Where Are Geri McGee’s Children Today? Casino Left Out the Worst Part HT
In casino, Ginger McKenna dies in a motel hallway. Sharon Stone collapses. The camera pulls back and Dairo’s voice over tells you she overdosed somewhere in Los Angeles alone. And that was the end. There’s a daughter in the film, a single girl called Amy. She appears in a handful of scenes, the custody fight, the driveway, the moment Ginger tries to flee to Lenny’s place with her.
After Ginger dies, the daughter vanishes. Scorsese never tells you what became of her, but here’s the detail the film erased. The one that changes everything you think you know about this story. Jerry McGee didn’t have one child. She had three. a daughter with Lenny Marmmer, the real Lester Diamond, born years before she met Frank Rosenthal, a son with Frank, and a second daughter with Frank, a girl Gary was pressured into having, and according to her own sister, could never bring herself to love. The film collapsed three children into one. And in doing so, it removed the single fact that explains Gary’s entire psychology. The reason she could never break free of the man James Woods played on screen. She didn’t stay connected to Lenny Marmmer because he was her pimp. She stayed connected to him because they shared a daughter named
Robin. That’s not a dramatic theory. That’s parenthood. And it’s the detail Scorsesei left out of the picture. This is the story of where those three children are today and why what happened after the credits rolled is the part of Casino its audience was never allowed to see.
Everyone who’s watched the film knows how Gary’s story ends. Ace survives. Ginger doesn’t. The old Las Vegas dies. The corporations move in. And the story is over. Except it isn’t. Three children inherited the wreckage of the most public marital collapse in Las Vegas history. And the 43 years since November 9th, 1982 have been the real narrative, the one the film was never built to contain.
One of those children became a cardiac surgery physician assistant in Texas who has never spoken a public word about his parents. one became a champion swimmer and US national team manager who in 2023 stood at the Circa Resort in downtown Las Vegas wearing a silk aqua gown and told 600 people her father was a great man and one vanished so completely that her own father’s cremated remains sat uncollected in a Los Angeles morg for 3 years before being dumped in a county mass grave.
gave casino ended at the credits. This story begins there. To understand what those children inherited, you have to understand who their mother actually was because the film didn’t tell you that either. Geraldine McGee was born May 16th, 1936 in Los Angeles to Roy McGee, an auto mechanic, and Leona Alice Pollock McGee, who suffered from severe mental illness that would eventually require institutional care.
The family was poor, not movie poor, genuinely destitute. Jerry’s sister, Barbara, told a journalist they were probably the poorest family in the neighborhood. and Jerry hated it more than anything. She graduated from Van NY High School in 1954. Her classmates included Robert Redford and Don Dale. Then bounced through deadend jobs at Thrifty Drugs, Bank of America, and Lockheed Martin.
Each one a reminder that the poverty she was born into had no intention of letting her go. Everything changed because of a man named Lenny Marmmer. She met him at Van NY High when she was roughly 15. He was older, slick, wore sunglasses indoors. He recognized immediately that her beauty was currency and began entering her in swimsuit contests and dance competitions, splitting the prize money.
He got her pregnant. Their daughter Robin was born in late 1957. They never married, though Marmmer would go on to marry three other women over the course of his life. Around 1960, he convinced Jerry to move to Las Vegas for y bigger opportunities while he remained in Los Angeles, visiting periodically, usually for 2 or 3 days, often for the purpose of borrowing money for whatever scheme had his attention that week.
Jerry arrived in Vegas as a single mother with a toddler and her mentally ill mother in tow. She had nothing. Within 5 years, she had everything. She started as a cocktail waitress, became a Tropicana showgirl, earning roughly $20,000 a year, then evolved into something Las Vegas had never quite seen before. an independent chip hustler who cultivated relationships with high rolling gamblers and earned her income through charm, presence, and nerve.
By the mid 1960s, she was pulling in between 300,000 and $500,000 annually on top of her showgirl salary. She owned her own home. She held blue chip stocks. She was supporting her daughter, her mother, her sister Barbara’s family, and still always Lenny Marmmer. Frank Colada, the mob hitman in Tony Spelatro’s Right Hand, confirmed she earned her living as arm candy for high rollers, not as a sex worker.
