Frank nodded slightly. So Harold’s pretty young daughter was playing in his casino.
From the monitors in his Desert Lion security room, Frank could spy on nearly all activity in his establishment. Virtually every corner of his hotel was watched by these cameras—his eye-in-thesky—including elevators. Select hotel rooms had also been outfitted with hidden cameras, which could be activated if necessary. Frank had gone so far as to install hidden filming devices in his own private penthouse where he lived with Mercedes, but those feeds only Frank could see, from a private setup in his office.
It wasn’t that he was spying on his wife but he did like to record the activities of staff who serviced his penthouse. One never knew when a problem might arise and visual evidence could come in handy, perhaps even in a court case, for example. Information was currency in his business.
And in Vegas, everybody watched everyone else. 24/7.
Frank himself liked to spend several hours per day up here in the Desert Lion security room, mostly at this time of night when the action really started happening on his floors. And he never ceased to tire of the Vegas drama that unfolded nightly.
In one twenty-four hour period, at one of his blackjack tables alone, fortunes could be made and lost several times over. He’d see hearts broken, dreams shattered. People being seduced by luck and parted from their money by the shimmering illusion—the promise of a dream—that he was selling.
And all the while, he got richer.
Such was the game.
His security nerve hub was located adjacent to his private office, and Frank felt that in standing up here, he was at the pulsing core of his happening hotel at the very heart of the Strip. Quite simply, he felt like a king.
Which, in many ways, he was.
It wasn’t an accident years ago that his inner circle had started referring to him as the Vegas Lion, or Lion King. He held power most men could only dream of.
Harold Rothchild, however, was one man who had the wherewithal to take it all away. Harold remained one of those annoying, ever-present fault lines in the otherwise solid foundation of Frank’s existence, a rival from Frank’s past who had something on him—and on whom Frank had something in return. It was not a situation Frank liked to be in.
But he also couldn’t simply make Harold go away—as much as he’d like to. He could kill Harold, but it would require some serious planning and risk. Frank was all about risk. Gambling, betting, odds—they were his business. Even so, the odds needed to be in his favor. The risk needed to be calculated, and resorting to murdering Harold definitely had the odds fully stacked against.
This was because Harold had “insurance,” a videotape showing an illegal business transaction between Frank and himself. That tape was being held in a bank safety deposit box. It was evidence that would incriminate Epstein in a much broader range of illegal affairs and provide the FBI with the tools to start dismantling his entire empire. Harold had made it quite clear that should anything “untoward” happen to him, his will would ensure the tape was released into the custody of federal agents.
Epstein felt fairly secure that Harold would never take the video to the authorities prior to his own demise, because the tape would implicate Harold as well. Hence, keeping his rival alive was playing the best odds. For now.
Ciccone, of course, had wanted to eliminate Harold years ago—said he’d become a problem down the road. And Ciccone was right. He had become a problem. But when Ciccone had presented his plan to whack Harold Rothchild the climate in Vegas had already shifted, and simply offing people Ciccone-mob-style had come to hold serious consequences, especially during a period Frank was trying to get respectable for stock market investors. It became a time that Frank desperately needed to distance himself from Ciccone. But trying to hold the mob enforcer at arms’ length hadn’t been easy.
Frank had once liked Ciccone—but he’d have liked him even better with his hairy butt back in Chicago, doing the mob’s union work. But Ciccone wouldn’t leave Vegas. Instead, the stocky little Italian with a vile temper had accused Frank of betrayal, and he’d gone renegade, doing unnecessary violence as he’d tried to muscle in on Frank’s turf. It turned into a bitter vendetta.
And things began to look real bad for Frank.
The feds had moved into Vegas in a big sweep to clean out Sin City and Ciccone was drawing serious heat to Frank—heat he didn’t need.
Turns out, he didn’t have to worry.
Ciccone “disappeared.”
He’d been whacked, and Frank knew who’d done it.
“Rothchild’s daughter is seeing the FBI agent assigned to the Rothchild homicide case,” Markowitz rasped as he studied the gorgeous young woman down at the blackjack table. “He’s the same guy Mercedes bid on at that auction.”