KVIG Informative

Frank Sinatra owned pieces of two Nevada casinos in 1963, until a Chicago organized-crime figure barred from every gambling property in the state showed up at one of them and Sinatra picked a fight with the man in charge of keeping people like him out. Sinatra surrendered both licenses within months. Sixty-three years later, Nevada’s gaming regulators have just expanded, earlier this year, exactly whose associates fall under their authority to police.

Sinatra bought a controlling interest in the Cal-Neva Lodge, a casino resort straddling the California-Nevada state line at Crystal Bay on Lake Tahoe’s north shore, in 1960, according to historian Alicia Barber’s account for the University of Nevada, Reno’s “Time and Place” history series, drawn from oral history interviews held by University of Nevada, Reno Libraries Special Collections. He also held a smaller ownership interest in the Sands Hotel-Casino on the Las Vegas Strip, according to the same account.

Nevada’s Gaming Control Board, created by the 1955 Legislature within the state Tax Commission to regulate casino ownership, according to the board’s own official history, built a list of people barred from setting foot on any licensed gambling property in the state starting in 1960. The Nevada State Archives, which holds the board’s records from that era, dates the first version of that exclusion list — later known as the Black Book — to March 29, 1960, when it named eleven people.

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Sam Giancana, a name on that exclusion list, visited the Cal-Neva Lodge in July 1963 while his girlfriend, singer Phyllis McGuire, performed in the resort’s showroom, according to Barber’s account. Giancana’s presence at a licensed Nevada casino violated the exclusion list’s entire purpose: barring listed individuals from so much as setting foot on a gambling property’s premises.

On Aug. 31, 1963, Sinatra telephoned Gaming Control Board chairman Edward Olsen over the board’s interest in Giancana’s visit, and the call turned hostile, according to Barber’s account. Guy Farmer, the board’s public information officer at the time, later described being on the line for that call at a 2019 Nevada Historical Society program hosted by the American Gaming Archives. The board filed a formal complaint against Sinatra afterward, Barber’s account says.

That fall, Sinatra announced he was surrendering his Nevada gaming licenses for both the Cal-Neva Lodge and the Sands rather than contest the board’s complaint, according to Barber’s account. He would not hold a Nevada gaming license again for nearly two decades.

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Sinatra applied to regain a Nevada gaming license in 1981. The Nevada Gaming Commission that reviewed the application was chaired at the time by Harry Reid, who left the commission that same year to enter Nevada politics and was later elected to the U.S. Senate, according to the commission’s own licensing history. The commission granted Sinatra’s application, and he held a Nevada gaming license for the remainder of his life.

The authority that ended Sinatra’s Nevada gaming career in 1963 was the state’s power to decide who a licensee associates with, not just who holds the license itself. That power is still being redrawn. The Nevada Gaming Commission adopted regulation amendments effective March 26, 2026, that expand the legal definition of a “registrant” under state gaming law and extend the commission’s compliance authority beyond licensees alone to reach registrants, people the commission has found suitable, and their agents and employees, according to the commission’s own adopted regulation text. Sixty-three years after a phone call ended Sinatra’s stake in two Nevada casinos, the state is still widening the net around who counts as close enough to a casino to answer for it.