“Do you know who I am? I run this town.”
When Tony Spilotro got to town in 1971, Las Vegas was a relatively quiet place. The bosses had been making so much money from their own illegitimate enterprises, such as illegal bookmaking, loan-sharking, and casino skimming, that there was a concerted effort by the mob to keep the town clean, safe, and quiet. The rules were simple. Disputes were to be peaceably settled. There were to be no shootings or car explosions in town. Bodies were not to be left in car trunks at the airport. Sanctioned murders took place out of town or the bodies disappeared forever in the vast desert surrounding the city.
Before Tony arrived, mob matters were so benignly administered that Jasper Speciale, the biggest loan shark in town, operated out of his Leaning Tower of Pizza restaurant, and his waitresses moonlighted as collectors after they finished work. The town’s petty criminals—the drug dealers, the bookies, pimps, even the card cheats—were operating for free. Las Vegas was an open city: mobsters from different families around the country needed no permission to wander into town, extort money from high rollers, work a credit scam on a casino, and go home. The kind of street tax imposed by the outfit back home was unheard of.
“Tony stopped all that,” said Bud Hall Jr., the retired FBI agent who spent years eavesdropping on Spilotro’s life. “Tony changed the way business was done in Las Vegas. He took over. The first thing he did was bring in some of his own men and impose a street tax on every bookie, loan shark, drug dealer, and pimp in town. A few, like a bookmaker named Jerry Dellman, resisted, but he wound up shot dead in a daylight robbery in the garage area behind his house. Nobody tried to hide the body. It was a message that there was a real gangster in town.
“Tony understood very quickly that he could run Las Vegas any way he wanted, because the bosses were fifteen hundred miles away and didn’t have the same kind of street ears in Las Vegas that they had back in Elmwood Park.”
“When Tony first moved to Las Vegas, very few people even knew who he was,” Lefty said. “I remember we had this really arrogant guy, John Grandy, in charge of all construction and purchasing. Nobody fucked with John Grandy. If people asked him for anything, he’d say, ‘Why the fuck are you bothering me? Get lost!’ I handled him with kid gloves.
“One morning Tony was coming in to see me. Grandy was there giving orders to three or four workers who were putting together some blackjack tables for dealers. He had a bunch of construction material in his arms, and he looked over and sees Tony coming up to me, and he says to Tony, ‘Hey, come here! Hold this! I’ll tell you what to do with it later.’
“I’ll never forget this. The stuff weighed about thirty or forty pounds. Tony was so surprised he held it a second before shoving it right back.
“‘Here,’ Tony said, ‘you hold it, not me. Who the fuck do you think you are? The next time you talk to me that way, I’ll throw you out the fucking window!’ Quote unquote.
“Grandy looks at me. I look at Tony. Tony is fuming. And Grandy does what Tony says. Grandy takes the stuff back and doesn’t say shit. Tony says he’ll meet me down in the coffee shop and he leaves.
“When Tony’s gone, Grandy says, ‘Hey! Who the fuck’s that guy? Who’s he think he is?’ I said, ‘The guy doesn’t work here. Never mind who he is.’
“But Grandy knows something’s wrong. He goes down into the casino and spots Bobby Stella and drags Stella to the coffee shop to look for Tony.
“‘Bobby, who’s that fucking guy over there? Who the fuck does he think he is?’ Grandy’s getting all riled up now.
“Bobby saw he was pointing to Tony and tried to calm him down. ‘Slow down. Take it easy.’
“‘What do you mean, “slow down”?’
“Bobby says, ‘That’s Tony Spilotro.’
“Grandy just stood there and said, ‘Holy shit! Holy shit!’ He apparently knew the name but not the face. He went right over to Tony and apologized four or five times. ‘I’m very, very sorry. I really didn’t mean to insult you. Things were a little bit busy and I didn’t know who you were. Would you accept my apologies?’ Tony said yeah and looked the other way. Grandy ran.”
Frank Cullotta got out of prison after doing six years for a Brinks truck robbery, and Spilotro flew to Chicago for his coming-out party. “I had ‘Free At Last’ on my birthday cake,” Cullotta said. “Everyone came and they all gave me envelopes, and at the end of the night I had about twenty thousand dollars, but mostly it made me feel great that so many guys were with me and liked me. I was still on paper [on parole], so I couldn’t leave Chicago right away, but Tony said that as soon as I got off paper I was supposed to come to Nevada.
