Casino

by Nicholas Pileggi

  “It would have been difficult doing what Tony did if he had secretaries, a filing system, Xerox machines, and the free use of a phone. But Tony did it all off-the-cuff and kept it all in his head. The only things he ever wrote down were telephone numbers, and he used to write them down in the tiniest little handwriting that made them unreadable without a magnifying glass, and when we’d get ahold of them, we found he would transpose the numbers or write half or three-quarters of each number backwards.

  “Listening to someone on a wire every day,” Bud Hall says, “is different than being around them all the time socially. It creates a strange relationship between the person listening and the subject. You’re listening to their lives, and pretty soon you’re inside their lives. I don’t mean that you get to like them, but you get to be able to tell by the sound of their voice what their moods are and where in the room they might happen to be. There are times when you can almost lip-sync what they are going to say before they say it. You come to know them so intimately that you almost become a part of the person.

  “Tony was the smartest and most efficient mobster I had ever seen. I think he was a genius. His biggest problem was that he was surrounded by people who were always screwing up. That’s all we kept hearing him say over and over. He’d harangue his crew about their incompetence and how he had no choice but to do things himself if he wanted them done right.

  “If you talked to him on the phone, all you had to say were three or four words and he would have digested the purpose of the call, and the call had better be about business and it had better be in his interest.

  “Tony had no capacity whatever for casual conversation. He could be congenial. Cordial. Likeable. But you couldn’t waste his time. He lost his temper faster than anyone I ever knew. There was no slow burn. He went right from being nice to being a screaming, violent maniac in a second. There was no way to prepare for him. I think the speed with which you were suddenly under attack was as terrifying as the thought of having Tony mad at you. However, once it passed, it passed. He forgot it. He went back to business.

  “He lived a completely separate life from Nancy. They shared their son, Vincent, but that was about it. He slept in his own room on the ground floor of their house behind a locked steel door. When he got up in the morning, around ten thirty or eleven, Nancy stayed out of his way. He’d make his own coffee, and when he picked up the paper on the front step or off the walkway, he’d look up and down Balfour Avenue for surveillance.

  “When he was ready to leave, there was no ‘good-bye’ or ‘see you for dinner.’ He’d just get in his blue Corvette sports car and routinely go around the block a few times, checking for tails. It could take him forty-five minutes to drive the ten minutes between his house and the Gold Rush because Tony would automatically dry-clean himself of tails by driving through shopping centers, stopping at green lights, moving through red, making illegal U-turns, and then checking his rearview mirror to see if anyone was following.

  “After all that time I spent listening in at the Gold Rush and at his house, I decided that he had what we called in the marines ‘command posture.’ When he talked, people listened. When he entered a room, he was always in charge. But in charge of what? That was his problem.

  “One day we picked up that Joe Ferriola, one of the Chicago street bosses, was trying to get a relative a job as a dealer at the Stardust. Tony asked Joey Cusumano to take care of it. Cusumano, one of Spilotro’s top guys, hung around the Stardust passing Tony’s messages back and forth so much that many of the casino’s employees thought he worked there.

  “A week passed and Tony got another call from Ferriola’s people that she was still unemployed. Tony had a fit. Cusumano checked back and found the casino wouldn’t hire her as a dealer because she had no experience and would have to go take a six-week course at dealer’s school.

  “Tony then tells Joey to ask Lefty, who was pretending to be the Stardust’s food and beverage director at the time, to get the kid a job as a waitress.

  “A few days later, Joey comes back and says that Lefty doesn’t want to hire her because he doesn’t think she’s good-looking enough to be a Stardust cocktail waitress, and besides, she’s got bad legs.

  “Spilotro exploded and he did something he should have never done—he called the Stardust himself. He got hold of Joey Boston, an ex-bookmaker Lefty had hired to run the Stardust Sports Book.

