Casino

by Nicholas Pileggi

  “I stood by the doors to make sure the man knew where it was, and as he walks toward Sachs, I see Sachs, about twenty feet away, rush up to him with both arms extended, and he gives my friend a big hug. Remember, Sachs is the president of the Stardust Hotel and Casino and he’s never met this man in his life.

  “I can hear both their voices as I’m walking away, because the kitchen is dead silent. And I hear Sachs say: ‘Gee, it’s a pleasure. I’m really happy. This is something I’ll never forget.’ And then he says, ‘You know, I’m really delighted to have Frank around. I know he’s just like a son to you.’

  “My friend, real serious, says, ‘You’re wrong.’

  “Sachs says, ‘What do you mean?’

  “And my friend says, ‘No, he’s not like a son; he is my son.’ That was the last thing I heard. And then I kept on walking. After a while, things cooled off and I moved back behind the pits.”

  9

  “Tony had a way of getting under a guy’s skin.”

  TONY SPILOTRO WAS ten years younger than his old friend Frank Rosenthal, but by 1971 their lives were on an oddly parallel course. Both of them were public figures, for all the wrong reasons. Both of them had been arrested many times, in Lefty’s case for a series of minor infractions, in Tony’s for a series of infractions considerably more minor than the ones he had actually committed. Both of them had handled the arrests by suing authorities. And as a result of the heat both of them chose to change their lives by going West.

  Tony was still in Chicago in 1971, where he had quickly become the most likely to succeed in his own particular class of criminals. “After whacking Billy McCarthy and Jimmy Miraglia,” Frank Cullotta said, “Tony rose up very quick. First he started working for Crazy Sam DeStefano as a collector. Crazy Sam was such a lunatic shylock that he once handcuffed his brother-in-law to a radiator, beat the shit out of him, had his crew piss on him, and then showed him off at a family dinner.

  “Then Tony got assigned to Milwaukee Phil Alderisio, and I’d have to say it was Milwaukee Phil who groomed Tony in the outfit. Phil was a great earner. He’s the first guy who figured out about shaking down sports bookies. Until Milwaukee Phil, only horse bookmakers paid the street tax. Phil changed all that and he started grabbing guys off the street right and left.

  “For a while, around 1962, 1963, Tony became a bail bondsman. It’s true. He could walk all around the courts in Cook County. Go behind the desks. Check the docket room. The outfit guys set it up for him. He worked with Irwin Weiner, on South State Street. Weiner used to bond out everybody. He bailed out Milwaukee Phil’s guys, and Joey Lombardo’s, and Turk Torello’s.

  “Now Tony had about six or seven guys booking for him out of different offices, and he had some loan-shark money on the street. One day Tony came to my house and gave me six thousand dollars from a score we had made. He told me, ‘You know, Frank, this is a lot of money. Why don’t you invest like me and go into the loan-sharking business?’ He said, ‘I have some money out on the street right now. I’m not asking you to invest it all, but why don’t you invest, like, four grand on the street. You could be getting four hundred dollars a week and the four grand would always be there, and whenever you wanted it I could just pull it out.’

  “Well, I didn’t really feel like giving him four thousand, so I offered to give him two thousand. Tony said all right, but he said it was nineteen sixty-one and money was getting scarce, so that meant there was a big demand. He thought that was a joke.

  “Anyway, I gave him two grand and he put it to work on the street. Every week I received my two hundred dollars cash. Plus, we had the accounts of loan sharks under us, and we used to get a percentage of what they were making, so it worked out pretty good. I spent money pretty good, too. I always liked brand-new cars. So I traded in my nineteen sixty-one Ford with the big engine and went to the Hope Park Cadillac dealer and got a blue Coupe de Ville. That’s a car I always wanted.

  “One night Tony took me to the North Avenue Steak House on Mannheim Road that was owned by the outfit. That’s where Tony wanted to introduce me to some big shots. This was really the night I decided to move to another crew.

  “Jackie Cerone was standing at the bar with Crazy Sam DeStefano and a blond broad. The three of them were drunk, and there’s nobody as obnoxious as Jackie Cerone when he’s drunk. When we walked in, I asked Tony who the loud bald-headed fuck was standing at the bar.