“By the time I got there, Tony was already running the town. He had everybody on the payroll. He owned a couple of guys in the sheriff’s office. He had guys in the courthouse who could get him grand jury minutes, and he had people in the telephone company to tell him about phone taps.
“Tony had the town covered. He was in the papers all the time. He had broads coming around in Rolls-Royces who wanted to go out with him. Everybody wanted to be around a gangster. Movie stars. Everybody. I don’t know what the fuck’s the attraction, but that’s the way it was. I guess it’s a feeling of power, you know. People feel like, well, these guys are hitters, and if I need something done, they’ll do it for me.
“He knew I was a good thief, and he said we could make good money. Tony always needed money. He went through cash fast. He liked to bet sports and he never stayed home. He was a sport. He always picked up the check. No matter if there were ten, fifteen people with us, he’d always pick up the check.
“He told me, ‘Look, get a crew together. And, whatever you gotta fucking do with the guys, you got my okay. Just give me my end. You’ve got carte blanche out here.’
“I sent for Wayne Matecki, Larry Neumann, Ernie Davino, real desperados like that, and we started putting the arm on everybody. Bookmakers. Shylocks. Dope dealers. Pimps. Shit, we’d strong-arm them. Beat them. Shoot their fucking guard dogs. What did we care? I had Tony’s okay. In fact, half the time Tony’d told us who to grab.
“Then, after we’d rob them and scare them, they’d run to Tony for protection to get us off their backs. They never had any idea it was Tony who sent us over to rob them in the first place.
“We made good money turning over houses. It was all cash and jewelry. I’m talking about thirty, forty, fifty thousand dollars in twenties and hundreds laying in dresser drawers. One time I found fifteen thousand-dollar bills next to a guy’s bed. Now, where the fuck am I gonna get rid of them? Thousand-dollar bills are hard to get rid of. Banks want your name if you try and cash them. So I pushed them at the Stardust. I handed them to Lou Salerno, and he shoved them in the drawer and gave me back fifteen grand in hundreds.
“How do you think I put up the money for my restaurant, the Upper Crust? I got the money in two days. Me and Wayne and Ernie hit two maitre d’s’ houses and got over sixty thousand dollars. Maitre d’s take twenty-dollar bills from people looking for good tables all night. Well, we took the twenties back. One of the guys also had a thirty-thousand-dollar Patek Philippe watch, and we sold it to Bobby Stella for three grand. Bobby gave it away as a present.
“We’d get our information from the casino people. Bell captains. The registration desk. The credit clerks. Travel agency people. But our best sources were the insurance brokers who sold the people the policies of the stuff we were robbing. They’d give us the information on everything. What kind of jewels the people had and how much they were insured for. Where in the house the stuff was located. What kind of alarm system. The people had to put all that info down on their policies when they got insured.
“If the doors and windows and alarm systems were a pain, we’d go right through the wall. Going through the walls was my idea. I invented it. It’s very simple. Almost all the houses out in Vegas have stucco exterior walls. All you need is a five-pound sledge to make a hole big enough so you can get in. Then you use metal shears to clip away the chicken wire inside the wall they use for lathing. Then you bang away a little more until you break through the interior drywall, and you’re inside the house.
“You could only do this in Las Vegas, because the houses were stucco and they have high walls around them for privacy. People have pools and things outside, and they like to live private lives. Nobody knows their neighbors. Nobody wants to know their neighbors. It’s that kind of town. It’s the kind of place, if people hear a noise from the house next door, they tune it out. We did so many of these jobs that the newspaper started calling us the Hole in the Wall Gang. The cops never knew who we were.
“‘Mean fucking pigs,’ Tony’d say, proud of us. ‘Look what I have created out here.’
“We had it down. We’d be in and out of a house in three to five minutes tops. And whenever we did a job, we had a guy in a work car outside with a scanner picking up police calls. We even had a descrambler so we’d get the FBI. Tony gave us the descramblers and the police frequencies.
“But no matter how well we were doing, we always needed more money. Burglary money goes quick. We always had to divide it four ways—me and my two guys, and then Tony would always get his end. On a forty-thousand-dollar job, Tony would get ten grand. For sitting home. He got an equal end every time.
