Being Oscar (18 page)

Cullotta, like Tony, had come to Las Vegas from Chicago. He had a pizza parlor called “The Upper Crust” and appeared to be one of those hangers-on types. I never liked him. Later Cullotta would claim that I had represented him, but that wasn’t true.

I bumped into Cullotta once while he was on his way to court. His lawyer had an office in the same building, and they were coming down the stairs through our lobby. Cullotta asked me, “How do I look?”

I told him he should be wearing a tie because it was important to show respect for the court. He said he didn’t have one, so we found one in the office. Then he said he didn’t know how to tie a knot, so I showed him. In hindsight, I probably should have strangled him with it.

After the Bertha’s bust, Cullotta cut a deal with the government. Among other things, he had been suspected of the murder of a guy named Sherwin “Jerry” Lisner. Lisner was found dead
in the backyard pool of his Las Vegas home in 1979. He had been shot multiple times.

When Cullotta agreed to cooperate, he said he was the shooter in the Lisner hit, but claimed it was ordered by Tony. He also tied Tony to the infamous M&M murders in Chicago and said Tony was the brains behind the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang.

This was another example of law enforcement’s willingness to deal with despicable people in order to make cases against individuals like Tony. Cullotta eventually admitted to being involved in four murders, yet the government was happy to use him as a witness and to vouch for his credibility in front of a jury. As far as I was concerned, he was a low-life. The FBI hated Cullotta when they were investigating him, but after he flipped, they fell in love with him. He was still the same rotten person he was when he was on the streets, but now he was their guy and could do no wrong.

He ended up getting eight years—not bad for four murders. And I think he actually spent little more than a year in jail. When he came out, he became this “Mafia expert” and gave talks and made appearances. It was as if he had become Professor Cullotta, which disgusted me.

Shortly after word got out that Cullotta had flipped, John Spilotro’s home was shot up. Somebody sprayed his house with gunfire in a drive-by. No one was ever charged, but speculation is that some of the investigators who were working the Tony Spilotro case were behind it. They were “celebrating” Cullotta’s decision.

That’s not the way law enforcement is supposed to conduct its business.

But the mob also had changed. Cullotta was not the kind of guy who would have made it to the inner circle of any organized crime group twenty years earlier. The oath of omerta, the code of silence, meant something back then.

This is not to justify or defend the Mafia, but merely an attempt to explain it. Those so-called “men of honor” from the 1930s and 1940s were different than the wiseguys of the 1980s. Some of them—not all of them, but some—truly believed they were part of a special society. They lived by their own code. They were outlaws, but they had rules and—I know it sounds bizarre—ethics.

Cooperating with law enforcement was unheard-of. To them, the Mafia was a way of life. If someone was arrested and sent to prison, his family would be looked out for. When he finished his time and came home, there would be a job waiting for him. A lot of that had fallen by the wayside by the 1980s. For many of these guys, the Mafia wasn’t a way of life, but a way to make money. And when they got jammed up and were looking at a prison sentence, omerta wasn’t part of their mindset. Instead, they looked at it from a business perspective: how do I cut my losses?

Cooperating with law enforcement was the simple answer. And so in case after case in city after city, you saw the government making deals with murderers, extortionists, and drug dealers. Cullotta fit into that category.

So did Aladena “Jimmy the Weasel” Fratiano, another Mafia snitch who had the perfect nickname. I was with Tony in San Francisco a few years earlier when we crossed paths with Fratiano. We had gone up there for a grand jury appearance, and Fratiano was in the hallway of the courthouse when we got there, ready to testify against Tony.

Fratiano was a big-time Mafioso who had turned rat. He saw Tony and gave him the finger. Although he was surrounded by all his handlers, FBI agents, and prosecutors, Tony wanted to go after him. I think Tony would have ripped his head off. Fratiano was very smug. I looked at him, and the only thing I could think of was, “This guy’s a mouse practicing to be a rat.”

Fratiano was never able to hurt Tony with his testimony, but Cullotta was another story. The only thing he had to deal with was information about Tony Spilotro, and so he gave the feds what they wanted. I believe he made a lot of it up, but the FBI was only too happy to make a deal with this devil.

That was the background, the buzz, the tension in Las Vegas in October 1982 when Lefty Rosenthal’s car was blown up.

The next time I saw Lefty, he was lying in his bed at home still trying to figure out who was behind it. He never said he thought it was Tony, but after that incident, he was a changed person. He wasn’t as arrogant. I think it took him down a peg, humanized him, showed him his mortality. Shortly after that he went through a divorce proceeding. I couldn’t get involved in that because I knew his wife Geri. I advised both of them, but I couldn’t be the lawyer for either one of them.

I remember thinking that things were getting out of hand. To see something like this happen on the street was mind-boggling. I never thought Rosenthal would end up in that kind of spot. I had a lot of respect for his acumen as a gambler and for the way he ran a casino; he was great at that, perhaps one of the best. But you have to understand, he was not a lovable fellow.

Still, the car bombing showed that in the world in which he did business, somebody—maybe more than one person—considered him expendable.

