He Pulled a Gun on Frank Sinatra — and Caesars Fired Him for It

So picture this: Caesars Palace, three years almost to the week after Carl Cohen decked him at the Sands, and Frank Sinatra is back at a baccarat table asking a casino executive to bend the rules for him one more time. Marble columns, gold leaf, cocktail waitresses done up like something off a Roman frieze, the low murmur of the baccarat pit where the real money sits behind velvet rope — Caesars built the whole place to feel like nobody in it could possibly lose. Sinatra’s already playing on an $8,000 credit line at the table — something like $65,000 today — double what the house normally allows anybody, extended just for him because he’s Frank Sinatra and Caesars wants him in that showroom every night. Tonight it isn’t enough. He wants $16,000 a hand, on credit, and he wants it now — call it $130,000 a hand in today’s money, eight times what any other gambler in the building could touch.

Sanford Waterman says no.

Waterman is Caesars’ executive vice president, the guy actually running the casino floor, and he’s not a rookie who doesn’t know who he’s talking to. He knows exactly who he’s talking to. He says no anyway. Sinatra doesn’t take it any better than he took it at the Sands in ’67 — chips start flying across the table, scattering across the felt and onto that thick Caesars carpet, and then Sinatra’s hands are around Waterman’s throat, squeezing hard enough to leave marks that’ll still be visible the next day. Somewhere in the middle of it, Sinatra tells him: “The mob will take care of you.”

Carl Cohen had absorbed a coffee pot and a mouthful of curses from Sinatra and answered with his fists. Waterman answers differently. He reaches into his waistband, comes out with a .38-caliber revolver, and points it at the most famous entertainer in America, right there in the middle of his own casino floor. The chip-throwing stops. The room goes quiet in the specific way a room goes quiet when somebody’s just pulled a gun. Sinatra lets go.

Waterman gets arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon. It doesn’t stick — law enforcement and the district attorney look at the whole thing and conclude, correctly, that Sinatra started it, that a man being choked by a legend twice his fame is allowed to reach for something. No charges. And here’s the part that should’ve been the end of the story and instead becomes the actual sting of it: Caesars Palace fires Sanford Waterman anyway. Not for anything he did wrong — for what he was willing to do to protect himself from a headliner the casino needed more than it needed him. Sinatra threw the punches, made the threat, put his hands on a man’s throat, and walked out of Caesars a free man with a canceled schedule and a story about “exhaustion.” Waterman did everything right and lost his job over it.

Sinatra cancels the rest of his three-week engagement, citing exhaustion and a recent hand surgery — the same kind of graceful exit line he’d use again and again whenever a Vegas night went sideways on him. No mention of the gun. No mention of the chokehold. Just exhaustion, like a man who’d simply worked too hard.

One more line about it surfaced, in a single California newspaper covering the story and nowhere else that’s been found since: a statement credited to Sinatra’s camp, reading simply, “He’s not running for office.” \[A caveat worth sitting with: 1970 wire coverage of this incident is wildly inconsistent from outlet to outlet — some papers barely mention the gun, others skip the chokehold entirely — and this particular line never turned up anywhere but that one clipping. Take it as period color from a single source, not settled fact, and make up your own mind about whether it’s real.\]

Word gets back to Sheriff Ralph Lamb, and Lamb — the same sheriff who’d already run a mob boss’s own necktie into his fist at the Desert Inn, the same sheriff who required organized-crime figures passing through his county to check in for a work card — decides he’s done being polite about it too. He’s blunt about what happens if Sinatra comes back to town and starts anything else: “If Sinatra comes back to town Tuesday, he’s coming downtown to get a work card, and if he gives me any trouble, he’s going to jail. I’m tired of him intimidating waiters, waitresses, starting fires and throwing pies.” It’s not an idle threat from Lamb, either — this is the same sheriff who marched 74 Hells Angels into a barber’s chair and had their motorcycles taken apart, the same sheriff who once stripped and deloused a Chicago Outfit lieutenant downtown just to make a point. Sinatra, for all his own real mob ties, gets lumped by Lamb into the same category as any other troublemaker who thinks Las Vegas answers to him instead of the other way around — a work card and a warning, same as anybody else who steps out of line in Ralph Lamb’s county.

It isn’t the first time a casino has had to choose between a legend’s temper and an employee doing his job, and by 1970 it isn’t even the first time it’s happened to Sinatra specifically. Three years earlier at the Sands, Carl Cohen took the same kind of abuse — flying coffee, a flipped table, a slur — and answered with a single punch that cost Sinatra two of his front teeth and got Cohen a hero’s welcome across the switchboards of Las Vegas. Waterman gets no such welcome. Cohen worked for an owner, Jack Entratter’s old regime, that had already soured on Sinatra’s credit demands and was happy to see him gone. Caesars, in 1970, still needs him — needs the marquee, needs the baccarat action he brings through the door even when he’s the one blowing past his own limit — and that need is exactly why the executive who did the right thing is the one who ends up unemployed.

Waterman doesn’t disappear from Las Vegas quietly, though, and it turns out he wasn’t exactly the clean-cut company man the story wants him to be, either. Three months later, on December 12, 1970, the FBI and IRS hit Caesars Palace as part of a coordinated nationwide raid on illegal sports betting tied to organized crime, and Sanford Waterman is one of the men they walk out with. Agents pull roughly $1.6 million in $100 bills out of the casino that day, a good chunk of it from Waterman’s own lockboxes. He’s charged with running an illegal sports book right out of the same building where he’d pointed a gun at Frank Sinatra. His defense attorney is a young Las Vegas lawyer named Oscar Goodman, who finds a flaw in how the federal wiretaps had been authorized — and by 1975, the case against Waterman and his co-defendants gets thrown out entirely, the biggest federal assault on Vegas bookmaking since Prohibition ending with every single defendant walking away clean.

Sinatra, of course, keeps working — and keeps working at Caesars specifically. He’d switched his allegiance there from the Sands back in 1967, the same year Carl Cohen sent him packing across town, and the gun that stopped him for exactly one night in September 1970 doesn’t so much as put a dent in that relationship. He’s back onstage there again and again through the decade, still headlining, still drawing the room, right through a celebrated 1978 show where witnesses describe him sipping a drink and cracking wise between songs like nothing had ever happened in that building. Caesars kept the man who choked an executive and threatened him with the mob. It fired the executive who stopped him — and the executive it fired turned out to be running his own illegal operation out of the same lockbox he probably kept his employee badge in.