Casino

by Nicholas Pileggi

  “Then he said, ‘It’s an emergency and you don’t have a choice.’

  “I said, ‘Okay, where is it?’

  “He said, ‘Kansas City.’

  “I thought that was ridiculous. I told him I couldn’t get there before three or four in the morning. He said, ‘We are going to come and get you, or you are going to come voluntarily.” He said he would meet me at the airport. The corporation had a couple of Lears at the time, and by two thirty or three in the morning I landed in Kansas City.

  “Rosenthal was waiting for me with a car at the airport and introduced me to the driver, Carl DeLuna, a really gruff, vulgar man. Rosenthal referred to him by his nickname, ‘Toughy.’

  “We then took a circuitous route to wherever we were going, because I noticed that we were passing the same places time and again. It took about twenty minutes. Round and around, and no one is saying anything. Finally we got to a hotel. We go up to the third floor. It’s a suite with a connecting door that is only partially open to a connecting room.

  “The suite was pretty dark. As I walked in I was introduced to a white-haired older man named Nick Civella. I had no idea who Nick Civella was. He turned out to be the Mafia boss of Kansas City. I put out my hand to shake and he said, ‘I don’t want to shake your hand.’

  “There was a chair and an end table with a light on it. He told me to sit down. I saw Rosenthal leave the room. I was in there with DeLuna and Civella, except I could hear people moving in and out of the room through the interconnecting door of the suite, but that was to my back.

  “Civella called me every name under the sun and then he says, ‘You don’t know me, but if it was my choice you’d never leave this room alive. However, due to the circumstances, if you listen, you may.’

  “When I said the light was bothering my eyes, he said he could accommodate me by pulling my eyes out. Then he said, ‘You reneged on our deal. You owe us one-point-two million dollars, and you’re gonna let Lefty do what he wants.’

  “I was amazed. I said I didn’t know what he was talking about. I meant it.

  “He looks at me and says, laying a gun on the table, ‘You’re going to start telling me the truth right now or you’re not leaving this room alive.’

  “He asked about my agreement with Balistrieri, and when I said I didn’t have an agreement with Balistrieri, he said, ‘What?’ Kind of surprised. He said he wanted to know about the agreement he had been told I had with Balistrieri.

  “I said the only agreement I had with Balistrieri was about hiring his sons, and I told him about the option, but I explained that the option was voided and we were going to work something out now that the deal had gone through.

  “Later, I found out that Civella did not know about my deals with Balistrieri—about hiring his kids and their fifty percent option. He thought Balistrieri had been given a one-point-two-million-dollar cash commission for getting me the loan. Since Civella felt he had also helped get me the loan through his trustee—Roy Williams, the Teamster boss of Kansas City and the next president of the entire union—he too was entitled to one-point-two million dollars.

  “Balistrieri had told me never to talk to anyone else about our arrangement, but I felt under these circumstances I had no choice. I also began to see why Balistrieri insisted I never talk to anyone else.

  “Civella was a tough guy but a smart man. When he asked me questions I could see that he was putting things together. All of a sudden, something rang a bell and he got up. He said I still had a commitment to him and he wanted the money paid.

  “When I said that I didn’t know how the corporation could pay him this money, he said, ‘Let Lefty handle that.’

  “He said that because he did not like me, he was going to personally see to it that I did not get the additional Teamster loans for renovation and expansion.

  “Then he said, ‘Get him outta here,’ and told DeLuna to take Lefty and me back to the airport and ‘drive down to Milwaukee and yank that fancy-pants sonofabitch out of bed and bring him here.’

  “This time it only took us five minutes to get back to the airport from the hotel, and all the while DeLuna was griping about how he had to drive all the way to Milwaukee to pick up Balistrieri, as though Balistrieri were a sack of laundry.

  “When I met Rosenthal the next morning I told him that I could not accept Civella’s conditions about paying him money and having partners, and Rosenthal said that I was really no longer in a position of authority. He said I could no longer determine my destiny.

  “When I told Balistrieri about my meeting with Civella and told him about the threat to cut off our additional loans, Balistrieri said there was nothing he could any longer do to help me. He said the pension fund matters were now out of his hands.”

