June 19, 2015 Friday
I received two wonderful reviews about 30 Illegal Years To The Strip by highly-respected columnists at two
major publications. The first was at the Las Vegas Review Journal, Nevada's largest
newspaper. The second column appeared six days later in the weekly
international newspaper that focuses on the Hollywood
movie and TV industry, VARIETY. Both columns follow in the order of their
publication dates.
AUTHOR SEPARATES ‘GOOD HOODS’ FROM ‘BAD GANGSTERS’
By Jane Ann Morrison, Las Vegas Review-Journal,
May 27, 2015
After 48 years researching the mob,
author and gaming consultant Bill Friedman knows the difference between “good hoods”
and “bad gangsters,” and his new book “30 Illegal Years To The Strip” examines
the differences between the two.
One example of a “good hood” was the late
Moe Dalitz, who came from the illegal liquor world spawned by Prohibition in
the 1920s and transitioned into legal gambling in Las Vegas.
In 1968, Dalitz had trouble talking about
himself with Friedman, who at the time was a young historical researcher on
organized crime. Dalitz shied away from Friedman who for a year had stalked the
man who came from the Cleveland mob and became a
sterling citizen in Las Vegas.
Dalitz sat with him for two interviews,
but then decided he couldn’t talk about himself, so he told Friedman to talk to
others — and gave those others permission to talk about him.
Mark Swain, Dalitz’s chief enforcer,
talked extensively to Friedman. Many years later, he told Friedman, “You think
you and I became friends because I liked you. I didn’t. We told you things to
find out who you were talking to and what you learned.”
Friedman said Swain was a top executive
at the Stardust and also “a flat-out killer.” Dalitz was not a violent man but
Swain “stopped problems.”
The author said Dalitz told associates,
“This is the most aggressive personality I have ever met, except for (Sam)
Giancana.” That was not a compliment, according to Friedman. “Giancana pushed
people around.”
“At one point he (Dalitz) told me to stop
my research and get out of town,” Friedman said. “Moe told me: You keep up this
research, you’re going to put me in prison.”
The researcher never uncovered what would
put Dalitz in prison, but was told the answer years later. Dalitz organized the
skim of untaxed gambling winnings and hidden ownership at the Stardust from the
1960s through the 1980s, a major part of a future book.
At 73, Friedman plans to write more books
that move the Las Vegas
mob story from the 1950s until the beginning of the megaresort era starting in
1989.
It’s an ambitious goal and he admitted
Tuesday he’s a slow and lengthy writer (I can relate) but he’s done nearly 600
interviews at least two hours long and often more. The interviews began in 1967
and ended in 1976 when he was working full time as a casino executive.
Friedman has the background many mob
writers lacked. He grew up in Nevada, attended
the University of Nevada, Reno,
was a dealer for three years and eventually became president of the Castaways
Hotel and the Silver Slipper.
Friedman approached his research from an
historian’s angle. “I never asked a question that wasn’t at least 10 years
old,” he said Tuesday from his home in Pahrump. “If you ask a recent question,
they give you the most socially acceptable answer they can think of. After the
10-year mark, the body language changes and they actually get introspective.”
In the world of gamblers, liquor peddlers
and organized crime, women were minor players with few exceptions. “There was
no point in interviewing the wives because they didn’t tell their wives
anything.”
So the 582 interviews were all guys.
Guys like Benny Binion, Bill Harrah,
Jackie Gaughan and Major Riddle — all gamblers — and gaming regulators like
Robbins Cahill and Ed Olsen and attorneys like Lou Wiener and Cliff Jones, who
negotiated the early contracts for almost every Strip casino, according to
Friedman.
Riddle described dating Virginia Hill,
when she was a sweet girl in the 1930s before she linked with Ben Siegel. Later
she became a foul-mouthed fun-time girl. Riddle told Friedman he wouldn’t have
dated her then.
His 500-page opus details how illegal
liquor and illegal gambling mixed with political corruption in places including
Chicago and New York
and ultimately chased the illegal casinos out of those places and into Las Vegas and Havana.
He describes the lives of the seven men
who started with distributing illegal liquor during Prohibition and eventually
made it to the top of the organized crime pyramid and transitioned into Las
Vegas gambling — Dalitz, Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Charlie Luciano, Joe Adonis,
Frank Costello and Vincent Alo.
