Everything Casino Doesn't Tell You About The True Story

Director Martin Scorsese's 1995 film "Casino" was inspired by a true story, with crime reporter Nicholas Pileggi co-writing the screenplay with Scorsese while simultaneously working on the nonfiction book. If you are a Scorsese fan, you probably already know that Pileggi also wrote the novel "Wiseguy" that Scorsese's film "GoodFellas" was based on. Their second project together was a little different than the first, though. Pileggi's book "Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas" came out in October and the film was released in November 1995.

This proved challenging for the film's production because unlike "Wiseguy," Pegilli's new book hadn't already been fact-checked and vetted before publication, leaving Scorsese to wrestle with the lawyers at Universal Pictures about what he could and could not include in the film. The lawyer's job was to ensure the studio wouldn't get sued for libel, while Scorsese's job was to make an accurate but engaging movie about gambling and the shadowy underbelly of the industry.

Simon Brew with Film Stories chronicled the tension between Scorsese and Universal's legal department, detailing compromises Scorsese made to get the film made — one of which was saying at the beginning of the film that the story was "adapted from a true story" rather than "based on a true story." This might seem like mere semantics, but these are the hoops Scorsese had to jump through to get this movie made.

Any film inspired by true events will contain minor differences. Sometimes for legal reasons and other times for dramatic effect. As the film's technical advisor Frank Cullotta told Uproxx, "They got to juice it up. It's a movie. Real life is boring." Keep reading if you want to know everything "Casino" doesn't tell you about the true story of how the mob lost control of Las Vegas.

This desert city's mob ties go way back, with some calling New York mobsters like Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel and Meyer Lansky the "founding fathers" of Las Vegas. By the 1970s, it was the Chicago Outfit running things in Vegas. Spilotro, a made-man in the Chicago mob, was sent to Las Vegas in 1971 as an enforcer (per Las Vegas Sun) to ensure their financial interests were being represented.

Despite these publicly recognized ties between the Chicago Outfit and Las Vegas, Scorsese did not refer to mob interests in the film "Casino" as being the Chicago Outfit. This was a legal issue with the studio, as reported by Film Stories. All names were already changed for the film, but the legal department at Universal Pictures wanted the locations changed as well. There is a lot of talk about Kansas City and meeting somewhere in the middle, but Chicago is entirely left out of the film.

Rather than change the name to another city in the Great Lakes region, Scorsese referenced the outfit "back home" as a humorous compromise. We even see this in title cards on screen during the movie. If you're a Scorsese fan, you probably got a chuckle out of this, thinking it a humorous reference to mobsters' penchant for vague language and speaking in code just in case they are being watched by law enforcement and need to establish plausible deniability.

The deaths of Nicky and Dominic Santoro in "Casino" make for one of the most brutal death scenes on screen. The brothers meet mob associates in a secluded cornfield, where they are beaten with baseball bats within an inch of their lives before being unceremoniously stripped to their underwear and buried alive. This is a gruesome death, but it is not what actually happened.

Scorsese and Pileggi had no way of knowing what really became of the character's real-life counterparts, Anthony and Michael Spilotro, because the full details of their murders were not revealed until long after the film came out. In 1986, their bodies were found and identified in an Indiana cornfield, and, as reported by the Los Angeles Times, "Investigators suspect[ed] that the two men 'died at or near' the grave." This led Scorsese and Pileggi to envision the violent end for the brothers that is seen in the film.

What really happened to the Spilotro brothers only became publicly known in 2007 during the "Family Secrets" mob trial. The brothers were lured to a basement in the Bensenville neighborhood, near the Chicago airport, under the false pretense Michael would become a "made man," as reported by the Wednesday Journal. The Spilotro brothers' family testified both men suspected it was a trap. Meanwhile, Nick Calabrese testified that the Spilotro brothers were killed by a group of mobsters in the basement, and they transported their corpses to the Indiana cornfield where the brothers were buried.

In Scorsese's "Casino," after being denied a gaming license by the state of Nevada, Ace hosts a talk show out of the Tangiers, going against the Chicago Outfit's suggestion that he keep a low profile. He justifies the decision by saying it is a way for him to have a platform to advocate for his application for a gaming license being reconsidered, and it gives him a legitimate reason to hang around the casino he is running without the proper paperwork.

As absurd as this sounds, in real life, Rosenthal actually did host "The Frank Rosenthal Show" in 1977 from the Stardust hotel. In an interview, he said, "that still angers me when I think of it — I never juggled on 'The Frank Rosenthal Show.' I resent that scene. It makes me look foolish. And I only did that TV show on the behest of the chairman of the board of the Stardust so that the public would realize I was a decent guy and not a mobster as portrayed by the media covering us at the time."

It's funny that out of all the nefarious things Rosenthal stood accused of — including mob ties, bookmaking in Miami, and alleged ties with an anti-Castro militant group in Miami lead by Luis Posada Carriles (per New York Times) — it was being misrepresented as juggling on television that really upset Rosenthal. This was a guy who clearly took himself seriously and wanted others to do the same.

The real-life counterpart of Sharon Stone's character Ginger, Geri McGee Rosenthal, had a daughter before she met Frank Rosenthal. This is one major discrepancy between the true story and the film "Casino." Another discrepancy between the film and the true story is that the Rosenthals had two children together, a daughter named Stephanie and a son named Steven, where as the film depicted the couple sharing only a daughter (per History vs. Hollywood). As a young woman in Los Angeles, Geri's first child, Robin Marmor, was born in 1957 and fathered by Lenny Marmor. James Woods' character in the film, Lester Diamond, is the fictional stand-in for Marmor.

In the film, Sam doesn't understand the hold Lester has on Ginger, blaming it on her drug addiction and history as a sex worker, with Lester acting as her pimp. In reality, Geri Rosenthal shared a child with Lester's counterpart, making a much more nuanced explanation for her continued communication and relationship with Marmor (per History vs. Hollywood).

Geri Rosenthal moved from Los Angeles to Vegas in the early '60s with her daughter, working as a cocktail server and a showgirl at the Tropicana before becoming a chip hustler, entertaining high-rollers at casinos in Las Vegas. The Rosenthals married in 1969 and divorced in 1981, and she died in Los Angeles in 1982 due to an apparent overdose.

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Despite Rosenthal's alleged mob ties, he always maintained that he was not a part of the Chicago Outfit running Vegas in the '70s, saying in an interview, "I was never a part of them, but I made it a point not to burn any bridges. I don't see any purpose in burning a bridge." Rosenthal also maintained he did not know about the skimming operation happening in the Las Vegas casinos he managed for the Argent Corporation. As he stated in the same interview, "Negative. If I did, they should have charged me. But they never did. I learned about it when the indictments took place."

Despite suspicions of his involvement, Rosenthal was never arrested or indicted for the Las Vegas skimming scheme, nor did he testify in the 1986 trial (per Las Vegas Review-Journal). Rosenthal elaborated about never being charged, saying, "If I were guilty I would have been. I submitted myself to endless hours of interviews regarding the skim operation. If they had something, they would have dropped the hammer on me. But they had nothing other than innuendo."

Rosenthal's involvement with the four casinos owned by the Argent Corporation in the '70s is undisputed, and he was known to have friendly associations with mobsters like Spilotor, as well as Joey "The Clown" Lombardo and Frank "The German” Schweihs. However, Rosenthal always claimed his associations with these people were "strictly social."