  11

  “Do you know who I am? I run this town.”

  WHEN TONY SPILOTRO got to town in 1971, Las Vegas was a relatively quiet place. The bosses had been making so much money from their own illegitimate enterprises, such as illegal bookmaking, loan-sharking, and casino skimming, that there was a concerted effort by the mob to keep the town clean, safe, and quiet. The rules were simple. Disputes were to be peaceably settled. There were to be no shootings or car explosions in town. Bodies were not to be left in car trunks at the airport. Sanctioned murders took place out of town or the bodies disappeared forever in the vast desert surrounding the city.

  Before Tony arrived, mob matters were so benignly administered that Jasper Speciale, the biggest loan shark in town, operated out of his Leaning Tower of Pizza restaurant, and his waitresses moonlighted as collectors after they finished work. The town’s petty criminals—the drug dealers, the bookies, pimps, even the card cheats—were operating for free. Las Vegas was an open city: mobsters from different families around the country needed no permission to wander into town, extort money from high rollers, work a credit scam on a casino, and go home. The kind of street tax imposed by the outfit back home was unheard of.

  “Tony stopped all that,” said Bud Hall Jr., the retired FBI agent who spent years eavesdropping on Spilotro’s life. “Tony changed the way business was done in Las Vegas. He took over. The first thing he did was bring in some of his own men and impose a street tax on every bookie, loan shark, drug dealer, and pimp in town. A few, like a bookmaker named Jerry Dellman, resisted, but he wound up shot dead in a daylight robbery in the garage area behind his house. Nobody tried to hide the body. It was a message that there was a real gangster in town.

  “Tony understood very quickly that he could run Las Vegas any way he wanted, because the bosses were fifteen hundred miles away and didn’t have the same kind of street ears in Las Vegas that they had back in Elmwood Park.”

  “When Tony first moved to Las Vegas, very few people even knew who he was,” Lefty said. “I remember we had this really arrogant guy, John Grandy, in charge of all construction and purchasing. Nobody fucked with John Grandy. If people asked him for anything, he’d say, ‘Why the fuck are you bothering me? Get lost!’ I handled him with kid gloves.

  “One morning Tony was coming in to see me. Grandy was there giving orders to three or four workers who were putting together some blackjack tables for dealers. He had a bunch of construction material in his arms, and he looked over and sees Tony coming up to me, and he says to Tony, ‘Hey, come here! Hold this! I’ll tell you what to do with it later.’

  “I’ll never forget this. The stuff weighed about thirty or forty pounds. Tony was so surprised he held it a second before shoving it right back.

  “‘Here,’ Tony said, ‘you hold it, not me. Who the fuck do you think you are? The next time you talk to me that way, I’ll throw you out the fucking window!’ Quote unquote.

  “Grandy looks at me. I look at Tony. Tony is fuming. And Grandy does what Tony says. Grandy takes the stuff back and doesn’t say shit. Tony says he’ll meet me down in the coffee shop and he leaves.

  “When Tony’s gone, Grandy says, ‘Hey! Who the fuck’s that guy? Who’s he think he
is?’ I said, ‘The guy doesn’t work here. Never mind who he is.’

  “But Grandy knows something’s wrong. He goes down into the casino and spots Bobby Stella and drags Stella to the coffee shop to look for Tony.

  “‘Bobby, who’s that fucking guy over there? Who the fuck does he think he is?’ Grandy’s getting all riled up now.

  “Bobby saw he was pointing to Tony and tried to calm him down. ‘Slow down. Take it easy.’

  “‘What do you mean, “slow down”?’

  “Bobby says, ‘That’s Tony Spilotro.’

  “Grandy just stood there and said, ‘Holy shit! Holy shit!’ He apparently knew the name but not the face. He went right over to Tony and apologized four or five times. ‘I’m very, very sorry. I really didn’t mean to insult you. Things were a little bit busy and I didn’t know who you were. Would you accept my apologies?’ Tony said yeah and looked the other way. Grandy ran.”

