“We’re either going to make a lot of money today or we’re going to be very famous.”
There were stories in the newspapers about Lefty and Geri, and Tony and Geri, and Lefty and Tony, and stories from anonymous law enforcement officials who “feared a Rosenthal-Spilotro mob war.” The FBI purposely exploited the publicity. William K. Lambie Jr., a director of the Chicago Crime Commission, received copies of the Rosenthal-Spilotro news clippings from a Las Vegas law enforcement source, who asked if Lambie could spread the story around Chicago with the “express purpose of upsetting Joe Aiuppa.”
A Lambie memo on file at the commission said his Vegas source had “furnished copies of news clippings regarding the Spilotro-Rosenthal affair.… He asked that I contact a local member of the working press so that the story would appear in the local print media together with a paragraph indicating that federal authorities had long been aware of the Spilotro-Rosenthal affair because of their surveillance of SPILOTRO. This information is designed to further upset AIUPPA.”
There were stories about Rosenthal and Spilotro in the Chicago newspapers, including one in Art Petacque and Hugh Hough’s Sunday column in the Chicago Sun-Times. But by that time, Joe Aiuppa had more to be upset about with Tony Spilotro than philandering.
“Nobody knew that we were doing the burglaries until we got too notorious,” Cullotta said. “But as soon as I opened up that fucking pizza joint, Tony started coming around too much. It was better when I used to sneak off and meet him in different parks. Tony was a restaurant guy all his life, and my joint to him was like a pleasure. He loved the business and he wanted to be a part of any restaurant business, especially with his buddy, you know.
“And there was nothing that he couldn’t do. He’d say, ‘Look, you need any money, you tell me. I’ll put whatever we need in this joint.’
“It’s my joint, but he loved to be there with the recipes, and he was there all the time. He just loved it. And meanwhile, he was just fucking destroying the business. You know, we used to have all the movie stars come in there. And the cops used to stop them on the street.
“Like Wayne Newton. He’s coming into my place to eat, and he’s pulling up, and he’s got an entourage of people with him. The cops jump out of their cars and they tell Wayne, ‘You know where you’re going?’ ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘I’m going to the Upper Crust.’
“They says, ‘Well, syndicate men own that place.’ He says, ‘I’m going in there to eat food, not talk to them.’
“And it’s all because the cops saw Tony was there all the time. That’s when everything went downhill. I used to be able to move around. They were thinking I was nothing. Just a nobody guy out there. Until they put me in the joint with him. They put me there with him. ‘Hey, who is this guy?’ And then they checked me out and they see that we’re going back to when we were kids.
“That’s when it was all over. It was too late. Then I said, ‘Fuck it.’ Until then I played real low. I lived high, but I was low profile. I was under investigation for different things, but not for being affiliated with Tony or OC. Until we were together too often.
“I was a stubborn guy. I don’t believe that I have to register when I come to town because I’ve got a sheet or did time. So I never registered as a felon with the sheriff. And nobody bothered me until they spotted Tony with me all the time.
“To me that was bullshit. Fuck it. Fuck this privileged town. I used to tell them to go fuck themselves. I wouldn’t tell them where I lived. And then they’d arrest me. And I’d get a rap. And I’d fight them. I didn’t give a fuck. The judge’d throw the cases out, but the cops arrested me all the time. And I’d still fight them. I would never tell them where I lived. I mean, they knew where I lived. I just refused to tell them.
“I was busting their balls all the time.
“Now Tony’s in my place all the time and he sends his kid and the baseball team in, and everybody’s there all the time. And to tell the truth, I don’t mind it. I love it. But so did everybody else, including the police.
“They used to park in the lot and watch. And that’s where they got all their pictures. You see all those surveillance pictures of Tony coming out of a restaurant? They’re all coming out of my restaurant.
“We did good up there until the night the cops killed Frankie Blue. Tony and I were sitting at the patio outside in front of the restaurant. Frankie Blue pulled up. He was a maitre d’ at the Hacienda. His father, Stevie Blue, Stevie Bluestein, was a business agent with the Culinary Workers Union.
“He was a good kid. I told him, ‘Frankie, take them fucking Illinois plates off that car.’
“Tony told him, ‘It’s not a good idea to have them plates on there, Frankie.’
“The kid says, ‘I’ll change them.’
“Then he says, ‘I got a couple of fucking guys following me around.’
“We say, ‘It’s probably the heat.’ We told him about the Illinois plates. That only means Chicago to the Vegas cops.
