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Casino, Martin Scorsese’s 1995 epic underworld story is the spiritual successor to Goodfellas in many ways. Not only did it see the director once again team up with Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, but he worked with the author who wrote the source material for both Goodfellas and Casino, Nicholas Pileggi. Pileggi’s non-fiction book Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas covers the heyday of mafia-controlled Vegas, focusing specifically on the real-life inspirations for Ace Rothstein and Nicky Santoro, Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal and Anthony Spilotro, respectively.
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If ever there was a spiritual successor to Martin Scorsese's classic mafia movie, Goodfellas
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it would be 1995's epic underworld story, Casino. The director teamed up with much of the Goodfellas crew, including Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci
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and writer Nicholas Pellicci. The result is a crime story of greed, violence, and humanity's hunger for power
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It also has Don Rickles playing a character called Billy Sherbert. So, you know, it has everything
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But we want to know if it contains the most important thing of all, any truth to the brutal tale of a Las Vegas mob boss
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So, today, we're getting the shakedown about the true story behind Casino
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Keep them playing, and keep them coming back for history. A hammer can be a great tool for fixing a house, building a fence
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or making mincemeat out of a cheating blackjack player's hand. Just to name a few options
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Some of the more heart-pounding scenes in Casino are also, unfortunately, based on real punishment doled out to cheaters discovered in the Tangiers Casino
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One such scene shows Ace, De Niro's character, performing some handiwork on a card-counting blackjack player's hand with a rubber mallet
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The scene is as brutal as it is accurate, according to Frank Lefty Rosenthal
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The real man Ace is based on. Apparently, a team of cheaters used a complicated wiring system to reveal the identities of the cards to another player, resulting in $75,000 worth of ill-gotten chips
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One cattle prod zap later, a wire was found, and the cheating player was brought in for questioning
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He became very cooperative once brought into The Woodshed, the casino enforcer's terrifying name for the back room, and the meat tenderizer was introduced
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When watching a brutal scene in a movie, it can sometimes soften the hideousness to remind yourself that it's just a movie
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For instance, if the character of Nicky were to, say, crush a man's head in a vice until his eyeballs popped out like a cartoon wolf
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it can help to remind yourself that Nicky is just an actor who starred in two of the most prominent Christmas films of all time
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though those films are pretty violent too. But in this case, reality isn't the sweet escape you think it is, since the whole head-meets-vice scene actually happened in real life
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Real mobster Anthony Spilotro was said to have tortured a man named William McCarthy by placing his head in a vice just like in the film flying eyeballs and everything The only difference between real life and the film was that McCarthy was put out of
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his misery with a fatal neck laceration. Jeez, the Home Alone kid got off easy in those movies
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The opening of Casino goes from 0 to 100 almost instantly. Ace starts his car, and instead of a refreshing blast of cool air from the vents, Ace is blown
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up sky-high. He survives with only a scorched suit. A little crispy, but no worse for wear
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thanks to the metal plate under his car seat. A ridiculous plot point, right? Only if real life
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can be described as ridiculous. And it can. Ace was driving a Cadillac Eldorado, which had a
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balancing problem that affected the car handles. The solution was to install a metal plate near
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the driver's side, which balanced everything out nicely. So on October 4th, 1982, when Lefty
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Rosenthal started his car, he was largely shielded from the subsequent fireworks show by an open door
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and a strategically placed metal plate. Bystanders who heard the explosion said it sounded like a
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train came crashing down, with Lefty Rosenthal's car shooting into the air in a gigantic fireball
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We've said it before and we'll say it again. Thanks, Metal! One of the harder-to-watch scenes of Scorsese's film depicts the final curtain for Nicky Santoro
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and his brother, Dominic, played by Philip Suriano. The two flee Las Vegas to meet up with their crew and discuss the future
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Unfortunately for the Santoro brothers, the crew had already made up their minds that these boys had no future
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and they were instead mercilessly beaten with bats and buried in a shallow grave
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a grisly end for the characters in the film that was pretty much shared by their real-life
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counterparts. Anthony Spilotro and his brother Michael were brought to the basement of a house
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near O'Hare International Airport in Chicago. When they arrived, they found not 15 Chicago
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deep-dish pizzas, but 15 guys who immediately jumped them. The two were beaten so severely
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that their muscles hemorrhaged, and Michael's Adam's apple was fractured. From there
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the bodies were transported to a cornfield in Enos, Indiana, and dumped in a five-foot grave