“Sometimes, if we needed cash and things were slow, we’d do straight robberies. We took the Rose Bowl out like that. At that time the Rose Bowl was owned by the guy who owned Chateau Vegas, and Tony gives me all the information and then says, ‘You’re gonna need a guy with a clean face.’ So I imported a kid from Chicago with a clean face, a guy that nobody knew. We couldn’t use a known guy because we weren’t supposed to be doing robberies like this in the first place. If the bosses found out Tony was doing armed robberies in the middle of town, he wouldn’t have been here long. But nobody back home knew we were doing burglaries and robberies. That was our little secret.
“The old broad who ran the Rose Bowl and her bodyguard came out into the back parking lot just like Tony said they would, with a bag of money. She walks toward her car. The bodyguard is just standing there watching her. The new kid I brought to town walks right up to her, flashes a gun, and grabs the bag out of her hand.
“The guy she had watching her tried to be a hero, and my kid whacked him with the back of his hand and the guy’s on his ass. My kid was real rough. He’s in jail now on something else. He’s doing forty years.
“The kid runs the block parallel to the Strip. There’s a chapel over there. Ernie Davino was waiting for him. Larry Neumann was in the parking lot, right nearby, as a backup if the kid needed help. When the kid jumps into the car with Ernie, Larry has already gotten in back. And as they’re coming off the street, I’m coming off the street. We were four blocks away cutting up the money when we could hear the police just starting to show up at the Rose Bowl parking lot.
“Looking back I see how crazy we were. Here we were in Las Vegas with a million ways to make a dishonest buck, and Tony’s got us out here doing house burglaries and armed robberies and 7-Elevens. It was dumb.”
All booming industries create jobs, and the Spilotro operation was no exception. Within a year Spilotro was providing work not just for his own crew but for dozens of law enforcement officers who tailed him, bugged him, and attempted to ensnare him in elaborate stings. At one point, Spilotro was betting $30,000 a week at a bookmaking operation that was actually an IRS sting; he was attracted by the fact that it offered better odds than any other book in town. When the IRS agent operating the sting had the nerve to ask Spilotro for collateral, Spilotro greeted him with a baseball bat. “Do you know who I am?” Spilotro asked. “I run this town.”
Spilotro had moved his jewelry store front from Circus Circus to West Sahara Avenue, just off the Strip. The Gold Rush Jewelry Store was a two-story building complete with platformed sidewalk and fake hitching posts.
“We got the necessary probable cause and dropped a mike in the ceiling of the back room of the Gold Rush,” said Bud Hall. “The front room was strictly for selling rings and wristwatches. Upstairs, Tony had antisurveillance devices, telephone scramblers, battleship binoculars so he could see if he was being watched from a mile away, and shortwave radios that picked up police calls and were even able to unscramble the bureau’s frequencies. Tony got our frequencies through some Metro cops he had on his payroll. He also had an electronics expert from Chicago, Ronnie ‘Balloon Head’ DeAngelis, who would fly into town every few weeks and sweep the place for taps and bugs. We always got our best stuff right after DeAngelis left. ‘Balloon Head says the place is clean,’ Tony would proudly announce, and everyone would relax.
“Tony was a totally focused human being. He woke up in the morning knowing exactly what he was going to do that day. He’d get dozens of calls at the Gold Rush. He had all kinds of financial deals going on at the same time. He had different groups, hundreds of people, a million schemes, all of them in various stages of development. And even though most of them never panned out, he still had to put in a sixteen- to eighteen-hour day trying to put the deals together.
“It would have been difficult doing what Tony did if he had secretaries, a filing system, Xerox machines, and the free use of a phone. But Tony did it all off-the-cuff and kept it all in his head. The only things he ever wrote down were telephone numbers, and he used to write them down in the tiniest little handwriting that made them unreadable without a magnifying glass, and when we’d get ahold of them, we found he would transpose the numbers or write half or three-quarters of each number backwards.
“Listening to someone on a wire every day,” Bud Hall says, “is different than being around them all the time socially. It creates a strange relationship between the person listening and the subject. You’re listening to their lives, and pretty soon you’re inside their lives. I don’t mean that you get to like them, but you get to be able to tell by the sound of their voice what their moods are and where in the room they might happen to be. There are times when you can almost lip-sync what they are going to say before they say it. You come to know them so intimately that you almost become a part of the person.