  “Tony shouldn’t have called the Stardust himself, because now we at the FBI had a tape of Spilotro asking a top executive of the Stardust casino to get a job for a Chicago capo’s relative. That’s exactly what we had been waiting for. It made for the kind of direct link between the mob and a licensed casino that neither side would ever want made public, the kind of connection that could jeopardize a casino’s license and call into question just who really owns the casino and who might be serving as a front.”

  Ferriola’s relative eventually went to work as a security guard at one of the other Las Vegas hotels. But the story of how Tony Spilotro, the most terrifying mobster in Las Vegas, could not manage to get a job at the Stardust for the relative of a Chicago capo did not help his reputation back home.

  “I was around Tony all the time and he was always worried about people listening in,” says Matt Marcus, a 350-pound illegal bookmaker who took a lot of Spilotro’s action. “We’d be in the Food Factory on Twain Street, a place he had a piece of, and he’d communicate with body language. He’d lean back and shrug and twist his head and frown. He drank tea all the time. Not coffee. He always sat with the tea bag hanging out of the cup, leaning and shrugging and twisting and frowning. He was positive the next person passing by would be the FBI. He was always changing cars. The intel unit was always checking his license plates. They’d go right up to the cars and take down their numbers.”

  “Tony seemed to get a real kick out of matching wits with the FBI, but he wasn’t stupid,” Frank Cullotta said. “Whenever he had anything to say we’d go for walks in empty parking lots or on the side of the road in the desert. When you said something to him, mostly he’d just make faces, or frown, or smile and get across what he meant for you to do. Even when he did talk, he’d always cover his mouth with his hand in case the feds were using lip-readers with binoculars.”

  At one point, the FBI became so frustrated with its telephone taps and its once-promising Gold Rush microphone that they installed a surveillance camera in the ceiling of a back room behind Cullotta’s restaurant, where they suspected Spilotro was having some of his key meetings.

  “We got a tip something was up there,” Cullotta said, “and we went up behind the false ceiling and tore it out. It was like a small TV camera and it said ‘United States Government’ or something, and its serial numbers had been scraped off. I got really pissed. I wanted to trash the damn thing, but Tony made us call Oscar and give it back. I think he liked the idea of the feds coming over with their hats in their hands to get it back.”

  When the FBI saw that over two years of electronic surveillance had failed to snare Spilotro, they sent an undercover FBI agent, Rick Baken, into the Gold Rush, using the name Rick Calise.

  As part of the ruse, Baken had first curried favor months earlier playing cards and losing to Tony’s brother John. During their card games Baken let it slip that he was an ex-con and jewel thief who desperately needed cash and was looking to unload some stolen diamonds at a great price. The bureau had, of course, given Baken the backup necessary to verify his criminal past in case Spilotro checked. But even after meeting Spilotro, Baken found that Herbie Blitzstein, Tony’s gofer, always kept him away from a direct conversation with Spilotro.

  After eleven months of this futile and dangerous undercover work, the feds became so frustrated that they tried a desperation move. Wearing a wire, as usual, Baken approached Spilotro directly and said that he had been picked up and questioned by the FBI and threatened with prison unless he talked about Spilotro’s illegal activities.

  To Baken’s surprise, Sp
ilotro suggested they visit his attorney, Oscar Goodman.

  The next thing Baken knew, he was in a defense attorney’s office wearing a wire and pretending to be a crook. Goodman listened to Baken’s story for about fifteen minutes and gave him the names of several lawyers to call. Goodman later had a great time playing up the incident just enough to make it appear as if the FBI had tried to violate the attorney-client privilege by eavesdropping on a potential defendant and his attorney.

  As time passed, Spilotro spent less and less time with his wife, Nancy. When they were together, they fought—and the FBI listened. She complained that he had lost interest in her. She accused him of affairs. He was never home. He never talked to her. In the morning, the FBI recorded the sound of silence as Tony made his coffee and Nancy read the newspaper. Then he would leave for the store without even saying good-bye.

