“Tony had a way of getting under a guy’s skin.”
Tony Spilotro was ten years younger than his old friend Frank Rosenthal, but by 1971 their lives were on an oddly parallel course. Both of them were public figures, for all the wrong reasons. Both of them had been arrested many times, in Lefty’s case for a series of minor infractions, in Tony’s for a series of infractions considerably more minor than the ones he had actually committed. Both of them had handled the arrests by suing authorities. And as a result of the heat both of them chose to change their lives by going West.
Tony was still in Chicago in 1971, where he had quickly become the most likely to succeed in his own particular class of criminals. “After whacking Billy McCarthy and Jimmy Miraglia,” Frank Cullotta said, “Tony rose up very quick. First he started working for Crazy Sam DeStefano as a collector. Crazy Sam was such a lunatic shylock that he once handcuffed his brother-in-law to a radiator, beat the shit out of him, had his crew piss on him, and then showed him off at a family dinner.
“Then Tony got assigned to Milwaukee Phil Alderisio, and I’d have to say it was Milwaukee Phil who groomed Tony in the outfit. Phil was a great earner. He’s the first guy who figured out about shaking down sports bookies. Until Milwaukee Phil, only horse bookmakers paid the street tax. Phil changed all that and he started grabbing guys off the street right and left.
“For a while, around 1962, 1963, Tony became a bail bondsman. It’s true. He could walk all around the courts in Cook County. Go behind the desks. Check the docket room. The outfit guys set it up for him. He worked with Irwin Weiner, on South State Street. Weiner used to bond out everybody. He bailed out Milwaukee Phil’s guys, and Joey Lombardo’s, and Turk Torello’s.
“Now Tony had about six or seven guys booking for him out of different offices, and he had some loan-shark money on the street. One day Tony came to my house and gave me six thousand dollars from a score we had made. He told me, ‘You know, Frank, this is a lot of money. Why don’t you invest like me and go into the loan-sharking business?’ He said, ‘I have some money out on the street right now. I’m not asking you to invest it all, but why don’t you invest, like, four grand on the street. You could be getting four hundred dollars a week and the four grand would always be there, and whenever you wanted it I could just pull it out.’
“Well, I didn’t really feel like giving him four thousand, so I offered to give him two thousand. Tony said all right, but he said it was nineteen sixty-one and money was getting scarce, so that meant there was a big demand. He thought that was a joke.
“Anyway, I gave him two grand and he put it to work on the street. Every week I received my two hundred dollars cash. Plus, we had the accounts of loan sharks under us, and we used to get a percentage of what they were making, so it worked out pretty good. I spent money pretty good, too. I always liked brand-new cars. So I traded in my nineteen sixty-one Ford with the big engine and went to the Hope Park Cadillac dealer and got a blue Coupe de Ville. That’s a car I always wanted.
“One night Tony took me to the North Avenue Steak House on Mannheim Road that was owned by the outfit. That’s where Tony wanted to introduce me to some big shots. This was really the night I decided to move to another crew.
“Jackie Cerone was standing at the bar with Crazy Sam DeStefano and a blond broad. The three of them were drunk, and there’s nobody as obnoxious as Jackie Cerone when he’s drunk. When we walked in, I asked Tony who the loud bald-headed fuck was standing at the bar.
“I guess I said it sort of loud, because Tony told me not to talk so loud and explained to me who the two guys were. Just about that time, Jackie Cerone grabbed the cocktail waitress by the arm and told her to suck his prick at the bar. She said no and he gave her a crack in the face and ran her out of the joint.
“Then Crazy Sam DeStefano came over to us and started talking about how goofy Jackie Cerone was. Crazy Sam was also very drunk that night. Now Jackie Cerone comes walking over and asks Tony who his friend is, meaning me. Tony introduces me to Sam and Jackie. That’s how I met Jackie Cerone.
“We only stood around for about an hour. They made all kinds of racket and noise in the place. This Jackie Cerone was a real, real ignorant man. Any girl that comes by, he’d pull her to him. He didn’t care if they were with another guy or not.
