Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Piero’s part
Movie experience fun, profitable for owner of Piero’s
Freddie Glusman is a tough man to impress. He’s known everybody who was anybody since he arrived in Las Vegas in 1957. Glusman was married to Diahann Carroll, taught Don Rickles how to water ski on Lake Mead and was great friends with two Jerrys — Lewis and Tarkanian — who defined different eras of Las Vegas.
So when there was interest in using his restaurant, Piero’s, in a movie — even one directed by Martin Scorsese — he wasn’t exactly starstruck.
“Originally, it started out when it was the busiest month,” Glusman, 83, says of the period when he was asked to close for filming. “But the way Scorsese shoots movies, he shoots ’em 10 different times every scene, so it extended it to the worst time of year. I was happy to have it.”
“It” included a rental fee of $30,000 a day for six days, plus the cost of the food that was prepared.
In “Casino,” Piero’s stood in for The Leaning Tower, the Italian joint owned by Joe Pesci’s Nicky Santoro, which was itself a version of Tower of Pizza, one of Tony Spilotro’s favorites. Piero’s is where Santoro schmoozed with Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows and where he forcibly removed Sharon Stone’s Ginger Rothstein down the back stairs, through the kitchen and into the parking lot.
Glusman had a small role, mostly as atmosphere, as The Leaning Tower’s maitre d’.
“You had to put it on double slow motion,” he says, if you wanted to see him. “That was it. Bang. No speaking part. I was just there in a tuxedo for six days.”
Asked about his favorite memories of that time, Glusman doesn’t miss a beat: “I couldn’t keep my eyes off of Sharon Stone.”
Having owned a prominent Italian restaurant in Las Vegas since 1982, it’s no surprise that Glusman had encounters with both men portrayed in “Casino.”
On a particularly busy evening, Spilotro called and asked for a table.
“I didn’t take his reservation,” Glusman recalls. “Said, ‘Sorry. We’re sold out tonight.’ ”
The mobster had frequented one of Glusman’s other establishments, The Oz restaurant and disco next to Circus Circus, sometimes to the detriment of other patrons.
“Tony Spilotro ran customers out; he didn’t bring customers in,” Glusman says, in his familiar rasp that sounds as though he gargles with thumbtacks. “So why would I want him in there?”
As for Frank Rosenthal, who inspired Robert De Niro’s Sam Rothstein, Glusman declares, “I went to a grand jury because of him.”
The men knew each other through the Stardust, one of the casinos Rosenthal oversaw, where Glusman ran the dress shop. They lived about five doors apart at the Las Vegas Country Club, and Rosenthal’s kids, Steven and Stephanie, played with Charlie Skinner, Glusman’s stepson.
One day, Rosenthal was getting a haircut at Caesars Palace when he asked about hair transplants.
“The barber told him, ‘Freddie just had a hair transplant. Why don’t you call him? He knows more about it than anyone,’ ” Glusman says.
As a result of that phone call, Glusman received a grand jury summons at 8 one morning and could only testify that the men had discussed their hair.
Time hasn’t dulled Piero’s connection to the movie. To this day, customers still ask to sit in the booth where, near the end of the film, the Rothsteins have a vicious blowout.
“Pesci was in the other night,” Glusman says. The actor tends to visit when he’s in town and recently dined with Raiders owner Mark Davis and The Summit Club executive Tony Renaud. Sharon Stone came in about a year ago.
“To do it again? I’d do it 10 times again,” Glusman says of the “Casino” experience. “I had so much fun, I might not even charge them.”