Casino

by Nicholas Pileggi

  One night, according to Roemer, Lefty was in the Blackamoor Lounge. The place was owned at the time by a legitimate businessman, even though it was a place where outfit bookmakers and gamblers, like Lefty, hung out.

  “This night it was really crowded,” Roemer said, “when in walks one of the outfit’s made guys. He was by himself. The man knew Lefty fairly well, and they said hello. Our undercovers were taking it all down.

  “About a half an hour goes by. This must have been about midnight, and all of a sudden four other outfit guys walk in the front door. They were rough guys. They nod to Lefty, and one of them walks over to the owner and says, ‘You’re closed for the night. Everybody out!’

  “The owner usually closed down around three or four in the morning, but when these guys said, ‘Turn out the lights!’ everybody, including Lefty and the owner, went outside.

  “When the outfit guy who had come in alone tried to walk out, the goon squad stopped him.

  “‘You fucking stay,’ they said. ‘Sit on your stool.’

  “Our agents no sooner got outside with everyone else when the goons started beating that poor guy to death. One of our men got to a phone and called the police. Lefty hung around outside listening to the bloody murder just like everyone else. When the goons walked out, they had left the guy for dead. In fact, one of them said to Lefty and a few of the other guys standing around, ‘Okay, get him some help, if he’s still alive.’

  “The guy was in the hospital for two or three months. He barely lived. His kidneys were gone. He’s been in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. I think he’s still alive, because we once asked about him.

  “We later found out that the guy received that beating because he got into a dumb argument with another made man’s wife and made the mistake of saying, ‘Fuck you. Fuck your husband, and anybody around him.’ With that, the wife told her husband and the husband went and told the boss that he and the wife wanted satisfaction. That’s the world Lefty grew up in. That’s how easy it was for even a made guy, one of the outfit’s own people, to wind up in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. That’s why guys like Lefty grow up being very, very careful. They know that no matter how much money they make for these guys, they cannot make any mistakes.”

  Still, according to Frank Cullotta, Lefty did once speak up to Buccieri and probably helped save Spilotro’s life.

  “There was this one time when Buccieri had everybody in Chicago terrified. I heard about the story at the time, but later Tony told me what happened. As crazy as it might seem, some psycho had actually gone to Fiore Buccieri’s house with a gun and robbed Fiore’s wife. When Buccieri got home he was insane. He wanted to know everything. The wife told him that the guy was a dapper-looking fella with a New York accent. She said he came to the door, showed her a gun, and made her open the safe. The guy took about $400,000 in cash and almost all of the wife’s jewelry. Since the guy hadn’t even bothered to wear a mask, he was probably not local, but Fiore had the cops bring him a dozen mug shot books, and he made his wife go through thousands of pages looking for the guy’s face.

  “Two weeks later, Buccieri still doesn’t know who robbed him, and he’s going wild. And everybody’s terrified. If he even suspects you know what happened, you’re dead, but the truth was nobody knew anything. Then, one guy looking to make a few points with Buccieri says the only guy he knew who might be crazy enough to maybe know somebody who could do such a thing was Tony Spilotro.

  “Years later, when Tony found out who that rat bastard was, he wanted to kill the bum, but the guy was already dead.

  “But at the time, Buccieri sends the word he wants Tony to show up at his house. Tony knows that Lefty is close with Buccieri, and he said he asked Lefty if he knew what the old man wanted. Lefty said he didn’t know, and they go over to see Buccieri together. Lefty used to be at Buccieri’s house all the time.

  “When they got there, Tony said, Buccieri had two guys the size of refrigerators in the doorway. When he walked inside, Fiore’s wife glares at him like he was the devil. He said she didn’t even acknowledge him. He said now he was not very happy. He and Lefty were led down into the basement where Buccieri tells Tony to sit down in a chair. Tony said Buccieri didn’t pay any attention to Lefty, who was just standing there in the dark. Then Buccieri looks at Tony and asks him, ‘Do you know what happened to me?’

  “‘Yeah,’ Tony says, ‘and I’m sorry.’

  “‘I didn’t ask you that,’ Buccieri says, ‘just answer my question.’

