The mob’s grip on the Stardust casino in Las Vegas turned it into the greatest crime scene in American gambling history, an operation so vast that it took an FBI investigation, several murders, and finally a Hollywood film by Martin Scorsese to expose what really happened behind the neon. The story begins with Antonio Cornero Stralla, an Italian immigrant who built a criminal empire during Prohibition running rum off the California coast. After a stretch in federal prison, he returned in 1931, just as Nevada legalized gambling, and opened the Meadows Casino, one of the first licensed operations in Las Vegas. When Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky demanded a cut, Cornero refused, and the Meadows burned down under suspicious circumstances.
Cornero moved back to California and anchored ocean liners three miles offshore, beyond state jurisdiction, turning them into floating casinos. The SS Rex attracted 2,000 gamblers at a time and generated $200,000 a month during the Depression. The Coast Guard eventually seized the ships, and in 1938 Cornero survived a bullet wound at his Beverly Hills home. By 1954, Cornero returned to Las Vegas, bought 36 acres on the north end of the Strip, and began building the most ambitious casino the city had ever attempted.
He called it the Stardust. Regulators balked at his criminal record, and the Nevada governor said he would never receive a gaming license, but construction continued anyway. On July 31, 1955, with the project three-quarters finished, Cornero suffered a fatal heart attack at a craps table at the Desert Inn. He was dead before he hit the floor.
The unfinished Stardust sat vacant for two years while creditors fought over the remains. Jake Factor, known as Jake the Barber, stepped in to settle debts and finish the project, though whispers persisted that $3 million in completion money came from Chicago mob figures Tony Accardo and Sam Giancana. On July 2, 1958, the Stardust opened as the largest hotel in the world, with 1,400 rooms at $6 a night. The casino floor stretched 16,000 square feet, and the showroom featured hydraulic lifts, an ice rink, and equipment capable of producing rain and snow on demand.
Sixty French performers appeared on opening night, and governors, senators, and Hollywood celebrities attended. By 1961, the management team read like a federal indictment waiting to be written. The credit manager had seven aliases and 14 convictions, the casino manager had worked with Al Capone, and the general manager had served time for tax evasion. Chicago, Milwaukee, and Cleveland all had hands in the Stardust’s pockets.
The man sent to run the operation was Gus Greenbaum, who had made Meyer Lansky’s organization profitable during Prohibition and turned the Flamingo around after Bugsy Siegel was killed. Greenbaum had retired to Phoenix, but after his sister-in-law was found dead in April 1955, the message was clear: come run the Stardust or people you love keep dying. He took the job. Greenbaum stabilized the casino and made it profitable, but the pressure consumed him.
His drug use worsened, his gambling spiraled, and he began skimming from the skim, taking money that belonged to Chicago before it reached the counting room. In November 1958, a former mob enforcer turned federal informant named Willie Bioff was killed by a car bomb in Phoenix. Less than a month later, on December 3, 1958, Greenbaum and his wife Bess were murdered in their Phoenix home. Bess was found with her wrists bound, her skull crushed, and her throat cut.
Gus was killed in his sleep. Nobody was ever charged. The Stardust kept running. Through the 1960s, the skim continued while the casino hosted Liberace, Elvis Presley, Harry Belafonte, Marlene Dietrich, and a young Barbra Streisand opening for Liberace in 1963.
The Rat Pack filmed Ocean’s 11 there in 1960. In 1967, seven casino executives, including three tied to the Stardust, were indicted for tax evasion, but the case ended quietly with small fines. The operation reached its peak in the 1970s. In 1974, the Stardust came under the control of Argent Corporation, fronted by a clean-cut 34-year-old San Diego developer named Allen Glick.
But the man actually running the casino was Frank Rosenthal, known as Lefty. Born in Chicago in 1929, Rosenthal was considered one of the greatest sports gambling experts in America, a reputation confirmed by Sports Illustrated. The Chicago outfit hired him in 1974 as an executive consultant at $4 million a year, with no official title or gaming license. Rosenthal transformed the Stardust.
He introduced the first sports book inside a casino, making legal sports betting professional and respectable. He hired female blackjack dealers, the first systematic use on the Strip, and casino revenue doubled in a single year. He demanded perfection in everything, reportedly requiring that every blueberry muffin baked in the Stardust kitchens contain an identical number of blueberries. He even hosted his own talk show taped at the casino, where Frank Sinatra made his only talk show appearance.
