Question of the Day - 19 August 2022

The Tropicana was the object of mob shenanigans from the very start. 

First, the Trop was the brainchild of Philip "Dandy" Kastel, who'd spent 25 years managing the entire Louisiana gambling scene for Frank Costello, a boss of New York bosses and partner of Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano. Kastel enlisted Ben Jaffe, of the Miami Fontainebleau Hotel, to invest and front for him and Costello in the Tropicana. Jaffe also held an interest in the Riviera and hired the same Miami construction company that built the Riv to put up the Trop. On opening night in April 1957, Jaffe had infused more than $7 million, plus another $7 million in other investors' capital (to Kastel's $300,000); licensing had been held up for a year, until Kastel's name was dropped from the application.

A month after the "Tiffany of the Strip" opened, Frank Costello was shot in an attempted hit in New York and detectives found a slip of paper in his pocket with a tidy sum of figures, which turned out to be the gross profits from the Tropicana's first few weeks in operation. In the shakeup that followed, J. Kell Housels, a casino juiceman with a number of downtown interests, came in and by 1959, he'd bought out Jaffe's interest. 

So that was the 1959 episode.

Over the course of the 1970s, the Trop changed hands several times, but gangsters were still ensconced in the operations. In an FBI wiretap, a conversation was recorded among entertainment director Joe Agosto, casino executive Carl Thomas, and Kansas City mob boss Nick Civella, in which the three discussed duping the current majority shareholder, Mitzi Stauffer Briggs, an heiress to the Stauffer Chemical Company fortune, and skimming casino cash. The fallout from this episode cost Briggs and a minority shareholder their gaming licenses. The hotel company Ramada bought them out in 1979. Subsequently, Thomas and Agosto turned state's evidence and their testimony helped convict many Midwestern capos, which finally broke the grip of the Chicago Outfit on Las Vegas. 

You didn't ask, but the Tropicana continued to have its share of problems throughout the 1980s and into the '90s. in our book Joe's Dash, Joe Dorsey describes the rat's nest of thievery, corruption, and impunity he encountered when he went to work there as director of security and surveillance. It got to the point that Joe considered hanging signs in all the break rooms saying, "‘The mob has left the building, so please stop stealing!” It's an amazing look at how a poorly managed casino can be the victim of outright and long-term larceny on a grand scale, whether or not the Mob was involved.