I found a book called War of the Godfathers in a used book store in Minnesota. It was written by someone who claimed to be a long-time FBI agent known for his career combating organized crime, especially the Mafia. He wrote that a casino called the Star was built by Chicago Mob and that the Desert Inn owner, Moe Dalitz, was murdered in a shootout in front of the Mirage. I know a little something of Las Vegas mob history (thanks to Dennis Griffin) and this was the first I'd ever heard of a shootout on the Strip and Dalitz catching a bullet. What gives?
We haven't thought about William F. Roemer Jr.'s book War of the Godfathers, published in 1990, for a long time, but apparently not long enough. It shows up again after all these years.
Roemer was an amateur boxer, a Marine during WW II, an FBI agent, and later in life the author of several books about the Mob, including biographies of mobsters Tony "The Ant" Spilotro and Tony "Joe Batters" Accardo, both of the Chicago Outfit. We didn't read any of his other books, but we don't recall seeing anything that questioned their veracity.
We read War of the Godfathers when it first came out and couldn't believe our eyes. First of all, it was promoted as nonfiction, so why change the name of the Stardust to "the Star?" Second, in it, Roemer writes that it was the New York mob that rubbed out Tony Spilotro and his brother Michael. Say what? The Spilotros were murdered in Chicago by a team of Chicago mobsters, including Nick Calabrese, who admitted to being part of the team and later was a key government witness in the murder trial in which James Marcello was found guilty, with testimony highlighting the involvement of other top Outfit hitmen.
Third and most ridiculous of all, as you write in the question, Roemer invented out of whole cloth the Mob-related shootout on the construction site of the Mirage where Moe Dalitz was killed. There was no such shootout on the Strip -- then or ever. And Dalitz died in a hospital in Palm Springs at age 90 from congestive heart disease, chronic hypertension, and kidney failure." His obituary in the Las Vegas Sun noted that Dalitz had been under nurses’ care since for a year year, as his various illnesses worsened, and he'd spent his last three weeks confined to bed.
Worse, other books picked up the myth, in which the 89-year-old Dalitz took four slugs from Joe Ferriola as he "surveyed the construction site for the Mirage Hotel" in ’86, which itself would have been a mighty neat trick, since the Castaways still occupied that land, which Steve Wynn didn't purchase and clear until 1987. In some versions, Dalitz miraculously survived another three years, only to be poisoned by a Sunrise Hospital orderly. (Ferriola, the big boss of the Chicago Outfit from 1985 to 1988 after Joey Aiuppa and John Cerone went to prison for skimming Las Vegas casino profits, would never have sullied his hands with a shooting; he had upwards of 200 made members in those days to that kind of dirty work.)
Oh, and here's another good one. War of the Godfathers depicted the "Vegas Star" as later being sold to a nonexistent Japanese industrialist, "Tojo Yashudi," and having its counting room bombed. To our knowledge, no counting rooms in Vegas history were ever bombed.
In his introduction to War of the Godfathers, Roemer freely admitted to making up characters and conversations, relying on hearsay and "fictionalized" episodes. We never could figure out what he hoped to gain from casting doubt on his own nonfiction book. Regardless, we strongly advise re-shelving the book under "Fiction."