“He says, ‘I don’t know. They’ve been following me around too much.’
“He says, ‘I had a Bonneville just follow me around the corner to here.’
“So he gives Tony and me a kiss and he leaves. He’s a good respectful kid.
“I think now that he thought that some guys were trying to rob him. It turns out there were a couple of heist guys specializing in maitre d’s because their pockets are filled with twenty-dollar bills. He didn’t know the guys were cops, because he never would have done what he did. He’s not stupid. That kid’s been around wiseguys all his life. And the cops killed him. They were in an unmarked car.
“A half hour later, we get a phone call from Herbie Blitzstein. Herbie lived right over there where it happened. Herbie said, ‘They just killed Frankie.’ I said, ‘He just left.’ He said, ‘They fucking emptied two guns on him by my house.’
“I said, ‘We’ve gotta reach these motherfuckers.’ He said, ‘They just declared war.’ ‘Well whenever they’re ready,’ I told him. I said I knew it had to be Gene Smith. Because I knew Gene Smith’s going for him. Smith was a fucking gung ho cop.
“What happened was Frankie left here and they followed him. He had a gun in the car. He didn’t tell us that. He said that he didn’t know who was following him. They claim that when they tried to curb him he pulled the gun out. They jumped out of their car and they fired one nine-millimeter and a thirty-eight into the door of the car. Well, they killed him. Immediately. Then they said they found the gun in the car. ‘In his hand.’ This is what they said.
“He might have made a rash move when he got near his security gates. He was in a guarded community, where there are gates that open and you drive in. And they killed him right out in front there.
“So Tony and them go over. He tells me to stay at the place. ‘Listen for the phone,’ he says; ‘I’ll be right back.’ And they jumped in some cars and they went over there. It was horrible. The cops panicked. Everything was getting very tense. And the police out here are real fast on the draw. They’re scared. They’re always shaking. They’re shaky guys.
“Then they all came back. Tony. Herbie. The father, Stevie Blue. Ronnie Blue, the brother. And they all came back over and they’re all crying and we’re talking, you know. Trying to talk out of sight. You know. And we didn’t see a fucking cop around. They just like pulled everybody off the street because they knew something was going to go down because Tony was fucking smoking.
“I mean he was smoking. He was planning stuff. He had an idea to start a race riot. He figured he’d use the blacks to start it up and then we can, you know, wipe a few of them out—and he didn’t mean blacks.
“Use it as an excuse. Make it like a few blacks were killed by some cops and it’d just snowball, because in that town the cops really mess around with the blacks. They had them contained in certain areas, and we were going to go in and uncontain it.
“That’s what Tony really wanted to do, but it never came about. Too many other things started happening. First, they tried to blame us for driving by and shotgunning a cop’s house. We didn’t do that. Somebody else did it and threw it on us.
“At the time Tony said, ‘These motherfuckers are trying to frame me for shooting this cocksucker’s house up. They’re using a reverse on us.’ They did it on purpose to take the heat off them for the Bluestein killing.
“So the cops killed the kid. I never saw Tony so upset. He was kicking chairs. Walls. Everything. He really loved that kid. At the funeral everybody showed. Tony commanded the kid got shown respect. Even Lefty went to the wake, but he was not standing next to Tony.”
The questions raised by the killing even further strained the relationship between Spilotro and the Metro cops. Metro would do anything to get Tony, and he would do anything to embarrass them. In November, when a security guard at the Sahara casino tipped Metro intelligence that Spilotro was having lunch with Oscar Goodman in the coffee shop, chief of Metro intelligence Kent Clifford was delighted. Police officer Rich Murray, who was on patrol nearby, was rushed to the location. Spilotro was in the state’s Black Book and officially banned from entering any casino in Nevada. A violation could subject him to arrest and the casino to a fine of up to $100,000.
The Sahara security guards had kept an eye on the Spilotro table ever since they got the tip from special agent Mark Kaspar of the FBI. Before calling Metro, the security guards had even called the FBI to make certain there was an agent Kaspar.
When Metro’s Rich Murray got to the coffee shop, the Spilotro table was pointed out to him by the security guards who greeted him. The security guards said that Spilotro’s lawyer, Oscar Goodman, had just gotten up and gone to the men’s room.
When Murray approached Spilotro and asked for identification, Spilotro said he did not have any. When Murray said he suspected the man was Anthony Spilotro, the man denied that he was Anthony Spilotro. As Murray was about to take Spilotro into custody and downtown for booking, Oscar Goodman returned and started insisting that the man was not Tony Spilotro. Murray arrested him anyway.