  Frank Cullotta got out of prison after doing six years for a Brinks truck robbery, and Spilotro flew to Chicago for his coming-out party. “I had ‘Free At Last’ on my birthday cake,” Cullotta said. “Everyone came and they all gave me envelopes, and at the end of the night I had about twenty thousand dollars, but mostly it made me feel great that so many guys were with me and liked me. I was still on paper [on parole], so I couldn’t leave Chicago right away, but Tony said that as soon as I got off paper I was supposed to come to Nevada.

  “By the time I got there, Tony was already running the town. He had everybody on the payroll. He owned a couple of guys in the sheriff’s office. He had guys in the courthouse who could get him grand jury minutes, and he had people in the telephone company to tell him about phone taps.

  “Tony had the town covered. He was in the papers all the time. He had broads coming around in Rolls-Royces who wanted to go out with him. Everybody wanted to be around a gangster. Movie stars. Everybody. I don’t know what the fuck’s the attraction, but that’s the way it was. I guess it’s a feeling of power, you know. People feel like, well, these guys are hitters, and if I need something done, they’ll do it for me.

  “He knew I was a good thief, and he said we could make good money. Tony always needed money. He went through cash fast. He liked to bet sports and he never stayed home. He was a sport. He always picked up the check. No matter if there were ten, fifteen people with us, he’d always pick up the check.

  “He told me, ‘Look, get a crew together. And, whatever you gotta fucking do with the guys, you got my okay. Just give me my end. You’ve got carte blanche out here.’

  “I sent for Wayne Matecki, Larry Neumann, Ernie Davino, real desperados like that, and we started putting the arm on everybody. Bookmakers. Shylocks. Dope dealers. Pimps. Shit, we’d strong-arm them. Beat them. Shoot their fucking guard dogs. What did we care? I had Tony’s okay. In fact, half the time Tony’d told us who to grab.

  “Then, after we’d rob them and scare them, they’d run to Tony for protection to get us off their backs. They never had any idea it was Tony who sent us over to rob them in the first place.

  “We made good money turning over houses. It was all cash and jewelry. I’m talking about thirty, forty, fifty thousand dollars in twenties and hundreds laying in dresser drawers. One time I found fifteen thousand-dollar bills next to a guy’s bed. Now, where the fuck am I gonna get rid of them? Thousand-dollar bills are hard to get rid of. Banks want your name if you try and cash them. So I pushed them at the Stardust. I handed them to Lou Salerno, and he shoved them in the drawer and gave me back fifteen grand in hundreds.

  “How do you think I put up the money for my restaurant, the Upper Crust? I got the money in two days. Me and Wayne and Ernie hit two maî-tre d’s’ houses and got over sixty thousand dollars. Maître d’s take twenty-dollar bills from people looking for good tables all night. Well, we took the twenties back. One of the guys also had a thirty-thousand-dollar Patek Philippe watch, and we sold it to Bobby Stella for three grand. Bobby gave it away as a present.

  “We’d get our information from the casino people. Bell captains. The registration desk. The credit clerks. Travel agency people. But our best sources were the insurance brokers who sold the people the policies of the stuff we were robbing. They’d give us the information on everything. What kind of jewels the people had and how much they were insured for. Where in the house the stuff was located. What kind of alarm system. The people had to put all that info down on their policies when they got insured.

  “If the doors and windows and alarm systems were a pain, we’d go right through the wall. Going through the walls was my idea. I invented it. It’s very simple. Almost all the houses out in Vegas have stucco exterior walls. All you need is a five-pound sledge to make a hole big enough so you can get in. Then you use metal shears to clip away the chicken wire inside the wall they use for lathing. Then you bang away a little more until you break through the interior drywall, and you’re inside the house.

  “You could only do this in Las Vegas, because the houses were stucco and they have high walls around them for privacy. People have pools and things outside, and they like to live private lives. Nobody knows their neighbors. Nobody wants to know their neighbors. It’s that kind of town. It’s the kind of place, if people hear a noise from the house next door, they tune it out. We did so many of these jobs that the newspaper started calling us the Hole in the Wall Gang. The cops never knew who we were.