  “I guess I said it sort of loud, because Tony told me not to talk so loud and explained to me who the two guys were. Just about that time, Jackie Cerone grabbed the cocktail waitress by the arm and told her to suck his prick at the bar. She said no and he gave her a crack in the face and ran her out of the joint.

  “Then Crazy Sam DeStefano came over to us and started talking about how goofy Jackie Cerone was. Crazy Sam was also very drunk that night. Now Jackie Cerone comes walking over and asks Tony who his friend is, meaning me. Tony introduces me to Sam and Jackie. That’s how I met Jackie Cerone.

  “We only stood around for about an hour. They made all kinds of racket and noise in the place. This Jackie Cerone was a real, real ignorant man. Any girl that comes by, he’d pull her to him. He didn’t care if they were with another guy or not.

  “It was just uncomfortable being around him, because you had to be on your toes. You had to watch what you were saying. Meanwhile, we’re standing there like goofs. Laughing along with Jackie and making him feel like a big man. Finally we left. We got in the car and went someplace else just to get away from them.

  “I let my money ride on the street for about two more months, but I kept getting steamed up over the way you had to kiss their asses and be careful all the time, and about the beef over getting rid of my car. Tony really wanted to be an outfit big shot. I didn’t.

  “So finally I said to myself: ‘Fuck this neighborhood! Fuck these guys!’ I told Tony, ‘I’m gonna start bumming east.’

  “He said, ‘What are you talking about?’ So I told him I wanted to stay involved with his crew, ‘but you guys ain’t doing too much and I want to keep active.’ We stayed close friends, but I told him I wanted more action and I started hanging on the East Side with a stickup crew.”

  According to retired FBI agent William Roemer, who tracked Spilotro’s rise during the sixties and wrote about it in his book, The Enforcer: “Tony had a way of getting under a guy’s skin. He was a bondsman at the time, and I caught him tailing me when I left the gym. He was driving a green Oldsmobile. He was good. He stayed far behind, but I saw him make a couple of U-turns and I knew he was on me. I had him tail me to Columbus Park, where I waited for him in a deserted area.

  “I knew what he wanted. He was trying to find out who I was meeting with, who my informants were, because we had been putting cases together against Sam Giancana and Milwaukee Phil and they knew we had inside informants. That’s what he was doing for the outfit hanging around the court all day long.

  “He lost sight of me for a while, but he kept looking. When he was about twenty feet from me, I pointed my gun at him and called out, ‘Looking for me, pal?’

  “He was startled, but just for a second. He came back real quick. ‘Just taking a walk. Ain’t this a public park?’

  “I took a look at the guy. I didn’t know it was Spilotro at that moment. He had on a fedora. The kind Sam Giancana used to wear. He was wearing a gray sweater with a tie, gray slacks, and black loafers. He was very, very short, but he seemed tightly wound. Muscular. Not a wimp. The opposite.

  “When I identified myself and asked him for his ID, he said, ‘None of your fucking business! I don’t give a shit who you are, asshole, you don’t have a right to question me unless you’ve got a warrant.’

  “I said it was my business, and I grabbed his left arm, held it back, and yanked out his wallet. His driver’s license identified him as Anthony John Spilotro. I should have guessed. I had seen him outside Sam DeStefano’s house. I asked him about DeStefano and he said he never heard of him. I ask
ed him why he was tailing me, and he said, ‘Who’s following you? I’m just walking in the park.’ When I told him I didn’t believe him, he said, ‘I don’t give a fuck what you believe.’

  “That was Tony. Instead of going with the flow and conning me, trying to be nice, he kept giving me the wiseass answers. I even tried being nice with him. I told him he was still a young guy. He was a bondsman. He should pull out of all the bullshit he was involved with.

  “‘Yeah, like you, asshole,’ he says to me. ‘I see how you live. I seen your house. Big shot! Live in a little dump out there in the steel mills. Big fucking deal. I should live like you?’

