What ‘Casino’ Didn’t Tell You About Mob Wife Geri Rosenthal

Posted on: November 26, 2024, 07:58h. 

Last updated on: November 26, 2024, 10:27h.

Corey Levitan Read More

Expertise: Commercial Gaming, Entertainment, Expert Insight, Las Vegas, Restaurants, Las Vegas Myths.

What you didn’t learn about Geri Rosenthal from “Casino,” Martin Scorsese’s 1995 film, may change the way you feel about her.

As the wife of mobster Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, Geri — a thinly veiled version of whom was played by Sharon Stone in her Oscar-nominated “Casino” performance — is commonly regarded as a combative, party-going material girl who was out for herself.

The real story is that she had a small child to support, as well as her mother and others back home in Los Angeles, before she even met Lefty.

“Some people say she was just a gold-digging bimbo,” Lissa Townsend Rodgers, told Casino.org. “But she wouldn’t have had the kind of impact that she did if that were true.”

Rodgers dedicates a chapter to Geri in her new book, “Shameless: Women of the Underworld,” which also features chapters on Virginia Hill, Stephanie St. Clair, Kathryn Kelly, Bonnie Parker, and Liz Renay.

“Some women in the book have actual positions of power,” Rodgers said. “Others, like Geri, are sort of the flip side. She didn’t have any power herself per se, but she had this huge impact.”

Geri’s Back Story

Geri’s childhood was marked by financial hardship she spent her adulthood trying not to relive. Her father worked in gas stations, and her mother was chronically ill. Geri and her sister took on odd jobs to help make ends meet, and all their clothing was handed down by neighbors.

The kid Geri had to support was a daughter by her high-school boyfriend. Geraldine McGee could have had her pick of suitors from the class of 1954 at Van Nuys High, including future Oscar winner Robert Redford and future baseball Hall-of-Famer Don Drysdale.

Yet her taste in men was always a little off. She chose Lenny Marmor, a two-bit hustler and future pimp. He peddled her to bikini contests to make the rent in their cheap Sherman Oaks apartment.

After Robin was born in 1958, Marmor refused to marry Geri, so she moved to Las Vegas two years later. In fact, the move was his idea. She took her mother along as she worked her tail off, first as a cocktail waitress at the Dunes, then as a showgirl at the Tropicana.

“The movie doesn’t give her a back story,” Rodgers said, “and I think the story of where she comes from is very important to understanding who she is. You can understand her being so obsessed with money if you understand how poor she was growing up.”

Lefty as Mr. Right?

Based on their “Casino” characters, it’s not hard to imagine how Geri could fall for a guy like Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal.

But a lot of that comes down to who plays him in the movie. (Casting Robert De Niro may have been a kindness Scorsese extended to Lefty for serving as the main source of information for the book on which “Casino” was based. Everyone else, including Geri, was dead by the time Nicholas Pileggi began writing it.)

The real-life Lefty was no De Niro. He was a below-average looker with a personality that didn’t compensate. A gorky, always-sweaty guy who never smiled and exuded discomfort in his own pasty skin, he was once described by a journalist as “a menacing Fred Astaire.”

If Lefty had a natural cinematic counterpart, it wasn’t De Niro in “Casino,” but John Cazale’s Fredo in “The Godfather.”

“Even Lefty himself said she didn’t marry him for love,” Rodgers said. “She did not love him when she married him. She married him because she was getting to a certain age where it was time to choose one of her many suitors, and she figured that Lefty would be the person who would give her the best life,” Rodgers said.

She added: “The fact that she wasn’t in love with him might have even been kind of a positive for her, so that she would feel like it was a situation she could always kind of keep some kind of control over.”

As for Lefty, he was besotted, of course. The couple had two children together.

“If you listen to Lefty speak about her until the end of his life, it was clear that he was still completely in love with her, despite everything she put him through,” Rodgers said.

What She Put Him Through

The impact that Geri had, mentioned earlier by Rodgers, was the entirely involuntary but pivotal role she played in finally shaking the mob out of Las Vegas. Specifically, the affair she had with Lefty’s boss, Tony “The Ant” Spilotro (the inspiration for Joe Pesci’s fetishistically violent “Casino” character), marked the beginning of the end for organized crime’s grip on the Strip.

The FBI knew about the affair because they bugged every member of that crew. And they seized upon this chink in the mob’s armor to finally bring its illegal skim at the Stardust, Fremont, Hacienda, and Marina casinos to a halt.

There are a few rules in the mob, and one of them is you don’t screw around with another guy’s wife,” Rodgers said. “It makes people want to get back at each other, rat each other out, maybe kill each other. So you just don’t do it.”

Infidelity had played a role in the Rosenthals’ marriage before. Lefty caroused with a showgirl, and Geri always had many gentleman friends. But this time, it was personal.

“They both hated Lefty at this point,” Rodgers said. “Both Tony and Geri felt like he thought he was king shit, that he looked down upon both of them.

“Geri was fucking Tony and Tony was fucking Geri, but they were both screwing Lefty,” she said.

To increase the heat on the crew, the FBI leaked news of the scandal to newspapers across America.

“So even if the guys back in Chicago wanted to look away or pretend they didn’t know, they really couldn’t,” said Rodgers, who believes it turned the mob against Spilotro.

I’m not going to say that’s why anybody specifically got killed,” she said. “I mean, there were a lot of reasons they wound up bumping off Tony — a lot of them.“

It ended for the Rosenthals, both in the movie and in real life, in a dramatic scene at their home on the Las Vegas Country Club golf course.

During a moment of heightened paranoia that made her feel cornered and helpless, Geri/Ginger/Sharon Stone pulled a gun on Lefty/Sam/Robert De Niro. She then emptied their safe deposit boxes, filed for divorce, and ran back to LA, spiraling down a chaotic and self-destructive path.

“That part was pretty accurate,” Rodgers said.

Geri died of a drug overdose at age 46 in 1982, the same year Lefty’s Cadillac Eldorado was car-bombed by an unknown assailant. He survived unharmed and lived until 2008, succumbing to an apparent heart attack at age 79.