Casino the movie..

Frank Lawrence "Lefty" Rosenthal (June 12, 1929 – October 13, 2008) was an American sports handicapper and a former Las Vegas casino executive. He also hosted a television talk show in Las Vegas during the late 1970s.

The 1995 Martin Scorsese film Casino, based on the book by Nicholas Pileggi, was inspired by Rosenthal's career in Las Vegas. Rosenthal (re-named "Sam 'Ace' Rothstein") was played by Robert De Niro, and his Mafia associate Anthony Spilotro (re-named "Nicky Santoro") was played by Joe Pesci.[1] Rosenthal's story was featured on The History Channel's, "True Crime Authors," as well.

Rosenthal was born in Chicago, Illinois, from the city's West Side, where he developed a close friendship with Anthony Spilotro. As a kid, Rosenthal would often skip class to attend local Chicago sporting events. He had numerous arrests and indictments for gambling crimes, including bribing players to fix football, basketball and other games, but few convictions.

A pioneer of sports gambling, Rosenthal secretly ran the Stardust, Fremont, Marina and Hacienda casinos when they were controlled by the Mafia.[1] He was the first to operate a sports book from within a casino[1] (previously, the inefficient norm had been to do the opposite), making the Stardust one of the world's leading centers for sports gambling. Another Rosenthal innovation was to allow female blackjack dealers; in just one year, this doubled the Stardust's income.

In 1976, when authorities discovered that Rosenthal was secretly running casinos without the Nevada license needed to officially do so, they held a hearing to determine his legal ability to obtain a gaming license. The board's decision: Rosenthal was denied a license as an employee in a casino. However, he later succeeded in an appeal before Judge Joseph Pavlikowski (who had been given a write off of $2,800—the cost of his daughter's wedding two years earlier—at the same hotel at which Rosenthal had been working as a publicity director). An effort to have Rosenthal's name included in the Black Book (which would have banned him from being in or near any casino in Nevada, and could cause any casino he was found in to lose its license), was temporarily thwarted in 1988 by Judge Pavlikowski, but his decision was ultimately overruled.

It has been said that Rosenthal was nicknamed "Lefty" because, during a Congressional subcommittee hearing, he invoked the Fifth Amendment 37 times, not even answering the question of whether or

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