After three years, I'm returning to my Burt-Day blog with postings of the entire novel I've written, Slim Chance - A Las Vegas Adventure. Watch this space, as I'll be posting every chapter over the next few days/weeks. If you like what you see, please pass it along or recommend it to friends. By the way, I think the book would make a great movie. If you agree, please pass it along to your Hollywood friends, especially if their names are Spielberg or Scorsese.
Here goes -- Slim Chance - A Las Vegas Adventure ...
Nearly a quarter-century has passed since I experienced the events recounted here, twenty odd years since the fabled Vegas Castle Hotel, the most successful and best known of the original Strip hotels – “The Place to Be!” – faced extinction. For me in that fateful year of 1989, Tiananmen Square, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the death of Emperor Hirohito, and the Dalai Lama winning the Nobel Peace Prize were events that all paled by comparison to what happened in the pages of this memoir.
That year – 1989 – was also, in retrospect, a year that changed Las Vegas forever, a year when the Golden Age of Las Vegas began to fade into memory. Yes, everything began to change for Las Vegas at about Noon on Wednesday, Nov. 22, 1989. It happened like most everything else happens in Las Vegas – it happened with considerable ballyhoo and hype! I witnessed it from across the street with thousands of people at my side. The next morning’s Las Vegas Sun devoted many pages to it, but its front-page headline and two lead paragraphs said it all:
The Mirage opens its doors
It was just about noon Wednesday when Steve Wynn, standing outside the entrance of his new The Mirage beside junk bondsman Michael Milken, radioed security to "Let those people in." Both men watched as hundreds of people waiting on the Las Vegas Strip ran up the two driveways to the main entrance to be among the first to visit the elaborate, $630 million Mirage.
Sadly, Las Vegas would never be the same from that day forward.
James B. “Slim” Chance
Las Vegas, NV
Chapter 1
Lefty Gets It. We Don’t.
==================
Everybody with ears, from the Strip east to Lake Mead, must have heard the bomb that killed Lefty Needham. The explosion wasn’t as big as those they have out at the Test Site, and it wasn’t as big as the blast that blew that rocket fuel factory to smithereens last year in Henderson. But the bomb that killed Lefty was plenty loud.
Every time I think of that sound, I shudder.
I was sitting in my own car, Miss Nomer, when the bomb went off. I had just finished work and was in the Vegas Castle employee lot, about to leave for home. It was a typical summer day in Vegas – hot as hell. I hadn’t yet started Miss Nomer. I had just rolled down her windows. Even the rumble of the big air-conditioning unit that sits next to the building where I park wasn’t enough to mask the noise of the exploding dynamite that ripped Lefty and his Cadillac.
I vaguely remember thinking that even though Nellis Air Force Base was right outside of town, you don’t often hear sonic booms in Las Vegas. Not today anyway, not since the Vegas tourism honchos cracked down on the Air Force a few years back. The booms scare visitors, went the argument, and visitors in Vegas are everything. In the old days, big booms were part of the allure of the town, or so I’m told. Back then, some tourists actually came to hear and even see the nuclear bomb blasts 75 miles away at the Test Site. Can you imagine? Las Vegas is the only city since Nagasaki that has seen a mushroom cloud against its skyline. But not since the 50’s has that happened, even in Las Vegas. For the past 25 years, ever since 1964, the bombs have been exploded underground. You can’t see them; you can’t hear them. But, you sure could hear the bomb that killed Lefty!
I thought it was a plane out of Nellis. I figured the pilot wasn’t headed north like he should have been. Most of the planes head north after takeoff from Nellis, just so they’ll avoid creating those booms over town. North of Nellis, there’s nothing to disturb, nothing except sagebrush, a rattlesnake or two, or maybe a prospector who hasn’t heard that the low mountains of Southern Nevada had yielded their last silver nugget.
Lefty was killed on a Wednesday; it was the first of July; it was the beginning of a month I’ll never forget.
By the time I steered Miss Nomer onto the Strip and toward home, the subject of sonic booms was well out of my mind. I was thinking about pizza by then. Yes, pizza. The supermarket near my apartment house sells a super frozen pizza. They make it in their own kitchens, and all the consumer has to do is to heat it up in the oven. With a beer, maybe some potato chips, it’s my kind of meal.
