Headscratchers / Casino

• Pat Webb and Sam Rothstein have a meeting about 2 hours into the movie in Sam's office. Why, exactly, is Sam not wearing pants before this meeting starts? He's told Webb is here to see him, tells his secretary to give him a minute, gets up, no pants, goes to his closet and puts pants on, then tells his secretary to let him in (and then call him in 9 minutes). Why no pants? He wasn't getting his knob shined.
  • This is a quirk taken from the real life Ace, Frank Rosenthal: Frank had something like 120 jackets, 200 pairs of trousers - a meticulous guy in every way. He wouldn't wear his pants in his office if he was seated at his desk because when he got up there was that crease. So he used to have his pants in the closet and when he had a meeting with someone, his secretary would buzz him, he'd go to his closet and put on his pants.
• The failed car bombing Ace gets caught in happens during the day. So why is he being taken into the ambulance at night?
  • The bombing seems to happen quite late in the day; most likely, the bomb goes off before sundown, the fire department and paramedics arrive to take control of the scene, and by the time they get around to shipping Ace to the hospital the sun has set.
  • Also, while Ace is clearly injured, his injuries don't seem to be immediately life-threateningly urgent, meaning there wasn't a critical need to rush him to the hospital. Since he was a victim of a car bomb, the paramedics may have allowed any police officers who attended the scene to question him first.
• Why did the mob go straight to settling out of court with Green's business partner who was suing him? Why not try the carrot and stick method first: send a few guys to her with guns, then present a briefcase full of money in front of her and simply say "pick"? Then there's no problem, the suit goes away, and legal problems are significantly reduced.
  • Greed, pure and simple.
  • Anna was a no-nonsense litigious liability, she would never settle out of court and was out for blood.
  • Remember that the carrot and stick was more Ace's thing than the mob's. Ace is far more about pragmatic villainy than his employers... he's willing to use psychology and intimidation to get his point across and rely on those. Whereas the mob, well, as one of the bosses puts it later, "Why take a chance?"
  • These are mobsters we're discussing here. They're the kind of people who think that every problem is a nail just because they have a hammer, they're very comfortable with violent solutions to problems, and they have lots of guns. They're not interested in being nice and reasonable, they're interested in getting a problem out of the way as quickly as possible, and for a problem like this, then a very quick way to solve it is to put three bullets into her head. If they were interested in finding as mutually reasonable solution, they wouldn't be mobsters. Besides, if they do the carrot-stick thing and it fails she can talk to the police and the prosecutors, but if she's dead to begin with she can't talk to anyone.
    • Of course, that line of thinking is also what led to their downfall. This murder was based on the murder of a business partner of Allen Glick, Phil Green's real-life equivalent. And it was quite simple why they sanctioned the hit: because her lawsuit would've required Glick to open his books in court and expose the Outfit's operations. A consequence of her death was that the press and the police began digging into the casino operations and uncovered how Lefty Rosenthal had been managing the casinos without a gaming license.
    • True, but again: mobsters, hammers and nails. They went for the best solution short-term, even though it caused them more problems long-term.