Interference (49 page)

After his meeting, Rosenthal, clad in a blue jogging suit, walked into the parking lot, stepped into his gold 1981 Cadillac Eldorado, sat down behind the wheel, and closed the door.
⁵
When he started the engine, a bomb exploded. The initial blast blew backward not forward, allowing Rosenthal a split second to force open his door with his left arm and leg.

After he tumbled out of the car, a second explosion blew a portion of the car's roof thirty feet into the air. The detonating device, which exploded first, had been placed under the gas tank between the rear tires. A specially made steel floor plate protected Rosenthal from being directly hit by the blast, and he escaped any serious injury when the gas tank exploded.

Marty Kane told me the events of that evening, “Lefty went on his way because the kids were coming home. We walked out of Tony Roma's. I went off to the right toward my car beside the building; his car was straight ahead by Marie Callender's restaurant. As I was walking toward my car, I heard this tremendous explosion. I had no idea what was happening. And then I heard
another one. When I looked up, there were pieces of glass flying everywhere. So I opened my car door and got behind it. I still didn't know what had happened. And then I saw the black smoke. I ran around toward Marie Callender's, and I saw two guys leading Lefty away from his car. Those two guys were Secret Service agents, who were doing an advance.”

The two Secret Service agents, who were scouting the area prior to a visit to Las Vegas by President Reagan, were eating at Marie Callender's restaurant at the moment of the blast. They were struck by flying glass and slightly injured. Both agents ran outside and found Rosenthal wandering around near his demolished car. The agents convinced Rosenthal to lie down until the ambulance arrived.

Kane continues, “When I saw Lefty walking around in a daze, I couldn't believe it. I mean, his car was totally demolished. It was one big pile of junk. I ran up to him, and I could see that his left arm and his left leg were burned. He was bleeding from the forehead and his hair was singed.”

When the ambulance arrived, Ruby Goldstein climbed in the back with Rosenthal. Kane and Sam Green followed close behind in Kane's car.

Rosenthal was treated at the Teamsters-financed Sunrise Hospital for cracked ribs, shrapnel injuries, and burns on his legs, hands, and face. After Rosenthal was released two hours later, Kane, Green, and Goldstein took him home.

Rosenthal was later interviewed at his house “for several hours” by the FBI and the Clark County Metropolitan Police Department, which described Rosenthal as being “very, very, very cooperative. He signed a crime report and gave us a lengthy statement.” Although the FBI did not have jurisdiction in the case, it offered intelligence information and its investigative facilities to the local police who were conducting the probe of the bombing. One of the police officers had told Rosenthal that he was “a walking dead man.”

Two of the FBI agents who interviewed Rosenthal after the bombing were Joe Yablonsky and Charlie Parsons. Yablonsky, the chief of the Las Vegas office, told me, “We had a long talk with Lefty. We went for hours at his place. He wasn't going to tell us anything about the cause or his theories of it. But our basic purpose was to talk him into the witness program and to testify. But he wasn't a typical candidate for the program because he had plenty of his own money.

“Lefty said, ‘What are my kids going to think if I become a snitch?' I told him, ‘Don't you think your kids know what the fuck you are? Look at what the fucking Mafia did to you. You don't owe them anything.' But we couldn't budge him. He just wouldn't talk about what we wanted.”

FBI special agent Charlie Parsons told me, “We never knew for sure who put the bomb in his car, but there isn't much question that the Chicago family was behind it. No one would dare do that without authority.”
⁶

Regardless of the lack of evidence, the bombing was immediately blamed on Spilotro, who was supposedly afraid that Rosenthal would become a government witness, as Glick had.

Within forty-eight hours of the explosion, Rosenthal held a press conference at his house. He told reporters that the FBI had “offered me fortresslike protection for an indefinite period of time … It was an invitation I thought to be honest and sincere. But I was not interested. I have nothing to offer and nothing to gain.” He repeated that—although he had made several appearances before the federal grand jury investigating skimming at the Stardust—he had not become either a government witness or an informant.