  Sometimes Nancy had to call him at work to relay a message; according to Bud Hall, Tony was always rude. “She’d say, ‘I don’t know if this can wait, but so-and-so called.’ ‘It can wait,’ Tony would say, sort of sarcastically, and just hang up. Or he’d say, in an exasperated tone, ‘Nancy, I’m busy,’ and hang up. He was never gentlemanly with her, and she’d whine to Dena Harte, Herbie Blitzstein’s girlfriend, who managed the front of the Gold Rush. Nancy would tell Dena whenever Tony beat her up or whenever she suspected Tony was fooling around with this one or that one, and Dena kept Nancy informed about what Tony was doing.

  “There was one time when Dena called Nancy at home and said, ‘The bitch is here.’ Nancy jumped in the car and tore over to the place and started screaming at Sheryl, Tony’s girlfriend, calling her a no-good cunt right there in the middle of the store.

  “We could hear the screaming on the wire, and then Tony comes out, and then we hear Nancy screaming for Tony to stop hitting her. He was really beating her up. We got worried that he was going to kill her. It was a mess. So we called nine-one-one and said we were in the Black Forest German Restaurant next door, and said someone was being assaulted in the Gold Rush. We couldn’t tell the cops who we were because at that point it looked like Tony owned Metro, and we didn’t want to blow our surveillance. The police got there in a few minutes, and everything calmed down.”

  “Nancy had her life and Tony had his,” said Frank Cullotta. “Hers was mostly playing tennis and running around in white outfits. She had Vincent and Tony’s brothers and their families. Once a week Tony’d take her out to dinner or something. But she wasn’t afraid of him. She would scream and yell at him and drive him crazy.

  “Once, he told me, she tried to kill him. They were having an argument over something and Tony knocked her across the room. She came up with a loaded thirty-eight cocked at his head. ‘I’ll kill you if you ever hit me again,’ she said. Tony said, ‘Nancy, think of Vincent.’

  “‘I saw death,’ he told me after. ‘We talked until she put down the gun and then I hid all the guns in the house.’”

  “Sheryl was about twenty, but she looked younger,” said Rosa Rojas, who was her best friend. “She was a Mormon from northern Utah, cute and fresh. When Tony first met her he used to call her his country girl. She was so naive that when he asked her out, she said she’d only go if she could bring her friend.

  “Sheryl and I were both working in the hospital where he was going for his heart problem, which was how they met. They’d go to restaurants, but he never put the make on her. He held her at a distance for a long, long time.

  “Before he got too close he found out everything there was to find out about her. He had Joey Cusumano ask about where she was from, who her friends were, how long she lived where she lived. He wanted to know everything he could know about her before he got involved or felt he could trust her.

  “It was a long time before she knew who he was. She began to suspect something was strange, because every time they went out, they were tailed by cops in plain clothes. Tony’s brother told her that there were some legal problems and that Tony was being trailed because of the legal stuff. Tony used to tell us that we were going to read things about him in the newspapers, but he said the newspapers weren’t always right.

  “It was only after a long time that Tony and Sheryl started going to bed together. He was a gentleman always. Very quiet. Very reserved. I would see him mad sometimes, but I never once heard him curse or use bad language.

  “Eventually, he bought her a two-story condo around Eastern and Flamingo, a two-bedroom place for about sixty-nine thousand dollars. It had everything. Refrigerator. Blinds. A washer-dryer. There was a garage and small patio and a sliding door that led into the downstairs, and upstairs they had the bedrooms and a large room that had all of the stereo and TV equipment you would want. That’s where they spent most of their time—watching ball games and listening to music.

  “Tony was very generous. He used to leave a thousand dollars a week in a bear-shaped cookie jar in the kitchen. He never mentioned money and it was never mentioned that he was keeping her, but when he bought her a full-length mink coat Sheryl felt he had finally committed himself to her. She had really fallen in love with him.

  “She didn’t know he was married for quite a while. When she found out, it was very hard. She believed the only reason she and Tony weren’t married was because Tony was a very strict Catholic and would have trouble leaving his wife. For a while, Tony even had Sheryl learning to be a Catholic. He gave her religious books to read. He knew the Bible.