“Tony was the smartest and most efficient mobster I had ever seen. I think he was a genius. His biggest problem was that he was surrounded by people who were always screwing up. That’s all we kept hearing him say over and over. He’d harangue his crew about their incompetence and how he had no choice but to do things himself if he wanted them done right.
“If you talked to him on the phone, all you had to say were three or four words and he would have digested the purpose of the call, and the call had better be about business and it had better be in his interest.
“Tony had no capacity whatever for casual conversation. He could be congenial. Cordial. Likeable. But you couldn’t waste his time. He lost his temper faster than anyone I ever knew. There was no slow burn. He went right from being nice to being a screaming, violent maniac in a second. There was no way to prepare for him. I think the speed with which you were suddenly under attack was as terrifying as the thought of having Tony mad at you. However, once it passed, it passed. He forgot it. He went back to business.
“He lived a completely separate life from Nancy. They shared their son, Vincent, but that was about it. He slept in his own room on the ground floor of their house behind a locked steel door. When he got up in the morning, around ten thirty or eleven, Nancy stayed out of his way. He’d make his own coffee, and when he picked up the paper on the front step or off the walkway, he’d look up and down Balfour Avenue for surveillance.
“When he was ready to leave, there was no ‘good-bye’ or ‘see you for dinner.’ He’d just get in his blue Corvette sports car and routinely go around the block a few times, checking for tails. It could take him forty-five minutes to drive the ten minutes between his house and the Gold Rush because Tony would automatically dry-clean himself of tails by driving through shopping centers, stopping at green lights, moving through red, making illegal U-turns, and then checking his rearview mirror to see if anyone was following.
“After all that time I spent listening in at the Gold Rush and at his house, I decided that he had what we called in the marines ‘command posture.’ When he talked, people listened. When he entered a room, he was always in charge. But in charge of what? That was his problem.
“One day we picked up that Joe Ferriola, one of the Chicago street bosses, was trying to get a relative a job as a dealer at the Stardust. Tony asked Joey Cusumano to take care of it. Cusumano, one of Spilotro’s top guys, hung around the Stardust passing Tony’s messages back and forth so much that many of the casino’s employees thought he worked there.
“A week passed and Tony got another call from Ferriola’s people that she was still unemployed. Tony had a fit. Cusumano checked back and found the casino wouldn’t hire her as a dealer because she had no experience and would have to go take a six-week course at dealer’s school.
“Tony then tells Joey to ask Lefty, who was pretending to be the Stardust’s food and beverage director at the time, to get the kid a job as a waitress.
“A few days later, Joey comes back and says that Lefty doesn’t want to hire her because he doesn’t think she’s good-looking enough to be a Stardust cocktail waitress, and besides, she’s got bad legs.
“Spilotro exploded and he did something he should have never done—he called the Stardust himself. He got hold of Joey Boston, an ex-bookmaker Lefty had hired to run the Stardust Sports Book.
“Tony shouldn’t have called the Stardust himself, because now we at the FBI had a tape of Spilotro asking a top executive of the Stardust casino to get a job for a Chicago capo’s relative. That’s exactly what we had been waiting for. It made for the kind of direct link between the mob and a licensed casino that neither side would ever want made public, the kind of connection that could jeopardize a casino’s license and call into question just who really owns the casino and who might be serving as a front.”
Ferriola’s relative eventually went to work as a security guard at one of the other Las Vegas hotels. But the story of how Tony Spilotro, the most terrifying mobster in Las Vegas, could not manage to get a job at the Stardust for the relative of a Chicago capo did not help his reputation back home.
“I was around Tony all the time and he was always worried about people listening in,” says Matt Marcus, a 350-pound illegal bookmaker who took a lot of Spilotro’s action. “We’d be in the Food Factory on Twain Street, a place he had a piece of, and he’d communicate with body language. He’d lean back and shrug and twist his head and frown. He drank tea all the time. Not coffee. He always sat with the tea bag hanging out of the cup, leaning and shrugging and twisting and frowning. He was positive the next person passing by would be the FBI. He was always changing cars. The intell unit was always checking his license plates. They’d go right up to the cars and take down their numbers.”
