by Sam Giancana
This type of behavior had become very bothersome to the powers that be in Chicago, and by the start of the 1970s, with Giancana out of power as well as out of the country, the table was set for Caifano’s removal. The Outfit wanted their interests in the sand-filled oasis—primarily in the form of tens of millions of dollars being illegally siphoned from hotel and casino profits in an operation known as “The Skim”—looked after with as little fanfare and controversy as possible.
Enter Anthony “The Ant” Spilotro, a thirty-one-year-old up-and-comer with the Windy City mob’s enforcement unit, who at the time was viewed by most in the Chicago underworld as a standup wiseguy who knew how to follow orders and had loads of leadership potential. Although Spilotro’s eventual legacy in Las Vegas would end up considerably worse than that of Caifano in terms of being insubordinate and out of control, this was not the case in 1971. At that point in time, The Ant elicited a great deal of confidence from his superiors within The Outfit and it was with those feelings that he was sent to Vegas to replace Caifano as the Chicago mafia’s overlord of the Strip, the mob’s newest golden boy and its most lucrative and important investment. It appeared to be a match made in heaven. And it was. At least at first.
BORN on May 19, 1938, Tony Spilotro was raised on Chicago’s West Side. Specifically, at the corner of Grand and Ogden, where his father, Pasquale, owned and ran a restaurant called Patsy’s (the nickname friends and family used to refer to Tony’s dad). Immigrating from Trigano, Sicily, in 1914 as a teenager, Patsy quickly learned that the skill of cooking he had adopted from his mother as a young child would serve him well in making a living for himself. Not long after settling in the Windy City, after several years in New York, Patsy married a young Italian girl named Antoinette, bought a home on Melvina Street, and started a family. In the midst of having six children with his wife, all boys, he opened up his restaurant and soon it became a favorite neighborhood haunt.
Famous for the homemade meatballs Patsy himself prepared every day for his loyal customer base, to go along with very popular veal and pasta dishes, the restaurant quickly became a hang out and gathering spot for the local mafia. Considering the restaurant’s location was in a residential area filled with people of Italian descent and the fact that quality food from the old country was hard to come by—Patsy was known to get many key ingredients shipped directly from Sicily via contacts in Detroit—this development was not all that surprising. Notorious Chicago gangsters like Tony Accardo, Sam Giancana, Sam Battaglia, Joseph Aiuppa, and Jackie Cerone frequented Patsy’s for its authentic Italian food as well as for use of its back room and parking lot for important meetings to discuss their secret underworld business affairs.
It was in his father’s restaurant, while working as a bus-boy during his early teen years, that Tony was introduced to The Outfit, men he would end up working for for the rest of his life. Tony’s mob involvement started at the age of fifteen, when he dropped out of Steinmetz High School and, along with a childhood pal Frank Cullotta, started a street gang. Made up of other young juvenile delinquents whom they had met around the neighborhood while skipping school and causing trouble, the gang specialized in stealing anything that wasn’t bolted down. If they could get their hands on it, they tried to steal it.
Tony was tiny in stature but had a demeanor that was as ferocious as a lion, and on January 11, 1955, at age sixteen, he experienced an underworld rite of passage—in hoodlum terminology he “popped his cherry,” meaning he was arrested for the first time. The charge was petty larceny as he was caught attempting to steal a men’s dress shirt from a department store in the upper-class suburb of River Forest. Fined ten dollars and placed on six months’ probation, Tony’s criminal career was off to an inauspicious start. Nonetheless, it was the beginning of something big. By the end of the decade, Tony had become a fixture at local police stations around town, having been arrested fifteen times by his twenty-first birthday.
“Spilotro got a quick start on the streets,” said Jim Wagner. “From the time he was young, he knew he wanted to be a gangster and he did everything in his power to make fulfilling his desire a reality. Eventually, the cops and the crooks took notice. He figured if he got on the cops’ radar and made enough noise, he’d get The Outfit’s attention. And that’s exactly what happened.”