Ten minutes later, as Murray was in the process of booking Spilotro, Detective Gene Smith arrived and realized Murray had arrested Tony’s dentist brother, Pasquale Spilotro. Of course, Pasquale Spilotro was immediately released, but not until the press had all been alerted to the fiasco.
Metro intelligence chief Kent Clifford always believed the department had been set up. For one thing, Mark Kaspar denied, in a sworn affidavit, that he had ever made a call to the Sahara about Spilotro. For another, Goodman apparently had not told Murray that the man in question was Spilotro’s brother.
The anger between Clifford and his Metro cops and Spilotro and his men escalated, and at one point they accused one another of shooting up one another’s houses and cars. It got so bad that one day, when Clifford received information that two of his detectives were on a hit list, he strapped on a gun, brought along an armed sidekick, and the two of them flew to Chicago.
He went straight to the homes of Joe Aiuppa and Joey Lombardo—Spilotro’s two immediate bosses—in order to confront them. But when Clifford and his sidekick arrived at Aiuppa’s house, the only person at home was the boss’s seventy-two-year-old wife. They then went over to Joey Lombardo’s house, but his wife, too, was the only Lombardo at home.
In later explaining his journey to Chicago to the Los Angeles Times, Clifford said he then “tracked down” Lombardo’s attorney and went over to see him, warning the lawyer: “If any of my men are harmed I will return to the homes I just visited and kill everything that moves, walks or crawls.”
Clifford said he then went to a hotel and waited until 2:30 A.M., at which time he got a call wishing him a “safe trip.” This, he said, was the prearranged code with Lombardo’s lawyer that the alleged hit on the two detectives had been called off. Clifford, who is now a real estate salesman in Nevada, has refused repeated requests for interviews.
“It was all going bad,” Cullotta says. “You’ve got that nut job Kent Clifford knocking at Lomby and Aiuppa’s door. I don’t want to know what Aiuppa heard from his old lady when he got home that night. Some Metro cops got loaded one night and pegged a couple of shots at John Spilotro’s house and just missed hitting his kid. They out-and-out murdered Frankie Blue and everybody knew that, no matter what they said. And on top of everything, Tony’s under a lot of pressure for money and he puts the pressure on us to earn.
“Joey Lombardo had just been indicted along with Allen Dorfman and Roy Williams for trying to bribe the senator from Nevada on some Teamster pension stuff, and Lomby needed cash. Tony had me driving my guys nuts. We were knocking over jewelry stores every other week. We ran out of places in Las Vegas. We were flying out to San Jose, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix. Usually I brought all the swag to his brother Michael, in Chicago, but now even Michael got eighteen months on a bookmaking case, so we were fencing the stuff all over the place.
“I first heard that there was over a million in cash and jewelry in the vault at Bertha’s Jewelers on West Sahara Avenue from Joey DiFranzo, about a year before. We knew it was a family business and there was a safe with at least five hundred thousand dollars in cash. You could see the jewelry in the place just by looking in the windows every day.
“The place was fully alarmed, but I went inside pretending to buy something just to case the place. As I talked to the woman waiting on me, I kept maneuvering her so I could see inside the vault. I saw that inside the vault they had no alarm.
“I told Tony about the score and he said for me to ‘fill in’ Joe Blasko. Blasko had been a cop, but he got kicked off when they found he was working more for Tony than the Sheriff, so Tony always made sure he was earning.
“Tony said maybe Blasko could make a quick fifty thousand dollars on the Bertha score so he could get the guy off his back for a while.
“Unfortunately, one of the guys in on the deal was working for the Gee. It was that asshole Sal Romano. We didn’t know it at the time, but the feds had Sal on a drug case and he was trying to skate by giving up Tony and us.
“I always knew there was something wrong with him, but everybody thought he was fine, and Ernie Davino said he was a great pick man and a lock expert.
“There was Ernie Davino, Leo Guardino, and Wayne Matecki, who were going to go in through the roof.
“Sal Romano, Larry Neumann, and I were going to be driving up and down the street keeping our eyes out, plus we all had police scanners and walkie-talkies to the guys inside and each other in the cars.
“Across the street from the place we had Blasko, the cop, in a truck he used for cleaning cement, with a great big Superman painted on it. Blasko was sitting in there with a police scanner and a walkie-talkie, too.
