During the Metro phase of his debriefing, Cullotta provided information that allowed the police to clear about 50 of their previously unsolved burglaries. He also admitted to the Lisner killing. But in order to get a murder conviction in Nevada, the law required that other evidence be presented to corroborate the suspect’s confession. In the Lisner case, no such hard evidence could be found.
“We tried,” Gene Smith said. “Frank took us out to where he said he threw away the murder weapon, but the gun wasn’t there. It had been almost three years, though, so that didn’t come as a big surprise.”
As the FBI case agent, Dennis Arnoldy worked the Cullotta debriefing with Metro from the start. He remained Cullotta’s primary interrogator after the feds took custody of the informant. “Once we took control of Frank, we got him out of Las Vegas. After that we only brought him back for legal proceedings. For Frank’s protection, we had to move him around regularly. I met with Frank hundreds of times during the following months in various locations across the country, including while he was in prison serving his sentence. Frank was treated courteously and our discussions were always civil in nature.”
Cullotta Outed
“We tried to keep Cullotta’s defection a secret,” former Strike Force lawyer Stan Hunterton said. “We were doing okay until Frank provided information that one of the other Hole in the Wall Gang burglars, Ernie Davino, had fallen out of favor with Spilotro and was going to be killed by one of his colleagues. The alleged hit man was in jail, but was trying to get out on bail pending an appeal of his conviction. We contested the motion, of course. During the bail hearing, Charlie Parsons testified and had to divulge that the source of our information was Frank Cullotta. A gasp went up from the spectators in the courtroom. The word was out, generating a buzz in the media.”
The hit man who Frank Cullotta said planned to kill Ernie Davino was fellow HITWG burglar Lawrence Neumann. Neumann was a very dangerous man. He’d been convicted of a triple murder in Chicago in 1956. In that incident he used a shotgun to kill a bartender, one Max Epstein. He then tried to kill the bartender’s brother Mickey, missed and blew away a female employee instead. When leaving the bar, Neumann bumped into a newspaper vendor named John Keller and killed him too. The local papers reported that the slayings were the result of a dispute in which Neumann thought he had been short-changed in the amount of $2. After the dispute he left the bar, returned with the shotgun, and opened fire. He was sentenced to 125 years in prison. For all practical purposes that should have been the end of Mr. Neumann’s criminal career. Incredibly, though, the killer was paroled in 1968, after serving only about 11 years of his prison term.
Frank Cullotta was also doing time in the same facility as Neumann and the two became acquainted. According to Cullotta, Neumann was a killer, plain and simple. He kept in top physical condition by exercising daily and “would dismantle you finger by finger.” In later years, Neumann intimidated even the ferocious Tony Spilotro himself. Cullotta recalls Spilotro saying of Neumann: “Jesus, don’t ever unleash that bastard on me.”
Stan Hunterton knew that as long as Neumann remained free, he posed a threat to the public in general and to potential witnesses in particular. He also knew that Frank Cullotta was providing information that would eventually put Neumann away for a long, long time. What Hunterton needed to do was get a conviction against Neumann that would keep him locked up until he could be prosecuted on the new charges. To accomplish that goal, he went after Neumann on the still-unresolved 1981 charge of an ex-felon in possession of a concealed weapon. The gangster was convicted and sentenced to two years, the maximum sentence allowed at that time. During the appeal process from this conviction, Neumann was trying to attain bail so he could kill Davino. Bail was denied, and Neumann was subsequently convicted of murder in 1983 and put away for good.
As more people became aware of the Cullotta situation, the concerns for his safety increased. “Frank was one of the best protected witnesses I ever dealt with,” Hunterton added. “He had a lot of information we were interested in. He was a valuable asset and was treated as such.”
Differing Opinions
Cullotta also had a lot of baggage. He was a career criminal and an admitted killer who had turned against his friends and associates to get a better deal for himself. How credible a witness would he be?
