Memory lapse about Rosenthal reflects poorly on Goodman’s honesty

Mayor Oscar Goodman spent Thursday morning with 400 children at the Mayor's Prayer Breakfast and it was only 11:30 a.m., so I doubted he was impaired.

When asked to comment on my column in that morning's Las Vegas Review-Journal in which three former law enforcement sources confirmed his client Frank Rosenthal had been a top echelon FBI informant, initially Goodman said exactly what I expected.

"If he was an FBI snitch, I didn't know it. My position was I never represented an informant, I made that very clear. I had no indication other than circumstantial evidence, when he was not indicted in some cases, that there may have been some issues."

He should have stopped there, but didn't.

"I was really not representing him at that point," Goodman said.

What?

Goodman stumbled a bit over how to phrase it. "From the moment he and his wife, uh, uh, the disclosure was his wife was having an alleged relationship with another client of mine, that was the last time I represented him. If in fact, he was an informant, he certainly wasn't an informant during my time."

Oscar, did you forget the 1980s? Are they blacked out? Did you forget what you said just 17 days earlier? Is this confusion or delusion?

After learning of Rosenthal's death Oct. 13 in Miami Beach, Fla., Goodman told the Review-Journal: "What I saw through representing him since 1972 until I was elected mayor was a different side, a loyal friend and a loving parent who doted over his kids."

Since Goodman was elected mayor in June 1999 and old newspaper clips showed he actually started representing Rosenthal in 1971 (a minor discrepancy), by that account the mob attorney represented Rosenthal for 28 years. Goodman fought at every level to keep Rosenthal working at the Stardust hotel when it was owned by the Argent Corp. from 1974 to 1979.

But at his televised news conference Thursday, Goodman rewrote history.

He claimed he stopped representing Rosenthal after he learned Rosenthal's wife Geri was having an affair with Goodman's other major client, mobster Anthony Spilotro, a close friend of Rosenthal's and ultimately an even closer friend of Geri's. If you saw "Casino," you know the sleazy details.

Frank filed for divorce in September 1980, three days after Geri went to their safe deposit box and left with $1 million in jewels and $150,000 in cash and what were described as "some papers." It was one of those only-in-Las Vegas stories in which police kept Lefty from stopping his wife. (Rosenthal later sued the Las Vegas police for false arrest, but the federal judge who dismissed the case in 1984 said they were doing good police work.)

So when Goodman said he quit representing Lefty around 1980 or 1981, that was wrong. Throughout the '80s, he was fighting to keep Rosenthal out of Nevada's Black Book, a list he joined in 1988 and which the Nevada Supreme Court upheld in 1991. Goodman headed the legal challenge every step of the way.

That should have been hard to forget.

Yet it seemed it was more important to Goodman to cling to the false belief that he never represented a rat than it was to be honest.

Sure, make this man your next Democratic governor. But triple-check everything he states as fact.

This was such an obvious misstatement of fact, I offered him a chance to clarify it Thursday. But no, what he said at the news conference was his "best recollection," he said through his spokeswoman.

It may be a point of honor for Goodman to be able to claim he didn't represent snitches, but old newspaper clips show, and people like me who were there know, his "best recollection" is wrong.

History by the numbers: The Rosenthals divorced in 1981. Lefty was injured in a car bombing in 1982 and he was informing prior to the car bombing, a first-hand source said. Geri died of a drug overdose a month later. Spilotro was murdered in 1986. In 1988, Goodman and Rosenthal were in Carson City trying but failing to keep Rosenthal out of the Black Book.

Goodman's claim he didn't represent Rosenthal when he was ratting out others (and presumably other Goodman clients) is just not to be believed.

Jane Ann Morrison's column appears Monday, Thursday and Saturday. E-mail her at Jane@reviewjournal.com or call (702) 383-0275.