Read Cullotta: The Life of a Chicago Criminal, Las Vegas Mobster and Government Witness Online
Authors: Dennis N. Griffin
While Frank Cullotta was in prison, Tony Spilotro moved to Las Vegas. The Outfit had interests in several casinos there and Tony’s old pal Lefty Rosenthal was overseeing their gambling operations. But with so much money involved, an enforcer was needed to assist Lefty as necessary. With his reputation as a whatever-it-takes type of guy, Spilotro was a logical choice for the job. So in 1971, Tony, his wife Nancy, and their adopted son Vincent headed for the gambling and entertainment oasis in Southern Nevada.
Soon after settling into town, Tony made his debut as a businessman. His first venture was opening a jewelry and gift shop at the Circus Circus Hotel and Casino. Concessions in major casinos were generally hard to come by, especially for people with known ties to organized crime. According to Nevada gaming regulations, any casino doing business with such people could lose its license. Nevertheless, Circus Circus owner Jay Sarno chose to ignore the rules and let the mob-connected Spilotro open his shop. The fact that Sarno had obtained around $20 million in Teamster loans may very well have influenced his decision.
Las Vegas was also ideal for an experienced loanshark like Tony. The casinos paid low wages, which many employees couldn’t stretch from paycheck to paycheck. It was a golden opportunity for someone with money to lend and the ability to get it back.
In August 1972, Tony was indicted for the 1963 murder of Leo Foreman. He was arrested and lodged in the Clark County Jail. Spilotro wasn’t the only person charged in Foreman’s murder. In Chicago, the DeStefano brothers, Mad Sam and Mario, were named as co-defendants.
Tony received troubling news when he learned that Mad Sam, out of Stateville prison after serving a five-year sentence on a conspiracy conviction, was planning to act as his own attorney. Even worse, Sam had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Rumor had it that he was contemplating making a deal with prosecutors so he wouldn’t have to die in prison. There was no doubt that any such arrangement would require Sam to give up Tony and Mario.
Tony took matters into his own hands and went to Outfit boss Tony Accardo. Five weeks before the trial, a person or persons unknown fired two shotgun blasts into Mad Sam’s chest. In June 1973, Tony was acquitted of the Foreman charges. He was off the hook in Chicago, at least for the time being. But Tony’s presence in Vegas was far from unnoticed.
In Tony’s first three years in Vegas, more gangland-style murders were committed there than in the previous 25 years combined. A casino executive and his wife were gunned down in front of their home, another casino executive was murdered in a parking lot, a prominent lawyer was blown up in his Cadillac, a loanshark victim went missing, and another casino boss was beaten and crippled for life. A witness against Spilotro in a fraud case in Chicago was murdered. Two Caesars Palace employees, one a pit boss, were killed gangland style in Las Vegas. And a San Diego real estate investor with points in several mob-run casinos was murdered with a .22 pistol, Spilotro’s weapon of choice.
It didn’t matter whether or not Spilotro was directly responsible for the violence. People, including the cops, believed he was, and as his reputation for viciousness grew, so did his boldness.
Not only was Tony Spilotro becoming more powerful. His organization was growing as well. By 1975, Tony’s entourage had increased dramatically, with the arrival of his brother John and an influx of bookies, loansharks, burglars, and other heavies from Chicago. He moved his operations from Circus Circus to the Dunes, then the Las Vegas Country Club, and finally another jewelry store, the Gold Rush. The two-story building located at 228 West Sahara, just off the Strip, had a front door that could be operated by a buzzer located behind the counter; a private security company regularly swept the building for electronic bugs and monitored the alarm system. The second floor housed communications equipment, including two radio transmitters and receivers and five scanners that monitored police and FBI activities. Gang members with binoculars were sometimes stationed on the roof or parked on the street looking for signs of law-enforcement surveillance operations. It was the perfect set-up to accommodate the growing inventory of loot from Spilotro’s thriving burglary ring.
