FauxNixon

Martin Scorsese’s fantastic follow-up to 1990’s Goodfellas, again teaming up with Nicholas Pileggi, who is also again both the author of the book and the writer of the screenplay.  Many of the faces of Goodfellas return here to Casino to tell the true story of how the mafia took Las Vegas from a small-scale military stop-over and turned it into the money-making machine that it is today–and how they screwed it all up on the way. Robert De Niro stars as Sam “Ace” Rothstein, an odds-maker who the bosses in Chicago think would be a good man to run the casinos for them in Las Vegas.  Only after getting assurances he would be allowed to run the casinos as he saw fit did he accept.  Coming along as the enforcer to see that what Ace wants to be done gets done is Joe Pesci playing Nicky Santoro.

Using Mafia-controlled Teamsters Union-loans, the casinos are bought with legitimate figureheads like the one played by Kevin Pollak as Phillip Green, who earn nice salaries, sign the official documentation, but otherwise have no control over operations.

Rothstein immediately begins firing and hiring people that he likes; he switches jobs constantly so that his gambling license is constantly shuffled to the bottom of the pile; he brings sports betting in from the streets into the casinos since this is the one place in the United States where that can be done legally.  Basically, he successfully turns the casinos into pleasure-palaces for adults who want to get away and Vegas is awash in money, which is in turn, keeping the bosses happy as they receive their skimmed cut of the money every month.

The tragedy comes when Sam falls in love with a prostitute and hustler named Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone) who is controlled by her pimp Lester Diamond (James Woods).  Ginger, even after marrying Sam, can’t get out from under the control of Lester and Sam continually has Lester harassed and beaten to try to break the chain of control.

Ginger turns to drugs and she turns to Nicky. Nicky, in addition to being the enforcer for Ace, has been doing his own thing in becoming the local mafioso of Las Vegas and robbing it blind as best he can; something that if the bosses found out about would get him killed.  He becomes sloppier and sloppier, spiraling into problems with drugs and alcohol and his side-jobs continuously attract more and more attention from the law enforcement community until he is finally placed in a book, alongside Al Capone, as a list of people who are prohibited from entering any casino whatsoever, under penalty of immediate arrest, and fines to the casinos found harboring him.

The downward spiral continues as things get worse and worse, with Ginger’s drug problems getting more and more out of control: she kidnaps the children with Lester and runs off, only to come back later to Sam.  This cycle continues until the two are finally divorced and Ginger is found to later have died of an overdose. Rothstein’s increasingly public profile brings him to the attention of the gambling authorities who stop shuffling his application and give it a hearing, at which it is denied.

This makes him useless to the bosses, but also to Nicky, who is absolutely enraged when Sam is found to have complained to the bosses about him and his activities in Vegas and feels betrayed. The bonds of friendship between the two are broken and things just dissolve.  The mafia loses control of its casinos which are bought up by corporations who turn them into family-friendly gambling establishments that are still the cash machines they were in the days when the mafia controlled them. Nicky meets his end and Ace goes back to picking bets and making odds, just as useful in that as ever.

Casino is the true story of how the mafia and more specifically two best friends took Las Vegas from backwoods stop-over and turned it into a metropolitan, cosmopolitan cash-machine and then how bitterness, jealousy and greed all served to screw it up so that their control was lost and Las Vegas became as legitimate as it is today, and all of it is based upon the true story of how these events occurred.

It is a masterpiece of Scorsese and Pesci, De Niro and Stone are acting at their absolute best.  If ever there were a pair of movies that told the stories of the mafia the way they really happened with the best cast and best director and greatest writing, it is Goodfellas and Casino.