There was no doubt in most minds that Frank Epstein did once have ties to the Chicago mob and subsequently to organized crime in Las Vegas. Epstein, now in his seventies, would have been in his late twenties in the late 1950s—a time when gangsters still owned and ran all the big Vegas joints. Epstein was reputed to have had a sharp eye for a deal, even at a very young age, and he’d made connections and climbed fast, eventually forming a powerful business cartel that had bought the old Frontline Casino. It was a mob-owned, Chicago-based union pension fund that had enabled Epstein to finance the razing of the Frontline and the subsequent construction of his massive Desert Lion—the sheer scope of his new casino unprecedented at the time.
Those were the days when no bank or legitimate investor would’ve come near the gambling business. Without mob money, the Vegas boom would have never happened. They were the days before Howard Hughes had started investing massive proceeds from his airline sale into Vegas property, giving gambling its first positive image, opening the doors to corporate ownership of hotel-casinos. After Hughes, Wall Street investors had finally sat up and started taking notice—and gambling had become acceptable to mainstream America. It was about that time that the federal government had started a massive crackdown on organized crime in Las Vegas, running most of the old gangsters out of town.
Epstein, however, had managed to elude the dragnet. He’d given the feds nothing they could pin on him. But they’d continued to watch him. They’d kept files on him, looking, in particular, to connect him with some of the brutal murders alleged to have been carried out by a man named Tony Ciccone.
A mob enforcer.
Lex continued to scroll down through the old microfiche files the FBI had compiled on Epstein dating back to the 1970s, noting that Epstein had hired Ciccone from Chicago to handle security at the Frontline.
He sat back, reached absently for his coffee mug, sipped. It was cold. He pulled a face, shoved the mug aside, thinking that one needed to understand the context of Vegas at the time. It was a period when the mob literally ruled Sin City. And people like Ciccone—who took orders from men like Epstein—commonly got away with murder. Murder and gangsters even added to the edgy glamour and allure that was Las Vegas in that era.
But when Ciccone had eventually come under investigation for a run of increasingly violent homicides, Epstein seemed to have severed ties with him. Lex scrolled further through the files, noting it was around this same time that some sort of rivalry had developed between Ciccone and Epstein. And Ciccone had broken away from Epstein, forming his own camp, and allegedly muscling into Epstein’s business, on Epstein’s turf.
It was also around this period that Lex’s mother had been murdered.
Lex rubbed his brow. Was he insane for even thinking along these lines? What on earth could Sara Duncan have had to do with any of these people? The fortune-teller’s words snaked back into his mind. “Everyone was touched by those tendrils of evil. Everyone…”
He shook off the thought, turned back to the files.
Apparently, before the feds had been able to pin the homicides on Ciccone, the Italian-American had simply vanished. Dematerialized into the ether. The FBI had mounted one of the country’s biggest manhunts for the violent mob enforcer, but no one ever found a clue what had happened to him. It remained an unsolved mystery to this day.
And from the point of Ciccone’s disappearance, Frank Epstein’s business seemed to have suddenly gone squeaky clean, Epstein apparently transitioning seamlessly into the new corporate era of Las Vegas.
The new Vegas has risen…
However, the FBI files on Epstein had remained open, and the feds continued to keep him in their sight. Now, decades later, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and the FBI’s financial crimes unit, finally had a small lead on Epstein’s alleged involvement in a massive junk bond scam. And now an undercover investigation into some of Epstein’s other holdings and New York Stock Exchange transactions was currently under way.
Lex reached for his coffee, almost taking another swallow before he recalled how cold it was. He set the mug back down, turned to Perez. “You got any idea yet when exactly Harold and Frank were on good business terms, and when things went sour between them?”
Perez flipped through her notebook. “I got here that in the early 1980s, they were still in business. Seems things went sideways in the mid-80s when they dissolved a formal partnership.”
“Does the dissolution revolve around any deal in particular?”
“Still looking into that.”
Lex chewed on the inside of his cheek, thinking. Harold was a little younger than Epstein; still he’d been around and doing business in Las Vegas long enough to have been tainted by the organized crime that had once ruled Sin City.