  “‘Mean fucking pigs,’ Tony’d say, proud of us. ‘Look what I have created out here.’

  “We had it down. We’d be in and out of a house in three to five minutes tops. And whenever we did a job, we had a guy in a work car outside with a scanner picking up police calls. We even had a descrambler so we’d get the FBI. Tony gave us the descramblers and the police frequencies.

  “But no matter how well we were doing, we always needed more money. Burglary money goes quick. We always had to divide it four ways—me and my two guys, and then Tony would always get his end. On a forty-thousand-dollar job, Tony would get ten grand. For sitting home. He got an equal end every time.

  “Sometimes, if we needed cash and things were slow, we’d do straight robberies. We took the Rose Bowl out like that. At that time the Rose Bowl was owned by the guy who owned Chateau Vegas, and Tony gives me all the information and then says, ‘You’re gonna need a guy with a clean face.’ So I imported a kid from Chicago with a clean face, a guy that nobody knew. We couldn’t use a known guy because we weren’t supposed to be doing robberies like this in the first place. If the bosses found out Tony was doing armed robberies in the middle of town, he wouldn’t have been here long. But nobody back home knew we were doing burglaries and robberies. That was our little secret.

  “The old broad who ran the Rose Bowl and her bodyguard came out into the back parking lot just like Tony said they would, with a bag of money. She walks toward her car. The bodyguard is just standing there watching her. The new kid I brought to town walks right up to her, flashes a gun, and grabs the bag out of her hand.

  “The guy she had watching her tried to be a hero, and my kid whacked him with the back of his hand and the guy’s on his ass. My kid was real rough. He’s in jail now on something else. He’s doing forty years.

  “The kid runs the block parallel to the Strip. There’s a chapel over there. Ernie Davino was waiting for him. Larry Neumann was in the parking lot, right nearby, as a backup if the kid needed help. When the kid jumps into the car with Ernie, Larry has already gotten in back. And as they’re coming off the street, I’m coming off the street. We were four blocks away cutting up the money when we could hear the police just starting to show up at the Rose Bowl parking lot.

  “Looking back I see how crazy we were. Here we were in Las Vegas with a million ways to make a dishonest buck, and Tony’s got us out here doing house burglaries and armed robberies and 7-Elevens. It was dumb.”

  All booming industries create jobs, and the Spilotro operation was no exception. Within a year Spilotro was providing wor
k not just for his own crew but for dozens of law enforcement officers who tailed him, bugged him, and attempted to ensnare him in elaborate stings. At one point, Spilotro was betting $30,000 a week at a bookmaking operation that was actually an IRS sting; he was attracted by the fact that it offered better odds than any other book in town. When the IRS agent operating the sting had the nerve to ask Spilotro for collateral, Spilotro greeted him with a baseball bat. “Do you know who I am?” Spilotro asked. “I run this town.”

  Spilotro had moved his jewelry store front from Circus Circus to West Sahara Avenue, just off the Strip. The Gold Rush Jewelry Store was a two-story building complete with platformed sidewalk and fake hitching posts.

  “We got the necessary probable cause and dropped a mike in the ceiling of the back room of the Gold Rush,” said Bud Hall. “The front room was strictly for selling rings and wristwatches. Upstairs, Tony had antisurveillance devices, telephone scramblers, battleship binoculars so he could see if he was being watched from a mile away, and shortwave radios that picked up police calls and were even able to unscramble the bureau’s frequencies. Tony got our frequencies through some Metro cops he had on his payroll. He also had an electronics expert from Chicago, Ronnie ‘Balloon Head’ DeAngelis, who would fly into town every few weeks and sweep the place for taps and bugs. We always got our best stuff right after DeAngelis left. ‘Balloon Head says the place is clean,’ Tony would proudly announce, and everyone would relax.

  “Tony was a totally focused human being. He woke up in the morning knowing exactly what he was going to do that day. He’d get dozens of calls at the Gold Rush. He had all kinds of financial deals going on at the same time. He had different groups, hundreds of people, a million schemes, all of them in various stages of development. And even though most of them never panned out, he still had to put in a sixteen- to eighteen-hour day trying to put the deals together.