Sandia Casino Rat Pack
Catch our premier headliners indoors, at Sandia's magnificent 27,000-square-foot Ballroom. Sandia Resort & Casino offers a full spectrum of exceptional dining destinations from our premier steakhouse to deli favorites and delicious snacks on the go. Whether you want to enjoy a great meal before a concert or grab a fresh cup of coffee between lucky streaks, Sandia’s outstanding restaurants and lounges offer something for everyone. For a week, the Rat Pack's presence turned Milwaukee Avenue at the Des Plaines River into the hottest address in show biz. Shortly before the Sinatra show closed, the casino shut down under belated.
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- Sinatra’s next move would create the legend of the Rat Pack — and cement the Las Vegas Strip as an international party destination. “Before the Rat Pack’s arrival, Vegas was all Jimmy Durante and Cyd Charisse — old hat,” said Lertzman. Sinatra was bopping through town in ’59, mulling a big payday while his elite status still held.
David G. Schwartz. At the Sands: The Casino That Shaped Classic Las Vegas, Brought the Rat Pack Together, and Went Out With a Bang. Las Vegas: Winchester Books, 2020.
The lights are coming down. Frank, Dean, and Sammy are about to take the stage. This is the moment we remember, when Las Vegas became classic. And it was at the Sands. Built in 1952 over the ashes of Hollywood Reporter publisher Billy Wilkerson’s last chance in Las Vegas, the Sands was a collective effort. Underworld figures like Meyer Lansky, Doc Stacher, and Frank Costello provided the cash. Beloved Texas gambler Jake Freedman was the public face. Manhattan nightclub king Jack Entratter kept the Copa Room filled and made the party happen, every night. Carl Cohen, esteemed as the greatest casino manager in the history of the business, made the team complete.
No matter how well your casino is run, you need a good hook to get the gamblers through the door. Casino owners were learning that entertainment was a pretty fair hook. Entratter, who broke into the entertainment business as a bouncer at the Stork Club, had risen to become manager of the Copacabana, one of Manhattan’s hottest hot spots, before heading to Las Vegas. At the Sands, “Mr. Entertainment” brought many of the brightest stars of the day to the casino’s showroom, named the Copa Room. The Copa was the hottest ticket in America and, for performers, one of the most coveted stages in the nation. Headlining at the Sands–or even opening there–meant that you had made it.
For gamblers, the Sands was paradise. For tourists, it was a chance to see some sophistication—and maybe run into a famous singer or actor. The resort itself became a celebrity. Early on, the Sands hosted numerous radio and television broadcasts, bringing the casino into American households coast to coast when gambling was still not entirely reputable. Las Vegas is a city built on public relations, and the Sands’ Al Freeman was one of its early masters.
The Sands did more than showcase stars: it made them shine brighter. In 1960, while filming Ocean’s 11, the Rat Pack (though they were never called that in those days) came together onstage at the Sands, creating a cultural icon that would define the era. Behind the scenes, Davis and Sinatra resisted the prevailing segregationist mindset of Las Vegas and helped to overturn Jim Crow on the Strip. With Sinatra as its star, the Sands reached its highest point, hosting everyone from John F. Kennedy to Texas oilmen to Miami bookmakers.
Yet the Sands wasn’t all comps and curtain calls. Behind the scenes, the casino’s connection with reputed mobsters made it a target. For years, the FBI tried to penetrate the casino, including a disastrous wiretapping operation that turned into a public embarrassment for the Bureau. And Frank Sinatra–at one point a 10 percent owner of the Sands–would divest his interests after a highly-publicized feud with Nevada gaming regulators over his friendship with alleged Chicago mob kingpin Sam Giancana.
After Howard Hughes bought the Sands in 1967 (with Frank Sinatra explosively departing soon after) the Sands lost some of its allure, but the casino soldiered on under Hughes and other owners before being sold to Sheldon Adelson, who closed the property in 1996 to make way for the Venetian mega-resort, along the way doing for conventions what Jack Entratter had done for entertainment in Las Vegas four decades earlier.
In the end, the Sands went out with a bang–an implosion that brought down its hotel tower. It had a wild 44 year run. Along the way, a host of characters, including the Rat Pack (and their many friends) in all their glory, author Mario Puzo, Apollo astronauts, wealthy arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, and President Ronald Reagan passed through the Sands’ doors.