“Tony seemed to get a real kick out of matching wits with the FBI, but he wasn’t stupid,” Frank Cullotta said. “Whenever he had anything to say we’d go for walks in empty parking lots or on the side of the road in the desert. When you said something to him, mostly he’d just make faces, or frown, or smile and get across what he meant for you to do. Even when he did talk, he’d always cover his mouth with his hand in case the feds were using lip-readers with binoculars.”
At one point, the FBI became so frustrated with its telephone taps and its once-promising Gold Rush microphone that they installed a surveillance camera in the ceiling of a back room behind Cullotta’s restaurant, where they suspected Spilotro was having some of his key meetings.
“We got a tip something was up there,” Cullotta said, “and we went up behind the false ceiling and tore it out. It was like a small TV camera and it said ‘United States Government’ or something, and its serial numbers had been scraped off. I got really pissed. I wanted to trash the damn thing, but Tony made us call Oscar and give it back. I think he liked the idea of the feds coming over with their hats in their hands to get it back.”
When the FBI saw that over two years of electronic surveillance had failed to snare Spilotro, they sent an undercover FBI agent, Rick Baken, into the Gold Rush, using the name Rick Calise.
As part of the ruse, Baken had first curried favor months earlier playing cards and losing to Tony’s brother John. During their card games Baken let it slip that he was an ex-con and jewel thief who desperately needed cash and was looking to unload some stolen diamonds at a great price. The bureau had, of course, given Baken the backup necessary to verify his criminal past in case Spilotro checked. But even after meeting Spilotro, Baken found that Herbie Blitzstein, Tony’s go-fer, always kept him away from a direct conversation with Spilotro.
After eleven months of this futile and dangerous undercover work, the feds became so frustrated that they tried a desperation move. Wearing a wire, as usual, Baken approached Spilotro directly and said that he had been picked up and questioned by the FBI and threatened with prison unless he talked about Spilotro’s illegal activities.
To Baken’s surprise, Spilotro suggested they visit his attorney, Oscar Goodman.
The next thing Baken knew, he was in a defense attorney’s office wearing a wire and pretending to be a crook. Goodman listened to Baken’s story for about fifteen minutes and gave him the names of several lawyers to call. Goodman later had a great time playing up the incident just enough to make it appear as if the FBI had tried to violate the attorney-client privilege by eavesdropping on a potential defendant and his attorney.
As time passed, Spilotro spent less and less time with his wife, Nancy. When they were together, they fought—and the FBI listened. She complained that he had lost interest in her. She accused him of affairs. He was never home. He never talked to her. In the morning, the FBI recorded the sound of silence as Tony made his coffee and Nancy read the newspaper. Then he would leave for the store without even saying good-bye.
Sometimes Nancy had to call him at work to relay a message; according to Bud Hall, Tony was always rude. “She’d say, ‘I don’t know if this can wait, but so-and-so called.’ ‘It can wait,’ Tony would say, sort of sarcastically, and just hang up. Or he’d say, in an exasperated tone, ‘Nancy, I’m busy,’ and hang up. He was never gentlemanly with her, and she’d whine to Dena Harte, Herbie Blitzstein’s girlfriend, who managed the front of the Gold Rush. Nancy would tell Dena whenever Tony beat her up or whenever she suspected Tony was fooling around with this one or that one, and Dena kept Nancy informed about what Tony was doing.
“There was one time when Dena called Nancy at home and said, ‘The bitch is here.’ Nancy jumped in the car and tore over to the place and started screaming at Sheryl, Tony’s girlfriend, calling her a no-good cunt right there in the middle of the store.
“We could hear the screaming on the wire, and then Tony comes out, and then we hear Nancy screaming for Tony to stop hitting her. He was really beating her up. We got worried that he was going to kill her. It was a mess. So we called nine-one-one and said we were in the Black Forest German Restaurant next door, and said someone was being assaulted in the Gold Rush. We couldn’t tell the cops who we were because at that point it looked like Tony owned Metro, and we didn’t want to blow our surveillance. The police got there in a few minutes, and everything calmed down.”
“Nancy had her life and Tony had his,” said Frank Cullotta. “Hers was mostly playing tennis and running around in white outfits. She had Vincent and Tony’s brothers and their families. Once a week Tony’d take her out to dinner or something. But she wasn’t afraid of him. She would scream and yell at him and drive him crazy.
