No final resting spot for Lefty Rosenthal, Las Vegas mobster of ‘Casino’ fame

Posted on by February 5, 2026
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Lefty Rosenthal

Frank (Lefty) Rosenthal

After a half-century pretending it didn’t exist, Las Vegas now embraces its mob heritage, with great gusto. The latest example came in a Las Vegas Review-Journal story posted online today. It breathlessly reported the sale of the site where Frank (Lefty) Rosenthal, a legendary organized crime character who secretly oversaw the illegal skimming of proceeds at four mob-owned casinos, was blasted out of his car in 1982 by a bomb as he turned the ignition.

Lefty somehow survived reasonably intact but refused to name names. No one was ever charged. He soon retired from organized crime and left town but still was added to the Nevada gaming regulators’ “Black Book” of folks banned from entering a Nevada casino. His story became the basis for the popular, surprisingly historically accurate 1995 movie, “Casino,” with Robert De Niro playing the Rosenthal role, renamed Sam (Ace) Rothstein, and Sharon Stone as his glamorous-but-troubled wife.

In real life, Lefty ended up in Miami Beach, where he ran a sports betting site and consulted on off-shore gambling operations. He died at age 79 in 2008 in his apartment on Collins Avenue of a reported heart attack.

For years since, the well-known web site FindAGrave.com featuring celebrity final resting spots has reported that Lefty was buried in Visitation Cemetery in Norfolk, N.Y. That’s a hamlet of 4,453 folks just a few miles from the St. Lawrence River and Canada. This would be hundreds of miles from any of his known haunts–he was a Chicago native who learned sports betting in the bleachers at Wrigley Field–and unlikely on its face. This was especially so since Lefty was Jewish, and Geri McGee Rosenthal, his divorced wife and mother of their two children, was buried in Los Angeles.

So after the FindAGrave page came to my attention at the New To Las Vegas world headquarters a few years ago, I resolved to sleuth out the truth. Continue reading →

Watching the bribery of ‘Melania’ in a Las Vegas theater

Posted on by January 31, 2026
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Melania

U.S. Rep. Michael (Ozzie) Myers, second from left, is recorded taking a $50,000 bribe during the FBI’s Abscam sting

Decades before becoming New To Law Vegas, I was a newspaper reporter in the Philadelphia area. In 1980 I helped cover the Abscam bribery scandal. That was an FBI sting in which agents secretly videotaped a plethora of elected officials mainly in New Jersey and Pennsylvania taking bribes to help out a phony Arab sheik. Some of the tapes became public record when they were played in open court during the resulting criminal trials, which sent nearly a dozen political heavies to prison. The scandal, which inspired the 2013 movie, “American Hustle,” is believed to be the first time the FBI used video in a big way to make criminal cases.

The TV-watching public was utterly transfixed watching actual footage of Congressmen, U.S. senators and a mayor accepting major bribes. “Money talks in this business and b—s— walks,” U.S. Rep Michael (Ozzie) Myers of Philadelphia famously declared after pocketing $50,000 of hundred-dollar bills in a New York City hotel room in 1979 (see nearby photo). He then added–somewhat less famously–“And it works the same way in Washington.”

How right he was.

The earthy video-recorded wisdom of Myers, who later went back to prison again for voter fraud but is still around at age 82, barreled back to me as I watched yet another recorded example of actual bribery–but this one this one out in the open and not secret. It was an early first-day showing yesterday of “Melania,” in a Las Vegas theater. The documentary about the First Lady and the 20 days up to Donald J. Trump’’ second inauguration on January 20, 2025, was simply terrible. It was so bad that fact alone amply supported numerous press accounts that Jeff Bezos’s Amazon wildly overpaid—a total of $75 million in rights and marketing–for the sole goal of currying favor for future regulatory actions with her husband, Donald J. Trump, again occupying the pinnacle of power in D.C.

Continue reading →

It Didn’t Stay Here: a civil lawsuit in Delaware for alleged sexual abuse in Las Vegas

Posted on by January 27, 2026
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Delaware’s famous Court of Chancery, now 234 years old, usually hears staid civil business dispute cases turning on dry, complicated, sleep-inducing contract language and mind-numbing lawyering. But every once in a while, a case pops up like Los Angeles City Employees’ Retirement System, on behalf of eXp World Holdings Inc. v. Glenn Sanford, Randall Miles, Dan Cahir, Jason Gesing, Eugene Frederick and James Bramble. 

The shocking claim: To enhance their personal wealth, leaders of the parent company of eXp Realty, a big publicly traded real estate brokerage incorporated in Delaware, largely turned a blind eye to allegations some of their biggest agents sexually assaulted fellow agents in Las Vegas and other cities. A judge’s recent ruling in Wilmington will allow the case to proceed.

Of course, most everything, especially liability, is being denied. But in a big way the eXp 6, as I might call the half-dozen defendants, still become the newest candidates for my long-running list, It Didn’t Stay Here. The criterion is simple: people in trouble elsewhere for something that happened in Las Vegas. The list is my New to Las Vegas rebuttal to “What Happens Here, Stays Here,” for many years the famous marketing slogan of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. You can see a list of the nominees nearby. A lawsuit like this is definitely trouble. Continue reading →

Far from Las Vegas, founding father Thomas Paine’s legacy in a town where he did nothing 250 years ago

Posted on by January 27, 2026
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Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine

Our nation’s semiquincentennial year has kicked off with the 250th anniversary this week of the publication of “Common Sense” by Thomas Paine (1737-1809). He’s the English philosopher and revolutionary who came to America in late 1774 and published his famous work barely a year later. His best-selling manifesto for freedom was so persuasive and fiery the Second Continental Congress borrowed large chunks of its logic when fashioning the Declaration of Independence just a few months later on July 4, 1776.

I’ll leave it to the historians and the scholars to ponder the continuing significance of Paine and his literary output. Admittedly, there’s no Las Vegas hook for this, but I am sometimes known to ponder matters far and wide. So I’m going to take another look at New Rochelle, N.Y., a leafy New York City suburb where I have relatives and have frequently visited long before becoming New To Las Vegas. They live just a block from one of the strangest and most bogus shrines to political action in America that I know of–strange and bogus mainly because nothing political ever happened there.

Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine Cottage Museum, New Rochelle, N.Y.

I am referring to what is now called the Thomas Paine Cottage Museum. The rather nondescript structure is perhaps the last tangible vestige of Paine. Why am I so down on this tribute to a man listed among the country’s Founding Fathers? Here are some reasons. Continue reading →