Sin City’s Mafia Days

George Knapp in front of TV monitors showing footage of Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal after his car bombing. Photo by Duane Prokop/Review-Journal

From Norm’s Vegas Confidential Column October 31, 2008:

As fashion statements go, George Knapp’s 1982 Halloween costume was definitely smoking hot.

He has Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal to thank for the inspiration. Their paths had crossed three years earlier.

Knapp, new in town and driving a cab to make ends meet, often stopped in to see his girlfriend, who served cocktails at Fred Glusman’s Oz. “The hottest nightclub in town,” Knapp recalled.

Glusman, who went on to own the at-times-infamous Piero’s Italian Cuisine, “knew all the wiseguys since he had a clothing store in the Stardust,” said Knapp, who months earlier had left the Bay Area and his position as a debate coach at UC Berkeley.

Knapp and his girlfriend were ready to move. After meeting some Las Vegas bartenders in East Bay, they decided to flip a coin — heads Hawaii, tails Las Vegas.

They headed for Sin City.

One night at Oz, Knapp’s girlfriend introduced him to one of the club’s more colorful patrons. One of them was “Lefty,” whose friends were Tony and Joey. Knapp didn’t know it, but Rosenthal, Tony Spilotro and Joey Cusumano were notorious for their mob associations. All three ended up in Nevada’s Black Book of persons excluded from entering casinos.

Knapp had just landed a part-time job at KLVX-TV, Channel 10, where he spent his time doing odd jobs and bugging the news department to give him a tryout as a cameraman/reporter for the station’s biweekly news shows.

Every so often, Knapp would wander back to the archives and flip through clippings.

“I was drawn to the mob stories and read everything I could since organized crime was still very much alive here,” Knapp said.

To his amazement, he quickly realized that some of the people he met — “I was introduced and that was about it” — were the same men mentioned in the news stories.

Later, when he joined KLAS-TV, Channel 8 in 1981, those introductions would serve him well.

“It gave me an ‘in’ with them, albeit on a very low level,” he said.

It wasn’t long before he was covering mob stories and casino stories, “which were often one and the same in those days,” Knapp said.

His mentors were Ned Day, the Review-Journal’s mob-baiting columnist who became an anchor at KLAS, and Bob Stoldal, who was running the station.

“This was a dramatic time,” for the Mafia, “the beginning of the end for them,” Knapp said.

Spilotro, the mob hit man who had turned into a loose cannon, “was under incredible pressure, along with his crew, and Rosenthal was at the center of the storm,” Knapp said. Both had annoyed the mob for bringing so much unwanted attention.

It didn’t help that the mob was hearing rumors that Spilotro was having an affair with Rosenthal’s wife, Geri. Her character was portrayed by Sharon Stone in the 1995 classic “Casino,” with Robert DeNiro cast as Rosenthal and Joe Pesci as Spilotro.

“It blew up,” Knapp said, when Geri “went crazy, caused a big scene outside her house in the Las Vegas Country Club, then went to the bank and carted off a pile of cash and jewelry.”

Publicity generated by that “very public scene was, in my mind, the final nail in the coffin,” he said.

On Oct. 4, 1982, Rosenthal, the mob’s frontman for their string of casinos, stepped into his 1981 Cadillac Eldorado outside Tony Roma’s, 620 E. Sahara Ave. A bomb ripped through the car, leaving Rosenthal scorched, bruised and in shock. But he caught a lucky break: It was later theorized that a metal plate Cadillac placed under the driver’s seat of that model absorbed the brunt of the explosion.

Two nights after the assassination attempt, Rosenthal invited three reporters, including Day and Knapp, to his home.

“Lefty held court, and it was a weird little episode. He cruised in, bandaged up, with scrapes or burn marks on his face and hands. He spoke for a brief period, then took a few questions, but he didn’t say much of anything.”

When Knapp asked Rosenthal whether he had any ideas about who was behind it, he replied, “Well it certainly wasn’t the Boy Scouts of America.”

Someone asked whether he thought his lifelong friend, Spilotro, might be behind it. Rosenthal’s response, Knapp said, was something like “I hope not.”

Asked if the FBI had contacted him, Rosenthal said yes but emphasized he had no intention of cooperating with the government.

Day and Knapp left convinced they were invited to the mini-news conference because Rosenthal wanted to use the media “to assure his associates that he wasn’t going to rat them out.”

Rosenthal left Las Vegas and resurfaced in Boca Raton, Fla., where he eventually returned to his suit: sports handicapping for an online company.

Knapp called occasionally with a request to get Rosenthal in front of a camera. The last attempt, several years ago, was for a news series on “the bad old days.”

Rosenthal “responded — characteristically — in third-person vernacular: ‘Frank Rosenthal is not interested in participating in a local news series. Frank Rosenthal might be interested in a prime-time special, a two-hour program, something that would air on one of the major networks.’ ”

It didn’t happen. The man who is credited with bringing sports betting to Las Vegas died October 13, 2008 in Florida. He was 79.

Four weeks after the Rosenthal car bombing, Knapp was invited to a Halloween party. He didn’t have a costume, but with the Rosenthal interview still on his mind, he had an idea.

“I took an old polyester suit — something Frank would never even think about wearing — and I tossed it into the fireplace, lit a match and let it burn a bit. Then I put a bandage around my head, some fake blood, and presto, I was ‘Lefty’ Rosenthal for the party.

“It wasn’t much of a costume, but I won some sort of prize. Maybe it was in the bad taste category.”