  “‘Yes,’ Tony says, ‘I heard about it.’

  “‘Do you have any idea who fits that MO?’” Buccieri says.

  “‘No,’ Tony says, like he’s getting a little annoyed at all this bullshit. It’s like he’s answering a cop.

  “‘Are you sure?’ Fiore asks.

  “Now Tony gets pissed and he says, maybe a little sarcastically, ‘I already answered that question.’

  “Before his mouth was closed, Tony said, Buccieri had him by the throat, and he started strangling Tony right there. Tony thought he was going to die. Tony said he began to lose his breath. He started to gag and feel weak.

  “And then he realized that Lefty was standing right next to him and that Lefty was begging Buccieri to stop. He could hear Lefty say that if Tony knew who did it he would already have given the guy up. Lefty said that Tony had a stupid mouth, but he didn’t mean to be disrespectful. Tony said he could see that Lefty was talking right in Buccieri’s ear until finally, Buccieri let go. He stepped back. Tony was gagging and coughing. He was dizzy.

  “Buccieri looked at him and said, ‘I don’t want to see you in Cicero ever again, and, if I find out you know what took place in my home and didn’t tell me, I’ll wipe out your whole family.’

  “Tony said even though Lefty saved his life, he and Lefty got out of there before the old man changed his mind.”

  4

  “I’d give half of what I own if I was as clean as you. Stay that way.”

  LEFTY WAS PROBABLY the youngest employee to have ever worked for Donald Angelini, the Wizard of Odds. Angelini and Bill Kaplan had the best-known and best-connected book in Chicago. They had outfit bosses as their partners and the city police as their protectors. Their clients either owned the city or ran it. To work for Angel-Kaplan meant you were a seasoned veteran of the bookmaking wars. The office was full of old guys chomping on yesterday’s cigars, Guys and Dolls rejects, gamblers who had spent years matching wits against every variety of scamster. Lefty was in heaven.

  “I’d been working at Angel-Kaplan a couple of years when Gil Beckley rented a couple of big suites at the Drake Hotel and invited me,” Lefty says. “There was some major fight in town. I don’t remember exactly who was fighting, but I was feeling on top of the world. I had just been invited to a party by the most prominent bookmaker and layoff man in the United States.

  “I knew I was picking up a little reputation at the time, and I felt like it was Gil’s way of making me a part of the fraternity.

  “There were no clients at this party. No high rollers. Nothing like that. Everyone there was a professional. The top pros in the business. Bookmakers. Handicappers. Layoff men. And a couple of professional players who made their livings by betting sports. There were no suckers. No politicians.

  “I had never even seen Gil Beckley before. I’d been talking to him over the phone for a couple of years. Talking to him six, seven times a day, and we’re very friendly.

  “Now when I meet him in person, he’s really nice. He was surprised I was only in my early twenties. There were about fifteen guys at the party, and every one of them had me by twenty or thirty or forty years.

  “So Beckley takes me around and introduces me to everybody in the room. It’s spectacular. There was food and broads all over the place. He took care of the broads.

  “And after the party’s going for a while, he says to me—he called me Lefty; he didn’t call me Frank—he said, ‘Lefty, I want to tell you something.
You’re a young fellow. You’ve got a very, very bright future. I’m going to tell you something that you need to keep precious to you for the rest of your life.’

  “He said, ‘I’d give half of what I own’—and this is a wealthy man at the time—‘if I was as clean as you. Stay that way.

  “‘You’ve got the brains. You’ve got the know-how,’ he’s telling me. ‘Keep clean!’

  “I never forgot that, but at the time, I didn’t really know what he meant. I didn’t respond. But he was telling me to play it smooth. Don’t get pinched. Watch your reputation. Don’t get labeled.

  “I didn’t listen to him. I didn’t know how important those words were. I was too fucking young. I had too much energy. There was too much ego. There was too much of the challenge. I wanted to become the best there was. Who’s worried about getting arrested? Bookmaking? A fifty-dollar fine. Ten days suspended sentence. Fuck the coppers.

