Mob Associate, Las Vegas Legends Added To Sports Gambling Hall Of Fame

Las Vegas casino executive Jackie Gaughan and oddsmaker Bob Martin, who made lasting marks in the gaming industry decades ago, have been named to the inaugural Sports Gambling Hall of Fame class. 

These sports betting innovators, along with Mob associate Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal and others, are scheduled to be inducted into the Sports Gambling Hall of Fame on Aug. 11 at Circa Resort in downtown Las Vegas. The induction ceremony will occur during the BetBash sports betting conference.

With the announcement this week that Gaughan and Martin will be honored for their contributions to sports betting, five of 10 members in the Hall of Fame’s first class have been named. The others are expected to be announced in the next few weeks.

Gaughan, Martin Pioneered Sports Betting 

Gaughan owned several casinos in Southern Nevada and, in 1975, opened a sportsbook inside the Union Plaza hotel-casino in downtown Las Vegas. In the modern era, this was the state’s first “legal, casino-based sportsbook,” according to the Nevada Resort Association. 

The Union Plaza sportsbook resulted from the Legislature’s decision in 1975 to lower the sports betting tax, “allowing the proliferation of casino-based sportsbooks/betting,” the NRA website states. That property, now called the Plaza, is at the site of the former passenger train station on Main Street.

Gaughan, a gaming pioneer also credited with popularizing prop bets, died in 2014 at age 93.

Martin managed the stand-alone Churchill Downs race and sportsbook on the Las Vegas Strip in the 1960s and ‘70s. The Churchill Downs, which no longer exists, was in a row of businesses on property now occupied by the Paris hotel-casino.

The betting lines that Martin set during his Las Vegas career, which included also overseeing the Union Plaza sportsbook, were considered “the industry standard of excellence,” according to the Las Vegas Sun. After a 1982 conviction for passing betting information across state lines, the legendary oddsmaker served 13 months in prison. Martin died in New York City in 2001. He was 82. 

Rosenthal Ran Casinos For The Mob 

Rosenthal was a Chicago oddsmaker who illegally oversaw four Argent Corp. casinos in Las Vegas, most notably the Stardust, for Midwestern crime families during the 1970s. The Stardust has since been demolished. In June 2021, Resorts World Las Vegas first opened at that location on the Las Vegas Strip.

In director Martin Scorsese’s 1995 movie “Casino,” Robert De Niro portrays a character based on Rosenthal, with Sharon Stone as his wife. Joe Pesci also stars in the movie, playing a character inspired by Tony “The Ant” Spilotro, the Chicago Outfit’s overseer in Las Vegas during that period.

In October 1982, Rosenthal was injured by a car bomb on the parking lot of a Tony Roma’s restaurant on East Sahara Avenue near the Strip. The bombing has never been solved. 

Rosenthal once was called by Sports Illustrated “the greatest living expert on sports gambling." A high-profile figure during his years in Southern Nevada, Rosenthal hosted a television show in Las Vegas and publicly battled with then-Nevada Gaming Commission Chairman Harry Reid. The negative publicity that Rosenthal generated during these years reportedly angered Mob bosses who believed he was attracting too much attention, threatening their control of Las Vegas casinos.

Soon after the car bombing, Rosenthal left Las Vegas, eventually settling in South Florida. He died in 2008 of a heart attack in Miami Beach, where he was operating an online sports betting handicapping service. He was 79. 

Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Jane Ann Morrison later revealed that Rosenthal, convicted in 1963 of attempting to fix a college basketball game in North Carolina, had been a longtime federal informant.  

Walters, Roxborough Named to Hall of Fame

The other inductees named so far to the Sports Gambling Hall of Fame are:

• Billy Walters, a legendary Nevada sports bettor whose memoir, “Gambler: Secrets from a Life at Risk,” is scheduled to be released in August. A Kentucky native living for years in Las Vegas, Walters was convicted of insider trading in 2017 and served 2 1/2 years in prison. Just before leaving office, President Donald Trump commuted Walters’ sentence.
• Roxy Roxborough, a longtime oddsmakers considered for decades one of the most influential handicappers in the country. The Las Vegas Sun credited Roxborough with helping to “bring sportsbooks into the computer age.”