So, I’m in my kitchen, and the pizza’s in the oven, and the phone rings.
"Mr. Chance?" It was Margaret, the night-shift hotel operator. My fate, it seemed as I heard her voice, was to be disturbed through eternity just as I was about to sit down to dinner.
"Margaret, you sweetheart! How are you? What’s it this time, a potato farmer from Idaho hit a jackpot? Or did a jumper reach for immortality?" Margaret was the senior operator at the Castle, as straight-laced as her white hair required. I had heard her a hundred times asking, in that formal tone of hers, "Mr. Chance? …"
She didn’t reply this time to my teasing. Instead, "Please hold on for Mr. Purdy ...."
"Please hold on for Mr. Purdy," I didn’t expect. Why would George be calling me? What would a bean counter want with me? It wasn’t tax season.
"Hi, Slim?" George’s high-pitched, almost whiny, voice drove me nuts. Still does.
"Yo, George ... Whatzamatter? You don’t see enough of me days, you gotta call me while I’m cooking dinner?"
"Slim, have you heard the ... uh,” he squeaked in soprano, ‘the ... uh, news? There was an unusual urgency to George’s whine this time. On the word "news," he unaccountably became a tenor.
"What’s going on, George?" My routine didn’t work with Margaret. Maybe it would work on George. "Somebody beat the casino out of a couple of dollars?" As soon as I said it, I knew better. It had to be more serious. Otherwise, a shift boss, slots manager, or a casino host would be calling me, and not George Purdy. At the same time, I was cooking a pizza, and that was serious too! I strained to reach the oven door to check on my dinner, but couldn’t. "Is that what it is, George? Can’t you tell Lefty your problems? I’m cooking."
"I can’t tell Lefty anything, Slim. That’s why I’m calling you."
"Whaddya telling me, George?" It wasn’t registering.
First, Purdy was calling me at home, which he never did before. Then, there was that change in the tone of his voice when he began the conversation. And now, he was giving me what could have been a punch line for a joke. "I can’t tell Lefty anything."
I stopped leaning toward the stove and slowly came to attention, holding the phone tightly to my ear, straining to hear something in the background, something to tell me what was wrong. There was something wrong, very wrong.
"Lefty’s dead. He was killed about an hour ago, Slim. They murdered him. Blew him up at Carla’s, in the parking lot.”
My heart skipped a beat. "What? What are you saying, George? What the hell happened?”
"It’s true, Slim. Nobody knows much of anything yet. I heard about it from a reporter from Channel 8. I was working late. He called the hotel and asked for the person next in charge to Lefty. So, the operator connected him to me. At first, I thought he was joking. But, it’s true, Slim. They killed him!”
"Who killed him, George? Who?” I knew I was asking the wrong guy.
There was a long silence that passed between us then. And after the silence, George replied quietly, “I don’t know. “ His voice was breaking now. “Slim, can you get over to the hotel? I’m not sure I’m gonna be able to handle this myself." And then, before I could answer, “Can you come over now?”
Like George, I wasn’t thinking too clearly at the time. But reflex took over. “Don’t say anything to the press, George. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
I don’t remember whether I said goodbye to George or not. I stood in my kitchen for a minute, maybe two, immobile, frozen by the news. Shock, puzzlement, anger, and fear swept over me in waves. Lefty murdered? Lefty dead? This didn’t make sense. I had just seen him at lunch; he was sitting with George in fact, probably discussing the hotel’s latest overdue bill. I heard him paged for a phone call. He took it at his booth. He joked and flirted with the waitress. He waved to hotel guests he recognized. On his way out, he came over and sat with me for a while. He told me about another of his plans to expand the Castle, said he’d leave me a file with the blueprints he just had printed. Then, he gave me his usual ribbing, "By the way, PR man, who’s dumping on us in the press today?"
Lefty was alive at lunch, as alive as anyone can ever be, as alive as Lefty always was. Now he was as dead as can be! Murdered? Yes, murdered!
I shook my head, as if I could shake some sense out of what I had just heard. It didn’t work. I was needed at the hotel. Reporters would be crawling all over the place, and a public relations man’s place is where the reporters are. This was no time to think about things. Perhaps it would be straightened out before long. But, Lefty dead? How could that be straightened out?