“We picked the Fourth of July weekend because we expected no one would be around, and if we had to make a blast or something, people would think they were fireworks. Plus, since Monday was a holiday, nobody would probably get into the place until Tuesday, giving us even more time to get rid of the merch.
“We started during the early evening. I remember when we got there it was still almost light.
“In Bertha’s we went in through the roof to circumvent the alarms. I had already cased the place for motion detectors. They’re the little boxes with little red lights on the wall or door. They look like home fire alarms.
“Bertha’s didn’t have motion detectors, but there were other regular alarms. I could see the tape. All the doors had tape.
“Normally, you could pull your truck up to the side of the building and make a hole. At Bertha’s, though, we figured if the vault wall was steel, not just cement, we needed torches, and that could take forty-five minutes. And that’s why we decided to go in through the roof.
“But right when we got started, I get signaled by Sal Romano. He says his car is stuck in the parking lot in the rear of a shopping center a little down the block from Bertha’s. He says he can’t start the damn thing.
“I drive over and pick him up, and I don’t understand it, because I had just checked the car out before the robbery. It’s wrong. I’m pissed. I use my Riviera to push his car out of the way. Far away. We don’t want it anywhere nearby the score.
“Also, I radio Larry Neumann and I tell Larry to pick up Sal on Sahara Avenue on the other side of the street from Bertha’s so they can go up and down the street watching out together. I mean, four eyes are still better than two.
“Meanwhile, I hear from the guys that they have broken through the roof and they’re going inside.
“Then I get a call from Larry saying he’s driving up and down Sahara and he can’t find Sal. Sal was supposed to be standing out there at the curb waiting for Larry to pick him up.
“Now Larry’s cursing Sal and saying he should have killed him long ago.
“‘Uh oh,’ I think. Then I see radio cars coming down the street, and I say over the walkie-talkie, everybody get out of there.
“We had rendezvous spots for the guys inside and I told them to get out of there, that the cops are on the way. From inside I hear them say it’s too late; the cops are coming through the roof.
“I get stopped right away, but they don’t get Larry until Paradise Road.
“Finally, they bring us all in, and there ain’t no Sal Romano. That’s when I was certain he was the rat. The feds had set us up. They were on us from the first.
“Sal walked the streets of Chicago for a week after that. I resented that Tony didn’t kill the guy for me. I told Tony that Sal was the rat, but he just put it off.
“Anyway, the Gee had been waiting for us in a building right across the street. They had been watching us out of some windows with binoculars. We didn’t stand a chance. They were going to use the Bertha’s case to bring us all down, and they did.
“The Bertha’s arrest was the beginning of the end of Tony’s crew at the Gold Rush. They got us all that day, and that left Tony pretty exposed.
“On the morning of the score, I remember I saw the Gee go by. I knew most of their cars and faces. I said to Tony, ‘The Gee doesn’t work on weekends; why are they here?’
“He said, ‘They might not be with you, they might just be on me.’
“They were watching us constantly.
“When I took off I said to him, ‘We’re either going to make a lot of money today or we’re going to be very famous.’”
The arrests of Spilotro, Cullotta, the ex-cop Blasko, and the Hole in the Wall Gang were the culmination of a three-year investigation into Spilotro’s Vegas operation, according to Organized Crime Strike Force prosecutor Charles Wehner. And while the Justice Department did not exactly come up with the kinds of evidence that could support its original premise—that Spilotro ran casinos for the mob—there were thousands of bugged conversations and miles of audio and visual surveillance tapes that showed Spilotro ordered murders, armed robberies, burglaries, and shakedown plots as the town’s mob boss.
Oscar Goodman, who accompanied Spilotro to his arraignment, at which he was freed on $600,000 bond—later reduced to $180,000—said the arrests were little more than a vendetta by law enforcement against his client. He said not one of his clients had ever been as harassed as Spilotro.
“And these latest wiretaps too,” Goodman said, “are the result of a continuous fishing expedition by the government in an attempt to find some vague, misrepresented excuse to continue their campaign to come up with something that will incriminate Anthony Spilotro.”
But according to retired FBI agent Joe Gersky, who spent years on Spilotro’s case, “This was different. This time we had a live witness, somebody who had been a part of the Hole in the Wall Gang, somebody who had been in on the planning of Bertha’s—we had Sal Romano.
“We had never had a real witness against Spilotro before. Romano had told us about the robbery, who would be in on it, and when and where it would be carried out, and he had been right a hundred percent. Plus we had him in custody, protected and alive.”