Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal

Rosenthal ran four Las Vegas casinos for the Chicago Outfit without ever holding a gaming licence, and could not have held one: he was a professional handicapper with a betting conviction behind him, and he was not Italian, so he could never be a member of the organisation whose money he was managing.

What he was instead was the best oddsmaker any of them had, and the man who understood exactly how a casino's cash moves before it becomes a number in a ledger.

Running a casino you are not allowed to run

He was the effective operator of the Stardust, the Fremont, the Marina and the Hacienda, under job titles that changed whenever the Nevada authorities objected to the previous one. Food and beverage director. Entertainment director. The title was paperwork; the job was the building.

When the state finally required him to apply for a licence, it refused him in

1. He responded by suing, by testifying, and by hosting a talk show broadcast

from the Stardust on which he interviewed entertainers and complained about the Gaming Control Board.

4 October 1982

He turned the ignition of his Cadillac outside a restaurant on East Sahara Avenue and the car exploded. He survived because of a steel plate the manufacturer had fitted under the driver's seat.

Nobody was ever charged. The bombing came as the federal investigation into the casino skim was closing in, and as his relationship with Anthony Spilotro, his own childhood associate, had become the most dangerous thing in his life.

He left Nevada, lived in California and then Florida, and died of a heart attack in 2008 at seventy-nine.