“I don’t really consider him a friend of mine anymore.”
This was the most dangerous time. Years of surveillance and phone taps had begun to bring in the indictments. In addition to the Hole in the Wall Gang indictments, Allen Dorfman, Roy Williams, and Joey Lombardo had been indicted for trying to bribe Nevada senator Howard Cannon. Nick Civella, Carl Civella, Joe Agosto, Carl DeLuna, Carl Thomas, and others had been indicted as part of the Tropicana skim, and Joe Aiuppa, Jackie Cerone, and Frank Balistrieri and his sons were expected to be among others indicted in the Stardust skim. Allen Glick had already been granted immunity by several grand juries in return for his testimony, but so far his lawyers had kept the prosecutors at bay.
It was a time when the defendants and their lawyers would spend months poring over hours of wiretaps and bound volumes of typed transcriptions. The lawyers were looking for loopholes. The defendants were looking for potential witnesses to murder.
It was a time when just being suspected of cooperating with the government was enough to get you killed. And even if you didn’t cooperate and got a long stretch in prison, you could still be in danger, because now you could be perceived as far more vulnerable to the government’s sweet deals.
“I’ve heard them go around a room,” Cullotta said. “‘Joe, whadda you think of Mike?’ ‘Mike’s great. Balls like iron.’ ‘Larry, whadda you think of Mike?’ ‘Mike? A fuckin’ marine. To the end.’ ‘Frankie, whadda do you think of Mike?’ ‘Mike? You kidding? Mike’d put his arm in fire for ya.’ ‘Charlie, whadda you think of Mike?’ ‘Why take a chance?’ And that’s the end of Mike. That’s the way it happens.”
It is a dangerous time because the mob bosses know that in addition to the wiretaps—which can be argued over by attorneys—the prosecutors need witnesses or coconspirators who can explain what actually happened, who can point the finger, who can translate the impenetrable shorthand verbiage of most wiretaps.
“Charlie Parsons, the FBI guy, came to see me,” Frank Cullotta says. “It was about eight months after we all got arrested in Bertha.
“‘We’ve got some information,’ he says, ‘that your friend Tony Spilotro has a murder contract out on you.’
“That was a Friday. I just nodded to the guy. I’m thinking about what happened a few weeks before. I was asleep. Boom! Bing! Boom! Boom! ‘What the fuck?’ I said. ‘What the hell’s all those shots?’ I got up real quick. I go look out the window. These guys in a van are going past. They shot the guy in the apartment next door.
“He was walking to his apartment. Next door to me. This guy’s a square John. What is this shit? And I go back to sleep. I had to take it at face value at the time, but I started thinking about it.
“Then Parsons plays me a tape. You can hardly hear it. But I could hear it. I could hear Tony asking for an okay.
“Now mind you, when they ask for an okay, it’s not, ‘Hey, I’ll hit Frank Cullotta tonight?’ It’s more like, ‘I need to take care of some dirty laundry. The guy didn’t wash what he was supposed to the right way, which caused that problem I talked to you about …’
“That’s me. I’m the problem because I was the only one who could tie Tony to everything. Sal Romano, that rat bastard, he never talked to Tony. Sal talked to me, and I talked to Tony. That’s how we had it set up from the start. None of my guys ever talked to Tony about anything. They didn’t even know I had to cut Tony in for a quarter; they just suspected it because we operated without any interference.
“But now I’ve got to think Tony knows I’m facing a long stretch. I’m a predicate felon. I’m looking at thirty years. Tony’s got to think why wouldn’t I give him up for a deal? The man’s not dumb. I would have figured it the same way.
“And the guy Tony’s talking to about laundry is aware of what Tony was talking about.
“I hear the guy say, ‘Okay, then just take care of it. Clean your laundry then. No problem.’
“But the guys Tony got to do the job missed. If he had me on the case, it would have been done right, but who knows where he was going for the work, now that my whole crew was buried?
“He farms the job out, and they shoot the wrong guy. They shoot the guy next door to me.
“I’m thinking to myself, ‘Hey, this guy tried to hit me in the head.’ If I beef on him now to the G, the most that he could do, tops, is a ten-year-sentence bit—do six, and he’s out.
“That ain’t gonna hurt him. He’s a young guy; he’ll get out. How could it hurt him? They ain’t gonna give him RICO [federal racketeering charges that carry long prison sentences]. They’ll never be able to lay the RICO on him and give him life. Tony’s been too sharp for that.”
Three days later, Monday morning at 8:15 A.M., FBI agent Parsons got a phone call.
“Do you recognize my voice?” Cullotta asked.
“Yes,” Parsons said.
Within twenty minutes Cullotta was in a safe house guarded by a half dozen agents. They began to debrief him and took him to Chicago for a hearing.
