansky at the Flamingo. He was an outgoing, very charming guy with a good sense of humor.
Las Vegas was a relaxing place for mobsters like New York’s Frank Costello and Chicago’s Sam Giancana. After all, their business was (somewhat) legitimate.
The nearby Desert Inn was run by Wilbur Clark. Clark was a former bellhop in a San Diego hotel. He became the front man at the Desert Inn for its owners, the Mayfield Road gang of Cleveland, led by Moe Dalitz. Dalitz later became a prominent philanthropist in Las Vegas. Clark’s and the hotel’s connection with the Dalitz mob was exposed during the U.S. Senate Kefauver committee hearings in the 1960s.
The Sands hotel was run by Jack Entratter, another charming guy, who’d been a bouncer for New York mobster Jack “Legs” Diamond.
At the same time, the hotels were the venues for the top entertainers—Jimmy Durante, “Spike” Jones at the Flamingo, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis and Danny Thomas at the Sands, Louis Armstrong and opera singer Robert Merrill at the Desert Inn and the Sands.
The entertainers were used to playing for the mob because many of the big nightclubs around the country were run by the mob. They also remembered the fate of Joe E. Lewis. In the 1920s, Lewis, then a singer, was playing in a Chicago club owned by Al Capone’s rival, Jack “Machine Gun” McGurn. Lewis refused a bid to play at a Capone club. Capone’s mobsters slit Lewis’ throat. He never sang again, but later became a top night club comedian.
Las Vegas was an open city during the mobster era, an open city with very little crime. It may have been a playground and profit center for mobsters, but it was also a safe haven—as long as they stayed there.
Once beyond its borders, mob revenge was permitted.
When Flamingo owner Gus Greenbaum ran into trouble with the mob, he made the mistake of leaving Las Vegas with his wife on a trip to Phoenix. They were found dead there, their
throats slit.
Among the most popular acts in Las Vegas was Louis Prima and Keely Smith in the Sahara Hotel lounge.
Many’s the time I went there at midnight and left at 6 a.m.
Harry Cohn, the despotic head of Columbia Pictures, often matched me hour by hour listening to their act with the hot Sam Butera Band.
As great as the headliners were in the main room, the lounge was often more fun. It was there that the headliners came to relax, Frank Sinatra breaking up to Don Rickles’ insults. But behind the act, Rickles was a pussycat. A musician in the house band told me that Rickles was the only star to thank him after his performance. The musicians appreciated it very much.
And of course there was that master improviser Shecky Greene, one of the funniest comics ever to appear in Vegas.
Both Don and Shecky eventually moved up to the big room. But it was in the lounge that after hours Las Vegas shone.
Las Vegas has become very corporate today, a kind of grownup Disneyland, much to my regret. It was a lot more fun back in the illegitimate old days.
Southern California is a crazy place. Every time I drive by the late Aaron Spelling’s big chateau on the old Bing Crosby estate, I am reminded about 50 years ago in a Sherman Oaks tract house the same Aaron Spelling bemoaning the fact that he couldn’t get work as an actor.
“And when I do it’s always as a sex maniac because they say I look like one,” he told me.
I suggested, “Maybe you’re on the wrong side of the camera.” Your friend Dick Powell has started a company. Why don’t you ask him for a job?”
In no time at all, Aaron was Dick’s assistant in Four Star Gem Inc.
One day Aaron got a script from the television editor of the Los Angeles Times. Aaron took it to Powell and said, “This is the worst thing I’ve every read. What shall I do with it?”
Powell replied with the magic words, “Pro-duce it.”
That was Aaron’s first shot at producing. He went on to become one of television’s most successful moguls. That’s how he could afford to big that big house, which his widow Candy now has on the market for millions.
I read recently that a New York ballet company is choreographing a new ballet based on the murder of Hollywood gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. Seems like a good idea.
Twyla Tharp has already mined the Frank Sinatra song book with a ballet and now a full-fledge Broadway production featuring Frank’s songs.
But if choreographers are going to go in that direction, they could probably find a goldmine of fresh ideas in Hollywood.
How about the murder of Lana Tuner’s lover hoodlum Johnny Stompanato by Lana’s daughter Cheryl Crane?
Or the graceful Charlie Chaplin as the Little Tramp?
Or even Mae West’s act with her entourage of University of Southern California football players?