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Sharon Stone immortalized wild, doomed Vegas showgirl Geri McGee in Martin Scorsese's movie Casino, opposite Robert De Niro as her husband, Frank 'Lefty' Rosenthal. The film, which was released 30 years ago next month, chronicled the moment the FBI broke the Mafia's stranglehold on Las Vegas – leading to the corporate takeover of Sin City and the eventual slide in tourism that is reaching crisis levels today. Now Stephanie Rosenthal, the daughter of McGee and Lefty, whose marriage was marked by violence, substance abuse and infidelity, has 'come out of hiding' to talk about her parents for the first time. According to the movie and the book by Nicholas Pileggi, McGee was a hard-drinking, pill-popping femme fatale who waved a gun at her husband during tumultuous fights, tied her toddler daughter to the bed one night so she could go gallivanting and had an affair with the violent mobster Anthony 'The Ant' Spilotro. Her high-risk lifestyle had a predictably tragic outcome – she wound up dead at 46 of a drug and alcohol overdose after being found at the Beverly Sunset Hotel in Los Angeles. The little girl who was tied to the bed – one of McGee's three children – is now a 52-year-old divorced single mother of four-year-old twins. A former champion elite swimmer, she lives in Mission Viejo, California. And her loyalty to her mom, who died when she was just nine, is strong. 'She was made out to be this crazy party girl that did hard drugs and had a heavy drinking problem,' Stephanie said. 'She was not that person. She liked to have a good time, but she wasn't how they portrayed her.' Stephanie has an older half-sister from her mother's first relationship, as well as an older brother, neither of whom was mentioned in Casino. After decades of keeping away, Stephanie has started going to Vegas every other weekend, she told Daily Mail, to reconnect with her roots. Her father died in 2008 and was inducted into the Sports and Betting Hall of Fame 15 years later. She spoke to Daily Mail during a steak dinner at Oscar's Steakhouse in the Plaza Hotel's iconic glass dome in downtown Las Vegas, in a booth where her parents often sat. The restaurant's namesake is Oscar Goodman, now 86, her father's longtime attorney, who later became the mayor of Vegas and still lives nearby. Stephanie has said that Casino – though both the book and film drew directly from verbatim interviews with him, his associates, and even McGee's sister – was still 'somewhat a lie,' particularly in its portrayal of her mother. But she admitted that the scene where she was tied to her bed so her mother could go out partying was true – as was a scene showing her mother abruptly taking her from the family home in Vegas to meet up with her longtime lover, Lenny Marmor, in LA. Her mother, she admitted, was 'a force.' 'She was drop-dead gorgeous,' Stephanie said. 'When she walked in a room, she owned it. She had a sparkling personality… very street smart… an aura where everybody wanted to be around her. My father fell in love with that.' McGee, who's called 'Ginger McKenna' in the film, died in 1982, just months before the Mafia lost control of Vegas forever. Lefty Rosenthal, a brilliant and innovative sports gambler, was the behind-the-scenes operator of the Stardust, Hacienda, Riviera and Marina casinos that were secretly controlled by mob families from Chicago, Milwaukee and Kansas City who profited off what was called 'the skim'. The skim involved diverting casino cash profits before they were officially recorded. The entire operation went up in smoke when it was exposed in the FBI's 'Strawman' investigation in the early 1980s. Lefty survived an assassination attempt in 1982 when a bomb exploded under his car. He walked away almost unscathed due to a metal plate under his driver's seat. Stephanie's devotion to her parents remains unwavering. She insists her father was a 'legitimate' businessman with no real mob connections, despite his own accounts of working as a bookie for the Outfit, the Chicago syndicate. When asked by Daily Mail if she was in denial about her parents – or maybe obeying the long-ago code of omertà to protect them both even in death – Stephanie shook her head. 'I'm not in denial, what I'm saying is they needed Frank more than he needed them,' she said. 'He was not a gangster.' But not all agree with her. 'Hell yes, of course he was, and from what I know, her mother was everything they say she was,' Randy Sutton, a former lieutenant with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, told Daily Mail. 