I turned off the oven, leaving my pizza half done. I grabbed my tie and jacket off the bed where I had thrown them less than an hour before, and walking toward the elevator, I tied my tie, realizing only then that my hands were shaking, and shaking badly. Lefty Needham was dead.
I had eaten at Carla’s Ribs ’n Chicken Restaurant almost as frequently as Lefty had, and with him many of those times. It was one of the boss’ favorite spots.
Lefty had offered Carla Simonetti a job at the Vegas Castle a hundred times, but a hundred times she had told him that all the money in the world couldn’t get her to give up her own place.
I knew why Lefty really wanted Carla. It wasn’t for her ribs, but it WAS for her thighs and breasts. Carla was a good-looking lady in her mid-40’s, one of the most eligible, unattached – ribs not withstanding – women in town, and even though Lefty was married, he occasionally – like on days ending in "Y" – fooled around.
My guess, though, was that Lefty hadn’t yet scored with Carla. She was an independent lady who didn’t need him and the complications a married man would bring into her life. She told Lefty that being in business for herself allowed her to call the shots. The same held true for her personal life; she called the shots there, as well.
I headed for the hotel by way of Carla’s, down Maryland from my apartment house, all the way to Desert Inn. Through the dim twilight, I could see in the restaurant’s parking lot what must have been Lefty’s car. A fire truck, its red light slowly turning on its roof, was parked next to where the still-smoking hulk was sitting. A small knot of people stood watching as a fireman sprayed water onto the wreckage. Beneath the car was a puddle trailing down the slight parking lot decline to the curb about 50 yards away. It must have been water, but I thought I saw the glint of redness in it. Lefty’s blood? Or was it the reflection off the fire truck light?
My car radio, always tuned to the all-news station, hit me with the reinforcement I didn’t need at the moment. "One man, who police identified as Lefty Needham, owner of the Vegas Castle Hotel and Casino, was killed instantly tonight, when a bomb attached to the starter in his automobile exploded. The explosion occurred in the parking lot of a Desert Inn Road restaurant. Details are sketchy, but a K-News news team has been dispatched to the scene. In other news, Federal authorities in Los Angeles are denying reports that terrorists from the Middle East are in California ...”
Sure enough, there it was, the K-News news team, one guy in a K-News news car, just pulling into the lot. He was showing a cop something through the driver’s side window. I assumed it was his press ID card.
I pulled into Carla’s lot on the far side of the wreckage where there weren’t any cops. I wasn’t going to learn much at the scene of this crime. Whatever remained of Lefty’s body had already been carted away. I walked toward the smoldering wreck that had been his Cadillac, but a uniformed cop stopped me about 20 yards away. “Hold it right there, pal!” he said, emphasis on the pal as if to indicate I wasn’t one. The cop brought me over to a detective, a homicide detective who the patrolman said was Lieutenant Kearney. I didn’t catch the first name. He was taking notes in a notebook with a pencil stub that looked like the one Columbo carries with him on TV. When he had taken my name and jotted down the fact that I was the PR man at the Vegas Castle, he asked me where I was when the bomb went off. I told him I was at home. "We'll be in touch, Chance," he announced abruptly. I had obviously been dismissed. I took the hint.
The cops were dusting for fingerprints now and interviewing restaurant employees and patrons. I saw Carla standing nearby, staring at the smoking Cadillac. She looked like she had been crying. One of her waitresses had her arm around her shoulders, trying to comfort her. As I started over to talk with her, another detective stepped in front of me, also headed her way. I figured I wasn't going to get my chance with Carla, and anyway, I was needed more urgently at the hotel. So, I returned to my car and headed up Desert Inn and over to the Strip.
In the Vegas Castle lobby, Sidney, the head bellman, was talking to one guy in a suit who could have been either a detective or a reporter. The stranger was dressed cheaply enough to be either, but he must have been a cop, as I knew nearly every reporter in town.
By the cage in the casino, a uniformed hotel security officer and our chief Al Casey were talking to two guys I did recognize as police. They were Metro detectives whom I had seen in the hotel before on suicide investigations. After gambling, suicide was the city's most popular, albeit least publicized, sport, and over the years, the Vegas Castle had witnessed its share of jumpers from the two 16-story towers that held its 900 guestrooms and suites.