“It was just uncomfortable being around him, because you had to be on your toes. You had to watch what you were saying. Meanwhile, we’re standing there like goofs. Laughing along with Jackie and making him feel like a big man. Finally we left. We got in the car and went someplace else just to get away from them.
“I let my money ride on the street for about two more months, but I kept getting steamed up over the way you had to kiss their asses and be careful all the time, and about the beef over getting rid of my car. Tony really wanted to be an outfit big shot. I didn’t.
“So finally I said to myself: ‘Fuck this neighborhood! Fuck these guys!’ I told Tony, ‘I’m gonna start bumming east.’
“He said, ‘What are you talking about?’ So I told him I wanted to stay involved with his crew, ‘but you guys ain’t doing too much and I want to keep active.’ We stayed close friends, but I told him I wanted more action and I started hanging on the East Side with a stickup crew.”
According to retired FBI agent William Roemer, who tracked Spilotro’s rise during the sixties and wrote about it in his book, The Enforcer: “Tony had a way of getting under a guy’s skin. He was a bondsman at the time, and I caught him tailing me when I left the gym. He was driving a green Oldsmobile. He was good. He stayed far behind, but I saw him make a couple of U-turns and I knew he was on me. I had him tail me to Columbus Park, where I waited for him in a deserted area.
“I knew what he wanted. He was trying to find out who I was meeting with, who my informants were, because we had been putting cases together against Sam Giancana and Milwaukee Phil and they knew we had inside informants. That’s what he was doing for the outfit hanging around the court all day long.
“He lost sight of me for a while, but he kept looking. When he was about twenty feet from me, I pointed my gun at him and called out, ‘Looking for me, pal?’
“He was startled, but just for a second. He came back real quick. ‘Just taking a walk. Ain’t this a public park?’
“I took a look at the guy. I didn’t know it was Spilotro at that moment. He had on a fedora. The kind Sam Giancana used to wear. He was wearing a gray sweater with a tie, gray slacks, and black loafers. He was very, very short, but he seemed tightly wound. Muscular. Not a wimp. The opposite.
“When I identified myself and asked him for his ID, he said, ‘None of your fucking business! I don’t give a shit who you are, asshole, you don’t have a right to question me unless you’ve got a warrant.’
“I said it was my business, and I grabbed his left arm, held it back, and yanked out his wallet. His driver’s license identified him as Anthony John Spilotro. I should have guessed. I had seen him outside Sam DeStefano’s house. I asked him about DeStefano and he said he never heard of him. I asked him why he was tailing me, and he said, ‘Who’s following you? I’m just walking in the park.’ When I told him I didn’t believe him, he said, ‘I don’t give a fuck what you believe.’
“That was Tony. Instead of going with the flow and conning me, trying to be nice, he kept giving me the wiseass answers. I even tried being nice with him. I told him he was still a young guy. He was a bondsman. He should pull out of all the bullshit he was involved with.
“‘Yeah, like you, asshole,’ he says to me. ‘I see how you live. I seen your house. Big shot! Live in a little dump out there in the steel mills. Big fucking deal. I should live like you?’
“As I said, Tony had a way of getting under your skin. I warned him that if I ever saw him anywhere around my house I would make it a personal matter.
“Still he keeps it up. ‘Fuck you, asshole,’ he says. I’m standing there in the woods with a gun on him. I’m over six feet and weigh two hundred and twenty pounds. If he’s been tailing me he knows I work out boxing every day at the Y. Meanwhile, he’s five five and a hundred and thirty-five pounds, and he’s busting my balls in a secluded spot in the park. That was Tony. He dared you to murder him.
“I gave him a shove, pushed him back toward the parking area. ‘Get the hell out of here, you little pissant,’ I said, and he walked away, got in his car, and drove off.
“After that, whenever I talked to my friends in the press about Spilotro, I always referred to him as ‘that little pissant.’ Sandy Smith of the Tribune and Art Petacque of the Sun-Times and later John O’Brien of the Trib began using the name ‘the Ant’ when they wrote about him. I guess in those days ‘pissant’ was not proper for the public press.”
