After a half-century pretending it didn’t exist, Las Vegas now embraces its mob heritage, with great gusto. The latest example came in a Las Vegas Review-Journal story posted online today. It breathlessly reported the sale of the site where Frank (Lefty) Rosenthal, a legendary character who secretly oversaw the illegal skimming of proceeds at four mob-owned casinos, was blasted out of his car in 1982 by a bomb as he turned the ignition.

Lefty somehow survived reasonably intact but refused to name names. No one was ever charged. He soon retired from organized crime and left town but still was added to the Nevada gaming regulators’ “Black Book” of folks banned from entering a Nevada casino. His story became the basis for the popular, surprisingly historically accurate 1995 movie, “Casino,” with Robert De Niro playing the Rosenthal role, renamed Sam (Ace) Rothstein, and Sharon Stone as his glamorous wife.

In real life, Lefty ended up in Miami Beach, where he ran a sports betting site and consulted on off-shore gambling operations. He died at age 79 in 2008 in his apartment on Collins Avenue of a reported heart attack.

For years since, the well-known web site FindAGrave.com featuring celebrity final resting spots has reported that Lefty was buried in Visitation Cemetery in Norfolk, N.Y., just a few miles from the St. Lawrence River and Canada. That would be hundreds of miles from any of his known haunts–he was a Chicago native who learned sports betting in the bleachers at Wrigley Field–and unlikely on its face. This was especially so since Lefty was Jewish, and Geri McGee Rosenthal, his divorced wife and mother of their two children, was buried in Los Angeles.

So after the FindAGrave page came to my attention at the New To Las Vegas world headquarters a few years ago, I resolved to sleuth out the truth.

I remembered that Steve Grybowski, a long-time friend and colleague from my college newspapering days at dear old Rutgers, lived in the general vicinity of Lefty’s supposed final resting spot. Then a practicing physician and now retired, he sportingly agreed to check it out for me on a day off. Here is his slightly edited report:

It was a beautiful spring day to go grave hunting in St. Lawrence County. Bright and sunny, temperature starting off in the mid-40s and peaking in the mid-60s. My GPS lead me readily to Norfolk, a place that I haven’t had a reason to visit since my kids played ice hockey. (The locals pronounce it “nor-fork,” lest a word that sounds impolite be uttered.)

The three persons that I found prepping Visitation Catholic Cemetery for two burials later that week and for Decoration Day, had never heard of Frank Rosenthal. Ron, a cemetery volunteer for 35 years, whose wife turned out to be a cousin of a retired postman in my village, told me about his family members who where buried there. A set of twins who died three days after birth. A daughter who was killed in a car crash. A beloved wife who passed away eight years earlier.

Bob, whom I interrupted weed whacking, gave me some good advice: “Walk down every third row and you can take in three rows of headstones at once.” Bill, who was negotiating the use of a borrowed backhoe, advised that I should check with the parish office if my search was not successful.

Satisfied that my search of the cemetery had been adequate to find a marked grave for Lefty if one existed, I headed into the village and stopped at the rectory of  Our Lady of the Visitation Catholic Church. Tammy, the church secretary, bade me come in.

She hadn’t heard of Frank Rosenthal, but was kind enough to look through all the R’s in her card file. Nothing. We looked at the cemetery map. No Rosenthals there. She went to her computer and pulled up a database of St. Lawrence County obituaries. No Frank Rosenthal listed.

As a last resort, she did a Google search. I watched her eyes widen as she learned the history of the man whose final resting place I was searching for: “Oh, yeah, it does say he’s buried in our cemetery.”

If Lefty’s here, he’s not going anywhere.

Now anyone can post on FindAGrave, which is now owned by Ancestry.com, the giant genealogy company. The Rosenthal report was put up three months later by one Jeff Thomson, with two stock photos of Rosenthal later added by others. Through FindAGrave, I sent Thomson a message summarizing Steve’s report and asking about the basis for the statement that Lefty was planted in Norfolk. I never heard back, but this was not surprising. According to the FindAGrave system, Lefty’s purported burial spot was the only one Thomson ever posted. In my experience, many FindAGrave posters are celebrity grave hunter enthusiasts with multiple postings to their credit. I concluded that Jeff Thomson was a pseudonym.

So where was Lefty? Efforts to reach Nicholas Pileggi, who wrote the book on which the movie was based, were unsuccessful. None of the contemporary local or national newspaper accounts at the time of Lefty’s death, and there were many (including a pretty good one in The New York Times that called him “Kingpin in Las Vegas”), made any mention of an eternal home.

It was time to pull out all the investigatory stops! Knowing that Florida is pretty free and easy with its public records, I finally ordered a copy of Lefty’s death certificate from the state’s Department of Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics in Tallahassee. It took awhile, but the document finally arrived. In a series of entries starting with box 24–“Place of Disposition (Name of cemetery, crematory, or other place) … Method of Disposition”–the long-obscured truth was revealed.

Cremation. At ABCO Crematory in Fort Lauderdale, to be precise. The death certificate explicitly said there was no burial of remains.

As I wrote back in early 2022 during a multi-part series entitled, “What’s buried here, stays here,” about the surprisingly few number of famous folks buried hereabouts, Las Vegas has a tradition of mob operatives being interred somewhere else. So Lefty sort of fit a pattern. (To read the rest of that series, click here, here, here and here.)

You might consider this an example of what another friend has called my long-time propensity for “comic investigative reporting.” Still, for awhile I didn’t have a good news hook to write this. Then the Review-Journal‘s Eli Segall kindly dug up the deed for the recent sale of the bombing site. It was the parking lot outside a fancy–now long-gone–Tony Roma restaurant on E. Sahara Avenue that has become a down-and-out shopping center.

The RJ website festooned Segall’s story with a montage of bombing headlines. More great gusto.

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