“I don’t know how I wound up with that transactional immunity, but I did. That’s the best kind of immunity you can get. In other words, when you’ve got transactional immunity, you can’t be tried for anything you talk about. No matter whatever it is. But the Chicago judge gave me that kind of immunity, and I didn’t even know what the fuck he was doing when he gave it to me. What do I know about immunity? I walk out of court and the FBI guy says, ‘I think the judge made a mistake.’
“They were shocked.”
After Rosenthal was forced out of the Stardust, you could set your watch by his schedule. So could a car bomber.
He got up early in the morning to take the kids to school. He then spent almost all of the day at home working on his handicapping picks for the weekend and doping out some stocks he had become interested in. Two or three days a week he would go to Tony Roma’s restaurant on East Sahara Avenue at about six o’clock at night and meet his old bookmaking pals Marty Kane, Ruby Goldstein, and Stanley Green. They would usually stand at the bar and have a couple of drinks while discussing the week’s sports picks, and shortly after 8 P.M. Lefty would order some ribs to go. He and the group usually broke up about 8:30, or whenever Lefty’s takeout order was ready. Lefty would then leave the restaurant, get into his car, and go home before the children went to bed.
On October 4, 1982, Lefty followed his usual pattern. But when he got into his car with the takeout order, it exploded. He remembers seeing tiny flames shoot out from the car’s defroster vents, and he also remembers that the inside of the car began filling with sheets of flame as he struggled to get out the door.
He grabbed the door latch and rolled to the sidewalk, rolling around on the ground for a while because his clothes were on fire. Then he stood up and saw that his car was entirely on fire. Suddenly two men raced up to him and forced him to the ground, urging him to stay calm and to cover his head.
Just as the three of them hit the ground, the flames reached the gas tank and the four-thousand-pound Cadillac Eldorado rose about four feet off the ground. A fireball of shredded pieces of metal and plastic shot about fifty feet into the sky and then began to rain blackened shards and soot over hundreds of square feet on the busy parking lot. (The two men who had forced Lefty to the ground turned out to be two secret service agents who had just finished dinner.)
The explosion was so intense and loud, according to Barbara Lawry, who lived across the street, that it “sounded like a train fell through my roof.” Lori Wardle, the cashier at Marie Callender’s Restaurant, across from Tony Roma’s, said, “I ran outside, and the parking lot was mobbed with cars. Rosenthal’s car shot right up in the air, and flames went about two stories into the air. It was a huge explosion. It blew the windows out of the back of the restaurant.”
A local TV news crew was having coffee nearby when the explosion occurred, and they took pictures of Rosenthal, minutes after the explosion, wandering dazedly around the parking lot and holding a handkerchief to his bleeding head. He was also bleeding from cuts on his left arm and leg. He can be seen asking Marty Kane and his other pals to call his doctor and make sure his children were assured that he was okay and that they be brought to the hospital.
Alcohol, Tobacco agent in charge John Rice, investigating the case with Metro, said Lefty was “very fortunate” to have survived the blast.
“Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a bomb like that should have killed him,” Rice said. “Except, in the model of an Eldorado Cadillac, the manufacturer installed a steel floor plate beneath the driver’s seat for added stability. It was that steel plate under the driver’s seat that saved Lefty’s life.
“The steel plate deflected the bomb upwards and toward the rear of the car instead of up and forward. He should change his name from Lefty to Lucky.”
The press and police arrived at the emergency room while Lefty was being treated for his cuts and burns. As Lefty’s head cleared, he looked up from a hospital bed to see a circle of concerned faces looking down.
“It was all the hotshots from the FBI and local cops,” Rosenthal said. “And they were not there out of friendship.
“I was still being treated when the first two guys from the FBI came in,” Lefty said. “They were polite. They said, ‘Jesus, we’re sorry about this. Can we be of any help?’
“I said, ‘No you can’t. Will you please leave me alone?’ They said, ‘Are you sure?’ I said I was sure. They left.
“Then came the Metro guys. At that time John McCarthy was the sheriff. Anyway, they walk in. They said, ‘You ready to talk now?’ I said, ‘Get the fuck out of here.’ That’s a quote. ‘Get the fuck out of here.’
“After they treated me at the hospital, I told my doctor I needed more help. I needed more painkiller. I was really in terrible pain. So he gave me a second shot, and then he helped get me out through a back way he knew about so I could avoid the newspaper people who were piled up in the lobby and front of the building. When I got home my housekeeper was there and I was grateful that the kids were already sleeping.
“I was home about thirty minutes when the phone rang. It was Joey Cusumano.
“‘Are you all right?’ he asks.
“‘Yeah, are you?’ I said right back.
“‘Thank God. Thank God,’ he says. ‘Is there anything you need, Frank?’
“‘Not a thing, Joe,’ I said, ‘but if I do, you’ll be the first one I call.’
