Nicholas Pileggi’s book Casino, later made into a powerful film by Martin Scorsese, seems on re-reading to be a metaphor for the corruption of the US Empire of gangsterism we are seeing now.
Casino centres around childhood friends Frank ‘Lefty’ Rosenthal, psychopathic Antony ‘the Ant’ Spilotro, and Lefty’s showgirl wife Geri, as Rosenthal rises to become a major personality in Las Vegas. Rosenthal’s financial and managerial skills boost the casinos’ takings dramatically, making him the mob’s equivalent of a pop star.
Vegas itself is a greed-ridden, gaudy, environmental disaster in the middle of the desert. While theoretically, Jewish Rosenthal cannot be a member of the mafia (or ‘outfit’ as it is referred to in the book), he clearly is, like Meyer Lansky before him – having access to the top gangsters at will. Supposedly wives, children, and civilians should not be attacked, but this “Rules-Based Order” is ignored. A woman who was suing the casino, Tamara Rand, is murdered in her kitchen to stop the courts getting hold of incriminating documents; one of Geri’s former boyfriends, another ‘civilian’ is shot in the street, after she goes to see him a few times.
Nothing except money and violence seem to be drivers of this society. There’s no art, culture, education, social responsibility. Sport seems only to matter where it centres around gambling – no-one seems to care or appreciate the sportsmen involved. Early on someone jokes that a prominent bookmaker doesn’t even know who Joe DiMaggio is.
Friendship and loyalty are just words: the book opens with a car-bomb attempt on Lefty’s life. Pileggi does not definitively say who did it, but points the finger at Spilotro (who is having an affair with Lefty’s wife) or another boss, Frank Balistrieri, who supposedly was friendly with Rosenthal, but now views him as a liability. As law-enforcement builds cases against various gangsters, they are pre-emptively whacked, in case they ‘rat out’ to avoid long jail sentences.
It is a profoundly depressing book, but it seems that Las Vegas is not an aberration, but a signal as to what the whole of the USA would become: a gangster state.