Chief Casey was gesturing broadly to the detectives. As I passed them, I overheard him in mid-sentence, almost yelling: "It's gotta be Mob. Christ, you kids! We would have had the case solved already!"
The uniformed hotel guard looked pained. Casey was obviously embarrassing him. Neither cop, apparently, was going to get a word in edgewise -- or otherwise -- with the chief. I moved on.
To my complete surprise when I had reached my second-floor office, I found Pinky Dawson had also returned to work. Not surprisingly, she was on the phone, just as she was on most of every workday, mostly on personal calls.
"Hi, boss! You heard the news?" She looked up at me while covering the phone with her hand.
"Yeh, I heard the news, Pinky. Is that for me?"
She shook her head, and to whomever was on the phone, she said, "It was good for me too. I've got to go now, honey. I'll call you back!"
Pinky explained that after work that night, instead of going straight home, she had been at The Moat with one of her latest, when she heard me paged. When I didn’t answer the third page, she took the call. It was George Purdy looking for me, and he told her about Lefty’s murder. "I told Mr. Purdy that you had gone home, Slim, and figuring you’d be coming right back to the office when you heard the news, I said goodbye to my date and came up here. You’re probably going to need some help with the press, won’t you?"
When I first moved to Vegas from Boston, right after my divorce, I couldn’t believe my good luck in inheriting a secretary like Pinky. Not only was she well meaning, as she proved again this night, but Pinky was also beautiful! No, that wasn’t doing her justice. She was stupendous, a blonde bombshell extraordinaire, curvy where the curvies should be, looking every bit the former showgirl she was.
Pinky was somewhere in her 40’s; she wouldn’t say where. Except for her complete lack of secretarial skills, she was everything I could have wanted in a secretary. She was also everything that most men could have wanted in a woman. Partly because of her great looks, and partly because she was so trusting, Pinky seemed to attract men that wanted to take advantage of her. Enough men had already hit on Pinky to make up a hit parade that Lucky Strike would be proud to sponsor. She had gone through countless boyfriends, and she had been married and divorced, officially, seven times – uncommon even in divorce-happy Las Vegas. In addition, she had lived with at least three more guys for at least six months each.
If ever there was a girl who couldn’t say no, Pinky was that girl. Come live with me, Pinky. Okay! Marry me, Pinky. Why, sure!
Tommy Lake – I’ll tell you more about him later – is the resident comedian in our lounge. Some of his best lines are his divorce jokes, which he could have created in Pinky’s honor, were he as thoughtless as I am. Did I say thoughtless? Yeh, that’s one way to describe someone who would use such jokes to talk about a real person behind her back. ‘We the People,’ begins her marriage certificate. Hilarious, Slim! ‘She owns a wash-and-wear wedding gown.’ Ha, ha! ‘She gets anniversary cards from the First Infantry Division.’... I gotta million of ’em! And, like in The Moat, when Tommy tells ’em, they always bring down the house, or the party, or the bowling alley.
I’m not so heartless anymore. Even back then, before I stopped with the Pinky jokes, I always felt more than a little mean afterward. I swear I don’t do it anymore! I don’t tell jokes about Pinky. But, even now, I have a vision of me, 20, 30 years in the future, still a bachelor in my 60s or 70s, and Pinky, still answering my phone, still single, perhaps by then divorced for the 13th time. I have a vision of my asking her to marry me, and in my vision I am overcome with guilt about the jokes I told over the years about Pinky and her marriages. And then, at the key moment, after I’ve said, "Will you?" Pinky discloses that she knew all about my jokes, and she’s waited for this moment, all these years, just to tell me that she knows what I was saying about her behind her back. My vision of Pinky has her, suddenly nine feet tall, standing – no, lording – over me. Everybody in my life is watching our scene. And she’s telling me off, calling me a jerk, and that she would never marry such a jerk.
I recoil in humiliation in my dream, because I know she’s right.
I never dated Pinky; I never even asked her out. It wasn’t because she was married so many times. Nah, that amuses me, but it doesn’t bother me. No, I never dated Pinky, because Pinky’s not too bright, and brightness is something I want in a girl. It took me all of two hours of working with her to find out that she wasn’t a rocket scientist. And I like girls who know a bit more than the details of tonight’s prime-time TV schedule. Call me spoiled!
