The Great Stardust Skim - Casino Collectibles News

The GreatStardust Skimby Stephen FischerThis is such a wonderful Americansuccess story. In 1976 the president ofthe Stardust Hotel was 34-year oldAllan Glick. Seemingly out ofnowhere, this nice clean-cut youngman and head of the ARGENTCorporation secured a Teamsters loanfor about 146 million that enabledhim to take over the Stardust Hoteland Casino. The ARGENT name wasan abbreviation of Allan R. GlickEnterprises.The timing on this loan was veryimportant. By 1976, many of the LasVegas casino “cash cows” the Mobthroughout the country depended onwere beginning to dry up.Stardust 1975Between the Federal Governmentand the state of Nevada, it wasbecoming more and more difficult fora mobster to make a decent living.The Chicago Outfit still had controlover the Stardust, Marina, Fremontand Hacienda, but it became necessary to increase the size of the skimto make up for other lost business.Let’s take a moment to discuss themeaning of the word “skim”. It isn’tstealing in the usual sense. It isn’ttaking money that belongs to someone else. Skimming is hiding moneyfrom Uncle Sam. Every time a dollarwould come into the casino, it had tobe reported to the government. So atthe end of the year, when the Stardustwould do its 1040-EZ or whicheverform they used, they would have topay income tax on every penny thecasino took in.90How much more profitable wouldit be if the US Government andNevada State Revenue people justdidn’t know how much money theStardust and the other hotels hadactually made? (“Wow! What a goodidea! That way, we could get to keepa lot more money, right boss?”)In the old days in Las Vegas thiswas pretty easy to do. A casino ownercould wander into the “soft countroom” where the bills were counted,take a few handfuls of the big ones,put them in his pocket and then gohave a cup of coffee and a Danish.Who was going to stop him? Heowned the place. This was his money.He wasn’t stealing. He just wanted totake a few thousand bucks as “walking around money.” What Uncle Samdoesn’t know ain’t gonna’ hurt him,CASINO CHIP AND TOKEN NEWS Summer 2005Then the hotel owner could find anice corner on a hot-looking crapstable, call Tony D., the pit boss thereat craps pit 3, have Tony D. bring hima marker for “10 large,” and get 10,000 in chips. He’d play a fewminutes, lose a couple of thousand,scoop up the remaining 8 G’s inchips, take them over to the cashierand cash out.When his signed marker arrived inthe accounting department, his girlfriend, Lola, would take the 10,000marker and put it in her pocket.(“Honest, she’s not my girlfriend,sweetheart, I hardly know thewoman”). And that was that. Nomarker means no money owed thecasino, right? It’s his money anyway,right? Who is he stealing from – himself?

and shot him six times in the mouth,Joey Aiuppa became capo of theChicago Outfit.Believe it or not, this very simplemethod of taking a few million dollars out of the Las Vegas hotels wouldwork, year after year after year. Thenthe Nevada Tax and the GamingCommission boys set down somerules. Damn spoilsportsNo such things as a “honeymoonperiod” for Joey Aiuppa either. TheFeds and the Nevada State GamingCommission, who were both developing real power in Nevada, werebeginning to make daily visits andphone calls to Aiuppa. It seems allthey wanted to talk about was theStardust. The question of real ownership of the Stardust, which had beenhidden for many years, was beginningto bubble to the surface.Rule Number 1 – An owner isnever allowed in a counting room.Rule Number 2 – An owner is neverallowed to play at his own hotel.Rule Number 3 – All money thatcomes into a casino. I reiterate,100% of the money, has to be reported as income.The US Government trained itseyes on the casino business throughthe Organized Crime Commission,the Kefauver Committee and, later,the Church Committee. Despite allthe Fed’s money spent on all theinvestigations of the Las Vegas hotelsand their owners, the only thing theycould get the owners on was good oldtax evasion. Skimming money meanstaking money from the pot beforeUncle Sam has a chance to count itand tell you how much tax you oweon it. If the money can’t be accountedfor, it can’t be taxed, plain and simple.The Chicago Outfit was faced witha cash flow problem. The answer presented itself in the Stardust, and AllanGlick. Nice, clean-cut Allan Glickand his partner, Gene Frisch, wereboth young men who were making apretty fair living owning theHacienda. Everything was aboveboard and going along well until acompany called RECRION, that thenowned the Stardust, got into trouble.Without going into the personalities of RECRION, the company wasbeing forced to sell the Stardust.There was some silliness aboutmoney from the Stardust Hotel finding its way on a weekly basis to JoeyAiuppa of the Chicago Outfit, MosheRockman of the Mayfield Road GangAllan Glickin Cleveland, and to Frank Balistieriof the Milwaukee Mafia. BothCleveland and Milwaukee in the mid1970s were subsidiaries of theChicago Outfit, which was run byJoey Aiuppa.Right up until June 19, 1975 Sam“Momo” Giancana had run Chicago.However, Momo wasn’t the best ofbosses of the Chicago Outfit. He wasvery high visibility, with his flamboyant personality, and his highly publicized affair with Phyllis McGuire.Then there was his friendship withFrank Sinatra, and with JudyCampbell, and with the Rat Pack he was just too visible for the oldschool dons. On top of everythingelse, their money stream, Las Vegas,became delivering less and lessmoney. Enough was enough.In the basement of his Oak Park,Illinois mansion, Momo made himselfa before bedtime snack of Italiansausage and peppers and he died.After his snack, at the top of thestairs, a gunman was waiting for him,At the same time, Allan Glick,who had just turned 32, was beginning to make quite a few bucks at theHacienda. He decided he wanted tomake even more money if he couldonly figure out a way to do it. Talkabout a fortuitous set of circumstances. Here were the owners of theStardust being told to get out or losetheir license, and here was AllanGlick, a nice, clean cut young man,who wanted desperately to get intothe big time.So Allan let it be known all overLas Vegas that he wanted to buy theStardust. His big problem was that hedidn’t have the money to buy it. Buthe let it be known, “If anyone wantsto lend me the 100 million dollars tobuy it, I wouldn’t say no.”So one day, Alan got a phone callat his Hacienda office from DelColeman, the largest stockholder inthe RECRION Corporation. Coleman,besides his RECRION affiliation, wasalso the unofficial representative ofthe Teamsters Union and the ChicagoOutfit in Las Vegas. That meantwatched over their business affairs.Del Coleman said, “Allan, we gotsomebody you should meet,” andAllan was introduced to the boss ofthe Milwaukee Mob, Frank Balistieri.CASINO CHIP AND TOKEN NEWS Summer 200591