  “But Gil Beckley knew that. He knew everything that I knew, plus. He knew the price you had to pay when you got to be well known. He was warning me to play it safe. Keep a low profile. Stay away from the limelight. He didn’t say this, but I could sense he meant for me to stay away from being too closely associated with outfit guys.

  “I just listened to Beckley and nodded. But I’m full of young blood. I’m ready to challenge the world. I know what I’m doing. I can handle it.

  “About a week after the party I saw Hymie the Ace. I know he had been invited, but he never showed. I told him he had missed a great party. I told him I finally got to meet Gil Beckley and that he was a great guy.

  “Ace looked at me like I was diseased. He didn’t want to hear about the party. He didn’t care who was there. Gil Beckley or anybody. But then, Ace never wanted to know about anything. He had no interest in street gossip, or in outfit guys, or in anything except his basketball. Ace never went to parties. Never went to outfit restaurants or hangouts. And as a result, the Ace never took a pinch in his life.”

  On May 26, 1966, when Gil Beckley was fifty-three, he was arrested along with seventeen others, including Gerald Kilgore, the publisher of J. K. Sports Journal of Los Angeles, and Sam Green, who headed the Multiple Sports Service of Miami, in a raid of his layoff operations, which were said by the FBI to exist in New York, Maryland, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Florida, Texas, California, and New Jersey. He was tried, convicted of interstate gambling violations, and given ten years. In 1970, before the appeal of his sentence could be heard, he disappeared. The FBI believes he was murdered because mob bosses feared he might talk if faced with such long prison time.

  By the early 1960s, Tony Spilotro was living the outfit life. He was making money and putting it in the street. He was getting $100 a week for every $1000 borrowed. He had teams of burglars—like Frank Cullotta’s—working all over town, and they kicked in between 10 and 20 percent of their takes to him. Tony was basically in the mob’s main business: franchising crime. And of course, Tony had to kick in a percentage of everything he got to the street capos and lieutenants above him, to guys like Joe “the Clown” Lombardo and Milwaukee Phil.

  Tony was also a master thief. He knew the best pick men, alarm guys, and fences. He could put together a team and pick a place clean. Mostly he worked with jewelry. He knew everything there was to know about stones. He could have been a jeweler. In fact, later on he opened up a jewelry store.

  In the summer of 1964, Tony and his wife, Nancy—a former hatcheck girl from Milwaukee—joined their friends John and Marianne Cook on a European vacation. John Cook owned a water-skiing business in Miami, but the FBI had him listed as an international jewel thief. The Spilotros and the Cooks flew to Amsterdam, rented a Mercedes-Benz, and drove to Antwerp, Belgium, the diamond capital of Europe. Interpol and local police were watching them every step of the way.

  The Belgian police watched them check into the hotel. They watched Spilotro and Cook casing dozens of jewelry stores and wholesale shops. They spotted the two checking alarm systems, window displays, and security. Then they visited the shop of Solomon Goldenstein, a local jeweler, who became suspicious when Cook used a fake name and gave a wrong hotel address when he tried to make a credit card purchase. The jeweler activated a silent alarm, and when Spilotro and Cook left the store they were arrested. Police found that Cook was carrying a high-powered slingshot and ball bearings, a small crowbar, and passkeys for Yale locks.

  When he was questioned he told police that he had the passkeys because he was afraid of being locked out of his car and that the slingshot and ball bearings were for his son.

  When the police took Spilotro and Cook back to the hotel, they found the two wives waiting with the luggage packed. When the police searched the luggage they found more ball bearings.

  Belgian authorities ordered the Spilotros and Cooks out of the country.

  The two couples left Belgium and continued their holiday, driving through the Swiss Alps and into Monaco for a couple of days in Monte Carlo, and then back to Paris before returning home.

  Spilotro and Cook did not know that they had been tracked since Belgium. When they got to Paris, the gendarmes swooped down again. This time the French police found a couple of dozen lock picks.

  When the Spilotros returned to Chicago, they were searched by customs agents, who found packets of diamonds, including two that had been sewn into Spilotro’s wallet. The customs agents confiscated the loot, which also included more lock picks and burglary tools.

