It’s 1970, and Neil Scartozzi is cutting hair in a Detroit bookie joint that doubles as a barbershop, feeling disillusioned about the mob life he’s facing and wondering how to get out. He’s not made. Hasn’t killed anyone, only gone to collect money. And the “life,” he says, isn’t for him. So one day he picks up a Las Vegas newspaper left behind by a customer, reads the classifieds and there it is, as if blazing in neon: “Barber stylist wanted. MGM Grand Hotel Las Vegas Nevada.”

A 19-year-old Scartozzi makes the long-distance call, heads to Vegas dressed “sugar sharp,” is hired and returns to Detroit to sell everything he owns. Like those who’d come here on vacation and never left, he was thoroughly amused by his golden ticket westward, to a gambling city in the sun writing its own story. And he was now in its chapters.

“I was excited, because all the way here, I’m saying, ‘Wow what has just happened to me, man?’ I landed the best job in Las Vegas at the best hotel on the whole Strip, from nothing. From obscurity to this.”

Scartozzi rented a $50-a-week studio on Flamingo Road, drove a limo and went to baccarat school while waiting for his Nevada barber’s license, heading to Caesars Palace every day to stand by the rail and watch the dealers in the pit. “The white gloves, tuxedos. I said, ‘That’s me.’ I always had a reputation for looking very sharp. I had a suit and tie, and I always present myself properly. My father always told me, ‘Dress for success. You can never take first impressions back.’”

After securing his license, Scartozzi cut hair at the MGM (now Bally’s) from 10 to 6, then dealt baccarat at Castaways from 8 to 4 in the morning—a three year stint until, he says, someone asked him to manage the salon at the Riviera. Instead, he negotiated an ownership agreement. Like his arrival in Vegas, this was dipped in a rose-colored cinematic lens gilded with gratitude: “Here’s a kid coming from a mob barbershop with nothing, to this. The Riviera was the Tiffany of the Strip. It was the most beautiful place. Dean Martin played there, Liberace played there. I started cutting all of their hair.”

Hair cutting would be Scartozzi’s story, and he would become Las Vegas legendary. Anytime someone wanted to write about a Las Vegas icon from yesteryear, who looks like he’s been sealed in a bubble from the past, they’d find him: dressed in tailored suits, Italian boots, gold chains and jeweled cuff links, with tan skin and a jet-black pompadour. The articles talk of days when he groomed stars and mobsters, snipping the locks of Milton Berle, Red Buttons, Frank Sinatra, Liberace and even Tony “the Ant” Spilotro. A photo of Scartozzi with MC Hammer hung on the wall, next to framed movie and play posters, by-products of a brief acting career that began with three years at Joe Bernard’s acting school in the ’80s.

“I would sit in class and watch these students do Shakespeare and scenes from movies, thinking, ‘Geez, I don’t know if I can do that. I’m a street guy from Detroit,’” he says, sitting in his girlfriend’s apartment on a hot afternoon. “One day I said, ‘Listen I’m spending this money, it’s 600 bucks, I gotta get my feet wet.’” The puddle he dove into was an 8-minute improv sketch with another student. Then he was doing monologues in class, catching the acting bug, he says, until he got cast in local theater productions and television shows.

But his focus, as always, was the salon he ran with his ex-wife, Silvia, who cut hair by his side. They’d married in 1976, divorced 15 years later and continued to work together as friends. “She paid her $300. I paid my $300. We went to dinner the same night to celebrate our divorce from each other.”

While the Riviera gradually lost the reputation of its early days, Scartozzi continued on in his Celebrity Club barbershop. He started there with one Vegas, ending with another. By the time the Riviera closed this year, it had gone, he says, from “fantastic and fabulous to dismal,” each remodeling over the decades making it worse, the once-glamorous clientele disappearing.

“The older that Las Vegas got, the younger it got. People were carrying coolers up the walkway to take to their room, because they were too cheap to buy anything from the hotel,” he says. “That’s the kind of clientele it turned out to be. In the old days I remember people coming to me and showing me their new suits they couldn’t wait to wear that night. I remember guys wouldn’t even go to the swimming pool until they got manicured and pedicured in case they met a girl. They wanted to have clean hands and feet. That’s how particular it was back then.”

Scartozzi was just as particular. He worked in a suit, not a hair out of place. “My clients loved it, they’d go home and brag and say, ‘Yeah my barber cuts hair in a suit.’

“I’ve always had great respect for my clients,” he says, adding that most of them have been locals in recent years. “These people are so cool. They’ve been with me through thick and thin.”

But he doesn’t have that fondness for the Riviera anymore, and doesn’t mind that he was out sick with bronchitis during its final week of operation, saying only, “I’m saddened because of the way it was and the way it ended up.”

His phone rings to the theme from The Godfather. He shoots the breeze with a client for a minute, and before hanging up, says, “Thank you for staying with me. Thank you for being loyal to me. I appreciate it.”

Now in his 60s, Scartozzi begins his next chapter this month at Innovative Hair on Flamingo, where he’s been getting his own hair done for five years. His girlfriend, Candice Hurst, sets a chicken salad sandwich in front of him and they joke about their relationship. They met at the Bootlegger two years ago. She’d been in town for two weeks, here to write a book about her career, particularly the 10 years she sang with James Brown (including a response to the steamy tabloid gossip about her and Brown’s wife). That night she sang Hoagy Carmichael’s “The Nearness of You.”

“When we go out we stop traffic,” he says. With a laugh, she adds:

“They don’t know who we are and what we do, but they know it’s something.”