When asked whether he thought he had been the target of a Chicago underworld contract, Rosenthal—who said that he viewed the bombing as “No message; No warning” but a straight-out effort to kill him—replied, “I know it didn't come from the Boy Scouts of America.” Specifically asked about the likelihood of Spilotro's involvement, Rosenthal became deadpan serious and said that he would be “very, very unhappy and very, very angry” if he was behind it. “It would be a very unhealthy situation—for all of us.”

Rosenthal added, “I just wanted to find out who did it, and make sure it doesn't happen again … I have no thoughts of revenge. If I say I'm looking for revenge, then I'm as low as they are.”

On November 6, 1982, at 4:35
A.M.,
forty-six-year-old Geri Rosenthal, who had visited her estranged husband while he was recuperating from his superficial injuries, walked into the lobby of the Beverly Sunset Motel on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and started screaming before collapsing to the floor, according to eyewitnesses. Comatose, she was rushed to the nearby Cedar Sinai Hospital. Attempts to save her life were unsuccessful, and she died three days later without ever regaining consciousness.

The Los Angeles coroner's office determined that she was the victim of a drug and alcohol overdose, a lethal combination of cocaine, Valium, and Jack Daniel's whiskey. The coroner also noted a large bruise, the size of a football, on her right hip and concluded that “foul play is not ruled out.” But foul play has never been proven. Lefty Rosenthal and the couple's two children did not attend the funeral.

In December 1982, Rosenthal and his children moved into a heavily secured $370,000 house in Laguna Niguel, a community south of Los Angeles. He insisted that he hadn't left Las Vegas because of the attempt on his life and considered his relationship with Spilotro “a private matter.”

One problem that existed with regard to the pursuit of bookmakers and the national gambling syndicate was the refusal of the Reagan administration to prosecute. A top Justice Department official admitted, “We're no longer in the gambling business.”

Despite the fact that organized crime was still controlling the major bookmaking and layoff operations, gambling became a low priority among the Reaganistas except when a major gambling network was discovered. Also, the President's Treasury Department was urging Congress to repeal two federal taxes on gamblers because they had not been effective deterrents to gambling and they were “wasteful and inefficient” to enforce. Significantly, in the past, government prosecutors had depended on tax evasion cases to try organized-crime figures who had managed to avoid prosecution for other, more serious crimes.
⁷

Also, during the early months of President Reagan's first term, Nevada senator Paul Laxalt, Reagan's closest friend in Congress, met with Attorney General William French Smith no fewer than three times, specifically to discuss the possibility of minimizing the role of the Justice Department's Strike Force Against Organized Crime in Las Vegas.

Laxalt had been loudly complaining that Las Vegas was “infested” with pesky FBI and IRS agents, and he pledged to use his influence on the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee to get federal investigators off the backs of Nevada's casino operators. Laxalt had taken the position that organized crime was no longer a factor in Nevada, which, he insisted, had established tight monitoring programs to keep out mobsters.

Joe Yablonsky, who headed the FBI's office in Las Vegas, told me, “Having the best friend of the President of the United States complaining about what I was doing had a chilling effect on the Justice Department's view of investigating Las Vegas.”

Reagan took Laxalt's advice, and the President's first opportunity to revise the federal budget yielded a one-third cutback of the FBI's investigations of gambling, prostitution, arson-for-profit, gangland murders, and pornography—along with a hiring freeze and dramatic staff reductions within the FBI. Reagan also indicated that no new undercover operations would be authorized against organized crime or white-collar crime. Instead, the Reagan Justice Department wanted to concentrate on street crime and small-time drug use.
⁸

41 Appearances and Realities

THE FINAL PRETRIAL HEARING before Al Davis's antitrust case to move his Oakland Raiders to Los Angeles was heard on May 7, 1981. During the hearing, NFL attorneys attempted to introduce as evidence Davis's relationship with Chicago Mafia “straw man” Allen Glick. The former mayor of San Francisco, Joseph Alioto, who was Davis's lawyer, agreed to permit the evidence as long as he could discuss the underworld contacts of Carroll Rosenbloom who “was much more involved than Mr. Davis.” Alioto added, “Other NFL owners have ties to known gangsters far greater than Mr. Davis ever had … Mr. Davis will tell the whole story about Mr. Glick provided we are allowed to tell the whole truth about the other owners.”
¹

The following day, to the relief of the NFL and several of its team owners, U.S. District Court Judge Harry Pregerson refused to admit testimony about the Glick-Davis relationship.
²

The NFL players weren't so lucky because they became the new targets of public scrutiny.
³
Once again, when glimpses of organized crime's coziness with NFL owners appeared, new gambling scandals among the players hit the headlines, making the owners back-page news.