When Oscar Goodman first heard about Cullotta cooperating with the authorities, he dismissed the matter as a non-event. He told a reporter that he wasn’t concerned about Cullotta saying anything detrimental about Tony Spilotro, because there wasn’t anything detrimental to say. He added that Tony wished his old pal the best. Goodman further supported his client in a 1983 Los Angeles Times article. He said Spilotro was a gentleman, and, “He’s never lied to me ... [but] I don’t ask him things I may not want to know the answer to. I’m a need-to-know lawyer.”
The attorney had a somewhat different take on Cullotta when he later summed up the informant’s effectiveness as a government witness. Goodman told author John L. Smith: “Although you’ll never get them to admit it, the government never got squat in the way of convictions for turning Frank Cullotta. He admitted murdering four people and his testimony was useless, because he refused to tell the truth. If he told the truth, he would have had to admit that Tony called him a little girl. Nobody in Tony’s world trusted Cullotta, because all their lives he’d always been a little girl. It’s why even people like Herbie Blitzstein and so many other people in Tony’s life all warned him about Cullotta.”
The lawmen who worked with Cullotta totally disagree with Goodman’s analysis. In their opinion, Cullotta was honest in his dealings with them and his information and testimony resulted in numerous convictions. “We didn’t just take his word for things. Everything he told us was corroborated independently. If it couldn’t be verified, we didn’t use it,” Dennis Arnoldy explained. “We learned early on that Frank didn’t answer every question by telling us what he thought we wanted to hear. If he didn’t know about a specific incident, he’d say he didn’t know. When he did tell us something, we’d double- or triple-check it. In that regard, Frank Cullotta was honest with us.”
One of the methods used to check Cullotta’s veracity was by matching police reports with his claims of criminal activity. For example, Cullotta supplied the date and location of a burglary and the items taken. Records were then searched for an incident report confirming Cullotta’s statement and the witness was actually driven to the location to positively identify the site. In a couple of cases involving residential entries, they found that the burglars had actually been under surveillance at the time of the crime. But the crooks had been so efficient that officers thought they were in the home on a social call.
All the local newspapers covered the Cullotta story. Reporters said that anonymous sources “close to the investigation” told them Cullotta was spilling the beans on everything from burglaries and robberies to murder. And his information wasn’t limited to Las Vegas. It went back to Chicago and elsewhere. Local mobsters and others from across the country had to be squirming, the journalists speculated.
However, Cullotta’s revelations weren’t solely about what he and other mobsters had done. He was also talking about those who had facilitated the burglaries and robberies by identifying lucrative targets and providing information about the victim’s movements. The valet parkers, desk clerks, dealers, maids, and, in some cases, the casino executives who had been complicit must have also been sweating.
Sheriff McCarthy compared Cullotta’s deciding to become a government witness with similar decisions by Jimmy Fratiano and Joseph Valichi. He said Cullotta was having a rippling effect on those in the Mafia all across the country. “It’s opened up a new facet to organized crime being involved and tied to a lot of crimes—something many law-enforcement professionals, including myself, didn’t understand.”
Cullotta’s Overall Effectiveness
Contrary to Mr. Goodman’s assessment, Frank Cullotta was a v
ery productive cooperating witness, according to Dennis Arnoldy. The former agent believes you have to look beyond Bertha’s to properly evaluate Cullotta’s overall benefit to the government.
To support his argument, Arnoldy cites statistics of Cullotta’s productivity between 1982 and 1988. During that time, Cullotta’s testimony in front of various federal and state grand juries and trials was instrumental in obtaining a number of indictments and convictions: 19 federal racketeering-related indictments, four Illinois murder indictments, and five Nevada burglary and armed-robbery indictments. These charges resulted in 15 federal convictions, one Illinois murder conviction, and five Nevada burglary and armed-robbery convictions.
In addition, Cullotta testified before the President’s Commission on Organized Crime, the Florida Governor’s Commission on Organized Crime, and at a sentencing hearing for Chicago mobster Joseph Lombardo.
The turning of Frank Cullotta impacted on many people in one way or another. To the law-enforcement personnel who brought it about, it made the endless hours of surveillance, interviewing, confrontations, and risk-taking all worthwhile. To many of their opponents, it meant the beginning of the end. To Tony Spilotro, his former friend’s move increased the already tremendous pressure he was under. But Tony was a tough guy and he still had some fight left in him.
