The biggest differences between reality and the onscreen version of events are usually questions of location rather than the validity of the event itself. Scorsese’s film is intense and filled with psychotic characters luckily, he barely had to change the real-life narrative to put this story on screen.
For a big-budget mafia movie, Casino is shockingly accurate, and many of the details that have been changed aren’t that far away from the real story. Through these two real-life gangsters, Pileggi provided a way for Scorsese to tell an intriguing story of greed and humanity’s hunger for power. Pileggi’s non-fiction book Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas covers the heyday of mafia-controlled Vegas, focusing specifically on the real-life inspirations for Ace Rothstein and Nicky Santoro, Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal and Anthony Spilotro, respectively. Not only did it see the director once again team up with Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, but he worked with the author who wrote the source material for both Goodfellas and Casino, Nicholas Pileggi. Casino, Martin Scorsese’s 1995 epic underworld story is the spiritual successor to Goodfellas in many ways.