My predecessor, a PR legend named Duke O’Callaghan, liked to have pretty girls around him. He had cut his PR teeth in the era of press agentry, and pretty girls were essential in the way he practiced his craft. In my picture files are hundreds of pictures of pretty girls at the pool, pretty girls kissing entertainers, pretty girls presenting checks to slot machine winners, and pretty girls caressing the Vegas Castle sign. There are pretty girls in short skirts, pretty girls in low-cut evening dresses, and, most of all, pretty girls in bathing suits.
And don't you think that O’Callaghan’s pretty girl method of publicity worked? It sure did. Nobody got more publicity pictures into the LA papers or into the papers back East than did Duke O’Callaghan. Nobody!
Pinky, a very pretty girl, was hired without so much as a typing test. Lucky for her. Typing's not her strong suit.
I spent the remainder of the evening doing my job, dealing with the press, reading to them, until I had committed it to memory, the detail of Lefty Needham's official biography, and now his obituary. But, no matter how I couched it, the morning papers and the wires, like the radio that night, would lead with the facts and land with the speculation: "Lefty Needham, owner of the Vegas Castle Hotel and Casino, was killed yesterday, when a bomb attached to the starter wires of his car exploded. Needham, a reputed underworld chieftain ....”
They'd shout those words that had always been associated with Lefty: “Mob, Mafia, La Cosa Nostra, organized crime.”
From the day he arrived in town to the day of his death, everyone knew Lefty as Mob. But, I’m here to tell you that it was a bum rap. I had no proof, but I knew Lefty as well as any man knew him. He wasn’t Mob. He couldn’t have been. He was boastful, crude, and clever. But, not Mob! He knew all the Mobsters; some even came to him for advice. But, I can’t believe he was one of them. Not Lefty.
Now that he’s dead, I guess I can – and I really should – separate the facts of Lefty’s life from the fiction that grew up around him. Lefty is the reason that I’m telling this whole story in the first place. It’s my chance to put it down in writing, to clear Lefty’s name for all time, to repay a guy who gave me a chance when I needed one.
Lefty gave this Chance a chance by giving me a job when I needed one. Lefty was also there with a kind word and a buck or two when my own gambling or my ex-wife’s money demands got me into financial or other type of trouble.
I owe Lefty much more than I was ever able to repay him while he lived. Now that he’s gone, and now that I know the whole truth about Lefty, all I can repay him with is that truth. So, here goes...
Lefty took a liking to me very early in my years of service with him; I think he thought of me as the son he never had. I felt comfortable in telling him some pretty personal things, and he confided in me, as well. Like Lefty, I had many acquaintances, but very few close friends. In fact, it’s safe to say that Lefty was my best friend. I often wondered, however, whether he felt that way toward me. He wasn’t always easy to figure.
One day, we were talking about the town’s reputation as Mob property, and Lefty changed the direction of the conversation. He looked me straight in the eye, and he turned serious, as serious as all hell. “I want to set the record straight with someone,” he said, “someone I can trust.” He paused, and I knew I was going to hear a pronouncement. “I’m not the freak, I’m not the murderer, and I’m not the asshole people think I am,” he said, square-jawed and serious. “I’m not Mob, and that’s the truth, no matter what the wise guys say!”
If he wasn’t Mob, and at that point in time there were plenty who would debate the point, he was tough enough to be Mob.
Lefty had come out of the slums of Chicago, a Horatio Alger of a rough and ready sort. His real first name had been Vincenzo, and the family name was Bacigalupo. But few people knew that. To his friends and to his enemies – of which he had many more – he was known as Lefty Needham, “Lefty,” because ever since he fractured his right hand in a teenage turf war, he had been a Southpaw, and “Needham,” for the street in the North Side of Chicago where he grew up.
Before becoming the owner of the Vegas Castle, Lefty’s bio said he had been in the transportation business in Chicago and here in town. Those who thought they knew him figured that the “transportation" euphemism referred to his former job as driver for Nick Grazzo, the Chicago don whom Lefty served for so many years. In actuality, however, Lefty was at one time the owner of a four-car taxicab company in Chicago and later a Vegas limousine firm. Both businesses were, to be sure, gifts from Nick Grazzo, so many people discounted Lefty’s ownership, figuring he was the straw boss and Grazzo was the real power in both cases.