More Scandals and Allegations
Starting in June, Metro and Kent Clifford were hit with back-to-back charges. In the first incident a former Metro detective was arrested by Intelligence Bureau officers and charged with operating a burglary ring that preyed on drug dealers. The suspect, Larry Gandy, and his crew allegedly identified drug dealers, then broke into their residences to steal money, jewelry, and drugs. Gandy denied that there were any other current or former officers involved.
The news media pounced on the story. During an interview with Gandy, the arrestee claimed that while he worked for Clifford, his boss had once ordered him to rough up a criminal suspect. Gandy claimed he complied by breaking the suspect’s nose. Metro denied the allegation.
“Gandy’s story was incredible, because he never worked for me; I never had any supervisory authority over him. Of course, the facts couldn’t be allowed to stand in the way of a good story,” Clifford said in 2004.
He went on to give his version of events. “I met Larry Gandy when we both worked for the former Las Vegas Police Department. I was a fairly new cop at the time and Gandy was one of the stars of the department. He had a reputation as being a good narcotics officer, but a little crazy. I took Gandy’s place in the narcotics unit when he left to take a job with the State of Nevada Narcotics Division. We worked a couple of joint investigations together and shared intelligence information on dope dealers. I think we considered ourselves to be friends. But he eventually left law enforcement and became a bail bondsman, and then a burglar and dope dealer. We arrested him in 1982 for burglarizing the house of a citizen who had an ounce of cocaine for personal use. I believe that Gandy found out about the dope from the dealer who had sold it and he wanted to steal it and resell it.
“His method of operation was to have a flunky kick in the front door of the target’s residence and enter to make sure nobody was home. If it was clear, Gandy would come in and do the burglary. We had intelligence that he had done the same thing in California. When the front man went inside, he was confronted by an armed homeowner and blown away. A vehicle matching Gandy’s was spotted leaving the scene, but there was no positive ID.
“The guy he was using as a front man in Vegas, a guy he abused regularly, came to me and told me what was going on. We arrested Gandy during the commission of the burglary. I told him I felt betrayed and said I felt like kicking his ass. I didn’t say I was going to do it, just that I felt like it. On the way to the jail, he offered to become an informant and turn us on to some big dope dealers if we turned him loose. I refused to deal with him because of the way I felt about him and booked him. Two days later that story appeared in the newspaper. I didn’t respond to it, because it was the ranting of a burglar and dope dealer. Gandy was unable to identify the victim of the alleged assault and nothing came of it. I chalked it up to sour grapes and went about my work.”
Another shoe dropped when a Metro detective charged that Clifford had permitted a confidential informant to sell cocaine on the street three years earlier. According to the allegation, the informant had purchased three ounces of cocaine from a casino executive and turned the information and drugs over to Clifford. He wanted to be reimbursed for the purchase. The Intelligence Bureau chief didn’t want to pay $2,500 for what he thought was a weak case. On the other hand, he didn’t want to lose a valuable informant. As a compromise, Clifford allegedly told the informant to sell the drugs and get his money back.
This charge was also denied by Metro and attributed to McCarthy’s political adversaries getting an early start on the election campaign. When reporters questioned John Moran about the timing of the accusation, he denied having any role in the release of the information.
In late July, the District Attorney’s office announced that there was insufficient information to charge Clifford with any wrongdoing in the cocaine case. Metro officers opposed to McCarthy claimed the decision not to prosecute was a whitewash. McCarthy maintained that the allegations were unfounded and politically motivated.
This was another case in which the accused says the newspaper accounts didn’t match the facts. “The amount of cocaine involved was actually one ounce, not three,” Kent Clifford said. “By Nevada law, an officer could trade or sell an ounce of narcotics as long as it was done in a controlled situation. We traded the ounce of cocaine for an ounce of heroin to get into a drug dealer. An arrest was subsequently made in the case. Someone in the Intelligence Bureau knew bits and pieces of the deal and told one of John Moran’s cronies. As the story circulated, everything was blown out of proportion. The newspapers ran with it and never contacted me to find out what was really going on. My relationship with the DA’s office wasn’t very good then. They cleared me, because I hadn’t done anything wrong. There was no whitewash.”
