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Casino Pen Scene Gif
Nativity Scene Figures. Maria Birth Chapel. Holy Three Kings Comet. Christmas Nativity Scene. Crib Maria Josef. AFAIK the history behind giving pens as a sign of respect among Princeton professors began at some stage during the production or screenwriting of A Beautiful Mind (2001 movie), as there is no such tradition at Princeton or anywhere else.
My daughter and I watched A Beautiful Mind a few weeks ago. Although it’s a film — and a wonderful one at that — I am not reviewing it for Film Friday. Instead, I am focusing on one element of the movie: the Ceremony of the Pens.
A Beautiful Mind tells the story of brilliant, yet schizophrenic, mathematician Dr. John Nash, who in real life went on to win the Nobel prize in economics for his work on game theory.
Early in the film, a young Nash, played by Russell Crowe, watches a professor being handed pens by his colleagues in the Princeton faculty club. Nash is told it’s a mark of respect, a way to recognize a mathematician’s contributions to the field. Many years later, Nash himself is silently presented with pens by his fellow professors, who finally accept and acknowledge him, despite his illness.
It’s a beautiful scene, a poignant scene. And it’s pure Hollywood.
Gifs.com is the fastest way to create animated gifs from Youtube, Facebook, Vimeo and other video sites. Just upload your own video or paste in a URL and click create a gif. At Kings Castle Casino in Lake Tahoe, Nate Jacobson, owner of the casino and the man who co-developed Caesars Palace in Vegas, had a habit of doing lines of coke while watching over his gaming floor. Casino.org is the world’s leading independent online gaming authority, providing trusted online casino news, guides, reviews and information since 1995. Contact Us Meet the Team.
I am so disappointed that Princeton does not really have a Ceremony of the Pens! I’ve dined in Caltech’s faculty club, the Athenaeum, where the paneled walls and dignified oil portraits provide the perfect setting for such a tribute, but they don’t have such a ceremony either. Apparently, no one does.
What better way to salute someone for his or her creative contributions than to symbolically present that instrument of creation: The Pen. How many novels, essays and letters have been written by pens? How many portraits sketched, inventions doodled, buildings designed and equations calculated? Generals have outlined strategy, cooks have passed down family recipes and boys and girls have expanded their horizons by writing to pen pals, all through the medium of the pen.
A pen is a magic wand, a conductor’s baton that can make real the symphony of imagination. And in a more perfect world, the Ceremony of the Pens would exist, and we could all hope that one day our peers might lay them before us, a tribute to our boundless capacity for creation.
Ace Rothstein (Robert De Niro) is surrounded by the press at a Nevada Gaming Commission meeting portrayed in Casino. Rothstein’s lawyer, Oscar Goodman (played by Goodman himself), stands by his side. Photo courtesy of Oscar Goodman.
Though the movie Casino was released more than 22 years ago, it still serves as a reference point for those hoping to understand what real Las Vegas mobsters were like when they were a sinister fixture in the news.
But most movies based on true stories, including Casino, twist the facts for dramatic effect and to compress long histories into a watchable timeframe.
What you see in Casino isn’t exactly the way things were. Case in point: the death of the Spilotro brothers, two mobsters originally from Chicago.
The way the movie portrays it, the brothers — or at least the fictional characters representing Anthony and Michael Spilotro — are beaten with baseball bats in a cornfield and shoved into a shallow grave while still alive.
Not true.
In his 2009 book Family Secrets: The Case That Crippled the Chicago Mob, journalist Jeff Coen details what really happened. Coen covered the Family Secrets trial for the Chicago Tribune. That 2007 trial resulted in convictions and revealed details that weren’t publicly known when the movie came out more than a decade earlier.
Casino Pen Scene Gif Animation
In the 1995 movie, it was baseball bats in a cornfield. But according to trial testimony, the Spilotros were lured to a residence near O’Hare International Airport in Bensenville, a subdivision of “modest homes,” and were beaten to death in the basement. (At the trial, one of the killers, Mob turncoat Nick Calabrese, said he could not recall which house it was.)
Anthony and his brother, Michael, a part-time actor and owner of the Chicago restaurant and Mob hangout Hoagie’s, went to the home in June 1986 believing they were to be promoted within the Outfit.
Although the brothers were suspicious, refusing to go was unthinkable.
When the Spilotros got to the basement, about 15 mobsters pounced on them. Michael had brought a pocket-sized .22-caliber handgun but could not get to it. Anthony was heard asking if he could say a prayer but was swarmed.
In addition to breaking Michael’s nose, the attackers inflicted blunt force injuries over his entire body. They severely bruised Anthony’s face, left temple and chest.
Anthony, 48, had blood in his trachea, lungs and nasal passages and hemorrhaging in the muscles of the larynx. The 41-year-old Michael had a fractured Adam’s apple.
Neither man’s skin was broken, indicating the killers did not use a heavy object such as a baseball bat. The brothers were beaten with fists, knees and feet, according to a pathologist at the trial.
The Spilotros were dead when buried in an Enos, Indiana, cornfield about 100 miles south of the murder house. The brothers were placed in a five-foot grave in only their underwear, one on top of the other.
The cornfield is near land that Outfit boss Joseph “Joey Doves” Aiuppa used for hunting, according to Coen. A farmer discovered the grave, thinking someone had buried a deer. The Spilotros were identified by dental X-rays provided by a third bother, Patrick Spilotro, a dentist.
Why did this happen to Anthony and Michael Spilotro? Mob higher-ups felt the two had to be silenced.
Since the early 1970s, Anthony Spilotro had overseen street rackets in Las Vegas for the Chicago Outfit. He also was keeping an eye on Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, a Chicago bookie handling the skim in Las Vegas for Midwestern Mob bosses.
Ultimately, though, news stories about Spilotro’s violent criminal activities, and his affair with Rosenthal’s wife, a former showgirl at the Tropicana hotel-casino, led to the gruesome outcome in that Bensenville basement.
Anthony Spilotro’s high-profile legal problems were jeopardizing the Outfit’s Las Vegas cash cow, prompting Aiuppa to order him “knocked down.” Michael Spilotro, facing a trial on extortion charges, had to go, too.
That terrifying outcome is not the only place where Casino misses the mark factually. In another example among many from the film, an animated Kansas City mobster pops off in an Italian grocery about the Las Vegas skim while federal authorities listen to his profanity-laced rant through a bug planted in a vent.
In reality, law enforcement authorities learned about the Las Vegas skim while eavesdropping on a conversation between members of the Civella crime family at a bugged back table in Kansas City’s Villa Capri pizzeria. Unlike the movie, there was no humorous scolding mom at the now-demolished Villa Capri nagging her mobster son about his vulgar language.
The only ones at the table were sinister Mob figures, behaving like real-life conspiratorial gangsters, not colorful movie characters.
Larry Henry is a veteran print and broadcast journalist. He served as press secretary for Nevada Governor Bob Miller, and was political editor at the Las Vegas Sun and managing editor at KFSM-TV, the CBS affiliate in Northwest Arkansas. Henry taught journalism at Haas Hall Academy in Bentonville, Arkansas, and now is the headmaster at the school’s campus in Rogers, Arkansas. The Mob in Pop Culture blog appears monthly.
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