1. Casino 1995 True Story Cast
2. Casino 1995 True Story Trailer
3. Casino 1995 True Story Movie
4. Casino 1995 True Story Film

The story is based on Frank 'Lefty' Rosenthal, who ran the Stardust, Fremont and the Hacienda casinos in Las Vegas for The Mob from the 1970s until the early 1980s. Source(s): Wikipedia 1 0.

• Filmmaker Joseph Alexandre’s fascination with the true story behind Martin Scorsese’s mob epic Casino started long before the movie’s release. It all began in the 1980s, while he was working at a Chicago style pizzeria and heard about “the guy,” a man who came around with his College Bowl picks.
• Martin Scorsese, well known movie directors in the world. He has many award-winning movies to his name and has become one of the most respected people in Hollywood. He directed the highly successful movie called “Casino” back in 1995. Casino is a true story based movie.
• There was always something fated in Stone’s casting as Ginger, the moll to Robert DeNiro’s casino mogul in Martin Scorsese’s 1995 Las Vegas crime epic.
• The famous hit movie Casino was released in the year 1995. It was directed by the prestigious Martin Scorsese and it starred Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro and Sharon Stone. The plot was actually inspired by a real-life person, known as Frank Rosenthal. He managed the Fremont, Stardust and Hacienda casinos in Vegas.

The 1995 movie Casino directed by Martin Scorsese is a cult classic but did you know the plot was inspired by a real-life story? Well you do now! The story was inspired by Frank ‘Lefty’ Rosenthal who managed the Fremont, Hacienda and Stardust casinos in Vegas for the Chicago mob in the 70’s and 80’s.

But just how much of the movie was based on real life events? Well, lets find out as we take a look through the Casino movie true events.

Casino 1995 True Story Cast

Casino Movie True Events

The real-life Frank Rosenthal

All Main Characters Were Based On Real-Life Counterparts

Every main character you see in Casino is based on a real-life individual. Sam Rothstein is based on Frank Rosenthal, Nick Santoro is based on Anthony Splitotro, Ginger McKenna is based on Geri McGee and Phillip Green is based on Allen Glick.

Rosenthal Survived A Car Bombing

In the movie when Rothstein survives the car bombing is a moment taken straight from history. The only thing that stopped real-life Rosenthal from being blown to shreds was a metal stabilisation plate located underneath his drivers seat!

A Former Casino Executive was Tracked Down and Killed in his Home

One particular murder in Casino happened in real life. A former casino executive met his demise after being tracked and murdered at his home in Costa Rica. I think we’ll stick to online casinos from now on! Speaking of online casinos check out the best online casinos and feel safer in the comfort of your own home knowing you’re not going to get whacked!

Geri’s Death Was by Overdose

Rosenthal tragically lost his ex-wife Geri from a drug overdose. Accurately portrayed in the movie as McKenna met a similar fate in the motel at the end of the movie.

Geri and Spilotro Had An Affair

Rothstein, McKenna and Santoro in the movie play a complicated and sordid love triangle. In real-life the story was very similar as Rosenthal’s ex-wife McGee and Spilotro were alleged to have had an affair. As we all know wives who stray is a code of conduct frowned heavily upon by the mob.

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Mobster Frank Rosenthal helped build a casino empire — then watched it all slip away in a storm of violence and betrayal.

Bettmann/Contributor/Getty ImagesFrank Rosenthal adjusts his tie while refusing to answer questions before a Senate subcommittee on gambling and racketeering. Washington, D.C. Sept. 7, 1961.

Casino 1995 True Story Trailer

In the 1995 film Casino, director Martin Scorsese and star Robert De Niro gave us the fictional story of Sam “Ace” Rothstein, a mob-affiliated casino operator who always knows just how to manipulate odds and maximize profits on behalf of the murderous gangsters he works with.

But if Rothstein and his violent Las Vegas adventures seem too outrageous to be true, take note that this character was based on Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, a real-life gambler and gangster every bit the smooth criminal the movie made him out to be.