'The Rosenthals were well-known to the police department and we'd all heard the stories about them,' Sutton said. Doug Poppa, a former undercover police investigator who ran security at several casinos for years in Vegas, said Lefty was a legend – but no one viewed him as a squeaky-clean businessman. 'Come on, everyone knew who he was,' Poppa said. Stephanie also insists her parents were in love, although a key point in the book and movie is how her mother was open about simply marrying him for security. James Woods played her shady, low-life high school sweetheart, Lenny Marmor (called 'Lester Diamond' in the film), with whom McGee was obsessed. In real life, Marmor was good looking and charismatic; Lefty was neither. Lefty is on the record as admitting he knew his wife never loved him, even as Stephanie says otherwise. 'She was in love with my dad,' she said. 'He was more in love with her than she was with him… but she was the true love of his life.' Robin Marmor, 67, McGee's daughter with her lover, lives not far from Stephanie in Orange County, California, but the two are not in contact. Marmor, who has also maintained a low profile over the years, told Daily Mail that Stephanie was 'very much influenced by' her father and said he was not 'the good dad Stephanie makes him out to be'. But she also defended her mother, saying Lefty 'controlled the narrative' he gave Pileggi and Scorsese, painting her mother as unstable while minimizing his own conduct. Marmor said she wrote Sharon Stone a note after the movie came out, congratulating her on her performance but also telling her that some of her portrayal 'just wasn't accurate.' 'I don't take anything in the movie or what Pileggi said to be factual,' she said, arguing Lefty 'told the story the way he wanted it' and her long-dead mother had no choice in how she was portrayed onscreen. Lefty was 'jealous', 'controlling', and physically and emotionally abusive – allegations she says extended to McGee and to Lefty's children. Marmor recalls volatile arguments and episodes of intimidation. 'He became an alcoholic, a cheater, an abuser… the core of him is rotten,' she said. In Pileggi's book, 'Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas,' Lefty told the author that McGee favored her older son, Steven, and had to be coerced into having another child, Stephanie. 'Geri just adored Steven,' Lefty says in the book, 'She spoiled him rotten. He was her prize. A beautiful Gerber baby. She favored him over her daughter. 'She didn't like it when I got on her about her drinking, and she didn't like it when I got on her about letting Steven, who was seven, beat up on Stephanie, who was only three.' But Stephanie told Daily Mail she has very few memories of anything bad during her early youth. She was born in Las Vegas and remembers the city as a child's playground. 'I was very much into swimming,' she said. 'My dad never spoke to me about what he did.' On pool decks, other adults would tease her. 'People would say 'Your dad's a bookie', she remembered. 'I asked him one day, 'Do you sell books for a living?' He said, 'No.' I said, 'What do you do?' And he said, 'Don't worry about it'.' Lefty was a strict parent, especially after her mother died and he became a single parent, she said. 'No drinking, no drugs, no pills,' she said. 'He used to ask me weekly as a kid and then give me five bucks - 'Good job, kid.' 'The rule stuck. I've never had a drink in my entire life. 'He told me the house always wins. If you want to gamble $1,000, go shopping and actually have something.' Stephanie says she does not remember meeting Spilotro, the Chicago-born enforcer whose vicious on-screen counterpart (played by Joe Pesci) is depicted as working side-by-side with her father. Spilotro and his brother Michael were found buried in an Indiana cornfield in June 1986, a week after they disappeared from Chicago. They were found one on top of the other, stripped to their underwear. 'I don't remember him, but I know a lot about him,' she said. 'He was a childhood friend of my dad's from Chicago.' After her mother's death, Stephanie says her father devoted himself entirely to parenting and to her swimming career. He applied the same handicapping mindset to shaving time off her races. 'Swimming is measured in tenths and hundredths,' she said. 'He handled my swimming the same way he handled his betting – always looking for an edge. 'If I was competing where it was really hot, he'd rent a motorhome so I had air conditioning… I always had the best of everything with him.
