Casino Movie True
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. Casino: the 1995 film by Martin Scorsese is a story about greed, deception, money, power, and murder between two best friends. A mafia enforcer and a cas ino executive compete against each other over a gambling empire and o ver a fast living, fast loving socialite.
These are the stories behind the real men and women whose lives were depicted in the movie Goodfellas.
One of the aspects of Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas that has elevated the film to the classic status it holds today is the intense realism of its depictions of the life in the Mafia. This realism largely stems from the fact that, unlike films such as The Godfather and Once Upon A Time In America, Goodfellas is based on a true story of one gangster, his associates, and one of the most daring heists in American history.
The story comes courtesy of the 1986 nonfiction bestseller Wiseguy that detailed the life of Lucchese crime family associate Henry Hill, as well as his comrades like James “Jimmy The Gent” Burke and Thomas DeSimone, and their involvement in the infamous Lufthansa heist.
This was, at the time, the largest robbery ever committed on U.S. soil. Eleven mobsters, mainly associates of the Lucchese crime family, stole $5.875 million (more than $20 million today) in cash and jewels from a vault at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.
Here are the true stories of the people who carried out this heist as well as countless other crimes that helped make Goodfellas the crime classic it is today.
Henry Hill
Wikimedia Commons
Henry Hill, the central character in Goodfellas (played by Ray Liotta), was born in 1943 to an Irish-American father and a Sicilian-American mother in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York.
It was a neighborhood filled with Mafiosos and Hill admired them all from a young age. At just 14, Hill dropped out of school to start working for Paul Vario, a capo in the Lucchese crime family, and thus became a member of the infamous Vario crew. Hill started out just picking up money from local rackets and bringing them to the boss, but his responsibilities quickly escalated.
He began to get involved in arson, assault, and credit card fraud. After returning from a short military stint in the early 1960s, Hill returned to a life of crime. Though his Irish blood meant that he could never be a made man, he nevertheless became a highly active associate of the Lucchese family.
Among Hill’s closest compatriots at this time was fellow Lucchese family associate and friend of Paul Vario, James Burke. After years of truck hijacking, arson, and other crimes (including extortion, for which he served time in the 1970s), Hill and Burke played major roles in orchestrating the Lufthansa heist in 1978.
At the same time, Hill was involved in a point-shaving racket with the 1978-79 Boston College basketball team and ran a major narcotics operation in which he sold marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and quaaludes wholesale.
It was the drugs that brought Hill’s downfall when he was arrested on trafficking charges in April 1980. Initially, he wouldn’t fold to police interrogators, but amid growing suspicions that some of his own associates were planning to kill him in fear that he might put them in legal trouble, Hill began to talk.
In fact, it was Hill’s testimony about the Lufthansa heist that brought the arrests of many of the other men involved — and became the basis for Wiseguy, and thus Goodfellas.
After testifying, Hill was placed in the Witness Protection Program but was kicked out of after repeatedly revealing his true identity to others. He was, nonetheless, never tracked down and killed by his former associates, but instead died of complications related to heart disease on June 12, 2012, the day after his 69th birthday.
The movie Casino remains one of the most successful films in American history. It’s based on Nicholas Pileggi’s book ‘Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas’ and follows the story of Sam “Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro), an American Jewish gangster who is sent to Las Vegas to oversee the Tangiers Casino and increase its profits. The plot was inspired by the real-life events of Frank Rosenthal who managed three casinos in Las Vegas for the Chicago mob in the 1970s and 1980s.
Is Casino Movie True
Casino was directed by none other than Martin Scorsese, the mastermind behind plenty of other mafia-related movie productions, and stars actors such as Sharon Stone, Joe Pesci, and James Woods. Casino achieved a box office earnings of $116 million, which was already double of the relatively low production budget of $50 million.
Since the movie mixes real-life events with fiction, you might find yourself asking which bits of Casino are true. With the help of Sister Sites, a comparison site for Internet casinos, we present you the scenes that remained unaltered by the screenplay writers.
Rosenthal did not hold a gambling license
In the movie, De Niro’s character Ace Rothstein does not possess a gambling license although he’s overseeing the entire casino operations. This fact is true! Frank Rosenthal never owned a gambling permit since it was too dangerous for him to apply. Instead, he was officially employed in a non-managerial position, which didn’t require such a license.
The Tangiers Casino is an actual resort in Las Vegas
This is true! Scorsese did not want to waste money on building a set when there was an actual casino that could be used for shooting the scenes. While there is no ‘Tangiers’ casino in Las Vegas, the film crew used the Riviera casino in Downtown Las Vegas.
Rosenthal survived an attempted murder
Correct! In Casino, Rothstein (De Niro) survives a car bombing, and this scene remains unaltered. In 1982, Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal was injured when a bomb situated below his car exploded. Although it was a huge explosion, Rosenthal walked away with minor burns to his legs, left arm, and left side of his face. According to one special agent, the reason Rosenthal survived the attempted murder was since the bomb exploded in the wrong direction.
The Chicago mob killed one of the Casino’s accountants in Costa Rica
In the movie, the mob hunts down an accountant and former executive of the Tangiers Casino and ultimately kills him in Costa Rica. This murder is based on real-life events. John Nance was a low-level accountant who also served as the mafia’s bagman, collecting money from several Las Vegas casinos and handing them to mafia bosses such as Joey Aiuppa in Kansas.
When his son got arrested for drug possession, the mafia feared that Nance would turn into a state witness against the mob in return for a better deal for his son’s drug charges. He fled to Central America, but was hunted down and eventually killed.
Joe Pesci
Geri McGee died of a drug overdose
Movie Casino Jack Based True Story
Casino shows Rothstein’s wife, Ginger McKenna, die of a drug overdose in a motel. Not only was Geri McGee’s involvement in criminal activity accurately portrayed in the movie but also her death. McKenna died in 1982 at the age of 46 at the Beverly Sunset Hotel. Although her sister believed McGee had been murdered by the mob because “she knew too much”, the coroner ruled it an accidental overdose. A postmortem examination showed a lethal mix of cocaine, Valium and alcohol in her system.