“I know the voice. I’ve known it all my life. It was Tony’s.”
“She was drinking and taking pills,” Lefty said. “She didn’t seem to care that I was under a lot of pressure. One night my ulcer had been acting up and I was upstairs in bed. I had called her on the intercom and asked her to get my dinner ready. My pain was beginning to show.
“After a while, I said over the intercom, ‘Geri, is it ready?’ She said, ‘Any second, dear.’ What she didn’t tell me was that she was so fucking drunk she never started dinner. Then, in a panic, she put the soft-boiled eggs on, burnt the fucking toast, and brings it up half-assed.
“When I look at it, I’m literally in pain. I gave her some shit. And I’m leaning back in the bed. She’s facing me, and she leaps toward the cabinet.
“I’m in a prone position. I did my best to leap with her in a kind of roll, but she got her hand on the cabinet before I did. I was probably a half second behind her, but she already had her hand on the pistol.
“We bumped heads and I was bleeding from the forehead, but she started bleeding from the nose. I had hit the bridge of her nose.
“The two kids came from their bedrooms in the rear. They saw we were struggling. I said, ‘Geri! Geri! The kids. Stop it!’ And I finally got the gun away, but she still wouldn’t stop struggling because she was so fucking drunk.
“I called Bobby Stella to come over right away to help me with the kids and the blood and everything. I told him to call my doctor, who rushed over right away. He took us to his office, where he patched me up pretty easily, but he had to give her a couple of stitches.
“She started mumbling about how I had broken her nose. I asked her, ‘Geri, what did you intend to do with the gun?’
“‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I was just drinking. I was wrong. I shouldn’t be drinking.’
“And by the time we got home, everything was calm.
“The next morning I’m going to work and she walks me out to the car and you’d think she was the perfect suburban housewife.
“Take care of yourself,’ she says, and gives me a kiss.
“I’m at work about an hour and I call the house. I ask her how she’s feeling and she says, ‘I feel great. How are you, my love?’ I detected her drunk voice.
“I got in the car and went back to the house. I parked the car down the block and snuck into the house. I wanted to see what was going on. Geri was on the phone. I think she was talking to her daughter Robin.
“I hear her say, ‘You’ve got to help me kill this motherfucker. Please help me.’
“‘Hey, she can’t help you Geri,’ I said, walking into the room. ‘Here I am.’ She almost died.
“‘You told me less than two hours ago you loved me and now you’re trying to get me killed.’ She hangs up the phone.
“‘Look what you did to my nose,’ she says, right back to my face. There was no winning with her. This is the way our lives had been going for a couple of years.
“After a while, when I’d get home, I’d come home very cautiously. Not just because of her pistol, but I was concerned that she would really hire someone.”
“Both Geri and Frank had terrible tempers,” Geri’s sister, Barbara Stokich, recalls. “They had tantrums. There was ketchup and mustard on the ceiling. Geri was spoiled. Even as a child when she got mad she would scream and fall to the floor and beat her hands and feet into the ground.
“Geri was too strong willed. To her, life was not a two-way street. She needed to dictate the terms. And Frank was exactly the same way.
“Once, in my house, after they had another fight, she admitted that it wasn’t always Frank’s fault. She admitted that she wasn’t always fair to him. But she said he wanted her to give up drinking, and she said she’d rather die than give up alcohol.
“I think Geri’s original plan was to divorce Frank right away if it didn’t work out, but nine months after the wedding she had Steven and he was everything to her. She adored Steven. She hadn’t understood how things would change when she had a kid. Now she could never leave Steven.
“She felt alone. I’d get calls at three in the morning. Why wasn’t he home with her and the kids? Lefty was living the big life. She heard that he was going out with showgirls. She knew it. She found receipts for jewelry in his pockets when she took his clothes to the cleaners.
“She’d come over to my place and let off steam and say if he could fool around, she could fool around. And she did.”
“Geri took the kids on a vacation to La Costa,” Lefty said. “When she left we weren’t getting along too well. On the second day she was drunk and couldn’t get on the phone. I didn’t talk to her for the next two days.
“Then, just before they were supposed to come home, I still hadn’t heard from them. I checked the hotel and was told they had moved out two days ago. I really began to panic. I couldn’t even find them on any of the airline manifests.