By 1970, Spilotro was appearing in the newspapers just about every day. He had made faces and mugged for the cameramen as he walked in and out of the Crime Commission hearings. He even insisted upon suing the police and the IRS for the $12,000 they had confiscated during a gambling raid. The police said the money was the proceeds of a gambling operation and the IRS had kept the money as a lien against possible unpaid taxes.
Spilotro lost the suit; to make matters worse, the legal action allowed federal agents access to his tax records. They wasted no time before bringing charges that Spilotro had filed a false mortgage loan application for his house when he said he had been employed by a cement company. The IRS agents showed that he had claimed that his sole income that year, $9,000, had been derived from gambling wins only. There was no income reported from a cement company.
“Tony couldn’t walk across the street without picking up a tail,” Cullotta said. “The heat was on. Lots of his crew, me included, were on our way to prison and he was too, unless he got out of town. At my going-away party—I had been given six years for some robberies and burglaries and assaults—Tony said he and Nancy and the kid were taking a trip out West for vacation. He said he might move out to Las Vegas and that I should come see him out there as soon as I got out. I put it in the back of my mind and went to sleep for six years.”
In the spring of 1971, right around the time Frank Rosenthal started to think about going to work at the Stardust, Tony Spilotro rented an apartment in Las Vegas, and on May 6, 1971, a trailer van of Transworld Van Lines with a work crew pulled up in front of Spilotro’s Oak Park house and began loading their van with the household’s contents. A few minutes later, two cars of IRS agents pulled onto the street and began taking notes on what was being carted out of the house.
Spilotro immediately suspected that as soon as the van was loaded with his family belongings, the agents were going to seize the truck as a tax assessment. So he ordered the crew of Transworld Van Lines to unload the trailer and place all of his property back in his home. He then called his lawyer and sued the IRS; federal authorities had harassed him into leaving town, he said, and now they were interfering with “his constitutional right to travel and reside anywhere in the United States.”
Within a week, prosecutors relented and Transworld Van Lines returned to repack and load eight thousand pounds of Spilotro belongings, including nine barrels of dishes, nine wardrobe cartons, forty-five cartons of household items, one crib mattress, four nightstands, a dining room table and six chairs, three TV sets, one sewing machine, a grandfather clock, three dressers, a divan, a love seat, six mirrors, six assorted chairs, four tables, and lawn furniture. According to the bill of lading, the items were valued at $9,900, and most were scratched or chipped.
On the bill of lading—in the space marked “Local Contact, person responsible for final payment”—the Spilotros wrote “Frank or Jerry Rosenthal.”
“Tony first came out to Las Vegas with Nancy for a visit,” Frank Rosenthal said. “A little vacation. That was just before they decided to move here. He said, ‘Let’s take a ride.’ We drove out of town into the desert, and we talked about what was going on back in Chicago.
“He said there was a lot of heat at home and he asked if I would have any objections if he moved out here. Why was he asking me? I think he was bullshitting me. He just wanted to cover his bases, so when the heat came down he could say: ‘Jeezus, I asked you, didn’t I?’
“During the drive I warned him that it was very different out here than it was at home. I told him that the local cops had a reputation for being very tough. I told him that a lot of people who got arrested out here could find themselves buried in the desert before they ever made it to court.
“Tony didn’t say anything. I knew that if Tony did come out to Las Vegas, he had better be on his best behavior.”
According to the FBI, when Spilotro arrived he did not have the outfit’s permission to start shaking everyone down and to start up the kind of loan-sharking operation that could jeopardize the mob’s skimming of the casinos that was their primary source of income. “Tony was smart,” retired FBI agent Bud Hall said. “He knew how far he could go with the outfit bosses back in Chicago. Joe Aiuppa, for instance, was a kind of don’t-rock-the-boat kind of guy. Aiuppa didn’t give a damn about Spilotro, but Tony knew that once he got out here, he would be left pretty much on his own.”
“When we got back to the house after the drive, it was obvious that Nancy and Geri had had a few drinks. They were both loaded. Tony went into his act. He started yelling at Nancy, ‘You can’t do this. You’re embarrassing me. Frank’s not going to want us around if you continue to act like this.’