Balistieri said he could help Glick geta loan. A friend of his was an officialat the Teamsters Central StatesPension Fund. Sam Giancana hadcalled Balistieri and told him to helpGlick get the money he needed to buythe Stardust.Then Glick starting getting callsfrom some of the other Mob families,all wanting to be helpful to Glick ingetting the Stardust loan. One callcame from Kansas City. Glick wastold the caller knew another CentralStates Teamsters official who couldhelp arrange the loan. Then morecalls came into Allan Glick’s officefrom very well-connected and veryfriendly men from Cleveland andChicago. And believe it or not, justlike in the movies, the money startedcoming in.Before long, our hero, Allan Glick,had enough money to buy theRECRION Corporation along with allof its assets including the giantStardust Hotel. And all for next to nomoney out of his own pocket! Nearly 140 million dollars was raised toinstall this nice young man as ownerof the Stardust. What a wonderfulcountry we live in!Glick’s predecessor at the Stardustwas a man named Al Sachs. Duringthe changeover, Sachs went to Paristo renew the contract on the amazingly successful Lido de Paris show. Hegot the new contract signed, butreturned to find his office furniture inthe hall. The transition was now complete. (This is a bit of an oversimplification on how Allan Glick, at the ripeold age of 34, actually got control ofthe ARGENT Corporation and theStardust Hotel. But actually, that’spretty damn close to exactly how itdid happen).With Chicago’s assistance, Glickbecame the new president of theARGENT Corporation and owner of92the four hotels. He packed his bagsand moved from the Hacienda to thePresidents Suite at the Stardust. Onhis first day at his new job, Glickhired bookmaker-dealmaker-oddsmaker Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal to behis assistant at a salary of “250large,” Two Hundred & Fifty Thou AYear!That same day, Lefty replacedBobby Strella, who was a pretty goodcasino boss at the Stardust, with afella’ whose previous job experiencewas owner-operator of the gift shop atCircus Circus, which he purchased forpeanuts. The gift shop at CircusCircus was given as a favor to one ofMomo Giancana’s friends fromChicago at a “friends and family”price of 70,000. It was worth over 2 Million. It was purchased byMomo’s friend Tony.When Tony was at Circus Circus,he was Tony Stewart, but when hemoved to the Stardust he went backto Tony Spilotro. Spilotro was a hitman, a street-enforcer and Mob killerwho worked for the Chicago Outfit.He had been sent to Las Vegas afew years earlier by Sam Giancana tolearn the city and to watch out forChicago’s interests there. The movieCasino starring Joe Pesci as the TonySpilotro character and Robert De Niroas Lefty Rosenthal was one of thebetter Las Vegas mob movies.OK, RECRION was out as ownersof the Stardust. They were boughtout, not kicked out, and they werepretty happy with their 30 million orso of profit. Sure, a few of them hadto go to prison, but overall, it was apretty good ownership transition.But then there was a problem withRosenthal’s position as Stardust general manager.Lefty had a “past.” He was aCASINO CHIP AND TOKEN NEWS Summer 2005Frank Rosenthalknown associate of the Mob and hada conviction on his police record forfixing a basketball game some yearsearlier. Rosenthal’s conviction, however, was conveniently removed fromthe record before he arrived in LasVegas. But the guys who made up theNevada Gaming Commission knewgambling and gamblers, and LeftyRosenthal had a widely known reputation.On the second day of Rosenthal’snew job at the Stardust, the gamingauthorities called Allan Glick andadvised him that Lefty was nevergoing to be given the “key employee”designation – ever. By the mid-1970sthe Nevada Gaming Commission,commonly referred to as the NGC,said that every employee who workedin a key position within a casino thathad a gambling license was going tobe called a key employee. As a keyemployee, they, too, had to have agambling license.Allan Glick had to tell this news toRosenthal. Glick was perfectly awarethat Lefty was fully running theStardust, even though he’d only beenon the job for two days. Glick ran