“I called Robin’s boyfriend. He was a decent kid. I told him I was looking for my wife and kids. At first he said that he didn’t know anything. Then he told me that Geri and the kids were with Lenny Marmor and Robin. He gave me a phone number.
“Lenny Marmor answers the phone. He sounded sharp. Slick. A smooth way of talking. He had a fake slight Southern accent.
“I said, ‘Lenny, this is Frank Rosenthal. I want to talk to Geri.’ He said she was not there.
“‘Lenny,’ I said, ‘I want to talk to Geri. It’s very important. I want my kids. I want her to put them on a plane, quick.’
“He said, very sincerely, ‘Frank, believe me, I don’t know where she is. But can I call you back in a few minutes?’
“‘Fine,’ I say, and I hang up.
“That was it. They all hit the road. Geri, Robin, my kids, and Marmor.
“That night Geri calls Spilotro. He calls me right away and says she’s worried that I was going to have them traced and killed.
“He told her: ‘I can’t help you. Just send the kids back now. Frank’s in a panic.’
“She calls. ‘Hi.’ ‘Hi.’
“I told her I wasn’t going to ask where she was; just put Steven and Stephanie on a plane as quickly as she could. Then call me back and give me their arrival time. Then you can do what you want to do.”
“Geri then asks, ‘If I were to come back, would you forgive me?’
“I told her I didn’t know. I said I’d try. I know I still cared for her, but I said, ‘Right now you’ve got to send me the kids.’
“She hung up and talked to Lenny and Robin. And what does Lenny say?” Geri later told Rosenthal. “He tells her to get the money out of a safe deposit box I had in Los Angeles, dye her hair, and take off with him and the kids for Europe. Geri told Lenny no because she knew me and said that I’d hunt them down until I found them. She called me back and said she was sending the kids. She called later with their flight number. The housekeeper and I went to the airport and we got the two kids.
“A little while later Geri calls. She’s feeling me out. I said to her, ‘You didn’t go to the box, did you?’ She didn’t answer me. I said, ‘Geri, what happened to the money?’ She said she made a mistake.
“‘How serious a mistake?’
“‘Serious,’ she says.
“Remember there’s over two million cash in that box.
‘“What’s it under?’ I ask.
“‘Twenty-five,’ she says.
“Twenty-five thousand?
“‘Yes,’ she says. She bought him some clothes. A new watch. Junk. Real pimp stuff.
“I said: ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s no big deal. I’ll have a Lear out there in a couple of hours to pick you up. Just hold that key. Don’t let Lenny near the key. If he gets the key, he’ll be able to open the box.
“‘You’ve lost twenty-five thousand dollars to that pimp,’ I said. ‘I can handle that. I can’t handle any more.’
“Geri said when she told Robin she was coming back to me, Robin said she felt like she had no mother. Robin’s loyalty had always been to Lenny Marmor, her natural father.
“Len had never married Geri. He had gotten married three times, but he never married Geri, the mother of his daughter. Still, Geri was as loyal to him as she could be to anyone. It was unreal.
“In a few hours I get a call from the pilot, who gives me the time he expects to land, and I get out to the airport and she wobbles off the plane. She’s got a big smile. Like nothing happened.
“On the drive home we’re talking about the box. She said she couldn’t get the safe deposit key from Robin. But there was no danger since the banks had been closed.
“We started arguing, again. When we got home the phone was ringing. It was Spilotro.
“‘How are things?’ he wants to know. I tell him things are okay. Geri says: ‘Is that Tony? Can I talk to him?’ I said no.
“Tony says: ‘I want to talk to her.’
“I say no again.
“Tony now says, ‘I want to talk to her. Do you hear me?’ He’s sounding a little strong.
“I said no again, and I thank him for his help, and he interrupts.
“‘But I said I want to talk to her,’ he says.
“‘Was that Tony?’ Geri asked. ‘I wanted to talk to him.’
“I told her I wanted to talk about the money in the box. The next morning we waited for a call from Robin. I didn’t answer it because I didn’t want to spook anything.
“Robin said that Lenny had been trying to get Robin to give him her key to the box.
“Geri says, ‘I am begging you with my life, don’t do it. Don’t listen to your father.’
“Geri is crying on the phone and begging Robin. A terrific performance. Robin surrenders … She promises she won’t raid the box.”
“As the marriage began to fall apart,” Geri’s sister, Barbara Stokich, said, “Frank would beat her up and she’d come to my place. She’d have a black eye. A black-and-blue face. Ribs. One night it was so bad we took pictures. Right in my house.