Friedman said his goal was not to correct
the record about organized crime, although he did that throughout, condemning
false or speculative information. His goal was to show who these men actually
are. “They were the most fascinating men and I wanted to understand them, who
and what they really were, the good, the bad and the ugly.”
“All organized crime wants is to separate
you from money, but gamblers want to separate you from money without pushing
you around, without hurting you physically,” Friedman said.
That’s what distinguished the good hoods
from the bad gangsters.
ARE MOVIE, TV MOBSTERS GETTING A BUM RAP?
Peter Bart, Variety EVP and Editorial Director, June 2, 2015
Even before the era of hacked emails, there has always been
a fascination (and entertainment value) in the private documents of public
figures. One of the classic “leaks” was a telegram sent in 1935 to a renowned
gangster by the publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, Billy Wilkerson, in which
he pledged to do the mob’s bidding. The Reporter at the time was running a
series of articles about how mobsters had taken over the Hollywood
unions, and Wilkerson’s telegram was addressed to mob enforcer Johnny Rosselli.
The articles promptly disappeared.
I was reminded of Wilkerson’s surrender
by consultant and author Bill Friedman, an expert on the gangster community and
its impact on various U.S.
institutions. Friedman, who served as president of two Las Vegas hotel-casinos, has made it a point
to interview key mob figures and their progeny over the decades, and has
written two books on the subject (the newest titled “30 Illegal Years to the
Strip”).
Having lived in the mob’s playground,
Friedman believes that society does not understand the gangster mind, and that
mobsters are ineptly portrayed in movies and TV shows. The surly hoodlums in
the “Sopranos” were way over the top, in his estimation, yet Johnny Depp’s
depiction of Dillinger in “Public Enemies” was absurdly benign.
Yet Friedman regrets the fact that the
gangster film has faded as a Hollywood staple (though Depp will try to
resuscitate the genre with September’s “Black Mass,” in which he plays Boston mobster Whitey
Bulger). Many of the top mob figures Friedman has observed were not
tough-talking hoods but, rather, “highly personable men who lived by their
word,” he claims, citing Ben “Bugsy” Siegel and Moe Dalitz as examples. Nor did
some live up to their reprobate reputations. Friedman argues that Arnold
Rothstein did not fix the 1919 World Series and was never charged with a crime,
and says that Rosselli was more inept than homicidal; when the CIA paid him to
assassinate Fidel Castro, he botched the job. The fabled Lucky Luciano,
Friedman maintains, while a criminal, nevertheless protected New York from enemy agents during World War
II.
Mobsters like Luciano, Dalitz and Meyer
Lansky were among the younger generation who basically built the Las Vegas
Strip, and ruthlessly guarded their kingdom. While they were criminals, to be
sure, the financial impact of their crimes seems trivial today compared with
the $5.6 billion in penalties paid by the five major banks that admitted this
month to illegal currency trading.
Friedman was shielded to a degree from
the direct impact of the mob; the casinos he ran (Silver Slipper and Castaways)
were owned by Howard Hughes, who had government contracts to protect, and who
disdained the hoods from the East.
Friedman by no means misses the mobsters,
but he regrets the corporatization of Las
Vegas. Gaming today accounts for less than 40% of
overall revenues, and is dwindling. Symbolically, attendance at the Mob Museum
in Las Vegas,
which celebrates the careers of top gangsters, has suffered reduced attendance
lately.
Still, giant sums of money are being
placed on Las Vegas’
revival. Malaysian developer the Genting Group broke ground last week on a $4
billion Chinese-themed casino on the Strip, with plans for a replica of the Great Wall of China, as well as a panda exhibit. Vegas,
it seems, is still a place that invites the big gamble.
The first newspaper mention about 30 Illegal Years To The Strip was a Shout Out by Nevada's most read
columnist, John L. Smith, in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. He announced my book
was coming out in his March 26, 2015 column. He said, "Longtime Las Vegas
casino marketing and management specialist Bill Friedman is just coming out with
another big book, this one titled "30 Illegal Years to the Strip."
The 500-pager is full of biographies of some of the Strip's "founding
fathers." Information: www.BillFriedmanAuthor.com."
I am most appreciate for each of these three top columnists'
encouraging comments.
