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From Amazon.com

Note this book is not fiction, nor a novelization of the film Casino. Like Wiseguy, it's the real account that Scorsese fashioned into a film (with Pileggi's help again).

Casino tells the story of the Chicago mob's major role in running Las Vegas, how it happened, and how it more or less ended (or appeared to) in the 1980s. Corporations (institutionalized gangsters) took over, and now we're to assume that gambling is a respectable, fine industry. It's hard to cheer for the state 'gaming' officials as they pursue mobsters who are skimming a casino, of all places. A character in the film says it best when he exclaims, 'You mean the money we're robbing is bein' robbed?!'

A good read before or after the excellent film. There's quite a bit of detail as far shady business dealings, politics, and mob bosses go, but less of the nitty gritty mobster detail from Wiseguy.

This was horribly written, repetitive, and choppy. Too much explanation, not enough action...hated it.

The basis for the Martin Scorsese movie of the same name, Pileggi's true-crime account charts the rise and fall of a pair of Vegas hoods.

[from the back cover] "Las Vegas wa a city with no memory. It was the place you went for a second chance." From Nicholas Pileggi, comes this brilliantly told tale of love, marriage, adultry, murder, and revenge Mafia-style. Both a love story and a bigger-than-life business story, CASINO exposes the secrets of Las Vegas's multibillion dollar casino gambling industry--and how the mob finally lost its stranglehold over it. CASINO is a real-life love story as well as Pileggi's inside account, in never-before-published detail, of a Mafia disaster---how the mob lost its control of the neon moneymaking machine it created. As one of the participants stated when it was all over, " We were given paradise on earth, but we F***** it all up."