Casino Quotes

“Las Vegas was a city with no memory.”
― Nicholas Pileggi, Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas

“It was a time when just being suspected of cooperating with the government was enough to get you killed. And even if you didn’t cooperate and got a long stretch in prison, you could still be in danger, because now you could be perceived as far more vulnerable to the government’s sweet deals. “I’ve heard them go around a room,” Cullotta said. “‘Joe, whadda you think of Mike?’ ‘Mike’s great. Balls like iron.’ ‘Larry, whadda you think of Mike?’ ‘Mike? A fuckin’ marine. To the end.’ ‘Frankie, whadda do you think of Mike?’ ‘Mike? You kidding? Mike’d put his arm in fire for ya.’ ‘Charlie, whadda you think of Mike?’ ‘Why take a chance?’ And that’s the end of Mike. That’s the way it happens.”
― Nicholas Pileggi, Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas

“Lefty’s lawyer got the indictment thrown out because John Mitchell, the attorney general at the time, had failed to personally sign the case’s wiretap orders, as required by law. Mitchell had been out on a golf course the day the court orders were to have been signed and had instructed an aide to forge his name.”
― Nicholas Pileggi, Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas

“The Frank Rosenthal Show began in April 1977 and appeared erratically thereafter at eleven P.M. on Saturday night for two years. At one point, the local television columnist Jim Seagrave of the Valley Times, writing about its unpredictable irregularity, referred to it as the Where’s Frank?”
― Nicholas Pileggi, Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas

“Like many men who come noisily to public life—like Donald Trump and George Steinbrenner, to take two other examples—he began to crave the spotlight.”
― Nicholas Pileggi, Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas

“Then, after we’d rob them and scare them, they’d run to Tony for protection to get us off their backs. They never had any idea it was Tony who sent us over to rob them in the first place.”
― Nicholas Pileggi, Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas

“Before his car was blown up outside Marie Callender’s Restaurant on East Sahara Avenue on October 4, 1982, Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal had been one of the most powerful and controversial men in Las Vegas.”
― Nicholas Pileggi, Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas

“It should have been so sweet,” Frank Cullotta said. “Everything was in place. We were given paradise on earth, but we fucked it all up.” It would be the last time street guys were ever given anything that valuable again.”
― Nicholas Pileggi, Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas

“contendere”
― Nicholas Pileggi, Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas

“Garmisa?”
― Nicholas Pileggi, Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas