LAS VEGAS - The Stardust, the neon-wrapped casino with a mobbed-up past witnessed its last roll of the dice Wednesday.
It'll be razed early next year to make way for the $4 billion Echelon Place resort.
The Stardust opened July 2, 1958, as the world's largest hotel and catered to middle America with $6-a-night rooms and low-minimum stakes gambling.
But as bigger, classier casinos sprung up around it in the late 1980s and '90s and patrons began shelling out more for rooms, food and drinks, its luster began to fade.
The resort became famous for its mob connections. In the 1995 movie "Casino," Robert De Niro played a character inspired by the finely tailored Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal, who ran the hotel-casino in the mid-1970s.
In its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, Elvis Presley would drop by. One night, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin showed up at the "Moby Dick" restaurant in the Stardust as it was closing. It reopened in a hurry.
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