There is no documented evidence Gary McGee was ever a prostitute. The film’s suggestion otherwise is a fabrication. And it matters because the woman casino reduced to a hustler with a drug problem was in fact one of the most financially independent women in Las Vegas. The daughter who would one day disappear from public life entirely.
The child the film erased. The one whose existence explained the marmmor connection the audience could never understand. Was growing up in the care of Gary’s mother while Gary built her empire on the strip. And the man who was about to marry Gary and father two more children was watching her from across a casino floor.
Already convinced he could possess what everybody else in Las Vegas only rented. Frank Rosenthal entered Gary’s life around 1968. He was a professional sports better from Chicago with deep connections to the outfit. a numbers man, precise, controlled, obsessive about detail in a way that made him simultaneously brilliant at running casinos and impossible to live with.
He’d been sent to Las Vegas by the Chicago mob to oversee their interests at the Stardust, the Fremont, the Marina, and the Hienda. He saw Gary across a casino floor and pursued her with the same methodical intensity he brought to everything else. They married at Caesar’s Palace on May 4th, 1969. 500 guests comped caviar and champagne.

Oscar Goodman was already their attorney. During the reception, Gary was caught on the phone crying to Lenny Marmmore, saying goodbye to a former life she had no intention of actually leaving behind. Frank admitted later he knew she didn’t love him when they got married. He believed he could build something anyway.
He was wrong, but it took a decade for the evidence to become undeniable. Author Lisa Townsend Rogers, who profiled Jerry in her book Shameless, noted that the film’s casting of Robert Dairo may have been a kindness. Scorsese extended to Lefty for serving as the main source of information for Pelagi’s book.
The film inevitably reflected Frank’s perspective since by the time the book was being written, nearly everyone except Frank was dead. That observation matters because it explains why Casino is fundamentally Frank’s version of the story. Gary never got to tell hers. The marriage produced two children and the circumstances of their births carry a darkness Casino never touched.
Steven Rosenthal was born around 1970. He was the child Gary wanted. She adored him. She spoiled him, showed him off, and had no complications with the son. Stephanie Rosenthal was born around 1973. And her arrival carried weight that would shape everything that came after. Frank pressured Gary into the second pregnancy. Her sister Barbara’s account is blunt.
Being forced to have a child and for that child to be a girl, a girl in competition with her daughter, Robin, made Jerry very upset. She could never warm to Stephanie. Barbara didn’t think Jerry ever forgave Frank for making her go through it, a mother who could not love her youngest daughter.
That detail, absent from every frame of Casino, is the key to understanding why the legacy played out the way it did. The rejected child became the one who would carry the name forward. The adored child chose silence. The pattern wouldn’t become visible for decades, but it was set the moment Stephanie was born into a house where her mother had already decided she wasn’t welcome.
Through the 1970s, The Household at 972 Vegas Valley Drive became a place where the distance between the public performance in the private reality widened until it couldn’t hold. Jerry drank vodka on the rocks, then whiskey. Valium followed, then cocaine. Pelagi’s book captured the effect on the children. In a single observation that should unsettle anyone who watched casino and thought they understood the domestic life behind it.
With Perkadan, she was warm and friendly. She wasn’t able to do much, but the kids were cleaned, dressed, and looking good. When she ran out of them, she was mean. The children lived inside that chemical oscillation every day of their young lives. Steven and Stephanie experienced versions of their mother that alternated with the medication supply.
And Robin, visiting from her grandmother’s care, witnessed a woman who kept telling her she’d be a better mother and kept failing to become one. Robin told Gary during one attempted reconciliation that she felt like she had no mother. One incident the film partially captured reveals the full extent of what the children experienced.
Frank came home to find Stephanie tied by her ankle to her bed with a clothes line. Jerry was out with Tony Spelotro. The affair with Spelotro, Frank’s childhood friend, the outfits enforcer, the man whose presence in their lives made everything exponentially more dangerous, had been ongoing for months.
The driveway gun scene from the film happened almost exactly as depicted. In September of 1980, Jerry brandished a chromeplated 38 caliber snubnse revolver with her name engraved on the pearl handle. Nancy Spelatro arrived and wrestled her to the ground with police assistance, but the film left out what followed.
