Carl Cohen for Mayor

So picture this: September 1967, the Sands, and Frank Sinatra just found out his credit’s got a ceiling on it for the first time in his life. Howard Hughes bought the place — this is the same Hughes who, a few months earlier, got asked to leave his Desert Inn penthouse so the hotel could seat New Year’s high rollers, and solved that by just buying the Desert Inn outright, then kept right on buying up the Strip. The Sands was one stop on that spree — Hughes picked it up for $14.6 million in 1967, one property in a run that would eventually put half a dozen Strip hotels under his name. And somewhere in that paperwork, Frank’s credit got clipped down to $3,000 a night. In today’s money that’s something like $28,500, which sounds like plenty until you know the number that came before it: nothing.

Under the old Sands, Frank’s credit was bottomless, and there was a reason for that. Jack Entratter — the guy who ran the place through the whole Rat Pack era — built the Copa Room specifically for Sinatra back when the hotel opened in ‘52, and Frank held two points in the place himself, a real 2% ownership stake. He wasn’t just a guest there. He was an owner who happened to also headline the showroom, the kind of guy who gets to walk into the cage and sign his name instead of paying. By the time Hughes’ name is on the deed, the Sands has spent fifteen years being the room where Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop pile onto the same stage with Frank for the shows people still call the Summit — the whole reason anybody who mattered wanted a table at the Copa Room in the first place. Hughes’ people didn’t know Frank, or didn’t much care to. Now there’s a ceiling on him, and for a guy who’s never once heard the word “no” at a table, a ceiling might as well be a locked door.

Baccarat’s his game there — has been for years. There’s a photo from November 1959 of Frank behind the layout at the Sands, half-joking, working the shoe himself for the cameras like he owns the place. This isn’t some tourist finding his way around a casino floor for the first time. This is his room, his table, his hotel, or close enough to it in his head.

So when the new limit shows up, Frank tests it. Still smarting over money his wife Mia Farrow had dropped at the tables, he buys $50,000 in chips — north of $475,000 today — trying to win it all back in one sitting. Loses the whole stack fast. Goes back to the cage for more.

Told no.

Frank does not take that well.

He cancels the rest of his Copa Room run on the spot. Storms his penthouse, flicks his Zippo at the curtains trying to get the place to burn — doesn’t work, but he tries. By the time he makes it down to the casino floor, the place is mostly dead — a few night-shift dealers standing around empty tables, the carpet still thick and red under everybody’s feet, the slots down the row still chiming away to nobody. Frank climbs up on a blackjack table right there in the middle of it and screams it out for whoever’s still around: *“This place was sand when they built it and it’ll be sand when I’m fucking done with it\!”* Paul Anka’s standing right there. Watches the whole thing happen. Then Frank climbs down, hops in an electric baggage cart, and drives it straight through the plate-glass window of the shopping arcade — glass raining across that same thick carpet, the crash echoing over the slots that never stop ringing. Rips the wires clean out of the switchboard on his way past. By the next day he’s in Palm Springs signing with Caesars Palace like the ink was already dry.

But Frank’s not finished with the Sands yet.

Monday, 5:45 a.m., he’s back. Walks into the Garden Room — the Sands’ coffee shop, glass-walled kitchen, tables overlooking the pool. This is the same room where Frank once threatened to walk the whole cast out unless the hotel let Black guests sit down and eat in it, the same pull that got Nat King Cole a table there years before anyone else’s name could’ve done it. This early it’s mostly graveyard staff and a few stragglers, nobody expecting a show. Carl Cohen — the guy who actually runs the floor, 250 pounds, not real interested in whose name is on the marquee — is eating breakfast before his shift even starts. Frank wants to see him. Frank gets to see him.

What comes out of Frank’s mouth next isn’t a case for his credit line back — it’s a straight stream of curses, a slur thrown right in Cohen’s face, and then Frank flips the whole breakfast table, sending a full pot of hot coffee into Cohen’s lap.

Cohen doesn’t say a word back.

**One punch. Two of Frank Sinatra’s front teeth — well, the caps on them — gone.**

Frank goes down bleeding, grabs a chair, and swings it at Cohen. Misses. Clocks a security guard instead. Then he’s gone, and by morning there’s a dentist named Abe Weinstein on a plane out of New York to glue Frank’s smile back together.

Nobody presses charges. Nobody at the Sands even blinks — ownership figures Cohen had it coming to him, or rather, Frank did. The switchboard lights up for days with people calling in to say Cohen did right. Somebody prints up mock election posters: Frank’s grinning face, front teeth blacked out, and under it — **CARL COHEN FOR MAYOR.** For a town that usually bent over backward for anybody with a marquee name, it was the one time the house came out on top of a headliner and got a parade for it.

The story’s gotten retold so many times over the decades that even the casino history sites have had to publish corrections on their own earlier corrections — early reports had Cohen knocking out Frank’s real teeth, when it was really just the caps. This version sticks to what actually holds up against the paper trail.

And that’s it for Frank at the Sands. Not a cooling-off period, not a quiet return once things settled down — he never sets foot back in the place again. The hotel that built him a nightclub, cut him in on the ownership, and let him run up whatever tab he wanted for fifteen years loses him over a $3,000 limit and a cup of coffee, and it never gets him back. Twenty-nine years later, the Sands itself comes down — imploded in 1996 to make room for the Venetian — with Frank nowhere near it.

It’s not just Frank’s story, either. That whole year, Hughes is quietly buying up the mob’s Vegas one hotel at a time — the Desert Inn, the Sands, and more to come — swapping handshake deals and bottomless credit lines for corporate paperwork and hard limits. Cohen’s punch doesn’t just cost Frank two teeth. It’s the sound of the old Rat Pack Vegas hitting a wall the new owners built, whether anybody standing in that coffee shop realized it yet or not.

Cohen wasn’t just muscle who happened to be standing nearby, either. He’d come up rough — started as a dice dealer and bookie running illegal clubs back in Cleveland before Vegas ever entered the picture — so a screaming, bleeding movie star flipping a breakfast table wasn’t exactly new territory for him. He’s also the one who introduced high-stakes baccarat to the Sands in the first place, back in the late ’50s — the same game, the same room, where Frank made his name at that hotel. By ’67 he’d worked his way up to senior vice president, and six years later he’d do it again at the brand-new MGM Grand. He never sat down and wrote his own account of that Monday morning — no memoir, no book. What’s on record comes from news clippings, casino folklore, and the people who were standing around him.

Anka’s the other name worth knowing. A little over a year after watching Frank scream off a blackjack table, he sat down at his typewriter at one in the morning, studied old Sinatra interviews to nail his voice, and by sunrise had the lyrics to what became Frank’s signature song — “My Way.” It’s still one of the most recognizable closing numbers in American music, sung at funerals and karaoke bars everywhere by people who’ve mostly never heard this story. Make of that what you will.