While Rosenthal publicly revolutionized casino operations, the largest skimming operation the FBI would ever uncover in Las Vegas ran underneath. Between 1974 and 1979, trusted men diverted cash from table games, slot machines, and the sports book before it reached the counting room. They rigged coin-weighing machines, used hidden compartments, and moved money through concealed routes. Chicago received $40,000 a month, with Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Kansas City taking their shares.
The skim pulled somewhere between $7 million and $15 million from Argent Corporation’s casinos. Rosenthal maintained until his death that he knew nothing about the scheme and was never indicted. He was never charged in connection with it, though the Nevada Gaming Control Board denied him a license and eventually barred him from gambling operations in the state. Rosenthal’s personal life was collapsing as well.
His wife, former showgirl Geri McGee, had a past that did not stay past, including a relationship with a hustler named Lester Diamond. Tony Spilotro, the Chicago outfit’s security enforcer in Las Vegas, was supposed to protect Rosenthal and the skim. Instead, Spilotro began sleeping with McGee, crossing a line that the mob could not excuse. The investigation burst into the open, and federal raids and grand jury indictments followed.
In 1983, 15 people were charged, all connected to Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Kansas City. McGee overdosed in Los Angeles. On October 4, 1982, Rosenthal walked out of a restaurant on East Sahara Avenue and climbed into his Cadillac Eldorado. A bomb placed under the car detonated.
Witnesses reported hearing him screaming as he crawled from the burning wreckage. He survived because his specific Cadillac model had a factory-installed metal plate beneath the driver’s seat that absorbed most of the blast. The bombing was never solved, and Rosenthal always said he did not know who ordered it. Six months later, Rosenthal left Las Vegas with his children, moved to California and later Florida, ran a sports bar, consulted for offshore bookmakers, and lived quietly until his death from a heart attack in 2008 at age 79.
Spilotro did not get the chance to walk away. In 1986, he and his brother were beaten to death and buried in an Indiana cornfield. In 1995, Martin Scorsese released Casino, based on Nicholas Pileggi’s book about Rosenthal and the Stardust. Robert De Niro played the Rosenthal character, Sharon Stone played Geri, and Joe Pesci played Spilotro.
The fictional casino was called the Tangiers, but nobody was confused about what they were seeing. Rosenthal rated De Niro’s portrayal about seven out of ten, close but imperfect, and refused to comment on Stone’s depiction of his former wife. The Boyd family bought the Stardust in 1985 and spent two decades trying to keep it relevant as newer mega-resorts like the Mirage, Luxor, and MGM Grand attracted a different kind of visitor. By 2006, the once-largest hotel in the world had become one of the Strip’s smallest casinos, with 1,522 rooms and 85,000 square feet of casino floor.
The 60 acres of land beneath it were worth more than everything built on top of them. In January 2006, Boyd Gaming announced plans to demolish the Stardust and replace it with a $4. 4 billion resort named Echelon Place. The Stardust closed on November 1, 2006, after 48 years in operation.
The iconic sign came down in February 2007 and was sent to the Neon Museum downtown. On March 13, 2007, at 2:34 in the morning, crowds packed the Strip to watch the demolition. A four-minute fireworks display went up first. Then 428 pounds of explosives detonated simultaneously.
The 32-story tower and the nine-story original structure folded into themselves, and over half a million tons of concrete and steel collapsed in an instant. A dust cloud rose like something out of a nuclear test film, and Las Vegas Boulevard was briefly closed for over 20 minutes as the desert wind cleared the ash. Echelon Place was never built. The 2008 financial crisis killed the project before a single room was framed, and the site sat vacant for years.
In 2013, Boyd sold the unfinished project to Malaysia’s Genting Group, which opened Resorts World Las Vegas on June 24, 2021, after 14 years of delays. The $4. 3 billion property features 3,500 rooms, 117,000 square feet of casino, and a 5,000-seat theater. Near the Las Vegas Boulevard entrance, they placed a replica of the original Stardust sign, a tribute weighing 2,800 pounds with 1,500 LED lights, a nod to the history beneath the ground.
They placed it near the sports lounge, a quiet acknowledgment of Frank Rosenthal, who invented the integrated sports book while overseeing the theft of millions from the same operation. Both things were true simultaneously. The original sign lives in pieces at the Neon Museum, where visitors can stand before the letters that once glowed three miles into the open desert and understand what the Stardust meant to an era that no longer exists. Tony Cornero dreamed of the biggest hotel in the world.
What he started before his heart gave out at a desert craps table became the most revealing institution in Las Vegas history, the place where the gap between what Vegas presented to the world and what Vegas actually was got fully exposed, documented by the FBI, dramatized by Scorsese, and eventually brought down by explosives while the city watched. Some buildings are just buildings. The Stardust was never just a building.