“Then Geri and Robin got mad at me because I wouldn’t give them the pictures. They wanted to take him to court. I didn’t give them the pictures, because the pictures didn’t prove it was Frank who beat her. They just showed she had been beaten. I remember I destroyed them. She thought she was going to be able to use the pictures to prove that he beat her when she took the case to court. Robin used to tell me everything that went on, until she turned on me for not turning over the pictures.”
“Lefty made her life miserable,” said a retired FBI agent familiar with the case. “He cheated on her all the time, and he didn’t care if she found out. He started to keep tabs on her like she was a Vegas version of a Stepford wife.
“He used to tape her schedule for the day onto the refrigerator in the morning, and he wanted to know where she was going to be every minute of the day. He also made her check in with him during the day.
“He even bought her a beeper so he could always get ahold of her, but she kept ‘losing’ it, and that drove him even more nuts. One time she was about a half hour late coming home with the kids. She said she got caught behind a long freight train that used to come through late in the afternoon. He made her stand there in front of him as he called the railroad freight yard and got the dispatcher just to double-check the time the freight went through.
“But no matter what he did to her, she’d never leave him, because there were always presents. Geri was an old hooker. He bought her when they got married, and she stayed bought.”
“Looking back,” Lefty said, “I realize we probably had three or four months of peace in our whole marriage. That was it. I was a fool. I was naive. I had really wanted a family. I never understood I couldn’t control her.
“One night I was in the Jubilation doing my TV show and Geri was in the audience. I see that Tony was also there. I see her go to the ladies’ room. I see Tony tried to stop her, but she fluffed him off. I didn’t know why, but the whole little thing didn’t sit right with me. I didn’t say anything.”
“Geri was a disaster,” Tony Spilotro’s pal Frank Cullotta said. “She was drinking a lot. She was doing a lot of coke, uppers, downers, everything.
“She caused Lefty a lot of embarrassment right at a time when he was having problems of his own with the Gaming Commission.
“Nobody liked Lefty. He was egotistical and he’d walk through a joint without acknowledging one person. He was arrogant. Lefty paid his dues to Chicago, but he acted like he didn’t have to acknowledge Tony any longer.”
“It was about two in morning, and Tony comes into the Stardust with another guy, and they’re loaded,” Murray Ehrenberg, the Stardust casino manager, says. “He’s not even supposed to be in the place, but everybody pretended like we didn’t know who he was.
“He goes over to a hundred-dollar blackjack table and starts playing five blacks [$500] a hand. He’s playing all alone and he’s losing. I see him go for ten thousand dollars out of his own kick in about twenty minutes.
“He starts to abuse the dealer. When he gets a card he doesn’t like he skips it back at the guy and asks for another. The pit boss nods for the dealer to do it. If that card’s no good, Tony throws it back and tells the dealer to shove it up his ass. We’re praying he gets good cards, but one after another are bad, and he’s getting very pissed. We’re just trying to get out of the night alive.
“Then Tony asks the pit boss for fifty thousand dollars credit. He knows the pit boss can’t extend that kind of line, and pretty soon I’m dragged in.
“‘Call you-know-who and get me my money,’ Tony says.
“I called Lefty on a special phone line we had set up at home. I tell him the Little Guy was in the place and wanted fifty credit. I told Lefty the guy had already lost ten of his own.
“Lefty was mad. Tony wasn’t even supposed to walk in the Stardust, forget about play and ask for credit. Lefty told me to put Tony on the phone and told Tony he’d make him even. Give him back the money he lost. But he ordered Tony to get out of the casino that instant, before some rat who worked in the Stardust tipped off the control board and he got everybody in trouble.
“Tony wasn’t that drunk. He didn’t want to create a war. Because of the skim and Lefty’s license and everything else, the control board was already coming down very hard on the Stardust.
“I okayed Tony’s ten thousand, which, of course, he never paid back, but Lefty didn’t care about that. Lefty just wanted to make sure that I didn’t put Tony’s name down on any credit slip or anything in the place.
“When Tony left he was really angry, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. Deep down he might have known Lefty was right, but he didn’t have to like it.”
“It was a Friday or Saturday night,” Lefty said. “It was after the TV show, and I was at the Jubilation. Joey Cusumano was standing next to me. I called the house. No answer. It’s two o’clock in the morning and there was no answer.
