Question of the Day - 19 October 2023

Perhaps we should hire you. Clearly, you know more about this than we do. But we'll give it a shot.

As they say in Dino’s ancestral Italy, Se non e ver, e ben trovato. That roughly translates as, If it isn’t true, then it should be.

The saga certainly fits with the wide-open (for white people) Las Vegas of the '50s and '60s, when Dean Martin reigned as the King of Cool. It also goes perfectly with his devil-may-care persona, which kept the outside world at bay.

We polled several prominent Las Vegas historians about the tale. The Mob Museum’s Geoff Schumacher said, “It sounds familiar and plausible.”

The University of Nevada Las Vegas’ historian Michael Green remarked, “I hadn’t heard that, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Remember, he occasionally dealt in the casino. If so, I suspect Gaming Control might have thought they had bigger worries!”

They did and we’ll get to that momentarily.

Jeff Burbank, author of License to Steal, a history of gambling regulation in Nevada, gently dissents. “That's possible, but it might be more legend than fact. Nevada gaming laws back then prohibited private gaming. It had to be open to the public. It might have been just a fun thing they allowed Dean, who had clout then, to do. Members of the Rat Pack were allowed to deal games at the Sands, which they publicized. I haven't heard specifically about a game installed in Dean’s dressing room.”

Further complicating matters is the fact that Martin held a Nevada gaming license as part-owner of the Sands, so in a sense he was his own boss. Martin bought a one percent stake in the resort in 1961. It cost him $28,838, the equivalent of one week’s paycheck. He’d been playing the Sands since it opened in December 1952 and continued to do so into the Howard Hughes' ownership in the late '60s and beyond, which reportedly rankled pal Frank Sinatra no end.

There's no mention of Martin having his own secret 21 table in all the 572 pages of Nick Tosches’s Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams. But the frequently profane and floridly pretentious prose of Tosches’ narrative is probably not the last word on its subject. Still, we can glean a few insights into how loose things were during the Dean Martin era.

According to Tosches, when the Sands debuted, “No other casino represented interests as far-flung. Sub-rosa owners of the Sands included men from the shadowlands of New York and New Jersey, Miami and New Orleans, Boston and Detroit, Cleveland and Chicago, St. Louis and Los Angeles, and elsewhere.”

Martin dealt blackjack in the casino when the mood struck him. Tosches documents instances of this in March 1956 and January-February 1959. Given Dino’s legendarily low threshold for boredom, doubtless there were other larks in the table-game pit.

If anyone in management was bothered by the shenanigans, they could console themselves with the thought that Martin was good for business. As Variety chronicled in November 1965, “He’s a pet of the pit bosses, because when he’s around, the money’s around.”

Besides, whatever went on at the Sands, Mob ownership notwithstanding, was nothing compared to the aforementioned headaches regulators experienced at the Cal-Neva Club on Lake Tahoe. Martin held a stake in that, too, but he wasn’t the problem. Chicago Outfit boss Sam Giancana’s hidden ownership, by way of Sinatra, was. By the time matters culminated in a September 1, 1963, Control Board raid, Martin had wisely liquidated his stake in the troubled casino.

Lacking the definitive answer on Dean Martin’s fabled private blackjack table, we turned to his daughter Deana, who didn't respond to our entreaties.