Jerry’s arrest on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles for attempting to undress in public while intoxicated. Her commitment to the psychiatric ward of Harbor General Hospital in Torrance, California, and the moment Frank arrived to find her in a straight jacket. She was screaming. She wanted him to loosen it, he said he couldn’t.
The divorce was finalized January 16th, 1981. Jerry received $5,000 a month in alimony, her Mercedes, and the jewelry she’d taken from Frank’s safe deposit boxes, reportedly close to $3 million in cash and valuables. She didn’t contest custody of Steven and Stephanie. She let her children go and then she burned through everything.
She fell in with what Paley described as a biker crowd in Southern California. People were taking advantage of her. The money, the jewelry, the stocks, the independence she had spent 15 years building. All of it was consumed in a blur of cocaine, whiskey, and people who wanted what was left. By the end, the woman who’d once earned half a million dollars a year on charm and nerve was functionally destitute.
October 4th, 1982, approximately 7:30 in the evening. Frank Rosenthal walked out of Tony Roma’s restaurant at 620 East Sahara Avenue, sat down in his 1981 Cadillac El Dorado, and turned the key. A bomb attached to the undercarriage detonated. The blast blew the driver’s door off and sent a fireball into the Las Vegas night sky.
He survived because of a manufacturing detail so mundane it reads as fiction. General Motors had installed a steel stabilizing plate beneath the driver’s seat to correct a balancing problem specific to that model year. The plate functioned as unintentional armor, deflecting the force of the explosion downward and outward instead of upward through the seat.
Frank was thrown through the still open driver’s door with burns on both legs, his left arm and the left side of his face, plus broken ribs. UPI journalist Myram Borders heard the explosion and watched him emerge, shouting that they were trying to kill him. Former Nevada Governor Michael O’ Callahan, who just dined at the same restaurant, reportedly walked over and told Frank he was evidently having a rough night.
The prime suspects were never the Spelatros, as the film implies, but figures from the Milwaukee and Kansas City mob factions who feared Frank was cooperating with the FBI. They were right. He was. Nobody was ever charged. The case remains unsolved to this day. 36 days later, Jerry McGee was heard screaming on the sidewalk outside the Beverly Sunset Hotel at 8775 Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.

She stumbled into the lobby and collapsed. Her legs were bruised. She was transported to Cedar Sinai Hospital, one of the best medical facilities in Southern California. 3 days later, November 9th, 1982, she died. She was 46. The Los Angeles County Coroner ruled it an accidental overdose. Cocaine, dasipam, that’s Valium, and whiskey, not heroin.
Casino implies heroin, and shows Ginger collapsing and dying immediately in a motel hallway. Neither is accurate. Jerry was found alive, hospitalized for 3 days, and killed by a drug combination the film never names correctly. Four competing theories have circulated for over four decades. Her sister Barbara believed she was murdered by the same people who’d tried to kill Frank because she knew too much, Lenny.
Marmmer was a person of interest, suspected of stealing what little wealth Gary had left. The biker crowd may have harmed her for her remaining jewelry. And Frank himself could never be fully cleared in public rumor, though he spent approximately $50,000 on a private autopsy that confirmed the accidental finding.
The attending physician reportedly couldn’t rule out foul play. No formal murder investigation was ever opened. The film compresses Gary’s death and the Spilotro brothers murders into what feels like the same moment. In reality, nearly four years separated them. Gary died in November of 1982. Tony and Michael Spyotro were beaten to death in a Bensonville, Illinois basement in June of 1986 by approximately 15 mobsters using only their fists and feet.
No weapons with Anthony reportedly asking if he could say a prayer before they swarmed him. The children, Steven approximately 12, Stephanie approximately nine. Robin, roughly 25, lost their mother five weeks after someone tried to kill their father with a car bomb. The psychological weight of that sequence on children who were still forming their understanding of the world is something no film can hold and no one involved has ever spoken about publicly.
Before I trace what happened to each of them, and the divergence between their lives is more dramatic than anything in Scorsese’s third act, I’d be curious what you think. Three children, three completely different ages, the same catastrophe. Which of them do you think carried the heaviest weight? the one who stayed with Frank, the one who was already an adult, or the one whose disappearance from public life was so complete it erased her from the story entirely.