At the Sands tells the story of how one of the most fondly remembered classic Las Vegas casinos beat the odds to become a success, staged some of the Strip’s most memorable spectaculars, and paved the way for the next generation of Las Vegas resorts. The Sands may be gone, but it did not fade away.
The ’60s were a boom period for the Las Vegas casinos. It had taken a while but business magnates such as the enigmatic Howard Hughes had finally cottoned on to the huge sums of money that could be made from the Strip.
And with the big corporations willing to splash out on ambitious construction projects, the place that had been nothing but a watering hole some 30 years earlier was now the place for Americans to let their hair down.
It wasn’t just the economic boom that allowed Vegas to flourish. Indeed, the first time Hughes rolled in to town – by private train, under the cover of darkness –it was after five men had sprinkled their unique blend of showbiz glitz over Sin City.
Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr, Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop – they never referred to themselves as ‘The Rat Pack’ but that’s how they became known. And from the time they came to Vegas to make the original Ocean’s 11 until they moved on to pastures new by the decade’s end, the Strip was theirs.
Sandia Casino Rat Pack Entertainment
The key to their success was a nightly stage show which functioned as an advert for all the town had to offer. Play a hand of blackjack, enjoy a drink, take in the show – people the country over flocked to enjoy temporary Rat Pack membership. And as the crowd cheered so the slot machines rang like never before.
Rewind just a few short years and Las Vegas was a very different town. The truth of the matter is the 1950s hadn’t been terribly kind to Vegas. The brief boom that followed World War II, when the first truly lavish casinos were constructed, petered out after it emerged that Nevada would have a key role to play in the preparation for World War III.
Yes, of the issues facing the town, by far the greatest was the city’s close proximity to the state’s nuclear test site. Being barely 60 miles away, the pyrotechnics were clearly visible to Las Vegans. And though there was no denying that the mushroom clouds were spectacular, they weren’t the sort of fireworks any tourist was interested in seeing. Although the government would later head to an even more remote location, colossal damage had been done to Vegas’s reputation as a vacation capital.
If a force of destruction threatened the city’s future, a force of nature all but secured it. Francis Albert Sinatra first played Vegas in 1951. A regular fixture on the casino circuit throughout the decade, it was when Sinatra brought the Rat Pack circus to town in 1960 that things really started to take off.
The first of four pictures they made together, time hasn’t have been kind to Lewis Milestone’s original Ocean’s 11. But at the time, the Clan – as they referred to themselves – took utter delight in carving up the Strip. For when the days filming was down, Frank, Dean, Sammy and Co. hit the stage, sometimes in the company of other major stars such as Shirley MacLaine and Angie Dickinson. And in an instant, a huge dollop of Hollywood glamour became available to anyone willing to travel to the Nevada desert.
And travel they did. The desire to see the boys in the flesh meant the hotels were booked out months in advance. As for those who couldn’t get a room, they settled for sleeping in their cars. The Rat Pack live was simply too big an event to miss.
Wealth wasn’t the only thing Sinatra and his celebrity friends brought to the city. Desegregation also swept Vegas after Sinatra – a noted civil rights activist – pointed up the hypocrisy of Sammy Davis playing resorts where his business wasn’t otherwise welcome. This, together with the staging of benefits concerts for Martin Luther King, helped cement the image of Vegas as a city looking to the future rather than beholden to the past.
Sandia Casino Rat Pack Facts
Of course, the golden years couldn’t last forever. If the exact period of the era’s end is hard to pinpoint, it’s because, in one sense, the Rat Pack never really left Las Vegas. Sinatra – who recorded the acclaimed Live At The Sands at the eponymous casino in 1966 – maintained a home there until his death. Sammy Davis Jr and Dean Martin also played regular residencies, while Lawford and Bishop – undeniably the junior members of the outfit – would often return to the Strip for one-off shows.
Recapturing the magic of the 1960s was another matter. Davis, Martin and Sinatra certainly had a good go in the early ‘80s when they played a few dates to help Dino cope with his grief over his son’s premature passing.
Rolling back the years was always going to prove futile, though. For as the gang had grown older – the British-born Lawford was dead from a drink-related condition by 1984 – the point of the exercise had been proven beyond any doubt long before.
Brat Pack
When the Rat Pack rolled into Las Vegas, they were like a posse of gun slingers riding into a ghost town in the making. When they rode away, the ghosts had been replaced with legends, and the silence substituted with roars of laughter, the chank-chank of slot machines and the sound of some of the greatest songs ever sung.