Being Oscar (4 page)

Vegas wasn’t a place I had ever thought about. Carolyn and I were living in an apartment in West Philadelphia, not far from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. It wasn’t the greatest neighborhood; we would routinely hear gunshots at night, and I bought Carolyn a container of Mace that she carried when she went to work. That night at home I asked her, “How would you like to go to the land of milk and honey?” She said, “What, Israel?”

I couldn’t wait to get out of law school. I sent letters out to district attorneys’ offices all over the country, but I didn’t get a whole lot of offers since I wasn’t the best student in school. I had a chance to go to work for Frank Hogan, the D.A. in Manhattan, but we would have been no better off financially than we were in Philadelphia. I married a princess, but she wasn’t a rich princess.

I didn’t want to stay in Philadelphia. My father had been in the district attorney’s office there, and later he had his own law practice. I loved my Dad, but I didn’t want to go to work for him and potentially strain our relationship. And I was intrigued by Las Vegas.

I could care less that the Flamingo was Meyer Lansky’s and Bugsy Siegel’s baby. At the time, I had barely heard the words “organized crime.” Back then, J. Edgar Hoover was still telling everyone that there was no Mafia. All that mattered to me was whether we should relocate to the desert.

I was looking for some adventure; something different. So I decided to write to the district attorney in Las Vegas about a job. Turns out there wasn’t a D.A. in Las Vegas; he was in Clark County. Luckily the letter got to the right place and I was offered a job. Before we decided, we went for a weekend to check it out.

We went on a junket run by the B’nai Brith. Carolyn was ill with mono the whole time we were there, so she just stayed in the hotel room at the Flamingo. I walked around downtown on a Saturday morning. People were friendly. I stopped in some lawyers’ offices and asked what kind of opportunities were there, and everyone encouraged me. Most of their practices were divorce and civil cases, of course, but I liked the place.

To a person, they told me the opportunities were limitless. There weren’t that many criminal cases, but every once in a while somebody would shoot somebody. It was a relatively safe city, in hindsight perhaps because the mob was there.

Carolyn was feeling better by Saturday, so I took her to the Flamingo’s “Candlelight Room.” I ordered a martini, and Jimmy Blake, the bartender, served one with a pickled Brussels sprout as a garnish. I never saw one before, and never saw one since.

By that point, I had made up my mind that I’d rather risk starting a career in Las Vegas than stay in Philadelphia. If I had stayed in Philly, I probably would have gone to work for Arlen Specter, and eventually would have become a federal judge. It was clear that Arlen was a shining light and that he was going to go places. Had I stayed, my whole life would have been different. I might have been as successful, but I wouldn’t have had the romance, the thrill of what I did in Las Vegas.

Later, when Specter was the U.S. senator and I was the mayor, he would always talk about that case he had assigned me when I was a kid. I was in Washington once with some politicians, and we were walking around the Senate offices meeting different senators. When we ran into Arlen, he told the story again. He said he sent me to Las Vegas to collect the money from the Lulabell Rossman case, and I never came back.

I accepted an offer to clerk for the Clark County District Attorney’s Office in Vegas, and we left Philadelphia right after I took the bar exam in August 1964. We drove out in an Oldsmobile
Cutlass convertible and took the old Route 66. I drove during the day, and Carolyn drove during the night; it took us three and a half days to get there. We stopped in St. Louis one night and in New Mexico another night. When we drove up on Las Vegas, we stopped on a mesa overlooking the valley. We could see a few flickering lights blinking in the desert. But not many big buildings. This wasn’t Philadelphia. I swear, some tumbleweed rolled across the highway in front of us. The only time either of us had ever seen tumbleweed was in a Roy Rogers movie.

My wife looked at me and said, “My parents were right. I should never have married you. Where have you taken me?” She was prescient. When she was taking courses at UNLV, where she got a Masters in counseling, one of her professors asked for a definition of cultural deprivation. Carolyn asked me what I thought. I said it was anyone in Las Vegas who couldn’t afford a round-trip ticket to San Francisco.

There were no fancy, boutique clothing stores or gourmet restaurants back then. There was a JC Penney’s, which we jokingly pronounced with a French accent—
Pen-nay
. But there was just something about Las Vegas. It was either the most real or the most unreal place I have ever been. I didn’t know whether this was what life was supposed to be like, or whether it was an aberration. For many, the only reason to come here was the promise of financial success. It was a new frontier, and it appealed to me.

Philadelphia’s society was steeped in tradition; there was almost a caste system in effect. In Las Vegas there was just a bunch of characters who mingled with one another. Social life seemed to revolve around Vegas Village, which was a supermarket. This wasn’t like any supermarket I was used to; it was open
24 hours, and on Saturdays and Sundays it was a meeting place. You’d see senators, lawyers, bookmakers, showgirls, prostitutes—everybody interacting.

When we got to Vegas, my wife wanted to move into a nice apartment, so we got a place at the Palms for $185 a month. It had a beautiful little patio and was full of interesting people. But for the first six weeks, nobody talked to us. We couldn’t figure it out. Then on the seventh week, everybody opened up. Later we found out that couples came there for six weeks to establish residence so they could file for divorce. Once we were there for seven weeks, they knew we were staying.