“I told Cusumano I was going home. It was only a five-minute drive.
“When I got there I found Geri and Steven missing. My daughter’s ankle was tied to the bed with a clothesline rope.
“I can’t believe this. I’m untying the kid and the phone rings.
“‘How ya doing?’ It’s Tony.
“‘Not good. What’s on your mind?’
“‘Relax. Relax. Everything’s okay. She’s okay. You two have been fighting. She wanted to discuss your problems.’
“He said Geri had dropped Steven off with a neighbor. He said I should relax and come over to the Village Pub.
“I drove over there raging. It was kind of crowded. Tony was waiting inside the front door. He tried to quiet me down.
“‘Don’t make a scene,’ he says. Tony is standing between me and the door, but I know Tony. I’m not going to brush past him disrespectfully. I tell him I’m okay and walk all the way around him.
“Inside, she’s in a booth with her back to me. I have to go past her and turn around to confront her. I sat down.
“I called her a few names. She was being careful. She was loaded. She just kept saying I should let her alone. After a while, I took her home. On the way out, Tony told me not to be too rough on her. ‘She’s only trying to save your marriage,’ he said.”
“She was a beautiful person, but he drove her to drink,” Geri’s friend Suzanne Kloud, a makeup artist on Lefty’s TV show, recalls. “He’d drive anybody to drink. He’d come home after his show at three or four in the morning, kick her out of bed, and talk to one of his girlfriends on the phone for two hours.
“He didn’t care about her feelings. He was always screwing around with the dancers, and he flaunted it. She told me that one time he flew into Los Angeles and he spent fourteen thousand dollars at Gucci for some dancers and he bought another one a seventeen-thousand-dollar necklace.
“She said she found the receipts in his pockets when she’d take his clothes to the cleaners. I mean, here’s a guy who’s not exactly looking for a quiet evening at home.
“He was always abusive to her, almost like he hated her. One night after the show she thought she was having dinner with him. He was surrounded by all his flunkies and she went up and interrupted him.
“She grabbed his arm. She wanted to know, in front of all those people, when they were leaving. It was stupid. He pulled his arm away.
“He says, ‘Don’t you fucking touch me,’ to his own wife in front of a whole crowd.
“I grabbed her and we went off to eat. I asked her why she did such a thing—it was only going to create a scene. But Geri seemed to always cause scenes with him. She knew what drove him nuts, but she’d do it anyway. She told me she didn’t know why. She just had to do it.
“But as miserable as he was, he’d also bring her stuff. He gave her the most incredible jewelry. He gave her a pink coral-and-diamond necklace and she had a cat’s-eye necklace surrounded by diamonds. The necklaces were worth two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand dollars. And she lived for that. If you were a hustler, that’s your God.”
“I remember I was watching football,” Lefty said. “She knew I was preoccupied. She said, ‘I’m going to my sister’s.’ She said she was dropping Steven off at some neighbors and taking Stephanie to Barbara’s with her.
“She wanted to know if I might want some McDonald’s on her way home. I said maybe. She knew I liked McDonald’s. She gave me Barbara’s number. I didn’t have her sister’s number. I didn’t give a fuck about her sister. She left the number near the phone and left.
“About halftime I decided to call her sister. I was going to tell her to bring me back some McDonald’s.
“I called and Barbara said she was at McDonald’s getting lunch for Stephanie.
“I said okay, have her call me when she gets back.
“I go back to the game, but after a half hour I still haven’t heard from Geri, and the mental computer starts clicking time.
“I called Barbara back and asked if Geri got back.
“‘No,’ she says.
“Now I’m a little annoyed. She was supposed to be getting a McDonald’s for Stephanie and she hasn’t done it. What about Stephanie’s lunch?
“I tell Barbara, ‘Make sure she calls me when she gets back.’
“Fifteen minutes. No Geri.
“I call back. ‘Okay Barbara,’ I say, ‘get in your car and bring my daughter home.’
“I then go and get Steven, and Barbara brings Stephanie back, and now that I’ve got the kids home, I can try and find Geri.
“On that day Geri had taken my car. It was bigger than hers. I had a mobile phone in my car. So I rang my mobile number just in case. The phone gets picked up, but it’s a man’s voice. Muffled. Covered up. But I know the voice. I’ve known it all my life. It was Tony’s. I knew Tony’s voice no matter what.