  “I went to pick Tony up at the airport,” said Frank Cullotta, who was now Spilotro’s right-hand man. “The cops were going through everything they had. Tony was really surprised, but Nancy was fuming. I don’t think he knew they had had a line on him from Paris. I don’t think he knew that he was now hot and getting hotter.

  “When we got home I remember they gave Vincent, the kid, something to eat, and then Tony got a white towel and put it on the kitchen table. Then Nancy bent over the table, and one by one she began dropping diamonds out of her hair. They kept coming out one after another. He had made her hide them there. The customs people might have confiscated some of the diamonds, but I think the prize stones got through in Nancy’s beehive.”

  Two months later, the French police found out that Spilotro and Cook had burglarized an apartment in the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo on the night of August 7 and made off with $525,220 in jewels and $4,000 in traveler’s checks. The apartment had been occupied by a wealthy married American woman who had been staying there with a young man and was therefore reluctant to get herself involved in an investigation. By the time she did, Spilotro and Cook were back in the United States.

  Spilotro and Cook were convicted in absentia by the criminal court in Monaco and sentenced to three years, if and when they ever cared to return.

  “I was with Tony’s crew for five years before I ever met Lefty Rosenthal,” said Cullotta. “I was with his burglars and goons. Lefty was part of his gambling stuff. Mad Sam was with his loan-sharking and leg breaking. Tony liked to keep everybody separate.

  “For instance, if he wanted you to drive somewhere, he wouldn’t tell you who would be there or anything. You just went there, and then, maybe, he’d tell you the next step. Meantime, when you get there, the guy who’s there doesn’t have any idea that he’s gonna meet up with you.

  “So on this afternoon I get a call from Tony asking me to drop by his apartment. I knew he needed me to do something; he doesn’t say what or anything. I don’t expect him to. So I go right over.

  “Tony and Nancy had a nice little two-bedroom, fourth-floor apartment in Elmwood Park. When I get there I see that Tony is playing gin rummy with a tall thin white-faced guy. It was Lefty.

  “Nancy was running around the apartment making coffee or on the phone. I just stood behind Tony as he played a few hands, but I didn’t say a word. Sometimes I’d whisper something to Nancy, but I can see Tony is beating this guy bad.

  “You’ve gotta know that Tony played gin rummy very, very well. He’d
play two hundred points across and he never lost. The guy could have been a professional gin rummy player. One night he was in Jerry’s Lounge, and he’s at the bar playing gin with Jerry. Jerry kept getting interrupted by customers, so Tony told me to take over the bar.

  “So I took over behind the bar and they played until Tony beat the poor guy for fifteen thousand dollars. Jerry fell off his own bar stool and started crying. ‘I can’t pay,’ he tells Tony. Tony says, ‘Okay, I’ll take the lounge.’

  “I never saw Tony pay. He’d make you play until his luck turned around. Usually, if he beat a guy for, say, fifteen thousand dollars, he’d have me take the guy to the bank, and I’d be there while he cashed a check, and then he’d give me the money and I’d take it back to Tony.

  “On a fifteen-thousand-dollar score, Tony would give me three thousand dollars just for making sure the guy doesn’t skip and for bringing him back the money. Tony was a very generous guy. When he was moving around town he always picked up checks. It didn’t matter. Twenty, thirty people, Tony always got the check. And he’d get really pissed off if you tried to take care of the tip. That was his, too. Nobody paid for his food.

  “Finally, Lefty stands up. He says he’s had enough. ‘That’s it,’ he says. I know that these guys go back a long time. Lefty just dropped about eight grand and he says he doesn’t have the cash on him, and that he’ll get it and give it to Tony later.

  “I knew they were close, because Tony didn’t ask me to go with Lefty to get the money. He just asked me to drive Lefty to a cabstand at Grand and Harlem Avenues, on the borderline between Elmwood Park and Chicago.

  “That’s the only reason why Tony had me come to his house in the first place. He didn’t want Lefty calling a cab from his house. He didn’t want any record of cab pickups from his address. This way, when I dropped Lefty at the cabstand, nobody knew where he came from. That’s why Lefty didn’t take his own car to Tony’s. He didn’t want anybody picking up his plates outside Tony’s. Back then, Tony was very careful about things like that. He was very, very cautious.