At the Sands by David G. Schwartz

Author:David G. Schwartz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Las Vegas, Casino, organized crime, hotel, Sands, Vegas history, gambling, Rat Pack
Publisher: Winchester Books
Published: 2020-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

WHILE THEY WERE PLANNING their expansions, the Sands’ managers were checking up and down the Strip: What were the Desert Inn, the Dunes, the Sahara, the Flamingo, the Tropicana doing? Those were their competitors. But their real enemy was Bobby Kennedy.

Starting in 1961, Kennedy authorized the use of hidden microphones—“bugs”—to procure intelligence that informants had been unable or unwilling to provide. He and his organized crime squad suspected that the mob was skimming thousands from Las Vegas casinos each month but were unable to uncover any actual evidence of the practice. While they were picking up a fair amount of gossip about petty rivalries among the casino managers and reputed mobsters behind the skim, they had been unable to penetrate the count rooms and procure actual proof that this was happening.

The usual method of flipping low-level criminals to build cases against their higher-ups proved virtually useless in Las Vegas. Those involved, through either loyalty or fear, owed more to each other than the federal government. Developing an undercover agent into a figure with enough trust to be allowed into the inner circle could take years, if not decades. The only way, Justice was convinced, to learn the truth about the mob and skimming was microphone surveillance, abbreviated in FBI-speak as “micsur.”

For more than a decade, federal investigators had been probing organized crime and were hot on the trail of several mob bosses, including Sam Giancana of Chicago. The Bureau identified another axis of organized crime that ran through New York, New Jersey, and Los Angeles. The key figure here was Doc Stacher, who resided in Los Angeles but who had come up in New Jersey. In early April 1961, the Bureau bugged his room at New York’s Hotel Pierre for a week. The G-Men then switched their focus to his rooms at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel where they installed microphones that remained in service indefinitely.

Stacher, living up to his nickname of “the Brain,” was well aware that he was being watched. One summer day, seeing two suited agents sweltering while watching him from a balcony while he lounged poolside, he waved them over.

“Put on some shorts and get in the pool with me,” he suggested. “You’re never going to learn anything about me from all the way up there.”

Carl Cohen, investigators believed, was Stacher’s chief contact at the Sands. To get to Stacher, they launched an intelligence-gathering campaign directed at Cohen. On August 9, 1962, the Los Angeles Field Office installed a bug in Cohen’s apartment on North Doheny Drive in Beverly Hills. Despite having already cultivated two informants in the field, agents were no closer to proving that Cohen was funneling money to Stacher, though they were optimistic that bugging Cohen’s apartment, which a “reliable source” had assured them was the site of many high-profile meetings, would finally provide proof.

That optimism was misplaced. Cohen did not talk business in his apartment, any more than Stacher did at the Beverly Wilshire—at least when he knew that cops might be listening in.

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