Tony, his brother John, and Herbert “Fat Herbie” Blitzstein, a 300-pound convicted bookie from Chicago, operated the store itself. A loaded 9mm semi-automatic pistol and a .45 revolver were kept behind the counter, should anyone be foolish enough to try to rob the robbers. And Tony even had two cops, a detective and a sergeant in the police department’s anti-crime unit, working for him from the inside.
Although he never officially attained “Don” status, the attention Tony Spilotro received from the law was nearly the same as that bestowed on higher-ranking mobsters. In spite of being almost continuously under investigation and a suspect in some 25 murders and countless other felonies, Tony conducted his affairs in Las Vegas for more than a decade without being convicted of even a minor offense. Part of the reason for that impressive run could be his skills as a criminal; another likely factor was that his reputation and willingness to use violence made witnesses against him scarce.
The FBI had been investigating Spilotro and his gang for years and by March 1978, they’d developed sufficient probable cause to obtain warrants authorizing them to monitor the activities of the mobsters through the use of wiretaps and electronic eavesdropping. In addition, the feds had managed to infiltrate the Spilotro operation via an undercover agent.
By the middle of June, after 79 days of wiretaps, eight thousand conversations had been recorded on 298 tapes. The FBI had amassed enough evidence to obtain search warrants for 83 locations. On June 19, the warrants were executed simultaneously, one of them at the Gold Rush. Some four thousand pieces of jewelry were seized from the store, of which 1,400 were later identified as being stolen.
The feds had collected a lot of items that might have led to convictions and prison time for Tony and his boys. That was not to be, though. A U.S. magistrate later ruled that the raiding agents had gone far beyond the scope authorized in the search warrants and that nearly all the evidence gathered was inadmissible. Chalk up another victory for Spilotro. But a downside arrived later in the year: In October, Tony’s name was added to Nevada’s Black Book, barring him from all casinos.
In addition to his many criminal activities, Tony became involved in another thing he shouldn’t have: He began having an affair with Geri Rosenthal, Lefty’s wife.
The once-close relationship between the two men had been on the skids for a while. Lefty was having licensing problems with the Nevada Gaming Control Board and placed part of the blame on Spilotro’s presence. And then Geri admitted to her husband that she was having an affair with Tony. Lefty was certainly angry and hurt, but he was also scared. He made Geri promise not to tell Spilotro that she had confessed. There was no telling what the bosses in Chicago would do if they discovered their Las Vegas enforcer had become involved with their embattled inside-man’s wife. Lefty reasoned that Tony would be afraid that he, the aggrieved husband, might complain to Chicago. Knowing that people who posed a threat to Tony tended to have a brief life expectancy, he told Geri that if the volatile Spilotro learned Lefty knew the truth, he’d probably kill them both.
Tony’s first seven years in Las Vegas were eventful, to say the least. He was firmly entrenched as the King of the Strip and his tentacles reached far and wide. Money was coming in from a variety of illegal sources. Allegations of criminal acts rolled off him like water off a duck’s back. The federal and local agencies investigating him had problems of their own, based on some of their own operatives being loyal or at least friendly to organized crime, and they didn’t trust each other on the organizational level. The law seemingly was unable to lay a glove on him. It was true that his relationship with Lefty Rosenthal had gone sour, but the one with his former friend’s wife was perking along and, to his knowledge, wasn’t known to the oddsmaker. All seemed to be good in his realm.
When Tony reached out to Frank Cullotta to join him in Las Vegas, he was more than likely feeling somewhat invincible. Asking a man like Frank—a master thief and killer who had proved his trustworthiness over the years—to join his team was a logical move.
What Tony may not have realized was that his victories over the law had only been the initial skirmishes. The battle was far from over; in fact, it was only beginning. Things were happening in the law-enforcement arena that soon began to turn the tide. The FBI was making personnel moves and preparing to launch a full-court press to take Tony down. And in November 1978, Clark County voters made a change at the top of their police department, electing a reform candidate who had vowed to put Tony and his gang in jail or run them out of town.
When Frank arrived in Las Vegas in early 1979, one of his first stops was at the Gold Rush, Tony Spilotro’s store and headquarters. After touching base with Tony, Frank rented a condo at a place called the Marie Antoinette, at 205 East Harmon Avenue. It was a beautiful place and Frank’s unit was located right by the pool. Everything was furnished except for the television.
