Blogging Should Pick Back Up

I was just feeling a bit lacking in anything to say the last few days and no urge to blog came up so...I didn't.

But that should end now that a big mob trial is starting in Chicago. This one has a lot of connections that I find interesting, and you may, too.

Among several other men of Italian heritage, on trial is one Joey "The Clown" Lombardo (pictured above).

As alleged members of the Chicago Outfit, they're accused of taking part in a wide range of mischief, including the murder of Tony "The Ant" Spilatro, which was also the cornfield killing (there's some debate if it actually took place there) of the Joe Pesci character in Casino.

So this also brings in a connection to current Las Vegas Mayor Oscar B. Goodman.

Here's the article from a newspaper I used to deliver when I was a kid...definitely more on this to come.

I'll Recommend This Before Finishing It

I've been enjoying parts of the last two wonderful-weather weekends in Cleveland (insert oxymoron joke here) reading John L. Smith's Of Rats and Men, a biography of Las Vegas Mayor Oscar B. Goodman.

What an enormously-entertaining read.

While I knew that Goodman was known as a mob lawyer before entering politics, and that parts of the movie, Casino, were reputed to be true, I never knew just how much until I started getting into this.

Without recounting the whole story, Oscar grew up in Philadelphia and ended up in Vegas sort of by accident, if you believe him.  Among many others, he defended Tony "The Ant" Spilotro (the Joe Pesci character in Casino) and Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal (the DeNiro character in the same flick).  Both of them were at least as colorful in real life as they were in the movie.

The amazing thing to me is Goodman's ability (at this point, I'm up to the early 1990s, while he was still a practicing attorney) to fool us, himself, or both, in maintaining that 'there is no mob.'

I can't wait to read more of this highly entertaining book.  It would probably appeal to anyone who's visited Vegas (it's been a few years for me, but now I find myself getting a bit of a hankering), gets off on mob books and movies, or enjoys legal drama.

A little side trivia...in the court scene in Casino when Ace Rothstein is fighthing for his work permit from the Gaming Commission, Goodman plays himself in the fight against real-life butthead, Senator Harry Reid.   The Mormon was the former head of the Commission.