  “As I said, Tony had a way of getting under your skin. I warned him that if I ever saw him anywhere around my house I would make it a personal matter.

  “Still he keeps it up. ‘Fuck you, asshole,’ he says. I’m standing there in the woods with a gun on him. I’m over six feet and weigh two hundred and twenty pounds. If he’s been tailing me he knows I work out boxing every day at the Y. Meanwhile, he’s five five and a hundred and thirty-five pounds, and he’s busting my balls in a secluded spot in the park. That was Tony. He dared you to murder him.

  “I gave him a shove, pushed him back toward the parking area. ‘Get the hell out of here, you little pissant,’ I said, and he walked away, got in his car, and drove off.

  “After that, whenever I talked to my friends in the press about Spilotro, I always referred to him as ‘that little pissant.’ Sandy Smith of the Tribune and Art Petacque of the Sun-Times and later John O’Brien of the Trib began using the name ‘the Ant’ when they wrote about him. I guess in those days ‘pissant’ was not proper for the public press.”

  By 1970, Spilotro was appearing in the newspapers just about every day. He had made faces and mugged for the cameramen as he walked in and out of the Crime Commission hearings. He even insisted upon suing the police and the IRS for the $12,000 they had confiscated during a gambling raid. The police said the money was the proceeds of a gambling operation and the IRS had kept the money as a lien against possible unpaid taxes.

  Spilotro lost the suit; to make matters worse, the legal action allowed federal agents access to his tax records. They wasted no time before bringing charges that Spilotro had filed a false mortgage loan application for his house when he said he had been employed by a cement company. The IRS agents showed that he had claimed that his sole income that year, $9,000, had been derived from gambling wins only. There was no income reported from a cement company.

  “Tony couldn’t walk across the street without picking up a tail,” Cullotta said. “The heat was on. Lots of his crew, me included, were on our way to prison and he was too, unless he got out of town. At my going-away party—I had been given six years for some robberies and burglaries and assaults—Tony said he and Nancy and the kid were taking a trip out West for vacation. He said he might move out to Las Vegas and that I should come see him out there as soon as I got out. I put it in the back of my mind and went to sleep for six years.”

  In the spring of 1971, right around the time Frank Rosenthal started to think about going to work at the Stardust, Tony Spilotro rented an apartment in Las Vegas, and on May 6, 1971, a trailer van of Transworld Van Lines with a work crew pulled up in front of Spilotro’s Oak Park house and began loading their van with the household’s contents. A few minutes later, two cars of IRS agents pulled onto the street and began taking notes on what was being carted out of the house.

  Spilotro immediately suspected that as soon as the van was loaded with his family belongings, the agents were going to seize the truck as a tax assessment. So he ordered the crew of Transworld Van Lines to unload the trailer and place all of his property back in his home. He then called his lawyer and sued the IRS; federal authorities had harassed him into leaving town, he said, and now they were interfering with “his constitutional right to travel and reside anywhere in the United States.”

  Within a week, prosecutors relented and Transworld Van Lines returned to repack and load eight thousand pounds of Spilotro belongings, including nine barrels of dishes, nine wardrobe cartons, forty-five cartons of household items, one crib mattress, four nightstands, a dining room table and six chairs, three TV sets, one sewing machine, a grandfather clock, three dressers, a divan, a love seat, six mirrors, six assorted chairs, four tables, and lawn furniture. According to the bill of lading, the items were valued at $9,900, and most were scratched or chipped.

  On the bill of lading—in the space marked “Local Contact, person responsible for final payment”—the Spilotros wrote “Frank or Jerry Rosenthal.”

  “Tony first came out to Las Vegas with Nancy for a visit,” Frank Rosenthal said. “A little vacation. That was just before they decided to move here. He said, ‘Let’s take a ride.’ We drove out of town into the desert, and we talked about what was going on back in Chicago.

  “He said there was a lot of heat at home and he asked if I would have any objections if he moved out here. Why was he asking me? I think he was bullshitting me. He just wanted to cover his bases, so when the heat came down he could say: ‘Jeezus, I asked you, didn’t I?’