Like Joe Namath, Ken Stabler was a product of the University of Alabama. Coached by Paul “Bear” Bryant—who called him “the best quarterback I ever had at Alabama”—Stabler, nicknamed Snake, was among the most colorful players in the NFL. Drafted by the Oakland Raiders, Stabler played for Al Davis from 1970 to 1979, amassing an impressive list of statistics.
⁴
After playing the 1980 season with the Houston Oilers, Stabler decided to retire. But he was lured back by the Oilers and a two-year $800,000 contract to play in the 1981 and 1982 seasons.

During the Oilers' summer training camp, a story by reporters John M. Crewdson and Wendell Rawls, Jr., broke in
The New York Times
on August 30, charging, in part, that Stabler had maintained a long relationship with sixty-three-year-old, twice-convicted bookmaker Nick Dudich, who had been linked to New Jersey's DeCavalcante crime family.
⁵

An NFL investigation of Stabler, which had supposedly begun the previous March, was continuing but inconclusive by the time the story was published: There was no evidence that Stabler had gambled, shaved points, or fixed games.
⁶

Years earlier, Al LoCasale, an assistant to Al Davis, had allegedly reported the association between Stabler and Dudich to NFL Security. Team officials, including Raiders head coach John Madden, had instructed Stabler to sever his ties with Dudich, but Stabler refused.

Bud Adams, the Oilers' owner and Stabler's new boss, charged that Davis had contrived the whole matter to embarrass Pete Rozelle and the NFL. Stabler agreed, and several former Raiders—Fred Biletnikoff, Pete Banaszak, and Phil Villapiano—told reporters that they had known Dudich as well. While insisting that Stabler had done nothing wrong, they all denied ever gambling or giving Dudich any inside information.

At the same time, the Raiders' head trainer, George Anderson, who had been with the Raiders since 1960, was also accused of gambling on NFL games and passing inside information to his bookmaker, Thomas “Whitey” Green, who was identified as the major layoff man in the Bay Area. Green, Dudich, and a third bookmaker, Samuel Reich, according to
The Times
, had tremendous access to Raiders players and staff.

The charges against Anderson had been made by bookmaker Gino Tropiano, a Green associate and check forger with a long arrest record, who was asked by the NFL to take a two-day polygraph examination about his charges—which included claims that Green had provided a bag of pills to Anderson. Although these allegations had been passed on to NFL Security as early as 1972, neither Tropiano nor Anderson was questioned by the league until September 1981.
⁷
Tropiano passed the examination. One answer was deemed as being “inconclusive.”
⁸

Whitey Green could not be interviewed. Just three months earlier, on June 3, 1981, Green and his wife were murdered. The forty-four-year-old, twice-convicted bookmaker was found bound with twine in the couple's bedroom; a single bullet from a small caliber gun had been fired into the top of his head. Nearby, his wife had been gagged and tied and was lying facedown on the bed with thirteen stab wounds in her body. Her head had also been struck three times with a claw hammer. There was no evidence of forced entry. Other than Green's wallet, nothing of value appeared to be missing from his $200,000 house in Livermore, a suburb of Oakland. Their bodies were discovered by their grandson, who became concerned when they didn't answer the door. The murder remains unsolved.

Tropiano said that four days before the murders, three men from Las Vegas had come to Green's house to collect on a $60,000 bet. Green had refused to pay them.

Meantime, after the Green murder, Stabler was questioned at length by Warren Welsh in 1981 about his relationship with Dudich. Anderson, who admitted making “a few small horse bets” with Green during the early 1970s, was also interviewed. The FBI reportedly received confirmation for Tropiano's earlier charges against Anderson from two confidential sources—whom the bureau refused to reveal to the Alameda County district attorney's office.