  “He never ever said anything bad about his wife. They had been married in the church and it was a difficult situation. On top of that, Tony loved his son. Vincent meant everything to him. Vincent was his soul. Tony would always get home at six thirty in the morning so he could be there to make breakfast for Vincent. Sheryl said he would do that even if he was in bed at her place.

  “Eventually, Tony bought a car for her. It was a new Plymouth Fury. It wasn’t a showy car.

  “When Nancy found out what was going on, things got a little tough. Sheryl had stopped by the Gold Rush to see Tony. She was wearing a diamond studded S necklace that Tony had given her, and when Nancy came in and saw Sheryl wearing the S necklace, Nancy went wild and she reached for it.

  “I got there just at that time and I found the two of them wrestling on the floor. Sheryl managed to hold on to her S. Tony came out of the back room and broke up the fight so Sheryl and I could get away.

  “In the end, when it was over between Tony and Sheryl, he wouldn’t return her calls. Sheryl was really crazy about him, but maybe she pushed too hard. He was having a lot of problems with the cops when they broke up, and maybe he was trying to spare her.

  “His brother John used to tell her not to try and reach him. ‘Don’t call him,’ he’d say. ‘Spare yourself.’ But she’d see him making his court appearances on TV and she saw that he was gaining weight and didn’t look good, and she used to blame Nancy for not taking care of him. Sheryl used to make sure he ate the right food, and her refrigerator was always filled with fruits and salad and the kinds of healthy food that were good for people with heart problems.

  “After she and Tony broke up she got a job doing cocktails at night. Tony wasn’t happy about it. But she had grown accustomed to his lifestyle. She needed the money. Then she got into dealing blackjack. She worked in the old MGM, at Bally’s. She had a prime shift and made excellent money. She started meeting high rollers. She wised up. She learned and started looking around for another rock to stand on.”

  “One day we’re in the back of the My Place Lounge, in the parking lot, and Tony tells me to kill Jerry Lisner,” said Frank Cullotta. “Jerry Lisner was a small-time drug dealer and hustler.

  “Tony said: ‘Frankie, you gotta take care of this guy. He rolled. He’s a rat.’

  “I told Tony that Lisner would be hard for me, because I had just beaten him out of five thousand Quaaludes and he and his wife didn’t trust me.

  “And Tony got all mad. ‘I’ll go kill the motherfucker,’ he says. ‘Just get him over he
re.’

  “I told him it wasn’t that I didn’t want to do it; it was that Lisner was worried about me. It would be hard to get close enough to get him.

  “‘I want it done now!’ he said. ‘Now and quick!’

  “That was all he said. He walked inside the joint. We were all being followed all the time, so I got in my car, went home and packed a bag, drove all the way from Las Vegas to Burbank airport in L.A., where I took the next flight for Chicago. Nobody even knew I had left town.

  “In Chicago I got ahold of Wayne Matecki. We left the next night using fake names on a flight for Burbank, got in my car, and drove back to Las Vegas.

  “We went from the airport to my condo, the Marie Antoinette, where I thought I’d take a chance and call Lisner. I say to myself, ‘Let me give it a shot. See if he’s home.’ He is. I say, ‘I’ve got a mark, a real good one. Somebody we can take for a lot of money.’ I tell him the guy is in town. I’m talking a great score.

  “He tells me to bring the guy over. We use a work car where we’ve got a police scanner and a twenty-five-caliber automatic. I didn’t have a silencer so I made half loads—I half-emptied the bullets so they wouldn’t make as much noise.

  “I left Wayne in the car with the scanner and I went inside. I told Lisner I wanted to talk with him before the guy came in. I want to make sure that there’s nobody in the house. I know his old lady works. I know he’s got two sons, but he was always complaining that they were pains in the ass.

  “As we’re walking into the house I’m asking, ‘Are you sure nobody’s home? You positive? Where are your kids? Where’s your wife?’ He’s telling me that there’s nobody home, and I’m telling him I want to make sure before I bring the guy inside.