I’d be interested to hear it. Here is the detail Casino erased that explains everything about what came next. Jerry McGee did not want her youngest daughter. She was pressured into the pregnancy. The child was a girl. competition in Gary’s mind with Robin. And the child she resented, the daughter she could never warm to, became the one who would stand in a ballroom 41 years later and tell a room of strangers that her father was a great man.
Stephanie Rosenthal was approximately 9 years old when her mother died. Within 6 months, Frank pulled her and Steven out of Las Vegas and moved to Lagona Niguel, California, an affluent Orange County community far from the desert and everything it contained. The man who had run four casinos simultaneously for the Chicago Outfit channeled every ounce of his obsessive, meticulous focus into a new operation, his children’s swimming careers.
Both Steven and Stephanie became competitive swimmers in California. Stephanie became something more. She was a prodigy. Frank relocated the family again to Boca Raten, Florida, specifically to access better coaching. Stephanie enrolled at St. Andrews School. And as a freshman, she broke the United States girls high school record in the 100yard backstroke with a time of 56.
41 seconds. Sports Illustrated featured her in its faces in the crowd section in December of 1987. 1988 Nisca. All American records confirm her elite times. Frank attempted to enter her in the 1984 Olympics when she was 11 years old. She made the United States national swimming team and trained under Mark Schubert, one of the most decorated coaches in American swimming history.
People in the sport described her as one of the best agegroup swimmers who ever lived. Today, Stephanie Rosenthal serves as the traveling team manager for Schubert’s mission Viejo Natadoris program. She is a mother of twins. Her Instagram account at step 777 identifies her openly. Daughter of Frank Lefty Rosenthal portrayed in the movie Casino, US national team alum, Mark Schubert’s team manager, Mommy of Twins.

She claims the legacy by name. On August 11th, 2023, Stephanie accepted her father’s induction into the inaugural class of the Sports Gambling Hall of Fame at the Circa Resort and Casino in downtown Las Vegas. The Chicago Sun Times described her wearing a respplendant silk aqua gown and train.
She told the room asked how he wanted to be remembered. He once said he hoped he’d contributed a little to gaming and that he was a great father. She has since appeared on the Hey Big Head Show, a Las Vegas podcast, in an episode titled Inside the Rosenthal Legacy, and in a Tik Tok video filmed at the Venetian Resort sharing stories about growing up in Old School Las Vegas and what Casino got right and wrong.
She is the only one of Gary McGee’s three children who has ever spoken publicly about the family. The daughter who was never wanted became the keeper of the flame. And the irony of that, the structural irony that sits beneath this entire story, like the steel plate beneath Frank’s driver’s seat, is that Gary’s rejection may have been the thing that freed Stephanie to claim the name.
She had nothing to protect. No idyllic maternal bond to preserve through silence. the absence of her mother’s love me and the absence of her mother’s weight, she could step forward because she had less to lose. If you’re finding this worth knowing, a subscribe keeps these coming. Steven Rosenthal is a physician assistant specializing in cardiac and thoracic surgery at Ascension Seat Medical Center in Austin, Texas.
That is almost everything the public record has to say about him. He earned his PA degree from SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University in 2016. His name appears on Doximity and Medical Practice directories. Nowhere else. No interviews, no social media, no public statements about Casino, his parents, his childhood or any of it.
The son Gary adored the child she spoiled the boy she had no trouble loving chose silence so totally it functions as its own statement. He swam competitively alongside Stephanie throughout childhood. Both were elite youth swimmers during the Laguna Niguel and Bokeh Ratan years. their lanes parallel in the water and in the wreckage they were both swimming through.
Somewhere in his 20s or 30s, Steven’s trajectory diverged entirely. He went into medicine. He moved to Texas. He built a career opening chests and repairing hearts, the literal interior of the human body, and never once looked back toward the cameras. The contrast between the two Rosenthal children is the quiet engine of this story.