The Road To Las Vegas

Casino 1995 True Story Movie

Born in Chicago on June 12, 1929, Frank Rosenthal spent many of his early days at the horse track with his father, who owned several horses, learning everything he could about racing. Moreover, of course, he learned about a crucial part of the sport: gambling.

As he grew older, Rosenthal’s interest in and knowledge of gambling extended beyond horse racing and into other sports like football and baseball. The young gambler learned, as he later said, that “Every pitch. Every swing. Everything had a price.”

Casino 1995 True Story Film

By the time he was a young adult, he was heavily involved in the mob-controlled illegal gambling scene in Chicago.

Working for the Chicago Outfit in the mid-1950s, Rosenthal had a talent for setting the perfect odds for sports betting. He manipulated the odds just enough to entice gamblers to bet while also keeping the odds just where they needed to be so that the bookies could be sure that they’d come out ahead no matter what happened.

A whiz with numbers possessed of a Rain Man-like ability to calculate odds, Rosenthal was also a meticulous researcher who would get up early in the morning to study some 40 out-of-town newspapers in order to gather all the information he needed to make the odds just right.

Of course, Rosenthal also wasn’t above taking steps to make sure that he got the results he wanted, and by the early 1960s, he found himself in trouble for fixing games. In 1962, he was convicted of bribing a college basketball player to shave points during a game in North Carolina.

The year before, he’d been dragged in front of a Senate subcommittee on gambling and organized crime due to his now-nationwide underworld reputation as an oddsmaker and match fixer. During the proceedings, he invoked the Fifth Amendment a whopping 38 times, even when asked if he was left-handed — hence his nickname, “Lefty” (some sources claim that the nickname simply comes from his being left-handed).

Around this same time, Frank Rosenthal moved to Miami, where he and other Chicago Outfit members continued to participate in illegal gambling operations and even engage in violent assaults on their rivals. As part of these so-called “bookie wars,” Rosenthal came under suspicion in several bombings of rivals’ buildings and cars.

Feeling the heat — and surely understanding that Sin City was the place to be if you were a big-time gambler — Frank Rosenthal set out for Las Vegas in 1968.

Frank Rosenthal, Casino King

Upon arriving in Las Vegas, Lefty Rosenthal initially ran a betting parlor alongside a boyhood friend from Chicago who acted as his enforcer: Anthony “Tony the Ant” Spilotro (called “Nicky Santoro” and played by Joe Pesci in Casino).

Bettmann/Contributor/Getty ImagesAnthony Spilotro sits in a Las Vegas courtroom in connection with two old homicide cases. 1983.

Spilotro had a long rap sheet filled with violent crimes. In Chicago, he’d long been a killer for his organized crime bosses and authorities believed he may have killed at least 25 people. As the movie depicts, he even once boasted of squeezing a man’s head in a vice until his eyes popped out and then slashing his throat. Unverified and perhaps apocryphal reports still claim that Las Vegas’ murder rate went up by 70 percent after Spilotro arrived in town.

And now this violent killer was in Las Vegas to help the Chicago Outfit keep an eye on their gambling interests, which meant he’d be right by Rosenthal’s side.

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Also by Rosenthal’s side was his new bride, Geri McGee (played by Sharon Stone as “Ginger McKenna” in the film, above), a former topless showgirl he’d met not long after moving to town and married in 1969. It was McGee who encouraged Rosenthal — whose betting parlor had come under fire on federal bookmaking charges (ones that he beat on a technicality) — to take a casino job.

So in 1974, Frank Rosenthal began working for the Stardust. Given his talent for gambling and his organized crime connections, he quickly rose through the ranks and was soon running the Stardust and three other casinos, all of them believed to be under the control of the Chicago Outfit.

This meant that each casino needed a squeaky clean frontman that would appear to be running things while Rosenthal was actually the boss behind the scenes. And Rosenthal was often quick to make it clear to such frontmen just who was really in charge.