The Campaign Officially Begins
In September, Sheriff McCarthy and John Moran won their respective primaries. The charges began to fly almost immediately. Frank Cullotta got into the fray by stating that Tony Spilotro had donated $40,000 to the Moran campaign and supplied booze for his campaign parties. Moran emphatically denied Cullotta’s claims, calling them “out-and-out lies.” He blamed the allegations on dirty tricks by the McCarthy people. Two days later Moran announced that he had taken a polygraph test that proved Cullotta’s story was baseless. He also suggested that Sheriff McCarthy submit to a polygraph examination regarding the old allegations that Spilotro had contributed to McCarthy’s campaign of four years earlier.
For his part, McCarthy admitted having heard about the accusations, but denied having anything to do with their becoming public.
In early October, Moran came under additional fire for dropping out of a scheduled debate with McCarthy on KLAS-TV. He claimed that one of the panelists was a staunch McCarthy supporter, so he wouldn’t get a fair shake.
The allegation game became a two-way street a week later when McCarthy was accused of receiving a $2,000 donation from Joe Conforte, a fugitive Nevada brothel owner, during his 1978 campaign against Ralph Lamb. McCarthy admitted receiving the money, but said it was made by a third party and the identity of the actual donor was never known to him. The person who had kept the campaign’s books at the time said the donation had been in the form of a cashier’s check. The man who had actually made the contribution on behalf of Conforte disputed that, saying it’d been a cash transaction. No record of that donation was found on file with the Secretary of State.
On October 20, McCarthy attacked Moran’s character in a newspaper article. He accused his opponent of conducting a campaign based on slanted commercials and fraudulent statements to the press. “I wonder what else he’s lying about to deceive the people of Cla
rk County,” McCarthy said.
Moran wasted little time in responding. He challenged both McCarthy and Clifford to take a polygraph exam to prove they hadn’t been responsible for leaking the allegation that Spilotro had made a contribution to his campaign. Both men declined his invitation, stating that the charges were a matter between Moran and Cullotta. As October neared an end, the news for Sheriff McCarthy wasn’t good. Polls showed that the incumbent was pulling only 29% of the vote.
Lefty’s Big Bang
Rosenthal’s stock with the Chicago Outfit and Tony Spilotro had been dwindling for some time. His highly publicized fight with the gaming authorities and his controversial television show hadn’t gone over very well in Chicago or with some of the other crime families. And the fiasco over Tony’s affair with Geri caused the bosses to be concerned about the judgment of both men. Spilotro was unhappy with his former buddy, because Lefty hadn’t backed his play to expand his power in Vegas and California. The situation with Geri had placed a further wedge between them.
Nick Civella, boss of the Kansas City mob that controlled the Tropicana, had been suspicious of Lefty for some time. He believed the gambler was way too friendly with the FBI and might be acting as an informant. At one point Civella called Oscar Goodman and asked if he thought Lefty was crazy. The lawyer said he didn’t think Rosenthal was crazy, that he was okay. An FBI agent later testified at the mob chief’s racketeering trial that to Civella, “crazy” was code for “trustworthy.”
Goodman said he wasn’t aware of the dual meaning at the time. When he learned about it, he realized that had he given the wrong answer, Lefty might have been killed. Still, was Rosenthal providing the authorities with information?
Attorney Goodman explained it this way: “There are snitches and then there are snitches. There is such a thing as a dry snitch, a person who talks to the FBI or police, but doesn’t necessarily say anything. I think Frank Rosenthal enjoyed playing with people in power. I think a lot of people played the game with him. But did he sit down and say, ’Make a deal for me not to be prosecuted’? I don’t think so. I think he’d been through too much in his life to become a rat.”
The Battle for Las Vegas: The Law vs. The Mob Page 15