The adored child chose invisibility. The rejected child chose the spotlight. Steven<unk>’s silence doesn’t read as damage or denial. It reads as the decision of a man who understood exactly what the Rosenthal name carried and decided he would carry something else instead. Frank’s obituaries, Associated Press, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, all noted he was survived by two children. None named them.
The family protected that boundary even in death. Steven Rosenthal fixes hearts in Austin, Texas. He does not discuss the ones that broke him. The ending Casino gave Ace Rothstein is a lie. Not a simplification, a fabrication. The film puts him in a diminished San Diego sports book, narrating his own irrelevance, a man who used to run the town, now watching point spreads on a television screen with retirees and tourists.
The real Frank Rosenthal spent his last 26 years as something the film couldn’t imagine. and Scorsesei had no interest in depicting a single father who organized his entire life around his children. He ran a sports bar in Boca Ratan called Crocs, a place where he held court with old associates and new acquaintances, always impeccably dressed, always work in the room.
He operated a personal website frank rosenthal.com that stayed active for years after his death featuring photographs of Gary with Sief Freed and Roy clips from his 1970s television show at the Stardust and detailed commentary on the gaming industry he’d helped build. He consulted for offshore gambling operations from his Miami Beach apartment on Collins Avenue.
Sports Illustrated called him the greatest living expert on sports gambling. He appeared on DLine, Night Line, Frontline, and multiple A and E specials. Always polished, always controlled, always giving exactly as much as he wanted to give and nothing more. He was never charged with a crime. He never served a day in prison.
And the thing that consumed his private hours was not the skim, not the outfit, not the gaming commission hearings that had driven him out of Nevada. It was Stephanie’s backstroke splits and Steven’s meat schedules and the logistics of traveling to age group swim competitions across California and South Florida.
The man who had once calculated the vigorous on a thousand college football games a week was now calculating relay assignments and checking lane times at high school meets in Orange County. Oscar Goodman, Frank’s longtime attorney, later the mayor of Las Vegas, said Sharon Stone’s performance was almost as real as Gary Rosenthal would have been if she had played herself.
Frank himself rated Dairo’s portrayal a seven on a scale of 1 to 10. He knew the film told his version of the story and he knew his version left things out. He died of a heart attack on October 13th, 2008 at 79 years old in his Collins Avenue condo. A retired FBI agent revealed in 2015 that both Frank and Jerry had been top echelon FBI informants during the Las Vegas years.
A detail entirely unknown when Casino was made and one that reframes everything the audience thinks they understand about the Rosenthal marriage. Frank’s code name was reportedly Achilles. The information went both ways and neither Frank nor Jerry knew the other was talking. Frank’s second act, the casino boss who became a swim dad, is a question I think is worth sitting with before we get to the last child.
Do you think it was genuine? The man who ran the skim for the Chicago outfit, who survived an assassination attempt, and whose wife died under circumstances that have never been fully explained? Did he actually become a devoted father? Or was fatherhood the last available identity for a man who’d been stripped of everything else? I’d be curious where you land.
Robin Marmmer is approximately 68 years old. That is nearly everything the public record can tell you about her. Gary’s firstborn. The daughter whose existence the film erased entirely. The child whose birth created the bond between Gary and Lenny that the audience could never understand.
The girl who told her mother she felt like she had no mother effectively disappeared from documented life sometime after 1982. She did not leave Las Vegas with Frank and the children. She was roughly 25 when Gary died, already an adult. and her father was Lenny Marmmer, a man with no money, no stability, and no demonstrated capacity for taking care of anyone, including himself.
Robin had been raised mostly by her grandmother, Alice, while Jerry worked the strip. When Alice’s mental illness worsened and she required institutional care, Robin lost the one stable figure in her life. Genealogical databases show alternate names. Robin Lin Marmmer, Robin L.
Fisk, Robin Marmmer Estrada, suggesting marriages, possibly multiple, somewhere in Southern California in the decades that followed. One source places her in Orange County, but no interviews surface, no social media profiles, no news articles, no public records of substance from the last 30 years. Frank Rosenthal’s obituaries did not mention her.
They listed his survivors as his two biological children, Steven and Stephanie. Robin was never counted among them despite having been part of the household during the marriage years, visible in a 1976 family court photograph standing alongside the Rosenthal children and their attorney Oscar Goodman. She is the ghost in this story, the missing third that makes the other two comprehensible.