“I hung right up. Uh oh. What the hell do I have here? Just to make sure, I called the number right back, but this time I get the operator saying that the mobile number is not in service at this time.
“Now I’m not able to watch the football game. I’ve got a real problem coming up. It gets to be about seven or eight o’clock at night. No Geri. Finally I get a call from her manicurist.
“‘Frank,’ he says. ‘Geri is hysterical,’ he says. ‘She ran out of gas and she had to get towed, and she feels she’s in trouble with you.’
“I stayed calm. ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘Put her on.’
“She’s crying. ‘I love you. I’m sorry.’
“She didn’t sound right, and I didn’t think she knew it was me who got Tony on the car phone, but I didn’t want to say anything right then.
“I had to go to Los Angeles for a few hours the next day. I asked her if she wanted to come. Do some shopping. She said she didn’t feel like it. She wanted to get a manicure. So off I went while she stayed home.
“When I got back late in the afternoon she was home, and I noticed her hands.
“‘Gee,’ I said, ‘you didn’t get your manicure?’
‘“No,’ she said. ‘I didn’t feel like it. It was raining.’
“‘What did you do?’
“‘Oh, nothing. I had lunch with my sister.’
“‘That’s nice,’ I said, but I’m ninety percent sure she’s on the bullshit. ‘Where’d you go?’ I’m being casual, but I sense she’s catching on.
“‘The country club.’
“‘What’d you have?’
“And she told me some salad or something.
“‘And what did Barbara have?’
“She told me what her sister had.
“‘Okay,’ I said, ‘get your sister on the phone. I want you to ask your sister what she had for lunch.’
“Geri gets a piece of paper and writes down her sister’s phone number and starts to go down the stairs to give the paper to our housekeeper to call Barbara.
“I grabbed the paper.
“‘You didn’t have lunch with Barbara, did you?’
“‘Yes I did,’ she says.
“‘Okay,’ I said, ‘then I’m calling her.’
“I pick up the phone.
“‘All right, all right,’ she says, kind of annoyed. ‘I didn’t have lunch with Barbara.’
“‘Then what were you doing?’
“‘I was just fooling around with some of my old pals. I know you don’t like them, and I didn’t want to say. That’s all.’
“I said, ‘Look Geri, the best thing is for me to tell it the way it is. I feel you’ve been with somebody. I know it. We both know it. I just hope it wasn’t with one of two guys.’
“‘What two?’ she asks, looking me in the eye. Almost a smile.
“‘Tony or Joey,’ I say. She just looks at me with a little smile. ‘Geri,’ I say, ‘this is no fucking game. I’m not going to listen to any more games. You go down the line with me right now, or you’re out of here.’ I’m telling her if she bullshits me the marriage is over.
“She was full of Tuinal. She told me it was Tony. She told it straight. No big deal. She said they had been half boozed when it began. I’m listening to her and I’m getting sick inside.
“Then she says, ‘Oh, by the way, he’s gonna be calling up at six o’clock.’
“Now I want to die. I’ll have to talk to him like I don’t know what she’s just told me. I tried to explain that we were all in danger. I told her not to tell Tony she’d told me about it. If Tony suspected I knew, he might think I’d make a beef back home, and she and I would both be killed. I knew him. We’d both just disappear. She said she understood. It had been a crazy thing. She’d get us all out of this. But she needed a little time to back him off. She couldn’t just stop seeing him in the morning. He’d get suspicious I’d found out. The plan was to let it die out nice and smoothly.
“At six o’clock the call came in. It was the loudest ring I ever heard. She told Tony that I just got back and wasn’t feeling well and that she’d talk to him in the morning.
“She filled me in on the background. She said that they had been seeing each other for six months to a year. I remembered when Geri and I were dating. I remembered taking her with me to Chicago. One of my first stops was to see Tony and Nancy and his brothers. I walked into Tony’s house with Geri. She was in a classy miniskirt. I remembered he said, ‘Holy shit! Where did you find her?’
“I took her to see my friends back home. We went to the country ranch and saw Fiore. I could see he was pleased and approved.
“But now it was over and I had a choice. I could go to Chicago and take a position against Tony, but I was trying to prevent a war. I felt there would be no winners. I told her that. She said she understood and that it was over and that she would break it off.
