One might have a hard time believing him, at first. Born in Pittsburgh, Manteris followed his Uncle Jack to Sin City in 1978 and never left. Vegas was small then; you could wave to Robert Goulet at a traffic light or chat up Tony Curtis at the grocery store. The city was well in the palm of organized crime, and Manteris was soon surrounded by the kinds of characters who were later portrayed, under aliases, in Martin Scorsese’s “Casino.” “The Bookie” is so rich in Franks (Mastroianni, Regina, Fertitta, Rosenthal), Johnnys (Avello, Tocco), Tonys (Taeubel, Spilotro), and Jimmys (McHugh, Newman, Vaccaro) that I lost track of who was mobbed up, who was down-and-out, and who was genuinely having a good time. Skimming was endemic among bookmakers, enforcement was brutal, and several of Manteris’s early acquaintances met violent ends. He dispenses with these stories quickly: “Tony Spilotro was beaten to death in a cornfield in Illinois that summer.”