Grazzo gave Lefty the business, the two businesses, that is, because Lefty was loyal. Loyalty in the Mob means everything, and Lefty, if nothing else back then, was loyal to Nick Grazzo. He’d be there night and day for the boss. He’d keep his mouth shut when he heard something said that he shouldn’t have heard. He’d look out for the boss, and once he even saved the boss’ life. That was the immediate reason for Grazzo to reward Lefty’s loyalty.
It happened at a red light on a busy Chicago street. A black limousine with black-tinted windows had pulled up next to Grazzo’s car, which Lefty was driving. Lefty happened to glance over at the limo, when he noticed a back-seat window dropping and a machine-gun barrel being raised and pointed at Grazzo. Lefty floored the accelerator, and in a hail of bullets and with some driving that would have impressed the best of the Grand Prix drivers, he outraced and outwitted the limo, until he had lost it in a maze of one-way downtown streets. The gift of a taxi company to Lefty was one way in which Grazzo had shown his gratitude. Giving Lefty another gift, the limousine company in Vegas that the Mob also controlled, was another way of saying thanks.
With the latter gift, Grazzo also had a trusted aide ready to go for him in Vegas, a destination that the Chicago Mobsters liked to frequent. And finally, when Grazzo, in his later years, was looking for someone to run the Las Vegas hotel he had just secretly bought for a song – it’s amazing what you can buy for a song, if you also have a gun – he put the hotel’s official ownership in the name of his trusted Las Vegas lieutenant, Lefty Needham.
The plan was that Lefty, who never had as much as a criminal indictment to his name, much less a conviction for anything, would be the licensed owner of the hotel, and Nick Grazzo – the secret owner – would handle the skimming, the scheming, and the scamming.
But before he could skim, scheme, or scam even a single plastic farthing at the Vegas Castle, Nick Grazzo did something for Lefty that far surpassed all the earlier largess he had shown his loyal friend. Nick Grazzo died. He walked into a men’s room at a Chicago restaurant and never came out. At least nobody every saw him come out. His body was found a few days later, two bullets lodged in his head, his hands tied behind him, face down in the dirt of a Chicago city dump.
Thus, Lefty Needham, in just a few years, had gone from Chicago Mob chauffeur to Las Vegas casino owner, from Family footman to Disneyland don.
The Chicago Mob and the locals in Vegas always assumed that Lefty was, himself, a Mobster. They left him alone in the years that followed, figuring he had Nick Grazzo’s organization, powerful long after the boss’ death, still behind him. Some even thought the Grazzo power had passed to Lefty. The truth was anything but. But nobody In Grazzo’s employ, or for that matter nobody else, knew about the arrangement Lefty had with the boss. Nobody knew that Lefty was to be the figurehead, and in fact, nobody knew that Nick Grazzo had anything to do with the Vegas Castle.
Lefty, the good guy, the loyal soldier who was never sent into battle, Lefty, who got lucky, broke a few traffic laws, and saved his boss’ life, was the king of the hill now and, more importantly, king of the castle, the Vegas Castle.
The year was 1975. Las Vegas was about to see its greatest growth period in history. And Lefty Needham was in the right place at the right time, at the crest of the wave, riding high as the owner of the legendary Vegas Castle Hotel and Casino.
But now, a decade and a half later, Lefty too was dead, killed the way the Mob would do it, as dead as was Nick Grazzo. It looked to the world that Nick Grazzo's enemies may have finally caught up with Nick Grazzo's trusted lieutenant.
Lefty's obit wasn't to be a classic obit. There were no memberships in the Lions Club, the Kiwanis, or the Rotary. He had not been active in any church. His only survivor was his wife Arlene. His only epitaph: R.I.P., Lefty Needham, Mobster. There was nothing I could do about telling the truth of Lefty's life or nothing I could tell the press that would change its and the world's impression of Lefty, nothing that could put the lie to his unearned Mobster reputation.
I thought I would never be able to set the record straight about Lefty Needham.
End of Chapter 1.
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