LEADING his street gang for a few more years, making a name for himself as a top-grade tough guy on the city’s West Side, Spilotro eventually got noticed by some of the very men he used to encounter while working for his dad at the restaurant. For criminals in Chicago, The Outfit was the big time. Getting recognized by them was the underworld equivalent of a Minor League Baseball player getting called up to the big leagues. That’s what happened for Tony when Outfit powers James “Jimmy the Turk” Torello and Vincent “Vinnie the Saint” Inserro took a liking to him and began using him for jobs. Things for Tony and the Second City’s nationally renowned crime syndicate started off small but gradually began to grow. After a few years under Torello and Inserro, Tony was recruited by Salvatore “Mad Sam” DeStefano, a well-known and highly feared gangster who gladly welcomed The Ant into his crew of henchmen and under his mentorship.
A protégé of former Outfit boss Paul “The Waiter” Ricca, DeStefano had built a reputation for being one of the area’s top mob enforcers, a sadistic hit man with few equals in the nation’s underworld. Not only would Mad Sam kill his victims for sheer pleasure, he would also torture them in the most heinous ways possible.
As a result of the overwhelming joy he derived from his duties on behalf of the Chicago mafia, DeStefano, although a highly valued commodity on the street, was never officially asked to join The Outfit or get made. In a nutshell, the syndicate hierarchy thought he was too mentally unhinged to become an official part of their rank and file and would likely be impossible to control. Using his skills as a leg breaker and assassin was good enough for them. And Mad Sam didn’t seem to mind either, since he enjoyed being his own boss and felt that being initiated into the crime family would force him into adhering to too many rules and regulations for his liking.
Under DeStefano’s tutelage, Tony undoubtedly developed his own taste for killing. It was widely suspected by local law enforcement that a young Tony Spilotro aided DeStefano in the murder of local Outfit strong-arm William “Action” Jackson. Working as a collector for a loan-shark operation being run by Outfit heavyweight William “Willie Potatoes” Daddano, Jackson was thought to have been moonlighting as a police informant. Whether he actually was is still up for debate; however, the fact that he was suspected to have been working for the other side of the law was, and still is, reason enough to get you killed in the Chicago underworld.
According to FBI informant reports, DeStefano, his younger brother Mario, and Spilotro grabbed Action Jackson when he was leaving a local bar and took him to a meat plant where they tied him to a meat hook and began beating him with baseball bats and steel hammers. Then they applied an electric cattle prod to his testicles until he passed out from the excruciating pain. While unconscious, the trio of hit man continued beating their victim mercilessly. Leaving him hanging on a meat hook, the group went out for a cup of coffee. When they returned, Jackson was dead. His corpse was discovered days later in the trunk of a car on Lower Wacker Drive.
HAVING thoroughly impressed The Outfit’s leadership during his tour of duty with DeStefano and his crew, Tony caught the eye of then-boss Sam Giancana. One day during the early months of 1962, Spilotro was approached by Vinnie Inserro, a top lieutenant of Giancana’s, and asked to go to a face-to-face meeting with the much-revered don. The purpose of the meeting, which took place at Giancana’s headquarters, the Armory Lounge, was reassignment. Realizing his talent as a first-class enforcer and labeling him a fast riser on the local streets, Giancana told The Ant he was placing him under the guidance of legendary Outfit assassin Felix “Milwaukee Phil” Alderesio.
In charge of the crime family’s enforcement unit, Alderesio was The Outfit’
s go-to guy for all the Chicago mafia’s top murder assignments and a large majority of its strong-arm work. After telling Spilotro of his new assignment and how impressed he was with the work he had been putting in, Giancana dismissed him. Not long after the conversation, Inserro picked Spilotro up from his house and took him to a personal introduction to Alderesio and his partner in crime, Charles Nicoletti. Giancana then called for a meeting with Alderesio and Nicoletti and told them to look after the syndicate’s newest young star and teach him the finer aspects of the killing trade—things a wild card like DeStefano often neglected to do in his work.