Tony never said anything about the car bombing. I always look for the unusual: when somebody dies, I go to the funeral and look around for who isn’t there. I thought it was very odd that Tony never brought up the bombing, and that we never had any type of discussion about it. He had no opinion, no speculation about who did it. I wouldn’t bring it up because it wasn’t my place. I was a “need-to-know” lawyer. If you have a criminal case, I want all the information available that will help me
defend you. But if there’s no case, I don’t need to know what else is going on in your life.

I said there never were any bombings in Las Vegas, but that’s not entirely true. There had been a couple, but it wasn’t the soup of the day. In Las Vegas, the Chicago way of doing things—a .22 bullet to the head—was more common.

When I first got to Las Vegas, somebody was blown to smithereens in a parking lot at one of the casinos, but that was the exception. When the mob was in control, there really were few murders in town. The rule was, if they were going to kill you, they took you to Arizona or California. The idea was not to bring attention to the area. It was bad for business, and they didn’t want to scare away the tourists. Kansas City was where there were bombings.

There was one funny bomb-plot story about Ash Resnick, a guy who was a casino executive at Caesars. Ash was a big guy who had played for the Boston Celtics when he was younger. He was very well liked, but he apparently had a problem with a guy named Chuckie Berns, one of the city’s more notorious cat burglars. Berns spoke with a heavy Russian accent. He was picked up on a wiretap talking about blowing Ash up. When he was asked when he was going to do it, he said in that thick accent of his, “Boom, boom. Ash Vensday.” Whoever was listening told Ash, and consequently, there was no boom boom.

At the time of the Lefty Rosenthal car bombing, I was representing members of four different crime families who were at odds with one another. I didn’t realize this until I saw the movie
Casino
. I just knew they paid me well and treated me great; I had no idea there were factions. If I had known all that was going on at the time, I would have charged a lot more money, and would have had my own private plane and an island in the Caribbean.

Every day was an eye-opener. People I thought were clowns or jokes were the ones making the skim work for the hidden owners in a half dozen casinos. I wasn’t a big fan of Carl Thomas, but everybody seemed to love him. He was indicted with Nick Civella, the alleged mob boss, in Kansas City for skimming cash out of the Tropicana. I had met Thomas through Jay Sarno. Like so many of these casino guys, Carl was a gentleman’s gentleman. He was very generous, and always polite. I thought he was a legitimate businessman. He owned a place called Slots-A-Fun on the Las Vegas Strip across from the Riviera and next door to Sarno’s Circus-Circus. It was like a pinball arcade except it was full of slot machines. It was a joint where they offered customers hot dogs and beer in the hopes that the food would be enough to draw them in as they walked along the Strip.

While his business establishment wasn’t anything like the city’s gambling palaces, Thomas nevertheless was a mover and shaker in town. He wined and dined with all the important people. For twenty-three years he was part of the society—whatever that means—of Las Vegas. I had no idea of the role he was playing.

But he was picked up on a wiretap telling Civella and those guys in Kansas City how to work the skim. He went to great extremes to make sure he was not followed when he traveled to Kansas City. They would meet at this secret location and Nick apparently told Carl to take a train, a bus, or walk through the desert if he thought he was being followed. Carl always took a circuitous route to these meetings, which took place in the basement of the home of one of Civella’s relatives. Unfortunately for
Thomas, Nick Civella, and several other fellows, the feds found out about the location and managed to have the room bugged. They got a complete discussion of the skimming operation on tape.

When I got a look at the transcripts of that conversation and the FBI affidavits, it was as if my world turned upside down. It was unreal. Things I had taken for granted weren’t so. It was like Alice in Wonderland.

Joe Agosto was another person who got indicted in the Tropicana case. He had been represented by my law office in an immigration dispute before the U.S. Supreme Court. He spoke with a really thick Italian accent and wore a silly hat. I always thought of him as a go-fer, and not much else. It wasn’t even clear that he was a citizen. There was a dispute over whether he was born here or in Italy. The story he told was that he was born here, and that his parents sent him to live with an aunt in Italy when he was a child. He came back and took over as the producer at the Folies Bergere at the Tropicana. I thought he was a clown; a chauffeur for some people. Turns out he was an inside man for the mob.

Civella was my client in the case. I had no idea he was involved with these casinos and the skims. I was representing him in cases in Kansas City, but I never knew he had relationships with the guys back here until the Tropicana indictment. I just knew him as someone who loved to come to Las Vegas. Even after they banned him, he used to sneak in wearing a disguise.

I realized that it was like a spider web: I was running from court to court representing my clients, attacking the wiretaps, fighting for their rights under the Fourth Amendment. Never once did I hear about a skim. I started reading this stuff, and my eyes were popping out of my head.

Civella’s problem was that he liked to talk. And back in Kansas City, they had this mistaken belief that if they used their
lawyer’s office, it was sacrosanct; that there was no way the government could be listening. Nick and some of his guys would get on the phone in the lawyer’s office and think they were immune from government wiretaps. That’s how the Tropicana skimming case got made.