In 1972, the ambitious Glick used a $2.3 million loan from Saratoga to acquire a major and later controlling share in the Hacienda hotel-casino in Las Vegas, and obtained a Nevada casino license.

Upon leaving the Army in 1969, Glick took a job in San Diego with a suburban home-building firm, the American Housing Guild, and two years later joined the real estate company Saratoga Development Corporation. The Army awarded him the Bronze Star and three combat air medals for his part in search-and-rescue missions.

Army, serving in Vietnam as a military police lieutenant and then as a captain in Special Operations. Nevada gaming authorities revoked Glick’s casino license in 1979.įor years before everything went south for him in the late ’70s, Glick earned glowing reviews in background checks requested by prospective partners and the Gaming Control Board, based on his military service and clean business history.Ī native of Pittsburgh, Glick was a graduate of Ohio State University and the Case-Western Reserve School of Law, then passed the bar in California and Pennsylvania.

However, the FBI would allege Glick hired a private attorney in Washington, D.C., to gather information on federal agents and the grand jury investigation into Argent and Glick to insulate him and others from the probe and possibly suborn perjury. The government defended Glick in court as a frightened tool of the underworld secretly responsible for loans from the corrupt Teamster pension fund used to buy the casinos. Glick swore he was not aware of the skimming, and indeed federal prosecutors never charged him criminally in return for his cooperation as a witness before two federal grand juries hearing evidence against the Mob-connected defendants. mobsters, including Milwaukee boss Frank Balistrieri (who pleaded guilty), Chicago Outfit leaders Joseph Aiuppa and Jackie Cerone, Carl DeLuna of Kansas City and Milton Rockman of Cleveland. The saga ended in 1986 with the convictions and federal prison terms for more than a dozen top U.S. The Nevada Gaming Control Board later determined that employees of Argent’s casinos quietly skimmed about $7 million from 1974 to 1976 from slot machines on behalf of Milwaukee, Chicago, Kansas City and Cleveland crime families with hidden interests in the properties. Through his company Argent Corporation, Glick owned four casinos – the Stardust, Fremont, Hacienda and Marina – second only in number to the Nevada hotels owned by billionaire Howard Hughes at the time.

Glick was a central character in an infamous organized crime scandal that rocked the Las Vegas casino industry in the 1970s and was later dramatized in the 1995 movie Casino. Glick was 79 when he died earlier this week in La Jolla, California.

1995 movie casino