After Tony had worked with Milwaukee Phil for several months, the Windy City mob brass, as well as Alderesio himself, felt The Ant had put in enough work for his crime family superiors to be initiated into The Outfit. It was every young Italian hoodlum’s dream to “receive his button” and Tony took the honor very seriously. Before the initiation was to take place, Tony was given instructions to participate in another high-profile murder that would cement his status as a future made man. In the mafia, this was called “making your bones.” Most of the time when up-and-coming mob initiates make their bones, it is the first time they participate in a murder. This wasn’t the case for Tony, who had put in wet work for The Outfit before. But because this killing—a double homicide—was so important, he was included and told that after it was completed, he would get his wish—full membership in the legendary crime syndicate that dated back all the way to the nation’s most notorious mobster ever, Al “Scarface” Capone.
The victims were Billy McCarthy and Jimmy Miraglia and the hit took place in May 1962. It would go down in infamy as “The M&M Murders” and would be depicted in its full gruesome nature in the motion picture Casino.
McCarthy and Miraglia were independent burglars and wannabe wiseguys who worked out of the city’s North Side. Being partners in crime, one was rarely seen without the other in tow. While having drinks in a local bar one night, they got into an argument with the Scalvo brothers, two of the bar’s owners. The bar’s third and final owner was a close associate of former Outfit boss Paul Ricca, which made the bar and all of it owners off-limits to any funny stuff or violence. But Miraglia and McCarthy were each only twenty-four years old and wet behind the ears when it came to local underworld protocol. They didn’t adhere to that rule and decided to kill the Scalvos.
One night in early May, McCarthy and Miraglia tracked down the Scalvos and killed them, along with a waitress from their bar that just happened to be walking with them. To add to the duo’s problems, the killings took place in the tree-lined suburb of Elmwood Park, an area that was off-limits from criminal activity because so many of the area’s top gangsters lived there and an area in which the “M&M” boys had been pulling robberies. The triple murder brought a great deal of media attention to the bedroom community, the exact thing The Outfit’s upper echelon was trying to avoid by residing there.
Needless to say, this incident didn’t place McCarthy and Miraglia in good standing with the Windy City mafia. Within hours of the murders, hit contracts were issued on both of them. Tony was put in charge of setting the whole thing up. He called his old pal Frank Cullotta, who was known to associate with the intended targets, and told Frank to bring Billy McCarthy with him to a meeting in the parking lot at a Chicken House restaurant on North Avenue. Cullotta obliged and when they arrived, Tony took McCarthy inside for a meal. When they exited the restaurant, Tony pulled a gun and ordered McCarthy into a waiting car occupied by Alderesio and Niccoletti. He was transported to a nearby warehouse where Tony’s old boss, Mad Sam DeStefano was waiting for them.
McCarthy was beaten severely with hands, fists, and bats. He even had ice picks put through his testicles. But despite the continuous savagery, he wouldn’t give up the whereabouts of his partner. At that point, Tony impressed his superiors and made his mentor DeStefano proud by putting McCarthy’s head in a vise and popping the Irishman’s right eye out of his skull until he finally told his tormentors where they could find Jimmy Miraglia. Only then did Tony finally put McCarthy out his misery by slitting his throat.
Miraglia’s murder was somewhat less complicated. Tony located him and took him at gunpoint to an Outfit-owned liquor store and locked him in the store’s storage room until Alderesio, Niccoletti, and DeStefano arrived. While they waited, Miraglia, sometimes called “Sonny,” got drunk on some of the liquor. When the rest of his murderers arrived, he was three sheets to the wind and begging for Spilotro and the rest of the killers to get their job over with as quickly as possible. Not putting up a struggle, Miraglia was beaten, strangled, and eventually killed by having his throat slit just like his partner.
Within months of the M&M murders, Tony earned his proverbial seat at the table. In the fall of 1963, with Phil Alderesio as his sponsor, he was formally inducted into The Outfit by Sam Giancana and Anthony Accardo. For the next several years, Tony continued to make a name for himself on the Chicago streets as a man to be reckoned with in the strong-arm game. During that time, he also worked as a bail bondsman throughout the city’s court system, bailing out his many criminal associates from various local lockups, and was a suspect in almost a dozen gangland homicides.
In between trips to Florida to look after a variety of Outfit interests, including its most profitable odds maker, Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, Spilotro kept busy handling a great deal of the Chicago mafia’s dirty work.