“I asked what if Tony didn’t want to break it off, and she said that would be no problem. She’d just back him off. If you listened to her she was really convincing.
“Instead, I later found out, they went right on meeting—in motels, or his apartment in the Towers across from the club, or wherever.
“Plus, he starts asking me all the time: ‘Is anything wrong? Is everything okay?’ He’s poking. I know him. One night I’m at the Stardust. One of the guys says to me, ‘Our buddy’s gonna call.’
“I knew he would be calling on one of the six booths in the back of the casino. I went back and waited for the call.
“‘How are you?’ he asks me.
“‘Fine,’ I say.
“‘I just wanted to ask you something,’ he says, and he starts talking to me about some horseshit thing he would never pay attention to. Then he gets around to why he called.
“He asks: ‘How are you and Geri getting along?’
“‘Why do you ask?’
“‘I just wanted to ask you something.’
“‘What?’
“‘Do you still love her?’ he asks me.
“‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Sure I do. Shouldn’t I?’
“‘No, no,’ Tony says. ‘I was just asking.’
“She had obviously told him we had been to see Oscar. I told her I was thinking about a formal separation. A divorce. Even without the Tony situation—which no one knew about—I had told her this thing wasn’t working.”
“In late 1979 and the early 1980s we were on Spilotro all the time,” retired FBI agent Emmett Michaels said. “It was routine. He’d think he slipped us, but we always had him from the surveillance plane. This time the plane tracked him to a mobile trailer he had way out on Tropicana Avenue.
“It was a hot day, and when we got there we just sat on him for a couple of hours. This was a place he used to go with his girlfriends. I knew his home life wasn’t the best because one time when I was bringing him in on some periodic questioning, he asked Nancy for some cigarette money. ‘Fuck you,’ she said, ‘get your own cigarette money.’
“On this day, Tony had no idea that the plane had taken him to the trailer and that we would be waiting there when he left. There wasn’t even a wire in the place. We were sitting in a van a couple of blocks away using glasses. I’ll never forget it. The door to the trailer opens and out comes Tony, and right behind him, out comes Geri Rosenthal. They had been in there over an hour.
“Geri was Nancy Spilotro’s best friend. We couldn’t believe it. We kept passing the glasses back and forth just to make sure. It was her, all right. She was about a foot and half taller than him. No mistake. We knew that it was only a matter of time before the word got out that Tony was having an affair with Lefty’s wife. I mean, who could keep a secret like that?”
“Even though Spilotro tried to be discreet, she didn’t,” retired FBI agent Mike Simon said. “It was the worst-kept secret in town. In no time, everybody knew. Geri began showing up at the beauty parlor and gym with presents that she said came from her new sponsor, which is hooker talk for a boyfriend or protector.
“She also began telling her friends that her new sponsor was Tony Spilotro. Geri did not keep up any pretenses.”
“Spilotro openly flaunted his relationship with Geri as a show of power,” Kent Clifford, the chief of Las Vegas Metro intelligence, said. “He could have had dozens of women younger and prettier than Geri Rosenthal, but power is an aphrodisiac.
“But Spilotro’s ego got in the way. I’m sure Spilotro felt, ‘I can do it and nobody can do anything about it. She’s my girlfriend, my moll.’ It was a stupid thing for him to do.”
“I go to Chicago,” Cullotta said, “and they heard about something. ‘What the fuck’s going on out there?’ Joey Lombardo says. ‘What’s he doing? Fucking the guy’s wife?’
“I lied. I said no. I played dumb. I said I didn’t know anything about that. What could I say—that Tony was fucking Lefty’s wife and that the FBI and Metro were all over everybody?
“‘We hope he’s not,’ they said, but I can see that they are perturbed.
“Next, Joe Nick, that’s Joe Ferriola, sees me. ‘What’s going on with that fucking Jew?’ he says. ‘He’s acting crazy. The Little Guy wouldn’t be fucking his old lady, would he? Because, if he is, that’s a problem.’
“I lied again. I said no. There’s nothing going on. The fucking guy is just crazy. Tony could have been called in and killed for jeopardizing everything, but by now they’re sure Lefty was a psycho. Only the bosses, like Joey Aiuppa, backed Lefty, but only because they had known him for so many years.
“Later that night, I was in Rocky’s Lounge, North Avenue and Melrose Park—that was Jackie Cerone’s joint—and I was at the bar with Larry Neumann and Wayne Matecki, two stone dead killers, scary looking guys, and Cerone comes at me at the bar.
