Ed Becker

Ed Becker was a Las Vegas promoter, businessman, private investigator and author.

He was the entertainment director at the Riviera Hotel and Casino under Gus Greenbaum at Las Vegas.[1] In 1956 he met singer Frank Sinatra through a cousin of Sinatra's, they became friends.[2] In the 1960s he began to work part-time for private investigator Julian Blodgett, a former FBI agent.[3] He later founded his own investigative firm, Ed Becker Associates.[4]

Becker was hired as a researcher for Ed Reid's book The Grim Reapers: The Anatomy of Organized Crime in America (1970).[5] He came to know Reid through their mutual friend Hank Greenspun, the publisher of the Las Vegas Sun.[6] He co-authored with the journalist Charles Rappleye All-American Mafiosi: The Johnny Roselli Story, published in 1991 by Doubleday.[7][8] Becker had known Roselli personally from his days in Las Vegas. He was introduced to Sidney Korshak through him.[9]

He was one of a plethora of people interviewed for the book Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas (1995) by Nicholas Pileggi, later adapted into the film Casino by Martin Scorsese.[10] He contributed the afterword to a 2000 Barricade Books edition of Hickman Powell's 1939 biography of Lucky Luciano, Lucky Luciano: The Man Who Organized Crime in America (original title: Ninety Times Guilty).[11]

Becker died in 2007.[5]

References

  1. ^ Summers, Anthony (2005). Sinatra: The Life. Knopf. p. 358.
  2. ^ Carpozi, George (1991). Poison Pen: The Unauthorized Biography of Kitty Kelley. Barricade Books. pp. 260–1.
  3. ^ Summers, Anthony (1993). Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover. G.P. Putnam's Sons. p. 327.
  4. ^ Carpozi, George (1991). Poison Pen: The Unauthorized Biography of Kitty Kelley. Barricade Books. p. 260.
  5. ^ a b "Murdering the Mayor of Paradise". NPR. 1 November 2018.
  6. ^ Russo, Gus (2006). Supermob: How Sidney Korshak and His Criminal Associates Became America's Hidden Power Brokers. Bloomsbury USA. p. 312.
  7. ^ Talbot, David (1 December 2005). "The top five books on the Kennedy assassination". Salon.
  8. ^ Smith, John L. (22 November 2013). "Figures in Kennedy assassination had many links to Las Vegas". Las Vegas Review-Journal.
  9. ^ Russo, Gus (2006). Supermob: How Sidney Korshak and His Criminal Associates Became America's Hidden Power Brokers. Bloomsbury USA. pp. 142 & 214.
  10. ^ Pileggi, Nicholas (1995). Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas. Simon & Schuster. p. 9.
  11. ^ Becker, Ed (2000). "Afterword". Lucky Luciano: The Man Who Organized Crime in America. Barricade Books.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.