Alderman Ben Lewis; bookmakers Irving Vine, Kenny Gordon, and Arthur “Boodie” Cowan; jewel thief Guy “Lover Boy” Mendola; and Outfit enforcers Leo Foreman, Al Romano, and Angelo Boscarino were all murdered between 1963 and 1968, and in all nine homicide investigations, the name Tony Spilotro appeared as a prime suspect. Even his former mentor, Mad Sam DeStefano, made it onto The Ant’s hit list; he was shot to death in April 1973.
FROM as early as the 1930s, long before Las Vegas became the city of sin it is known as today, the Chicago mafia had representation in Nevada. Even back to the days of The Outfit’s most notable mob boss of record, Al Capone, the Windy City crime syndicate held numerous interests on the West Coast. Capone and his cohorts had money tied up in movie studios in Los Angeles and in gambling houses in Nevada outposts such as Reno and Lake Tahoe.
Before Capone went to prison for tax evasion in 1933, he sent a lieutenant of his named John “Handsome Johnny” Roselli to oversee these various business ventures. In California and Nevada, Roselli soon became recognized as the man you needed to see if you wanted to deal with the Chicago mafia out west. After over thirty years holding down the post for his bosses in The Outfit—a job that then included looking after the large investment the Chicago mafia had made in the Las Vegas hotel and casino industry—Roselli was forced into semiretirement due to law enforcement hassles brought on mainly as a result of his high-profile behavior.
With Roselli unable to continue his duties for The Outfit because of tight scrutiny from the police and the FBI, Sam Giancana and Anthony Accardo dispatched Marshall Caifano to Las Vegas to aid Roselli. Within a few years of landing in Vegas, Caifano fell victim to the same fate as Roselli and came under too much heat from law enforcement as a result of failing to keep a low enough profile; he was called back to Chicago by his superiors in the mob in the early 1970s.
That brings us to 1971, when fast-rising Outfit golden boy Tony Spilotro was pulled from his job on the streets as an enforcer and placed in Las Vegas as the Chicago mafia’s new man out west. This suited Spilotro just fine because his face was becoming a fixture in local newspaper headlines and television broadcasts, which pegged him as a top area hoodlum and future mafia leader. The heat was on heavy and that prevented him from being able to maneuver unfettered through the Second City’s underworld as he once could. Vegas, he thought, would be a perfect place to reinvent himself.
His job, just like Roselli’s and Caifano’s before him, was to look after and protect the crime family’s interests on the West Coast, most specifically their investments in the
lavish and star-studded world of Vegas casinos. These gambling palaces had few equals in the world and accounted for major cash flow into the pockets of Outfit royalty.
Tony, his wife, Nancy, and their four-year-old son, Vincent, arrived in Las Vegas in early May 1971. Once there, he was re-paired with Outfit gambling specialist and boyhood friend Lefty Rosenthal, who had left Florida in the late 1960s and relocated to the Nevada gaming paradise. Around the time Tony surfaced in the desert oasis, Rosenthal, who started out his life in Vegas running his gambling operations out of the Rose Bowl Sports Book, was placed by The Outfit in the Stardust hotel and casino, in an attempt to have an authority running things inside the casino for them.
If Lefty was Mr. Inside, then Tony was Mr. Outside, sent there to make sure nobody interfered with Rosenthal or the illegal profits being stolen from their various casino count rooms controlled by the Chicago mob. Like his predecessors, Spilotro was instructed to keep his head down and out of the view of the public, the media, and most important, the police. And for a very short period of time, he did.
Attempting to maintain a facade of run-of-the-mill domesticity, the Spilotros moved into a modest three-bedroom home on Balfour Avenue in a middle-class section of town and, with the help of Rosenthal, joined the prestigious Las Vegas Country Club. Tony and Nancy enrolled their son in a local highly regarded Catholic school and signed up for the PTA. When Vincent was old enough to play Little League Baseball, the couple didn’t miss a game and sat alongside the other parents in the grandstand cheering on the team. As a front, Tony bought space in the newly built Circus Circus hotel and casino, a gambling and entertainment complex geared toward families, and opened up a gift shop.