“Once, he told me, she tried to kill him. They were having an argument over something and Tony knocked her across the room. She came up with a loaded thirty-eight cocked at his head. ‘I’ll kill you if you ever hit me again,’ she said. Tony said, ‘Nancy, think of Vincent.’
“‘I saw death,’ he told me after. ‘We talked until she put down the gun and then I hid all the guns in the house.’”
“Sheryl was about twenty, but she looked younger,” said Rosa Rojas, who was her best friend. “She was a Mormon from northern Utah, cute and fresh. When Tony first met her he used to call her his country girl. She was so naive that when he asked her out, she said she’d only go if she could bring her friend.
“Sheryl and I were both working in the hospital where he was going for his heart problem, which was how they met. They’d go to restaurants, but he never put the make on her. He held her at a distance for a long, long time.
“Before he got too close he found out everything there was to find out about her. He had Joey Cusumano ask about where she was from, who her friends were, how long she lived where she lived. He wanted to know everything he could know about her before he got involved or felt he could trust her.
“It was a long time before she knew who he was. She began to suspect something was strange, because every time they went out, they were tailed by cops in plain clothes. Tony’s brother told her that there were some legal problems and that Tony was being trailed because of the legal stuff. Tony used to tell us that we were going to read things about him in the newspapers, but he said the newspapers weren’t always right.
“It was only after a long time that Tony and Sheryl started going to bed together. He was a gentleman always. Very quiet. Very reserved. I would see him mad sometimes, but I never once heard him curse or use bad language.
“Eventually, he bought her a two-story condo around Eastern and Flamingo, a two-bedroom place for about sixty-nine thousand dollars. It had everything. Refrigerator. Blinds. A washer-dryer. There was a garage and small patio and a sliding door that led into the downstairs, and upstairs they had the bedrooms and a large room that had all of the stereo and TV equipment you would want. That’s where they spent most of their time—watching ball games and listening to music.
“Tony was very generous. He used to leave a thousand dollars a week in a bear-shaped cookie jar in the kitchen. He never mentioned money and it was never mentioned that he was keeping her, but when he bought her a full-length mink coat Sheryl felt he had finally committed himself to her. She had really fallen in love with him.
“She didn’t know he was married for quite a while. When she found out, it was very hard. She believed the only reason she and Tony weren’t married was because Tony was a very strict Catholic and would have trouble leaving his wife. For a while, Tony even had Sheryl learning to be a Catholic. He gave her religious books to read. He knew the Bible.
“He never ever said anything bad about his wife. They had been married in the church and it was a difficult situation. On top of that, Tony loved his son. Vincent meant everything to him. Vincent was his soul. Tony would always get home at six thirty in the morning so he could be there to make breakfast for Vincent. Sheryl said he would do that even if he was in bed at her place.
“Eventually, Tony bought a car for her. It was a new Plymouth Fury. It wasn’t a showy car.
“When Nancy found out what was going on, things got a little tough. Sheryl had stopped by the Gold Rush to see Tony. She was wearing a diamond studded S necklace that Tony had given her, and when Nancy came in and saw Sheryl wearing the S necklace, Nancy went wild and she reached for it.
“I got there just at that time and I found the two of them wrestling on the floor. Sheryl managed to hold on to her S. Tony came out of the back room and broke up the fight so Sheryl and I could get away.
“In the end, when it was over between Tony and Sheryl, he wouldn’t return her calls. Sheryl was really crazy about him, but maybe she pushed too hard. He was having a lot of problems with the cops when they broke up, and maybe he was trying to spare her.
“His brother John used to tell her not to try and reach him. ‘Don’t call him,’ he’d say. ‘Spare yourself.’ But she’d see him making his court appearances on TV and she saw that he was gaining weight and didn’t look good, and she used to blame Nancy for not taking care of him. Sheryl used to make sure he ate the right food, and her refrigerator was always filled with fruits and salad and the kinds of healthy food that were good for people with heart problems.
“After she and Tony broke up she got a job doing cocktails at night. Tony wasn’t happy about it. But she had grown accustomed to his lifestyle. She needed the money. Then she got into dealing blackjack. She worked in the old MGM, at Bally’s. She had a prime shift and made excellent money. She started meeting high rollers. She wised up. She learned and started looking around for another rock to stand on.”