And her absence reveals the film’s deepest failure of understanding. In Casino, Lester Diamond is a parasite, a pimp clinging to Ginger for money, manipulating her through some murky psychological leverage that the screenplay never fully explains. James Woods plays him as SE’s incarnate and the audience accepts the portrayal because the movie offers no alternative.
The real Lenny Marmmer’s hold on Gary McGee was the most ordinary force in the world. They had a child together. Robin was the bond. Not exploitation, not pimping, not some unspecified power dynamic from the streets. Parenthood. The film converted a co-parenting bond into pathology because its narrative architecture couldn’t accommodate a third child and in doing so it made Ginger McKenna less comprehensible and Lester Diamond less real.
There is a pattern embedded in these three lives, a shape that only becomes visible once all three arcs are laid side by side. In families built inside organized crime, the children who were most loved often vanish. They insulate themselves by severing the connection entirely. The children who were least wanted, the ones who arrived under protest and grew up carrying the lightest share of expectation, sometimes become the ones who stepped forward to claim what everyone else abandoned.
Steven adored disappeared into a surgical suite in Texas. Robin, the bridge between worlds, the daughter who explained everything, disappeared entirely. Stephanie, the child Gary resented from birth, became the public face of the Rosenthal name. The inheritance paradox, the weight passed to the one who was never supposed to carry it.
The house at 972 Vegas Valley Drive is still standing inside the gated Las Vegas Country Club community. Frank bought it in the early 1970s for approximately $15,000. It last sold in December for 2020 for $835,000. The 3266q ft twostory home retains its bulletproof windows, one still bearing a bullet mark from the night Gary waved the 38, its soundproof insulation, its steel commercialrade framing, the original smoked mirrors rumored to have come from the Stardust, and a gold leaf dining room ceiling that still catches the light the way it did when the Rosenthal family sat beneath it for dinners that were by every account increasingly
silent. A real estate agent who listed the property described it as the Fort Knox of Las Vegas. He was trying not to be killed by the mob and trying not to be heard by the FBI. The parking lot where they tried to kill Frank Tony Romas at 620 East Sahara Avenue closed in 2014. A Hustler Hollywood adult boutique opened in the building in 2016.
The entire Sixth and Sahara Center Plaza sold on December 31st, 2025 for $4.95 million to new ownership. The neighboring Marie calendar sites boarded up, its windows dark. Jerry McGee is interred at Mount Sinai Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles. No photographs of her headstone are publicly available.
The cemetery restricts photo requests. She rests under the name Gary McGee Rosenthal in a Jewish cemetery because Frank was Jewish. And whatever else their marriage was, it apparently extended to where she would spend eternity. Frank Rosenthal has no grave. for years. Find a grave listed him at Visitation Cemetery in Norfolk, New York.
In February of 2026, journalist William P. Barrett obtained Frank’s Florida death certificate and discovered the truth. Cremation at Abco Crematory in Fort Lauderdale. No burial of remains. The find a grave listing was a hoax posted by a single entry anonymous user three months after his death. His ashes were never interoured. Nobody knows where they are.
The man whose life inspired a three-hour Scorsese film has no physical place in the ground. And then there is Lenny Marmer, the real Lester Diamond, the man whose hold on Gary the film could never explain because it erased the daughter standing between them. Lenny died on August 24th, 2013 in Los Angeles at approximately 76 years old.
His cremated remains sat unclaimed in a county facility for 3 years. Nobody came. Not Robin, his daughter, the child who was the entire reason for his connection to Jerry. Not his three ex-wives. Not a friend, a relative, or an acquaintance. On November 30th, 2016, Leonard Marmer’s ashes were buried in a mass ceremony at the Los Angeles County Crematorium Cemetery in Boille Heights alongside the unclaimed remains of strangers.
The man who recognized Jerry McGee’s beauty when she was 15, who fathered the daughter the film pretended didn’t exist, who visited Las Vegas every few months to borrow money and remind everyone he was still around. ended up in an unmarked grave in a county cemetery uncollected while the daughter Jerry never wanted stood in silk at the circa resort and told the world her father was a great Man.