Carolyn and I both came from pretty staid backgrounds, but now we were living in this apartment building with showgirls, dealers, casino workers, and probably some hookers, too. There was a woman who used to walk her poodle every day wearing the skimpiest bikini I’d even seen. Nobody thought anything of it; she was a hooker or a showgirl, maybe both. Nobody cared. You’ve gotta love a place like that.

At first I worked in the civil division of the Clark County District Attorney’s office while waiting to take the Nevada bar exam, which wasn’t scheduled again until November of the following year. The job was interesting and allowed me to get to know a lot of people in the legal community. The people in the D.A.’s office took a liking to me. I think they respected the fact that I was from an Ivy League law school. Among other things, I became the ghostwriter for one of the judges, who used me to craft his opinions.

After I was clerking for six months, I got a call asking me to come back to Philadelphia to work for Arlen Specter, who had been elected district attorney. They offered me a salary of $17,000, and at the time I was making $7,200. But I made the decision to stay, and I’ve never regretted it. I’ve always felt that
you can make your own mark in Las Vegas, since the city’s founding fathers all came from somewhere else.

When I took the bar, I got the number one grade, so I was a shining star. The judge who supervised the group had nice things to say about me. It was said that Harry Reid was the best young civil lawyer, and Oscar Goodman was the best young criminal lawyer among the batch admitted during those years.

Carolyn got a job right away in advertising and publicity at the Riviera. Part of her job was to go out every night to the lounges and the showrooms to socialize with other people in the business. Sometimes she’d schlep me along. The first time we went to the Thunderbird, Frankie Laine and Sarah Vaughn were playing the lounge. It was free, and the casino was giving away drinks. They just hoped you would gamble.

Carolyn had a number of jobs. She worked PR for Louis Prima, and later she was the first executive secretary for two of the three founders of Caesars Palace. Nate Jacobson, one of those founders, asked her why she had married scrambled eggs when she could have roast beef, the little prick. I think that if she had stayed in the business, she would have become a casino president.

Carolyn also was a card counter before the gamers ever dreamed up that term. Today they would ban her from the casinos, but back then they didn’t. And they played blackjack with one deck of fifty-two cards. One of her favorite games as a kid involved spreading out all the cards in a deck face-up, then turning them all over and trying to match them: a Queen with a Queen, a five with a five. She was very good at that game, and very good at counting cards. The dealers used to look at her like she was a mystic.

My mom and dad spent my whole youth teaching me to learn how to “fly,” but when it came time to “fly away,” they balked.
My dad had read
The Green Felt Jungle
, and he was disturbed by its depiction of the underworld in Las Vegas. For years, he told everyone that his son had moved to Phoenix. Even so, he would send me $25 every week, with the caveat that I had to spend that money for something we enjoyed. It wasn’t to pay bills or to put in the bank. We would go over to the Hacienda for dinner and afterward Carolyn would go to the blackjack table with whatever was left over from the check. She usually won, put what she started with in her purse, and spent the rest of the night playing with the house’s money.

After I passed the bar, I opened my office and started practicing law. From that point on, I’ve never worked for anyone except myself. I got the opportunity to practice law in a way that no other young lawyer ever has. It was because of the clientele, and because I was in Las Vegas. Because there was no society, no caste system, you made your own mark. The cream rose to the top, and I liked that. Still, you could be the smartest guy in the world, but without a client, nobody would know it.

I
didn’t set out to be a mob lawyer—they don’t teach a course on that in law school. But I knew I wanted to practice criminal law because I thought it was meaningful.

I’ve always looked at life in terms of David versus Goliath. I identify with the underdog. When I was a boy attending religious school, stories involving fights against injustice and oppression made a big impression on me. Anyone who’s ever read the Bible knows there are plenty of those in the Good Book.

At this time horrific stories were coming out about the concentration camps. This was post–World War II, and Americans were finding out about the atrocities perpetrated by Hitler. Six million Jews had been slaughtered because of a maniac who spewed a philosophy of hatred and intolerance.

All of that shaped who I was, and what kind of lawyer I would become.

It’s no secret that I became a lawyer because of my dad. I saw him practice law, and I knew what it meant to see justice served. When I was about twelve years old, he took me to court with him one day. By this time he had left the district attorney’s office and was in private practice. He was representing a woman in a civil case. When I think about it now, it still sends chills down my spine.
She had been a survivor of Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp in Poland. She had those horrible numbers tattooed on her arm. Some family members wanted to have her lobotomized so that she would forget the shock and terror that she had experienced.

But she was against it. She thought it was important that people remember.

My father had taken me to hearings held in police districts when he was with the D.A., but this was the first time he ever took me to City Hall, and the first time I was ever in a real courtroom. I was there for closing arguments in the case. I think he wanted me to understand what being a lawyer was. He was emotionally involved because of the principled position his client had taken; so involved, in fact, that he was getting physically ill.

But when he made his closing argument, he was awesome, passionate, and eloquent. The point he made was that while those were horrific times, forgetting them would be an utter tragedy. The judge ruled right from the bench in his client’s favor. There would be no lobotomy.

Whenever I think about that case, I remember my dad’s passion and conviction. From that point on, I knew that a lawyer—in particular, a lawyer who cared about what he was doing—was in the business of fighting for righteousness. It may sound trite, but when I was practicing law, I really saw myself as a defender and protector of the Constitution. My father had taught me that attitude, and as a result, I took my work very seriously.