“He was trying to bullshit me that everything would be okay. That the two of them would be on their best behavior.
“Well, a couple of weeks later they arrive permanently, and it was like a signal for the bureau. The heat began. They started watching him and me. And in a way, I don’t blame them. They assumed—everybody assumed—that Tony had come to town with instructions from Chicago. That he was their muscle in town and I was the outfit’s man inside the casinos.
“Nothing could have been further from the truth, but Tony took advantage of that incorrect perception. He went along with it. He encouraged it. He’d tell people, ‘I’m Frank’s advisor.’ ‘I’m Frank’s protector.’
“Even Geri thought he was my boss. One day I walked into the country club with some executives and one of them said that my boss was in the corner. I looked over expecting to see one of the bosses from the Stardust, and instead there was Tony playing cards. When I really got annoyed the guy said he was only joking, but that was the perception in town right from the start.
“He was only in town two or three days before Sheriff Ralph Lamb gets ahold of me. He says, ‘Tell your friend I want him out of town in a week.’ I tried to speak up for Tony. I said, ‘Ralph, I don’t own this guy, but he’ll behave himself. Give the guy a break.’ It made no difference. He wanted Tony out of town.
“I gave Tony the message, but I think it was his birthday or something coming up, and anyway, instead of Tony leaving town by that weekend, his five brothers arrived. They were all legit guys. One was a dentist. But Sheriff Lamb picked them up as soon as they got to town and threw them in jail for a few hours.
“He kept Tony in the drunk tank overnight. That’s a wet pit where they keep hosing you down because everybody in the place has lice.
“When Spilotro finally got out he was crazy. He’s screaming, ‘I’ll kill that motherfucker.’ But he calmed down. The truth was he had a perfect right to stay in town, and there was a truce, even though he and Sheriff Lamb were not what you could call friendly.
“I don’t think Tony ever anticipated when he moved out here what was going to happen. I don’t think he had a master plan. I think things just developed day by day and, most important, he was left alone to establish himself without interference.”
Tony, Nancy, and their four-year-old son, Vincent, settled into an apartment, and Nancy settled into being a Las Vegas wife. Lefty and Geri helped settle them: Lefty called the Bank of Nevada for Tony, and Geri introduced Nancy to her favorite hairdressers and manicurists at Caesar’s Palace. Geri and Nancy became great friends. They shopped together, had dinner on the nights their husbands were busy (which was often), and played tennis three or four times a week at the Las Vegas Country Club, where Lefty managed to get them a membership.
In contrast to the elegant Rosenthals, with their expensive cars and house on the golf course, Nancy and Tony lived modestly. They drove inexpensive cars and bought a three-bedroom house on Balfour Avenue, a middle-income community. Nancy enrolled little Vincent in Bishop Gorman Catholic school, joined the PTA, and marched down to the local police precinct when her son’s bike was stolen from in front of their house. Tony was a regular at Little League games, where he would sit in the stands or behind the coach with the other fathers cheering for their sons.
Tony opened a gift shop at Circus Circus called Anthony Stuart Ltd., and Nancy often worked there. Tony spent most of his time in the poker room at Circus or at the Dunes lending busted dealers money at loan-shark rates. It wasn’t long before just about every dealer at the two casinos owed him money.
His loan-sharking, shakedowns, and crooked card games soon attracted so much attention that the Spilotros’ Ozzie and Harriet act fell apart. Tony moved a cement block next to the rear wall of his house so he could look over the fence and see if he was being tailed that day. He usually was. Agents caught him partying late into the night with the youngest and most naive girls who hit town. Meanwhile, Nancy was arrested for drunken driving; on that occasion, she listed Geri’s name—not Tony’s—as the person to call in case of emergency.
Tony wasn’t in town two weeks before the Feds had him on a wire. The FBI in Chicago had alerted Las Vegas that he was on the way. They tailed him to one of his first meetings, in the middle of the desert, where he was asked to help get a connected meat company into all the big hotels. They then tailed him to a meeting with the leaders of the local culinary union. Later, those union officials had meetings with the main buyers at the casino hotels, and by the summer, all the hotels were buying their meats from the company.
