Longtime Las Vegas entertainer and TV host Tony Sacca dies at 65

Tony Sacca, a popular figure on stage and television for more than three decades in Las Vegas, died Monday night of a heart attack. He was 65.

His longtime partner, Josette LeBlond, said Tuesday morning that Sacca died soon after checking in to the emergency room at Spring Valley Hospital.

LeBlond said the couple had dinner at Trattoria Reggiano in Downtown Summerlin and were watching TV together in bed at about 8 p.m. when Sacca said he was experiencing chest pains. The two drove to Spring Valley Hospital, where LeBlond said Sacca walked into the emergency room and was lucid when providing his personal information to the medical staff.

Then, suddenly, “his heart stopped, his legs went stiff,” LeBlond said, sobbing. “He really didn’t suffer, and that is good.” The staff worked on Sacca for 45 minutes before pronouncing him dead at 10:05 p.m. LeBlond said she is planning a Las Vegas memorial for Sacca, possibly this weekend. Sacca is expected to be laid to rest in Philadelphia.

Sacca was best known for his locally produced talk and variety shows, which he had self-produced since 1986, and for which he even penned the theme, “Las Vegas The Greatest Town Around. Over the years, Sacca accumulated hours of archival interviews with showroom stars of varying degrees of fame.

Sacca was known to be fitness-conscious and as recently as Saturday headlined back-to-back shows in Las Vegas: his matinee production “Vegas the Story” at Windows Showroom at Bally’s, then a performance at the Starbright Theater in Sun City Summerlin.

“His show was good, business was good, everything was good,” LeBlond said. “I loved him, and he loved me.”

Sacca arrived in Las Vegas in 1981 with his twin brother, Robert, after developing a polished song-and-dance act in their native Philadelphia. They first performed at the lounge at the old MGM Grand, now Bally’s, and launched the local interview show, “Live From Las Vegas,” which grew to two shows: “Entertainment Las Vegas Style” and “Classic Vegas Entertainment.”

Sacca had appeared regularly in these shows, and on local TV commercials, since 1986. After Robert died of leukemia in 1999 in Philadelphia, Sacca continued performing solo.

In September, Sacca launched “Tony Sacca’s Vegas the Story” at the Windows Showroom at Bally’s, co-produced with Ken Walker, the showroom’s operator. The production was an ambitious retelling of Vegas entertainment history dating to the 1930s and offering a glimpse of its future through 2050.

For 30 years, Sacca was also the entertainment host of the annual San Gennaro Feast Italian food and music festival, held most recently at Craig Ranch Regional Park in North Las Vegas.

“Tony was like a brother to me, so this is very hard right now,” said longtime Las Vegas publicist Jackie Brett, who had been in touch with Sacca at 8:30 p.m., asking if he wanted to make plans to watch the Super Bowl. Brett first met Sacca more than 20 years ago and had worked as his publicist over the past several years.

“Things were going very well for him. He seemed healthy and finally had a show that he could be proud of,” Brett said. “He was very happy, so this is a shock to me and I’m sure to all of his friends.”

The Sacca Twins got national television exposure when David Letterman’s talk show settled on the Strip for a week in 1986. The brothers parlayed that into the first deal with a local affiliate to produce “Live From Las Vegas.” The twins would flank their interviewees from matching desks on either side. “I feel like I am at a tennis match,” Frank Sinatra Jr. told them.

As the explosion of cable TV channels made local network affiliates pull back from self-produced programming, Sacca persevered, self-financing his show and creating loose-knit networks of stations to carry it in outside markets.

He made an annual tradition of the Christmas show with local entertainers and school choirs. The first one had the Philadelphia native lip-syncing to his prerecorded songs while suited up like a cowboy on a horse. “Growing up with cowboys and Gene Autry and stuff like that, I always had a desire to sit on a horse and sing Christmas carols,” he recalled in 2014. “It was one of those fantasies.”

Though he was more often seen on the TV sets of night owls, Sacca was equally tenacious when it came to finding venues for his live show, including a stretch in 2010 at the Las Vegas Rocks Cafe that he and LeBlond operated on Fremont Street. The two closed the 20,000-square-foot facility in early 2011.

He called a 2003 run in an enclosed lounge at the Riviera “a showcase for other hotels to come in and see me.” People would tell him, “They can’t find a crooner — in Las Vegas.”

Former Mayor Oscar Goodman was in office when Sacca and LeBlond embarked on the project, located on the street level of the Neonopolis entertainment complex on Fremont Street and Las Vegas Boulevard.

“Tony had a great deal of energy and I always enjoyed talking to him about our old days in Philadelphia,” Goodman said Tuesday morning. “He had always wanted me to designate him as our official ambassador of Las Vegas entertainment. I couldn’t do that, because of so many great entertainers here, but I did tell him once, ‘Tony, if anyone is the ambassador of Las Vegas entertainment, it is you.’ ”

Las Vegas Review-Journal writer Mike Weatherford contributed to this report.