In an interview with New York Times reporter Gilbert Millstein, he admitted that while he had been “good friends” with Frank Costello for years, the reputed Mob boss had “no interest” in the Tropicana whatsoever because he was too busy and troubled to take on Las Vegas. Kastel was the driving force behind the Tropicana’s construction, and was happy to talk about his vision for Las Vegas.

And it almost goes without saying that most “Miami hotel men” who came to Las Vegas in this era were more than familiar with Meyer Lansky, another famous gangland name. For years, Kastel had run New Orleans’ Beverly Club (an ostensibly illegal but still operating casino) for Costello the two also shared in a Louisiana slot machine route operation that, similarly, might have been illegal on paper but which police managed to avoid until the Kefauver Committee’s spotlight forced them into action.

It just so happened that Conquistador’s owner, “Dandy” Phil Kastel, had a long and fruitful partnership with Frank Costello, perhaps the nation’s most infamous gangster in the spring of 1957. It had a curious ownership structure: Miami hotelier Ben Jaffe (part owner of the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach) owned the land on which the casino would sit, but Conquistador Inc. The Tropicana had been planned since 1955, and on the surface did not seem to have been hurt much by the failures of that year. So to open the doors of the town’s most expensive hotel yet built was going against the grain. The previous year’s opening of the Hacienda had been a low-key affair with little glamor. The Dunes, Riviera, New Frontier, Royal Nevada and Moulin Rouge had all struggled through ownership changes, some slipping into bankruptcy the latter two never recovered. It was April 1957, and the town was still coming to terms with the opening of five major resorts two years earlier.

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