VEGAS MYTHS RE-BUSTED: Lefty Rosenthal, Who Inspired De Niro’s ‘Casino’ Character, Hired the Strip’s First Female Dealers

EDITOR’S NOTE: “Vegas Myths Busted” publishes every Monday, with a incentive Flashback Fri edition. Today’s accounting entry inward our ongoing serial publication originally ran on July 17, 2023.

Sure, Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal secretly ran the Stardust, Fremont, Marina, and Hacienda casinos inwards Las Vegas for the Chicago fork of the maffia from 1974 to 1978. That’s without yet possessing a gaming license, ensuring the crime syndicate a “skim” of at least $1.6 million, and in all probability practically more.

Sure, inward the ’50s, he bought contracts to pickle sporting events, earning multiple sports graft indictments. And sure, he was a surmise in multiple business concern and railcar bombings inward Miami inwards the ’60s, which is allegedly why he fled to Las Vegas inward 1968 inward the number one place.

But Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal was also the very first-class honours degree operator of a Las Vegas Strip resort hotel to employ female dealers for tabularize games, which makes him a prizewinning for women’s rights.

And that makes upwards for at to the lowest degree some of the bad stuff and nonsense inward his legacy, right?

No, Because it’s a Myth

Women dealt cards inward downtown Las Vegas from at least 1943 — the date stamp of the firstly known chore advertisement seeking them — through 1958. That’s the year their growing presence made manly dealers fear for their job security. The men organized, met with the all-male Las Vegas city government, and succeeded inwards getting an ordinance passed banning all women from card-dealing positions. That forbidding lasted 12 years.

“The hotel-casino industry, same the bulk of US businesses at the time, divided up chore opportunities by gender and race,”  Joanne Goodwin, a UNLV professor emerita of chronicle and founding theater director of the Women’s Research Institute of Nevada, told Casino.org. “Despite the ban, some women continued to deal out of doors city limits.”

Those women dealt in the first place in the cities of North Las Vegas and Henderson, though, because the Strip, which has never been part of the city of Las Vegas, was a boy’s social club until Aug 1970. That’s when Jean Mathew B. Brady became its very number 1 identity card dealer.

Brady, 47, was hired past gambling casino manager Jack Piper to sell cosh at the Silver Slipper, which was ne'er a belongings controlled past Frank Rosenthal.

“I’m non fighting for any rights for women,” Diamond Jim told the Las Vegas Review-Journal inwards a story published on Aug. 13, 1970. “I’m simply trying to have the topper chore opportunity uncommitted to me.”

The Strip wasn’t a very progressive tense position back up then. Only a month before Brady’s hire, State Labor Commissioner Henry M. Stanley John Luther Jones had to order the Desert Inn to halt discriminating against female person dealers who were applying for jobs there.

It was this ruling that prompted the Slipper to encourage Brady, who had been workings as a slot political machine cashier.

One Thing Lefty Did Right

Rosenthal was the world-class to take sports betting to a Las Vegas Strip casino, the Stardust, inwards 1976. For this, he deserves some acknowledgment — though gambling casino possessor Jackie Gaughan opened the number one sportsbook privileged a gambling casino inward Las Vegas right a twelvemonth earliest — at his Union Plaza downtown.

As far as his existence a Florida key figure inwards the battle for rival opportunity in employment, Rosenthal most certainly hired female dealers inward his casinos. But he was next a trend, non background or bucking one. The fillet of sole roadblock he broke was hiring the Strip’s 1st baccarat dealer, Shirley Brancucci, almost cinque years after Brady’s hire, and even that achievement isn’t so ironclad.

Al Sachs, who was so running the Stardust prior to its purchase past Argent, appears to get had to a greater extent to make with her hiring than Rosenthal did,” Michael Green, a story prof at UNLV, told Casino.org.

“I am non aware of any rights barriers disordered by Frank Rosenthal,” Goodwin added.

So How Did this Myth Get Started?

Crime newsman St. Nicholas Pileggi’s 1995 book, “Casino: Love and Honor inwards Las Vegas,” states that Rosenthal was “the 1st to earmark women blackjack dealers on the Strip.” This “fact” was also repeated on Rosenthal’s prescribed website, frankleftyrosenthal.com, for which Pileggi wrote the bio.

Since nearly every other dependent of Pileggi’s book was dead, Rosenthal served as its main source of information. This volume was also the basis for Mary Martin Scorsese’s Academy Award-nominated movie, “Casino,” whose screenplay was co-written by Pileggi and Scorsese.

In the 1995 film, Robert De Niro stars as Sam “Ace” Rothstein, a reasonable, likable, and highly fictional variant of Rosenthal.

“As I of the in conclusion ones left standing, Lefty was able to work media portrayals of him,” William Green said, “so it was understandable that Ace Rothstein would seem a fleck meliorate on the screen than Lefty Rosenthal did inward tangible life.”

Rosenthal enjoyed a longer and happier life-time than to the highest degree other people inwards his demarcation of work. Despite a 1982 endeavour to hasten the contingency with a gondola bomb inward the parking lot of a Las Vegas Tony Roma’s, he didn’t pass away until 2008 — of a pump onset at age 79 inward Miami.

It wasn’t until after his last that Las Vegas Review-Journal editorialist Jane Ann Jim Morrison disclosed a bombshell private near Rosenthal that he had been hiding since at to the lowest degree his departure from Las Vegas 26 years earlier …

Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal was an FBI informant.

Had this arcanum gotten come out earlier, Rosenthal would in all likelihood make ended up just another silenced footer in Las Vegas history.

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