Question of the Day - 15 February 2024

Yesterday we covered the big names in the early Mob years in Vegas: Lansky, Siegel, Sedway, Greenbaum, Dalitz, Cohen, Entratter. Today we continue from there and wind up at the end of that era, with a story that's close to our own hearts along the way. 

John "Jake the Barber" Factor was Max Factor's half-brother; they shared a father, a rabbi. Unlike Max, who had no known organized-crime affiliation, Jake went the other way from the start; he perpetrated a massive stock swindle in England, cheated the casino in Monte Carlo, staged kidnappings in Chicago, and served six years of a 10-year sentence for mail fraud. He showed up Las Vegas in 1955 to bail out the Stardust, which was in dire straits after its developer, Tony Cornero, dropped dead at a Desert Inn dice table; Factor invested his own money, but it's widely believed that he was fronting for the Chicago Outfit. He "owned" the Stardust for seven or eight years and though he "sold" it in the early '60s for $7 million, the casino allegedly earned upwards of $200 million over that time.   

Speaking of the Stardust, the movie Casino immortalized Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal; the character based on him, Sam "Ace" Rothstein, was played by Robert DeNiro. Rosenthal was a childhood friend of Tony Spilotro's, an enforcer for the Chicago Outfit. A numbers guy like Lansky, Rosenthal's specialty was sports betting and at one time, he ran the biggest illegal bookmaking operation in the U.S. for the Chicago bosses. He arrived in Las Vegas, via Miami, with a national reputation as a sports bettor, oddsmaker, and handicapper and promptly joined forces with Spilotro at the Stardust, where he developed the sports book into the country's leading sports-gambling venue, known far and wide for the Stardust line. He was also Chicago's man behind the scenes in the hotel and casino and oversaw the Outfit's interests in the Fremont, Hacienda, and Marina, until he fell afoul of state regulators for running casinos without a license, plus the FBI and Metro Police for his dubious affiliations with Chicago and Spilotro. He was married to showgirl-hustler Geri McGee Rosenthal, one of the six "Women of the Underworld" in our new book Shameless. 

Finally, we come to our most treasured Jewish gangster story, that of David Berman. Davie's life of crime began young, in his early teens, and after turning 20, he was recruited by Lansky and Company for strong-arm work in New York. He served seven years of a 10-year bit at Sing Sing, then was sent to Minneapolis to run Mob operations there for the Genovese crime family. He tried to enlist in the U.S. military to fight the Nazis, but was turned down as a convicted felon; the Canadians had no such compunction, so he fought for Canada, landing at Normandy shortly after D Day. In France, he was shot several times and left for dead, but survived to return to Minnesota, then migrated to Las Vegas in 1946 as an enforcer; he was with Moe Sedway and Gus Greenbaum when the trio walked into the Flamingo and took over operations while Bugsy Siegel's body was still warm.

Davie was immortalized in the 1981 book Easy Street by his daughter Susan Berman, who, on a personal note, became a friend when she returned to Vegas after a decades-long absence to work on an A&E documentary and the book Lady Las Vegas. The Bermans were the only gangster family we found in a search of Las Vegas phone books from the 1950s; they lived in one of the original bungalows on Sixth Street on what was at the time the edge of town for a few years until Davie died at age 57 from a heart attack during colon surgery. His wife Gladys died somewhat mysteriously at age 39 from an overdose of barbiturates. Susan was later murdered by the madman Robert Durst; Durst had also murdered his first wife, who was Susan's best friend, as well as a neighbor in Los Angeles.

The Jewish mobsters we've covered in these two QoDs are just the best known, due mainly to their notoriety and, shall we say, executive positions in the Mob and Mob-owned casinos.

But legions of lesser lights -- dealers, pit bosses, casino managers, count-room personnel and bag guys, enforcers, etc. -- were also  employed in Las Vegas in those days. They'd held similar positions in the illegal joints all over the country and, with gambling a legitimate business in Nevada, were instantly and miraculously transformed from criminals at home into lawful tax-paying shift workers and upstanding members of the growing Las Vegas community as soon as they crossed the state line. They're mostly forgotten today, but these casino workers, of all religions, ethnicities, and backgrounds, had as much to do with decriminalizing, destigmatizing, and legitimizing casino gambling as the gangsters who did or didn't survive the Mob.