“‘Is there a problem with the Jew guy and his old lady?’ Jackie Cerone asks me. Shit, I think, this is all over town. Somebody brought this story back, and the only person I knew who could bring the story back was Lefty.
“I told Cerone that Lefty and his old lady argued all the time, and that’s all. Then he looked at me and asked: ‘Is the little guy fucking her?’
“I said no. What could I say? Jackie Cerone was a boss and he hated both Tony and Lefty.
“‘Well,’ Cerone says, ‘we wouldn’t want to jeopardize anything with our friends.’
“When I got back to Las Vegas I told Tony about these questions and he got hot. We were walking back and forth in front of the Gold Rush on West Sahara, and he’s got his mouth covered because the Gee was using lip readers with binoculars.
“‘That fucking Jew motherfucker,’ he says. ‘He ran back there and cried. The Jew fuck is gonna start a war. I gotta think about it.’”
“I assumed she had backed Tony off,” Lefty said, “but when I suspected she was still talking to Lenny Marmor, I had my home phone bugged. I put the tapes in because when I’d get home and she’d be on the phone, she’d quickly hang up or say, ‘I’ll call you back.’ And I wanted to make sure she didn’t try and kidnap my children again.
“The tape reels had a one-hour limit. I had the unit set up in the garage. First couple of days I found out that she talked to Nancy Spilotro a lot. And I’d hear things like, ‘Guess what Mr. Know-It-All just said to me?’
“One day she called her father and said, ‘I wish you’d kill the sonofabitch.’ I could hear her glass tinkling in the background. Her father asked if she was drinking.
“‘Daddy,’ she says, ‘I haven’t had a drink in months.’
“As I listened to the tape, I had to eat a lot of shit. It was very hard. I couldn’t tip my hand that I knew what she was saying behind my back.
“And then, after a couple of days, I heard her talking to Tony on the tapes. He talked very quickly. She’d tell him when I was coming home. This was after she told me she was going to back him off. After I warned her of the danger and everything. And now I’m listening to her talk to Tony with my own ears, planning where they could meet. ‘I’ll meet you at the baseball field.’ ‘Vincent is playing tomorrow afternoon.’ ‘I’ll see you at the ball game; he’ll be working.’ ‘Frank’ll never call.’ That kind of stuff.
“I couldn’t even look at her, I was so angry with what I heard. She was going to get us killed.
“The kids had a swim meet the next day and went to bed early, and that night, I said, ‘Geri, level with me. If you’ve never leveled with me before, tell me the truth. Are you still seeing our friend?’
“I told her, ‘You’re just as much at risk as I am. They’ll kill you before they kill me or him.’
“‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘It’s over.’
“Meanwhile, I know I’ve got her on tape and she’s still meeting the guy.
“I asked, ‘Do you have any contact at all with him?’
“‘No dear,’ she says.
“‘Are you sure?’ I say.
“‘After all we’ve been through, I’m surprised you could even ask,’ she says.
“‘Okay, Geri,’ I say. ‘Swear.’
“‘I swear,’ Geri says. ‘I would never. Can’t you ever let it go?’
“‘Swear to me,’ I say. ‘Swear to me on your son’s life and then I’ll let it go.’
“She looks right at me. She’s angry. ‘I swear on our son’s life,’ she says. ‘Now will you stop?’
“‘You bitch!’ I said. ‘I’ve got you recorded.’
“And I took out the small recorder with the cassette and I pressed the play button, and she heard herself talking to Tony.
“‘Turn that off!’ she screamed at me. ‘I don’t want to hear any more!’
“‘You bitch,’ I say. Now I’m really hot. ‘I’m gonna throw you out this fucking window!’
“She starts screaming. ‘Steven! Help! Steven!’
“The poor kid comes out half asleep. He’s about nine. Now Geri had me backed off.
“‘If you don’t get off me,’ she said, ‘I’m calling the police.’
“I walked out and went to the casino. I had some dinner and later went back home and fell asleep. I made my priority Steven and Stephanie’s swim meet.”