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of wearing nothing but their underwear. Okay, getting beaten to death is one thing
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but getting buried in Indiana, insult to injury. The response to rude criticism contains many options Ignore it and walk away fire back with an equally biting remark
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or use a nearby fountain pen to open up a new hole in the skin. In Casino, Nicky chooses the third option for an unfortunate victim
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an incredibly grisly and intense scene that incredibly really happened. Lefty Rosenthal described the scene in an interview where he revealed he was at a bar one night but wasn't drinking
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The gentleman sitting next to him, however, had been heavily drinking and causing a ruckus near the increasingly agitated mob boss when the loud drunk's pen rolled over into Rosenthal's area
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His attempts to return it to the man were met with a few uncouth comments from a man who clearly did not know who he was dealing with
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The patron ended up with some unscheduled surgery and can never have an excuse to leave home without a place to hold a pen
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A small scene in Casino shows Ace engaging in conversation over muffins
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only to become distracted when he notices Kevin Pollack's character has more blueberries than him
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Ace immediately heads to the kitchen to demand to the chef that every muffin had the exact same
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amount of blueberries, regardless of how long it would take. A fictionalized film would include
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a scene like this to show Ace's methodical attention to detail. However, this detail was
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pulled from real-life events. To make sure people did their job properly, Rosenthal admitted in an
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interview that he was regularly on top of people who wanted to challenge how things should be done
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and that he was criticized for being a perfectionist. As such, every blueberry
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muffin at the Stardust Hotel and Casino needed at least 10 blueberries
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When Ace attempts to get a gaming license in Casino, he's turned down due to prior criminal
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convictions. This proves to be only a small speed bump as the Tangiers Casino ends up running
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unlicensed for the mob anyway. However foolish you have to be to run a casino without a gaming
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license is nothing compared to Lefty Rosenthal, whose real story is even crazier. Four times as
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crazy to be exact. Casinos The Hacienda, The Fremont, The Stardust, and The Marina were all
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run by Rosenthal in Vegas, despite none of them being legal. It all came crashing down in 1976
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when Rosenthal's deception was uncovered. The film romance between Ace and Ginger played by an Oscar Sharon Stone mirrors that of Lefty Rosenthal and his wife Jerry That is if you can use the word romance
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In the film, Ginger has an intense substance addiction and ends up in an extramarital affair with Nikki
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She also drives drunk and smashes her car through the front of the house, the kind of scene you can only see in Hollywood
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Except this scene played out in real life and was actually wilder than the one depicted in the film
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On September 8, 1980, Jerry Rosenthal arrived home in her car around 9 a.m.
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where she slammed into the side over and over like the slowest, largest jackhammer you've ever seen
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Rosenthal finally came outside only to find his wife screaming, pointing a gun, and threatening to go to the FBI
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Anthony Spilotro's wife, Nancy, was called to the scene in her pajamas to de-escalate the situation
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Ah, young love. As Casino's plot unfolds, the story gets wackier and wackier
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culminating in a bizarre variety show hosted by Ace. This show was based on a real-life show filmed in the Stardust Casino
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as an attempt to get the public on Lefty's side after his arrest. He would later claim that he only did the show to please the chairman of the Stardust Casino board
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Maybe next time try an edible arrangement. Rosenthal wasn't too happy with Scorsese's version of how the events unfolded
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Namely, that De Niro repeated himself twice when the real Rosenthal only needed to say things once
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He was also quick to note that he had never juggled on the Frank Rosenthal show
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And moreover, he was pretty miffed about the scene making him look foolish. That again, even the goofiest looking Robert De Niro is still the coolest guy in the room
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Scorsese's film shows the process of the mafia taking over Las Vegas
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which is pretty much how it all went down in real life. In the movie, the Chicago Mafia pays a bunch of Teamsters to provide Philip Green, played by Kevin Pollack, the scratch needed to purchase the casino
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While it was understood that Green was the legally friendly frontman of the agreement, Ace actually ran the business
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As for the real-life version, that's about the long and short of how it happened. The Argent Corporation outfit purchased four casinos, and real estate mogul Alan Glick of San Diego became the face of it all
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He had a clean name, the know-how, and even kind of looked like Kevin Pollack
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Since Rosenthal had none of that, he couldn't technically be an owner and had to find other
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ways to make himself useful