  “During the drive I warned him that it was very different out here than it was at home. I told him that the local cops had a reputation for being very tough. I told him that a lot of people who got arrested out here could find themselves buried in the desert before they ever made it to court.

  “Tony didn’t say anything. I knew that if Tony did come out to Las Vegas, he had better be on his best behavior.”

  According to the FBI, when Spilotro arrived he did not have the outfit’s permission to start shaking everyone down and to start up the kind of loansharking operation that could jeopardize the mob’s skimming of the casinos that was their primary source of income. “Tony was smart,” retired FBI agent Bud Hall said. “He knew how far he could go with the outfit bosses back in Chicago. Joe Aiuppa, for instance, was a kind of don’t-rock-the-boat kind of guy. Aiuppa didn’t give a damn about Spilotro, but Tony knew that once he got out here, he would be left pretty much on his own.”

  “When we got back to the house after the drive, it was obvious that Nancy and Geri had had a few drinks. They were both loaded. Tony went into his act. He started yelling at Nancy, ‘You can’t do this. You’re embarrassing me. Frank’s not going to want us around if you continue to act like this.’

  “He was trying to bullshit me that everything would be okay. That the two of them would be on their best behavior.

  “Well, a couple of weeks later they arrive permanently, and it was like a signal for the bureau. The heat began. They started watching him and me. And in a way, I don’t blame them. They assumed—everybody assumed—that Tony had come to town with instructions from Chicago. That he was their muscle in town and I was the outfit’s man inside the casinos.

  “Nothing could have been further from the truth, but Tony took advantage of that incorrect perception. He went along with it. He encouraged it. He’d tell people, ‘I’m Frank’s advisor.’ ‘I’m Frank’s protector.’

  “Even Geri thought he was my boss. One day I walked into the country club with some executives and one of them said that my boss was in the corner. I looked over expecting to see one of the bosses from the Stardust, and instead there was Tony playing cards. When I really got annoyed the guy said he was only joking, but that was the perception in town right from the start.

  “He was only in town two or three days before Sheriff Ralph Lamb gets ahold of me. He says, ‘Tell your friend I want him out of town in a week.’ I tried to speak up for Tony. I said, ‘Ralph, I don’t own this guy, but he’ll behave himself. Give the guy a break.’ It made no difference. He wanted Tony out of town.

  “I gave Tony the message, but I think it was his birthday or something coming up, and anyway, instead of Tony leaving town by that weekend, his five brothers arrived. They were all legit guys. One was a dentist. But Sheriff Lamb picked them up as soon as they got to town and threw them in jail for
a few hours.

  “He kept Tony in the drunk tank overnight. That’s a wet pit where they keep hosing you down because everybody in the place has lice.

  “When Spilotro finally got out he was crazy. He’s screaming, ‘I’ll kill that motherfucker.’ But he calmed down. The truth was he had a perfect right to stay in town, and there was a truce, even though he and Sheriff Lamb were not what you could call friendly.

  “I don’t think Tony ever anticipated when he moved out here what was going to happen. I don’t think he had a master plan. I think things just developed day by day and, most important, he was left alone to establish himself without interference.”

  Tony, Nancy, and their four-year-old son, Vincent, settled into an apartment, and Nancy settled into being a Las Vegas wife. Lefty and Geri helped settle them: Lefty called the Bank of Nevada for Tony, and Geri introduced Nancy to her favorite hairdressers and manicurists at Caesars Palace. Geri and Nancy became great friends. They shopped together, had dinner on the nights their husbands were busy (which was often), and played tennis three or four times a week at the Las Vegas Country Club, where Lefty managed to get them a membership.

  In contrast to the elegant Rosenthals, with their expensive cars and house on the golf course, Nancy and Tony lived modestly. They drove inexpensive cars and bought a three-bedroom house on Balfour Avenue, a middle-income community. Nancy enrolled little Vincent in Bishop Gorman Catholic school, joined the PTA, and marched down to the local police precinct when her son’s bike was stolen from in front of their house. Tony was a regular at Little League games, where he would sit in the stands or behind the coach with the other fathers cheering for their sons.