“One day we’re in the back of the My Place Lounge, in the parking lot, and Tony tells me to kill Jerry Lisner,” said Frank Cullotta. “Jerry Lisner was a small-time drug dealer and hustler.
“Tony said: ‘Frankie, you gotta take care of this guy. He rolled. He’s a rat.’
“I told Tony that Lisner would be hard for me, because I had just beaten him out of five thousand quaaludes and he and his wife didn’t trust me.
“And Tony got all mad. ‘I’ll go kill the motherfucker,’ he says. ‘Just get him over here.’
“I told him it wasn’t that I didn’t want to do it; it was that Lisner was worried about me. It would be hard to get close enough to get him.
“‘I want it done now!’ he said. ‘Now and quick!’
“That was all he said. He walked inside the joint. We were all being followed all the time, so I got in my car, went home and packed a bag, drove all the way from Las Vegas to Burbank airport in L.A., where I took the next flight for Chicago. Nobody even knew I had left town.
“In Chicago I got ahold of Wayne Matecki. We left the next night using fake names on a flight for Burbank, got in my car, and drove back to Las Vegas.
“We went from the airport to my condo, the Marie Antoinette, where I thought I’d take a chance and call Lisner. I say to myself, ‘Let me give it a shot. See if he’s home.’ He is. I say, ‘I’ve got a mark, a real good one. Somebody we can take for a lot of money.’ I tell him the guy is in town. I’m talking a great score.
“He tells me to bring the guy over. We use a work car where we’ve got a police scanner and a twenty-five-caliber automatic. I didn’t have a silencer so I made half loads—I half-emptied the bullets so they wouldn’t make as much noise.
“I left Wayne in the car with the scanner and I went inside. I told Lisner I wanted to talk with him before the guy came in. I want to make sure that there’s nobody in the house. I know his old lady works. I know he’s got two sons, but he was always complaining that they were pains in the ass.
“As we’re walking into the house I’m asking, ‘Are you sure nobody’s home? You positive? Where are your kids? Where’s your wife?’ He’s telling me that there’s nobody home, and I’m telling him I want to make sure before I bring the guy inside.
“We’re walking around inside and I say, ‘I hear a noise,’ and he’s saying it’s nothing. I looked out the living room toward the pool and I closed the blinds. We’re walking together and we’re coming out of the little den area and I pulled the stick out and popped him two times in the back of his head.
“He turns around and looks at me. ‘What are you doing?’ he says. He takes off through the kitchen toward the garage.
“I actually looked at the gun, like, ‘What the fuck have I got? Blanks in there?’ So I run after him and I empty the rest in his head. It’s like an explosion going off every time.
“But he doesn’t go down. The fuck starts running. It’s like a comedy of errors. I’m chasing him around the house, and I’ve emptied the thing in his head.
“I catch him in the garage. And as I catch him in the garage, he hits the garage door button, but I hit him before it goes down. I can see he’s getting weak. I drag him back into the kitchen.
“I’ve got no more bullets. I’m thinking, what am I going to do with this guy? I grab an electric cord from the water cooler and I wrap it around his neck and it breaks. I was going to the sink to get a knife and finish this thing when Wayne walks in with more bullets.
“Lisner is still gasping. He says, ‘My wife knows you’re here.’
“I emptied the gun into his head. In the eyes. And then he just went down, like he deflated, and I knew he was gone.
“Now I wanted the house to be clean. I had blood all over the place. Blood was all over him. My worry was that I’d leave a print in the blood somewhere on his body or clothes.
“I hadn’t worn any gloves because Lisner wasn’t dumb. He wouldn’t have let me in the door if he saw me wearing gloves. So I made sure I didn’t touch anything. The only thing I knew I touched was the wall, when I hit him near the watercooler. And there, right away, as soon as he went down, I wiped everything clean real fast.
“But there was the danger of my prints on his body, so I grabbed him by the ankles and Wayne opened the sliding door, and I dragged him to the pool and slid him, legs first, into the water. He went in straight, like a board. Like he was swimming.
“I knew by soaking him in the pool the blood would dissolve and any of my prints on the body would disappear. I looked down as he floated there and I saw the blood starting to come up.
“Then Wayne and I looked through the house. I wanted to make sure the guy wasn’t recording my conversation with him in the house. I looked downstairs and Wayne went upstairs. I found his phone book and took it.
