Question of the Day - 30 January 2011

In part one of this portrait, which ran on Thurday, Jan. 27, we followed Allen Glick’s career from real estate lawyer in San Diego to Mafia-backed owner of four Las Vegas casinos, all of which were being skimmed by the Mob, under the direction of Lefty Rosenthal and his lieutenant, slot cheat Jay Vandermark. It took less than a year for Glick’s squeaky-clean image to get smudged, first in a confrontation with a disgruntled former oddsmaker, then in litigation with a silent partner in the Stardust. Both adversaries were later gunned down, bringing unwanted scrutiny to Glick’s activities and associates. In part two, the scummy skim comes to light, with dire consequences for Glick …

If Argent CEO Allen R. Glick couldn’t figure out what Lefty Rosenthal and Jay Vandermark were doing, two young Nevada Gaming Control Board employees – auditor Dennis Gomes and accountant Dick Law – put the pieces together. They launched a carefully timed raid on the Stardust on May 16, 1976, seizing documents and skimmed cash. Vandermark fled the country the next day. Glick’s reaction was to accuse his employees of stealing money from him, then file an insurance claim for the loss.

While criminal misconduct had been discovered, the role of Glick’s Mafia benefactors remained hidden behind the CEO’s bespectacled visage. With Vandermark on the lam, Carl Thomas was brought in to resurrect the skim. He never discussed it with Glick (nor did Glick ask). Thomas found his boss to be incurious, impotent … and frequently absent. But by 1977, Thomas was out and Glick nemesis Rosenthal – his gaming license having been reinstated – was running the show once more.

By this time the Securities & Exchange Commission was probing Glick’s own financial irregularities (which included no-strings loans to himself from Argent funds). His usefulness as a Mob front was waning. As Nicholas Pileggi writes in Casino, where Mafiosi were concerned, "It was hard enough stealing from a casino, without having the casino owner ahead of you in line."

According to Glick’s subsequent court testimony, Lefty Rosenthal broached an under-the-table, $10 million buyout of Argent’s silent Teamster and Mob partners. Lefty himself was to stay on as half-owner and CEO. Glick found this to be an offer he could refuse.

After lengthy indecision, the Mob decided upon a more direct approach. Glick was summoned to Oscar Goodman’s law office on April 25, 1978. (Goodman, a sometime Argent attorney, was not present.) As Glick recalled, a "vulgar and animalistic" Mob emissary told the executive he was persona non grata and that if he valued the lives of his children, he’d put Argent up for sale that very day.

Glick complied soon afterward, although he still didn’t quite get the message. He floated the idea of retaining ownership but leasing the Stardust and Fremont to other local hoteliers and Rosenthal cronies – an arrangement that, the Las Vegas Sun noted, would "net Glick a healthy profit as landlord." When news of Glick’s exit strategy leaked in July 1978, it was spun by the Sun as "the youthful casino operator" becoming fed up with "continual harassment by state gaming authorities" and the SEC.

By the time a sale closed, on Nov. 30, 1979, it was too late for Glick to make a clean getaway. An unrelated FBI investigation had run across the Mob’s role in Argent. Key evidence then turned up in a February raid and the ugly scheme became public the following May, when U.S. District Judge Harry Claiborne unsealed hundreds of pages of FBI affidavits. Glick’s gaming license was revoked and Nevada authorities fined him $500,000, whereupon the boy wonder retreated behind the walls of his fortress-like compound in La Jolla.

When the skim was at its height, Argent’s CEO crowed, "Allen R. Glick has never, nor will ever be, associated with anything other than what is lawful." Goodman disagrees, saying in Of Rats and Men, "it’s obvious to me Glick had to have been part of the whole deal. No question about it. There’s no way he could not have known what was going on. He was not a dope."

Although the Stardust and Fremont were now owned by Allan D. Sachs’ Trans Sterling Corp., some things didn’t change. In 1984, the Nevada Gaming Commission revoked the casinos’ licenses and fined them $3 million, after finding the skim to still be humming along. (Sachs denied it to his dying day.) Boyd Gaming was brought in to run – and eventually purchase – the two properties, finally banishing their Mob taint.

The man who once proclaimed he’d never gotten so much as a traffic citation proved to be, in return for federal immunity, a veritable font of knowledge on the depths of the Mafia’s involvement in his casinos. He sang like a canary at the 1985 trial of his former patron, Frank Balistrieri, and six associates – as did Carl Thomas. Pileggi describes Glick as "a devastating witness … precise and incapable of being unruffled."

"I believed that getting the true story out was much more important than the risks involved," Glick told the Chicago Tribune. "I was caught in a vise between people who had infiltrated the casino and the government’s investigation."

Having escaped virtually scot-free, Glick "managed to lead a low-key existence, giving generously to the private schools attended by his children, playing golf at La Costa, and easily mixing with La Jolla’s beautiful people," according to a profile in the San Diego Reader. But the gaming industry remained a powerful lure. Glick would be linked to Third World casinos and to electronic-lottery venture – as well as with a diet beverage. Glick invested in Democratic Party fundraiser Richard Silberman’s unsuccessful Yuba Natural Resources, a gold-mining outfit. (Silberman later did time for laundering money. When caught, he offered information on Glick to the FBI.)

His name remained toxic. A series of dodgy financial transactions between Glick and Jeremy Simms led to the 2001 denial of the latter’s application for tribal-gaming contracts in Arizona. Wherever Glick went, trouble managed to find him.

Goodman, however, is chagrined by his former client’s ensuing career. "He walked away from a massive organized-crime skimming operation with millions of dollars and today lives like a country gentleman," he fumed to biographer John L. Smith. Goodman knows "far more about the man than he is willing to share," Smith adds.

Like so many aspects of Glick’s past, his present whereabouts are subject to dispute. According to Smith’s Las Vegas Review-Journal column, the former Mob patsy is still ensconced in the San Diego area. The San Diego Reader’s Don Bauder reported, however, that as of July 1, 2009, Glick was in the Philippines.

Wherever he may be, Glick remains secure in his reputation -- summarized by Smith -- "as a local laughingstock and the most consciously naïve man in the history of Las Vegas."