Is Casino a True Story?

Casino is a 1995 American epic crime drama film directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Sharon Stone. The film is based on the nonfiction book Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas by Nicholas Pileggi, who also co-wrote the screenplay for the film with Scorsese.

The film chronicles the rise and fall of mobster Sam “Ace” Rothstein (De Niro) and his friend and partner Nicky Santoro (Pesci). Rothstein is a Jewish American gambling expert handicapper who is asked by the Italian Mob to oversee the operations at the Tangiers Casino in Las Vegas.

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His character is based on Frank Rosenthal, who ran the Stardust, Fremont, and Hacienda casinos in Las Vegas for the Chicago Outfit from the 1970s until the early 1980s. Santoro’s character is based on real-life Mob enforcer Anthony Spilotro, who acted as Rosenthal’s bodyguard and was secretly involved in skimming money from casinos until he was discovered and murdered in 1977.

PRO TIP:Casino is a movie inspired by true events, but it is not a true story. The movie is based on the career of Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal and Anthony Spilotro, but certain aspects of the film have been fictionalized for dramatic purposes.

The primary characters in Casino are Ace Rothstein (De Niro), a Jewish American gambling expert handicapper who is asked by the Italian Mob to oversee the operations at the Tangiers Casino in Las Vegas; Nicky Santoro (Pesci), Rothstein’s friend and partner whose increasingly violent behavior begins to jeopardize their business; Ginger McKenna (Stone), a former prostitute who becomes Rothstein’s wife; and Lester Diamond (James Woods), a small-time con artist and ex-lover of Ginger who is hired by Nicky to be a stand-in for him at casinos when he has to leave town.

The movie Casino was a release from director Martin Scorsese after his movie Goodfellas came out. Many people wondered if Casino was based on a true story, just like Goodfellas was. However, while Goodfellas was based on a book that told a true story, Casino was actually based off of another book that only used real life events as inspiration for fiction.

The author of Casino took some real life experiences he knew about or had heard about and then embellished them with his own fiction to create an entertaining story. So while parts of Casino are based on actual events, large portions of it are completely fictionalized.