In Vegas, everybody's gotta watch everybody else. Since the players are looking to beat the casino, the dealers are watching the players. The boxmen are watching the dealers. The floormen are watching the boxmen. The pit bosses are watching the floormen. The shift bosses are watching the pit bosses. The casino manager is watching the shift bosses. I'm watching the casino manager. And the eye in the sky [the CCTV cameras] is watching us all.
Nicky Santoro
Joe Pesci · 22 quotes
Sam "Ace" Rothstein
Robert De Niro · 21 quotes
Most scenes together: Nicky Santoro & Sam "Ace" Rothstein (5)
Casino quotes
Page 3 of 3It took months for everything to calm down. But finally, my guys got out on bail and the bosses wanted me to send my brother Dominick out to Vegas. Always the dollars. Always the **** dollars. I mean, it was still way too hot for me to even go near Vegas, so I set up a meeting with the guys way out in the sticks. I didn't want my brother to get **** around. I mean, what's right is right. They don't give a **** about— [Frankie hits him from behind with a baseball bat] AGH!
Listen to me, Anthony. I got your head in a **** vice. I'll squash your **** head like a grapefruit if you don't give me a name. Don't make me have to do this, please. Don't make me be a bad guy, come on.
Meeting in the middle of the desert always made me nervous. It's a scary place. I knew about the holes in the desert, of course, and everywhere I looked, there could have been a hole. Normally, my prospects of coming back alive from a meeting with Nicky were 99 out of 100. But this time, when I heard him say "a couple of hundred yards down the road," I gave myself 50/50.
No matter how big a guy might be, Nicky would take him on. You beat Nicky with fists, he comes back with a bat. You beat him with a knife, he comes back with a gun. And you beat him with a gun, you better kill him, because he’ll keep coming back and back until one of you is dead.
No matter what the feds or the papers might have said about my car-bombing, it was amateur night - and you could tell. Whoever it was, they put the dynamite under the passenger side. But what they didn't know - what nobody outside the factory knew - was that that model car was made with a metal plate under the driver's seat. It's the only thing that saved my life. The bombing was never authorized, but I suspect I know who lit the fuse. [cut to Nicky meeting up with his gang in the cornfield] And so did the powers that be.
The town will never be the same. After the Tangiers, the big corporations took it all over. Today, it looks like Disneyland. And while the kids play cardboard pirates, Mommy and Daddy drop the house payments and Junior's college money on the poker slots. In the old days, dealers knew your name, what you drank, what you played. Today, it's like checking into an airport, and if you order room service, you're lucky if you get it by Thursday. Today, it's all gone. You got a whale show up with four million in a suitcase, and some 25-year-old hotel school kid is gonna want his social security number. After the Teamsters got knocked out of the box, the corporations tore down practically every one of the old casinos. And where did the money come from to rebuild the pyramids? Junk bonds. But in the end, I wound up right back where I started. I could still pick winners, and I could still make money for all kinds of people back home. And why mess up a good thing? And that's that.
The word was out. The bosses had enough of Nicky. They had enough. How much were they gonna take? So they made an example of him and his brother. They buried them while they were still breathing. They had other ideas for me.
They had so much **** money in there, you could build a house outta stacks of $100 bills. And the best part was that upstairs, the board of directors didn't know what the **** was going on. I mean, to them, everything looked on the up-and-up, right? Wrong! The guys inside the counting room were all slipped in there to skim the joint dry. They'd do short counts, they'd lose fill slips. They'd even take cash right outta the drop boxes. And it was up to this guy, right here, standing in front of about 2 million dollars, to skim the cash off the top without anybody getting wise — the IRS, or anybody. Now, notice how in the count room, nobody ever seems to see anything. Somebody's always looking the other way. Now look at these guys. They look busy, right? They're counting money. Who'd want to bother them? I mean, God forbid they should make a mistake and forget to steal. Meanwhile, you're in and you're out, past the jack-off guard, who gets an extra C note a week just to watch the door. I mean, it's routine, business as usual — in, out, hello, goodbye — and that's all there is to it. Just another fat ****, walking out of the casino with a suitcase. Now that suitcase was going straight to one place: right to Kansas City, which was as close to Las Vegas as the Midwest bosses could go without getting themselves arrested. That suitcase was all the bosses ever wanted, and they wanted it every month.
We all have a past! You have a past, I have a past, and my past is no worse than yours, but you guys think you have the right to pass judgment on me!
When you love someone, you've gotta trust them. There's no other way. You've got to give them the key to everything that's yours. Otherwise, what's the point? And for a while, I believed that's the kind of love I had.
You wanna get rid of me? Here I am. Go ahead, get rid of me.