Yesterday, Part II of the Stardust Saga concluded when Recrion Corp., the newly named offspring of the scandal-scarred Parvin-Dorhmann Corp., sold the Stardust to the new front company, Argent Corp.
Recrion, even with its new name, never recovered from the Parvin-Dohrmann scandals, so the Chicago mob arranged a sale of the Stardust, along with the Hacienda, Marina, and Fremont, to Argent Corp., fronted by Allen R. Glick (the name was an initialism for Allen R. Glick Enterprises). Entire books have been written about the next five years at the Stardust. Nick Pileggi's Casino (also a movie) is one of them. Our own Fly on the Wall and Battle for Las Vegas are two others.
Here's the brief version.
Allen Glick attended Ohio State University, got a law degree from Case Western Reserve, also in Ohio, and served a stint in Army Intelligence in Vietnam during the war. Apparently, Glick was a classmate of Joe Balistrieri, son of Milwaukee mob boss Frank Balistrieri, at Ohio State. That might account for the fact that Glick eventually signed his name to Teamster Pension Fund loans that totaled $70 million, brokered by Chicago lawyer, fixer, and mob associate Allen Dorfman; when the dust settled, Glick's Argent Corp. had bought the four casinos from Recrion. (Allen Dorfman was murdered gangland-style in 1983 in Chicago.) At the tender age of 34, Allen Glick was the ostensible owner of the second-largest casino consortium in Las Vegas at that time.
However, Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal was the real boss, still operating under orders from the Chicago mob, with Tony Spilotro as the muscle enforcing Chicago's will on the streets of Las Vegas. (Our upcoming book Cullotta -- The Life of a Chicago Criminal, Vegas Mobster, and Government Witness provides a unique look at the street-crime side of the Spilotro era in Las Vegas.) Basically, the only things that changed at the Stardust when Argent took over were the front man and the name of the holding company. Most importantly, the cash skimming continued, as it had for two decades.
But in 1978, the audit division of the Nevada Gaming Control Board got lucky. It turned up $7,200 in quarters in the Stardust's vault that hadn't been accounted for in Argent's books. Another unrecorded $3,500 was discovered soon thereafter at the Stardust, with more found at the Fremont. A lengthy investigation followed, revealing that as much as $12 million had been skimmed from Argent casinos within the previous couple of years.
At long last, the Chicago-Midwest underworld's 20-plus-year control of the Stardust was exposed. Glick's era in Las Vegas was shortlived: In 1979, his license was revoked. He later turned state's evidence to avoid prosecution. His fine, initially, was $12 million; it's believed that he paid $500,000 in all.
Meanwhile, Lefty Rosenthal was also hounded out of the casino business by the regulators. Thus, the Chicago-Midwest mob's tentacles into the casino counting rooms were cut off. Or were they?
The Stardust's troubles were far from over.
Next, the Stardust was sold by Argent to Al Sachs of Trans-Sterling Corp. Sachs started his casino career as a dealer in the illegal gambling halls in Chicago in the 1940s. He worked in Havana as well, prior to the Castro revolution. Ironically, he opened the Royal Nevada in 1955 (which the Stardust subsequently swallowed) and served as president of the Stardust under Glick and Rosenthal.
He and his partner Herb Tobman formed Trans-Sterling in 1979 to buy the Stardust. Trans-Sterling also ran the Sundance Hotel (now Fitzgeralds), which was built and owned by Moe Dalitz. Tobman was the first general manager of the Moulin Rouge; he also replaced Al Sachs as president of the Stardust when Sachs was sacked after a disagreement with Lefty Rosenthal.
Sachs and Tobman ran the Stardust for six years. But they ran afoul of the regulators in 1983, when a raid by the auditors exposed a phony fill-slip scheme perpetrated by four casino executives. In 1984, the Nevada Gaming Commission fined Sachs and Tobman $3 million for the skimming scheme; at the time it was the highest fine ever imposed by the state on a casino company. (The record stood until 2003, when regulators fined the Mirage $5 million for failure to file 15,000 cash-transaction reports with the Treasury Department.)
Of course, now Trans-Sterling had to go. To the rescue rode the highly reputable Boyd Corporation, which bought the Stardust (along with the Fremont) in 1985. Boyd’s purchase hammered the last nail into the old coffin and put an end to the Stardust’s nearly 30-year ill-fated association with the mob.
In 1991, Boyd added the 32-story 800-room tower that will be imploded next month. A year later, Lido de Paris closed; it was replaced with Enter the Night, which ran through 1999. That year, Wayne Newton signed the biggest entertainment deal in Las Vegas history; he earned $25 million annually to perform in the renamed Wayne Newton Theater. Newton performed there for nearly six years, ending his run in April 2005. The Stardust officially closed at exactly noon on November 1, 2006. The Bobbie Howard Band led the last casino patrons out the front doors in a conga line while playing "When the Saints Go Marching (Out)." When the new tower is imploded and hauled away in mid-March, it will end a long sordid saga in Las Vegas’s colorful past.
Boyd’s $4 billion Echelon Place metaresort is scheduled to open on the Stardust Property in 2010.