Lefty had already begun to divide things up shortly after Geri returned from her trip to Beverly Hills with Lenny Marmor. He’d filed a quit claim agreement in court separating the properties in preparation for the dissolution of the marriage. According to the terms of the agreement, Lefty got almost everything: the house at 972 Vegas Valley Drive; lots 144 and 145 at Las Vegas Country Club Estates on Augusta Drive; and the couple’s four Thoroughbred race horses—Island Moon, Last Reason, Est Mi Amigo, and Mister Commonwealth.
But three safety deposit boxes at the First National Bank of Nevada, Strip branch, remained in both their names. According to Rosenthal, he needed someone to have access to the cash if he was under arrest or otherwise unable to get to his own money.
Lefty had also gotten Geri to agree that she would lose her right “to care, custody and control of their minor children if she engaged in alcohol and or barbiturates.”
4-5-79
3:12 AM
My Dearest Robin …
Honey I don’t want to worry you but I don’t know how much more I can take here. As I sit here tonight I have a cracked rib, 2 black eyes, bruises all over my body & I don’t have to tell you how I got all of it. All in the last two weeks. Last night he came home drunk & choked me until I lost consciousness. I really can’t tell this to anyone but you because no one cares. Believe it or not I can handle all the shit but I also might take the gun & fuckin kill him one night. He almost killed me last night. When I regained consciousness he was standing over me so drunk & ready to kick me. He doesn’t even care or know what he’s doing anymore when he drinks. Tonight he came home and started again so I screamed at him to go back out & leave me alone & he started to get mean again so I just sat there & let him rant & rave & prayed he wouldn’t hit me again. I’m deathly afraid of him.…
Please write me. I love you & don’t talk on my phone—he listens—Mom.
“We were in the Jubilation and Tony got the idea of whacking Lefty,” Frank Cullotta said. “He didn’t say Lefty’s name. He said ‘the Jew.’ He said, ‘The Jew, I’m not sure yet. But if I’m right, I need you to get a guy. You got somebody?’
“I says, ‘Yeah, the big guy.’
“He says, ‘Well I don’t want you hitting him on the street.’
“He says, ‘The Jew.’
“He says, ‘I’ll set him up, so when he pulls up, you scoop him. You’ll know where the hole’s at.’
“We’d just have to move the plywood, drop him in the hole and cover it up.
“And then Tony says, ‘But I’ll let you know when.’
“I says, ‘Okay.’
“He says, ‘I’ll let you know, but for now I’m not sure.’
“She started staying out all night,” Murray Ehrenberg said. “Who knew what she was doing? She was either loaded or high most of the time. But Frank wasn’t much better. He was getting drunk and bouncing around every night with his dancers. He’s throwing money away. Buying them this. Buying them that. He lost a bundle playing blackjack. He was probably the worst blackjack player I ever saw, or else he was punishing himself for something.”
“I owned the Upper Crust Pizzeria,” Frank Cullotta said. “We had food, but it was also a hangout. One morning, really early, we were still preparing the food—it must have been seven, eight, eight thirty—Geri pulls up. She comes out of the car and leaves the car door open. She looks haggard. She was the kind of woman you didn’t want to challenge in public because she could make a real scene. She’d flail around and scream and swing her arms, and she was tall and striking looking and she was a nightmare to handle.
“She comes storming into the restaurant yelling, ‘Where the fuck is he?’
“‘Please, Geri,’ I say, ‘calm down; don’t make a commotion.’
“‘I want to see him now,’ she says. ‘Where is he? I’m gonna kill that motherfucker. Now.’
“I tell my old lady to watch her—she’s hysterical. We put her in a booth in the lounge and I lock the front door. She wanted to talk to Tony immediately.
“I call Tony and she’s screaming in the background that she’s gonna kill the Jew. Meanwhile, I know if Nancy finds out about all of this with Geri, there’s gonna be hell to pay.
“Tony never drove in Las Vegas. He always sat in the passenger’s seat. This morning he’s there in two minutes. He had Sammy Siegel drive him. Sammy would be at his house from early till late playing gin rummy with Tony and taking Tony anywhere he wanted to go. That was Sammy’s job.
“Tony walks in the door and he tells me to move her car around back so nobody sees it. I told Ernie to put her car in back.
“I walked away, but I can see that he’s talking to her and he’s moving his hands up and down in a chopping motion like he always did, and she’s got tears come down her face and she’s nodding a little bit, and finally he tells her to leave.
“Her car was round back and we’re standing there when she drove off. Tony turns and looks at me. ‘I fucked up,’ he said.”