“And I’m on the bullshit with him, because I knew Tony Spilotro was right there with him. Cusumano’s on the phone, but it’s Tony asking the questions. But by then my nerves had calmed down. I’m trying to go over things. You know. The pain wasn’t so strong at this time. The morphine was still there. I was trying to replay what happened and tried to figure out who did it.”
The explosion was big news. The newspapers and TV news shows led with it for days. There was immediately speculation as to whether Spilotro had had anything to do with the bombing and whether the bad blood between the two old friends over Spilotro’s affair with Lefty’s estranged wife might have ignited the bomb.
FBI agent Charlie Parsons told the press that Spilotro and the Chicago mob probably were behind the murder attempt. He suggested the lingering bitterness and hard feelings between Spilotro and Rosenthal over Geri were probably responsible for the bombing.
Parsons said he even made Rosenthal an offer to become a government witness: “Lefty, the mob can’t take a chance you won’t talk. Now they must kill you. Can you take the chance they won’t? Come with us. We’ll protect you and your children.”
Joseph Yablonsky, the FBI Las Vegas chief, said Rosenthal’s escape was a “miracle” and that “the hit man probably came from out of town—although there are persons in Las Vegas capable of constructing such a device.”
The day after the explosion, Lefty recalls that local cops and federal agents kept knocking at his door with questions. Lefty was concerned about what the police were doing to protect him and his family, but the cops only wanted to know about his relationship to Spilotro and whether the two men were feuding. Lefty said Parsons even offered him carte blanche in the federal witness program.
“After what organized crime has done to you,” Parsons insisted, “you owe them no loyalty.”
Metro intelligence chief Kent Clifford put it even more bluntly: “Lefty,” he said, “you’re a walking dead man and you will receive no police protection unless you provide us with intelligence information.”
Rosenthal responded to Clifford by calling the sheriff and newspapers to complain about Clifford’s threat—pointing out that as taxpayers accused of no crimes, he and his family were entitled to police protection no matter what the intelligence chief felt about him personally.
The next day, Clifford’s threat to Lefty was blasted in the Vegas editorials, and Sheriff John McCarthy publicly apologized for Clifford’s remarks. He said Rosenthal was entitled to police protection regardless of his personality or his lack of cooperation in assisting law enforcement officers. Editorials, both in the newspapers and on TV, took up Lefty’s battle, pointing out that Lefty’s young children and housekeeper could very well have been in the car at the time and that all citizens are entitled to protection under the law.
Kent Clifford had performed a feat Lefty Rosenthal had been unable to do in years—get him some favorable press.
Media and police attention to the incident was so intense that Lefty decided to hold a news conference in his own home and lay to rest some of the more provocative and dangerous innuendos and stories that were getting into the papers. He received about a half dozen reporters in his silk pajamas. He still had some bandages visible on his forehead and left arm.
During the forty-five-minute interview session, Lefty said that the feds and local cops had “strongly suggested” the car bombing was engineered by Spilotro. While he knew that the bombing “didn’t come from the Boy Scouts of America,” Lefty said, he refused to accuse anyone he knew of such an act.
He said he would be “very, very unhappy and very, very angry” if it turned out that his longtime friend Tony Spilotro was responsible. Lefty said he did not believe it and that it “would be a very unhealthy situation for all of us. I don’t even want to entertain that thought.
“I don’t really consider him a friend of mine anymore,” Lefty continued, “but I am not prepared at this time to believe Spilotro was responsible. I am not willing to believe that he would have the ability to do such a thing. I had no reason to feel that either myself or any member of my family was in danger, and I conducted my life no differently than anyone else. Obviously, I was wrong. I am not going to turn on Spilotro. I don’t feel the need to do this. It is not my way of doing things.”
Lefty said he wanted to find out “who did it and make sure it doesn’t happen again … but I have no thought of revenge. If I say I’m looking for revenge, then I’m as low as they are.” He did not feel the bombing was a message or a warning. “I don’t know the motive for this first attempt. I’m going to do everything I can to stop them. I’ll do what I have to do to protect myself and my kids.”
There are two serious theories about who tried to bomb Frank Rosenthal. The first—which the FBI believes—is that it was Frank Balistrieri. Balistrieri was actually known as the Mad Bomber owing to his habit of blowing up his adversaries. And an FBI wiretap in Balistrieri’s office a few weeks before the bombing had recorded Balistrieri telling his sons that he believed that Frank Rosenthal caused their problems. He promised his sons that he would “get full satisfaction.”
The second theory, popular with the Metro cops, is that Spilotro did it.
“Geri flew into town after the bombing,” Lefty said. “She said she wanted to take care of me. Protect me. But the flame was out in me. She said, ‘You know I can change.’
“She tried to give me her phone number that day, but I said I didn’t need it. She could always reach me.”