As Rosenthal told one of his nominal “bosses” in 1974:

“It is about time you become informed of what is going on here and where I am coming from and where you should be… I have been instructed not to tolerate any nonsense from you, nor do I have to listen to what you say, because you are not my boss… When I say you don’t have a choice, I am just not talking of an administrative basis, but I am talking about one involving health. If you interfere with any of the casino operations or try to undermine anything I want to do here, I represent to you that you will never leave this corporation alive.”

And there was indeed plenty of ruthlessness in Rosenthal. As the film depicted (below), his security caught a man cheating and so he ordered them to break his hand with a hammer. “He was part of a crew of professional card cheats, and calling the cops would do nothing to stop them,” Rosenthal said in an interview later. “So we used a rubber mallet… and he became a lefty.”

But as ruthless as he could be, Rosenthal was also as meticulous and sophisticated in his approach as he ever was — and not just in terms of the gambling itself. He hosted a local television show featuring celebrity guests and even counted the blueberries in the kitchen’s muffins to make sure that there were always 10 in each.

Of course, he truly did make his mark in revolutionizing the casino’s gambling operation by moving heavily into sports betting and hiring female dealers. All in all, Frank Rosenthal’s moves helped send the Stardust’s profits soaring.

However, all good things must come to an end — especially when the mob and millions upon millions of dollars are involved.

Frank Rosenthal’s Fall From Grace

While the Stardust was thriving, Frank Rosenthal was having trouble with the authorities.

Though he was secretly running several casinos, he had no official gaming license (his past meant that he surely wouldn’t have been able to get one). And because of this as well as his known contacts in organized crime, the Nevada Gaming Commission was able to bar him from having anything to do with gambling in Las Vegas in 1976.

Meanwhile, authorities indicted Spilotro and a dozen other mobsters who’d been making serious money off of these casinos. What’s more, Rosenthal also found out that Spilotro had been skimming money that even his mob bosses weren’t aware of, causing a falling out between the two old friends (see the film’s dramatization below).

Furthermore, Rosenthal learned that Spilotro had been having an affair with McGee. Though she and Rosenthal had two children together, this infidelity and her drug abuse contributed to their marriage failing in 1980.

Meanwhile, Frank Rosenthal’s whole world was falling apart as authorities continued to interrogate him about his connections with Spilotro and his involvement in all manner of illegal activities that had taken place inside his casinos. He tried repeatedly to get the gaming license that would enable him to freely and legally return to work inside a casino, but was never approved.

Things only got worse in October 1982. Rosenthal left a local restaurant and got into his car. Moments later, it exploded. Rosenthal was thrown from the car, but his life was saved by a metal plate underneath his seat that just happened to be a feature of that particular model and was able to shield him just enough from the bomb’s blast from below. He suffered only minor burns and a few broken ribs.

Authorities never figured out who set the bomb, and Rosenthal always insisted that he never knew either, but most suspect that the mob had done so as a way to get revenge and clean house after the news broke that Rosenthal’s friend, Spilotro, had been skimming mob profits.

Lefty Rosenthal survived, but McGee and Spilotro did not. McGee was found dead in Los Angeles a few weeks after the bombing due to a mysterious collapse that was officially ruled a drug overdose (details remain fuzzy). Spilotro was found beaten to death and buried in an Indiana cornfield in 1986.

But Rosenthal emerged unscathed and took his two children to California and then to Florida, where he worked as a nightclub manager and ran an online betting site before dying in 2008 at the age of 79.

To the end, Rosenthal had mixed opinions about the movie based on his Las Vegas career but felt that it was largely accurate (but insisted that he never funneled casino profits illegally to the mob). And in a sense, that says a lot about the wild life of Frank Rosenthal. After all, how many people could have their life story turned into a hit movie with few, if any, embellishments needed?

After this look at Frank Rosenthal, discover the true story of Henry Hill as well as other real-life Goodfellas like Tommy DeSimone and Jimmy “The Gent” Burke.