“We’d pick him up every three or four months on general principles,” said Las Vegas Metro Detective Sergeant William Keeton, “and bring him in on a complaint, and he’d grouse that people were just setting him up for a pinch, and then we’d let him go.
“But Tony liked publicity. He was a volatile type. Cocky. He could also be charming. The Chicago Crime Commission had sent us a picture of a guy whose head Tony had supposedly put in a vise. Every once in a while I’d look at it to remind myself about how dangerous he was. The guy’s head was wedged to about five inches wide, and then Tony had put lighter fluid on his face and set it on fire. The eyeballs were bugging out.
“In September of nineteen seventy-two we picked him up on a nineteen sixty-three Chicago homicide warrant. He was being held without bail—normal in a homicide case—awaiting extradition back to Chicago. I guess Tony didn’t want to spend the night in jail, because the next thing we know is that Rosenthal shows up in court at a bailing hearing for Spilotro. It wasn’t the smartest thing Lefty could have done, but I guess he didn’t have any choice.”
“Tony was only in town about a year when I got a call from him,” said Frank Rosenthal. “He was in jail. ‘You gotta vouch for me. You gotta do this for me,’ he says. ‘I need you as a character witness on a bond.’
“It turned out to be in connection with a homicide in Chicago back in nineteen sixty-three. I said, ‘Holy shit, Tony, I’m working in the casino. I’m up for licensing.’
“I’m trying to get it across that it might not be the best move for me to go down to court and put myself on the line for him in a homicide bail hearing. It would be a red flag for the Gaming Control Board.
“‘I need it bad,’ he says. ‘You gotta do it.’
“So, I went down to court. I vouched for him and he got out on ten thousand dollars bail. Tony swore to me he wasn’t involved in the case. He was very convincing. The next day I scoured the papers to see if my name appeared in connection with the case. I was lucky. It didn’t.”
“They took Spilotro back to Chicago to stand charges,” said FBI agent Bill Roemer. “When he was arraigned, he pleaded not guilty and said that he had no idea where he was on the day of the homicide. He said he knew President Kennedy had been assassinated a week later, and he was going to use that date to try and reconstruct where he was on the day of the Foreman murder.
“He was very cute. He said he was going to ask his family to search through their records. He said he hoped they might find something that could prove he was not at the murder scene.
“Then, about a month before the trial, one of Tony’s two codefendants, Crazy Sam DeStefano, gets shot and killed in his garage. Two fast shotgun blasts. Sam’s wife and bodyguard just happened to leave about thirty minutes earlier to go see relatives.
“Tony had been worried about Crazy Sam. He had tried to get his case severed from Sam’s. Sam had just been given three years for threatening a government witness in a narcotics case, and he had shown up for an earlier court appearance in a wheelchair, wearing pajamas and carrying a megaphone. Tony had been very worried that Sam was going to prejudice the jury. There were also reports that Sam had cancer and his fear of dying in prison was going to get him to double-cross his codefendants, namely his brother Marlo and Tony. We heard that Tony had secretly appealed to the outfit’s boss, Anthony Accardo, claiming that Mad Sam was going to take him down.”
Spilotro beat the case. His sister-in-law Arlene, who was married to his brother John, took the stand. She testified that on the day of the murder, she and her husband and Nancy and Tony had spent the entire day together shopping for furniture and appliances, having lunch, and discussing color schemes. The jury dismissed the charges against Tony.
“I was there that day,” said Roemer. “When the verdict was announced, Tony raised his arms up in triumph. Then he looked over at a group of us, law enforcement people, where I was seated. Spilotro had a big grin of scorn on his face. His eyes focused for a moment on me.
“As he exited the courtroom, now a free man, I stepped into the aisle. ‘You’re still a little pissant,’ I said. ‘We’ll get you yet.’ I said it very softly.
“Tony looked at me and smiled. ‘Fuck you,’ he said.”