After getting settled in, Frank met Tony for dinner to discuss what his function was going to be.
“I want you to be my eyes, ears, and muscle,” Tony said.
“It sounds like I’m going to be pretty busy,” Frank smiled. “Seriously, though, I’ll probably need some help to keep up with things. What do you think?”
“Sure, bring in whoever you want.”
Frank got to work lining up his crew. One of the first men to join him was Leo Guardino, a Chicago burglar who was already living in Las Vegas. Guardino was trying to go legit, but was having trouble landing a decent job. When Frank reached out to him, he was more than ready to listen to his proposal.
When they got together Frank made his pitch. “I’m working for Tony Spilotro and I’m putting a crew together. You interested?”
“What’s the setup?”
“We’ll do our own scores and any that Tony tells us about. All we have to do is kick back some of the money from our jobs to Tony and fulfill our other obligations to him.”
“What kind of obligations?”
Frank shrugged. “That depends. He’ll probably want us to muscle people once in a while. Maybe shake down drug dealers and renegade bookies, things like that.”
“I don’t mind a little rough stuff, but I’m not a killer. I don’t want to get into that kind of shit.”
“Don’t worry about it; you won’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. I’ll have some other guys around to handle anything like that,” Frank assured him.
That seemed to satisfy Guardino, but he had another question. “Tony’s an Outfit guy. What about them?”
“Tony will determine how much money has to be sent to Chicago. We’re going to make a lot of money for ourselves, too; you can count on it. On top of that we’ll have carte blanche at some of the casinos. Shows and meals and stuff will all be comped. We’ll be living the good life.”
Guardino liked the deal and went for it.
The next man to join the team was Ernie Davino. Frank had never met him before, but he came highly recommended as a thief and was also living locally.
Next, Frank’s thoughts turned to his former co-worker from Stateville’s psych ward, Larry Neumann. After serving only 11 years, the murderer had somehow managed to get out on parole while Frank was still in Chicago. Even though Neumann’s father had died and left him a lot of money in a trust fund, he preferred the criminal life. He and Frank partnered on a couple of jobs before Frank left town and they remained in contact after Frank moved to Vegas. Because Neumann wasn’t known as a thief, only a killer, Frank figured maybe he could use him in Sin City someday. With Frank gone, Neumann was doing jobs in Chicago with a man named Wayne Matecki; they were both the kind who had to stay active. During one of their phone calls, Neumann asked Frank if he knew of any good scores in Chicago that he and Matecki could handle, then bring the merchandise to Frank in Vegas. As it happened, Frank was aware of a robbery that had a lot of potential and told Neumann about it. He didn’t realize at the time that he was condemning the victim to death.
The score Frank turned Neumann and Matecki onto was the robbery of a jeweler. Frank had information that the jeweler likely had between $150,000 and $200,000 worth of merchandise on hand at any given time.
The jeweler’s name was Bob Brown. He was a friend of Allen Dorfman, who was involved in arranging Teamster loans to the Outfit. Neumann and Matecki prepared a plan for the job. It turned out that Matecki knew Brown and wouldn’t be able to do the robbery himself, but he thought he could enter the store under the pretext that he was looking to buy a ring. After Matecki got inside, Larry could come in and stick the place up. Neumann called Frank and told him what he and Matecki had in mind. Frank agreed that it sounded like a plan that would work.
The two Chicagoans did the robbery and 36 hours later Neumann was at Frank’s door in Vegas. He was carrying an attaché case. “It looks like everything went well,” Frank said.
Neumann patted the case and said, “We got the money, but we changed the plan a little.”
Frank didn’t like the sound of that. “What kind of change?”
“I had to kill him.”
“You killed Brown?”
“I didn’t intend to when I got there. But it was in the back of my mind that the Outfit might figure out that Wayne was in on the robbery and come after him. When I got in the store, I said fuck it. I put my gun down and grabbed a machete that was hanging on the wall. I started stabbing him and Wayne broke a vase over his head.”