FILM RIGHTS AVAILABLE

FILM RIGHTS AVAILABLE
FILM RIGHTS AVAILABLE

Factor was released from Sandstone Prison in February of 1948.

   Factor was released from Sandstone Prison in February of 1948. He was sentenced to parole for the remaining four years of his ten-year sentence. In 1954, at the end of his parole sentence, he told the parole board he was broke. In 1955, one year after his final meeting with the parole board, and six years since he last held a job, convicted felon John Factor announced that he had purchased the Stardust Casino in Las Vegas. Jake the Barber was now the owner and operator of one of the largest casinos in the world.
   It was Murray Humpreys who decided that Jake the Barber would buy the Stardust with the only explanation out of the mob being that "Jake owes Chicago a big one."
   Humpreys must have put up the money to buy the casino. From that point on, Jake the Barber was Chicago's front man in the Stardust, and it was a mob gold mine.
   At first the outfit was excited at the prospect of having John Factor as its head man. He was, at least by mob standards, trustworthy. He was smart enough to know the outfit would kill him in a heartbeat if he tried anything creative.
   The problem with Factor was that he, like Cornero, couldn't get a liquor license. As Hank Messick wrote, "...much to the disgust of the Chicago boys. The Barber tried everything he could to get a license but there was no way it was going to happen. He finally bowed to reality and announced that he would lease to the Desert Inn Group....It took a western Appalachian to solve the matter."
   In a meeting held in mob lawyer Sidney Korshak's Beverly Hills office, Meyer Lansky, Longy Zwillman, Doc Stacher (representing New York and New Jersey), Moe Dalitz and Morris Kleinman decided that Dalitz would lease the casino operation. Dalitz represented the Desert Inn. All involved agreed that Dalitz's Desert Inn would pay $100,000 a month-a low figure for the second largest money maker in Las Vegas-to operate the casino part of the Stardust. Factor would, at least on paper, still own the building, the grounds and the hotel operation.
   Dalitz, who was one of the founding members of the national crime syndicate, would run the day-to- day operation and Johnny Rosselli-Brian Foy's old pal-would be off in the shadows, representing the true owners of the Stardust: Paul Ricca, Tony Accardo, Sam Giancana and Murray Humpreys.
   Everybody was making money off the Stardust. Carl Thomas, the master of the Las Vegas skim, estimated that the Chicago mob was skimming $400,000 a month from the Stardust in the early sixties, and that was only for the one arm bandits. Blackjack, craps, keno, roulette and poker yielded a different skim.
   It was more money then they had ever dreamed of and nothing, absolutely nothing, was going to prevent them from taking it.

   And then Roger Touhy was released from prison.