Casino by Nicholas Pileggi

Author:Nicholas Pileggi
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504041621
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

While Hannifin refuted the story told by the disgruntled agents, rumors about Rosenthal’s close relationship with Hannifin had a basis in fact. Hannifin’s admiration for Lefty’s gaming expertise was well known. It was Hannifin’s idea to allow casinos to have sports books, and he enlisted Rosenthal in the campaign; in the process, Hannifin became an admirer. “Back then you couldn’t run a race and sports book in a casino,” Hannifin said. “They were usually on the outside, and they had lots of problems. There was past-posting and the state never got a full count. There were two and three sets of books. You’d have a guy with a chalkboard, a phone line, and a lease, and at the first sign of trouble he was gone. I always felt it would be better if we brought the sports book into the casinos and that way we could regulate them. Lefty probably knew more about the sports book than anyone in Las Vegas, and I asked him if he’d help explain the advantages to the state legislature of getting the Gaming Commission to approve sports books. He loved the idea. I had him fly up to Carson City a half dozen times and testify. He was great. He liked getting on the stand and he was brilliant on the subject. He stood up and sold the system.”

Lefty Rosenthal says, “Hannifin was onto something with bringing the sports books inside the casinos. In 1968, when I first got here, there were only two or three sports books in Vegas where you could bet sports. But there was about to be a revolution. Television was about to start covering sports, and every year after the first Superbowl in 1967, the interest in betting sports quadrupled.

“Before then, there was no Monday-night football. Most sports books were devoted to horse bettors, and the places looked more like stables than what you see today. They were very inhospitable places. Sawdust joints. Most of them had the old chalkboards. There were no amenities.

“So when we got the okay, I knew exactly what to do. I had spent my life in those places and knew what they needed. I can’t tell you the hours I spent going over the design, just the hours going over the right kind of seat to buy, the space, height, the boards, the TV screens. I wanted them to be like theaters.

“But I’m working with people who didn’t know what I was talking about. There had never been a sports room like this before.

“It was nearly nine thousand square feet with room for six hundred people, including two hundred and fifty individually lighted theater seats with their own desks and dimmer controls for our regular players.

“We put in a bar measuring nearly a quarter mile of inlaid wood and mirror and the largest projection-lighted board system in the world. We had a forty-eight-square-foot color television screen, and since horseplayers were still our biggest bettors, we had entry boards for five separate racetracks covering a hundred and forty square feet.

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