“We got back to my place and I took a shower with kitchen cleaner to get rid of any blood trace. Then we got rid of our clothes. We cut them into shreds, put them in a bunch of bags, and drove out into the desert, depositing them all over the place.
“Wayne took a taxi to the airport and went back to Chicago. I then drove by the Lisner house, but there was no activity. So I drove over to the My Place Lounge. As I was pulling up, Tony pulled up with Sammy Siegel.
“I asked him if he had a minute.
“We walked to the side.
“I said, ‘It’s done.’
“He said, ‘Done?’
“I say, ‘I just took care of it.’
“He said, ‘Did you get rid of everything?’
“I said, ‘Yeah. I put ten into him and I threw him in the pool.’
“He looked at me and said, ‘Fine. As of this day we’ll never talk about this again.’ We never did.”
“I was driving Tony to a place about sixty miles out of town for dinner, because between his heart and my licensing problems we didn’t want to be seen together in town. All the way out he’s telling me about how he’s under constant surveillance and how he’s just trying to make a living and live a quiet life. All I can do is ‘yes-yes’ him. Tony wasn’t telling me all this because he wanted an argument. He didn’t seem to put together the fact that he might have been making enemies of various people with the fact they they would secretly pass the word around about what he was or wasn’t doing. I don’t think he understood, right or wrong, that when you’re as hot as he was, every cop in the state had your picture up on their bulletin boards. Later, his lawyers found that the federal strike force had pictures of Tony and his whole family, and friends, even their lawyers. The agents and prosecutors had Tony’s picture on a dart board and nasty comments written in under most of the snapshots. That’s what happens when you’re the target. There isn’t a cop in the state that doesn’t know who you are and isn’t looking to either put you in jail or shake you down.
“When we got to the restaurant outside town, two of his guys were already waiting. They had taken a booth in the back.
“We had just sat down when a guy comes over to the table. ‘Mr. Rosenthal,’ he says, ‘let me introduce myself to you. I’m the owner of this property. I’ve seen your picture in the paper and I wanted you to know we’re all rooting for you. How’s the service? I hope you enjoy your dinner.’
“I told him everything was fine and thanked him, except I felt awful that he spotted me. Then, instead of going away, he turns to Tony. ‘And Mr. Spilotray’—he pronounced Tony’s name with an A—‘can I introduce myself to you?’
“Tony stands up and puts his arm on the guy’s shoulder and sort of walks him about twenty feet away, just out of earshot.
“I can see Tony’s shaking the guy’s hand and I’m watching the guy’s smiling face and then I see he goes white and turns around and walks into the kitchen.
“When Tony sits down he’s all smiles.
“‘What the hell did you tell that guy?’ I asked him.
“‘Nothing,’ he says.
“What happened was that Tony walked the guy away and said: ‘My name isn’t Spilotray, you motherfucker. You never saw me in your life. And Frank Rosenthal wasn’t here either. And if I hear you telling anything to anybody, this place is going to become a bowling alley and you’re gonna be in the fucking racks.’”
Spilotro was wired, he was tailed, he was harassed, he was arrested, he was indicted. But he was never convicted. In his first five years in Las Vegas, there were more murders committed than in the previous twenty-five. He was indicted in the murder of a Caesar’s Palace box man named Red Kilm, but the case never got to trial. He was suspected of killing Barbara McNair’s husband, Rick Manzi, who was involved in a drug deal that went sour, but nothing ever came of it. Spilotro would walk into court waving and smiling, with his lawyer, Oscar Goodman, as the television cameras ground away. Says Frank Cullotta: “The more reporters Oscar saw, the further away he’d park his goddamn car so he’d have more time to be interviewed. Tony swore by Oscar. In all the years he was out there, he never spent more than a couple of hours in jail waiting for bail. When I’d warn him about Oscar, who as far as I was concerned was a publicity hound, Tony’d just nod and chew on his thumb. He used to chew on the cuticle of his right thumb. If you looked at it sometimes it was all raw and chewed away.
“Later on, when Oscar got rich, Tony’d look up at the big brick building Oscar built on Fourth Street and say, ‘I built that building.’ Like he was proud of it. But I never understood why Tony liked Oscar so much. The guy was a lawyer. He made a fortune off Tony. I could never trust a man who wears a fake Rolex.”