Casino

by Nicholas Pileggi

  The conversation—which was about fifteen minutes in length—detailed for the first time in the mob’s own voice the influence and power organized crime exerted in Las Vegas. Bill Ouseley was fascinated; he had been keeping up his mob charts and files for years, and when DeLuna and Civella started talking, none of their half sentences or code names got past him. In addition, his mother was Italian, so he even understood their Sicilian phrases.

  “It was like the Rosetta stone for all of our suspicions,” Ouseley said. “No one had ever recorded mob guys talking about buying and selling casinos and who should and should not be permitted to take them over. Still, it was hard for us to believe that Toughy DeLuna, in his windbreaker and pizza apron, was negotiating the sale of multimillion-dollar Las Vegas casinos. We didn’t know for sure until eight days later, on June tenth, when Allen Glick called a press conference in Las Vegas and announced he was planning to step away from the Argent Corporation.”

  The Kansas City FBI went into court for permission to extend its wiretap authorization on the Civella crew; it put a spotter plane on DeLuna in order to present to the court the elaborate antisurveillance steps he went through on a typical day. Says Ouseley: “All the evasiveness, the fact that DeLuna and Civella were going from place to place to make phone calls, that DeLuna even carried a pouch filled with quarters and routinely made evasive driving maneuvers like spinning U-turns on highways and zipping through private driveways, indicated to the court that these guys were up to no good. Our surveillance of DeLuna took us to the Breckinridge Hotel. DeLuna would go there just about every day because there were dozens of public phones. In order to get wiretap orders on a public phone, we had to be able to prove to a federal court judge—in private, of course—that DeLuna was using these phones for illegal purposes and that the phones themselves were being used as part of the conspiracy. We brought everyone from the office out to the hotel. We had secretaries and clerks standing at phones so when DeLuna arrived and started his conversations they would be able to overhear anything he said that might be suspicious enough to get us the probable cause we needed to legally bug the hotel phones.” FBI agents heard DeLuna talking about Caesar (Joe Agosto) and Singer (the code word for Carl Caruso, the man who it later turned out brought the Tropicana skim from Las Vegas to Kansas City). He talked about C.T. (Carl Thomas) and investigations. In the end, the bureau was given permission to tap just about every phone the Civella crew regularly used—including the phone at Civella’s attorney’s office.

  “Until the late 1970s, there had been a hiatus in law enforcement in Las Vegas,” said Mike “Iron Mike” DeFeo, who was the deputy director of the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Strike Force in 1978. “There was corruption. There were judges who made things difficult. Paul Laxalt, as both a senator and governor, complained that there were too many FBI and IRS agents in the state. Our wiretaps were leaked. One judge used to unseal grand jury minutes we asked to be sealed. At one point, one of the corrupt cops who worked for Tony Spilotro had his sister-in-law working as the chief clerk of the court. All this meant for law enforcement was years and years of frustration. We were beating our heads against the wall.

  “And then finally, when a break did come, it didn’t come out of Vegas but out of the back room of a Kansas City pizzeria. It was fortuitous. It was luck. But mostly it was the fact that the Kansas City supervisor, Gary Hart, and his squad knew there was something to be pursued on that wire and they pursued it. If you listen to that wire, even today, it’s not all that obvious. These guys didn’t talk with footnotes. You hear DeLuna telling Carl Civella about how he was going to get Genius to get out of the Stardust. None of it is all that clear or all that direct. Lots of it is impenetrable. Lazy listeners could have easily missed it.”

  From the tap at the Villa Capri Pizzeria: “Well, you see this guy wants to make a public announcement,” said Carl DeLuna. “Genius, Genius wants to make a public announcement. He is the last thing Caesar told me, if he can give Jay Brown [Oscar Goodman’s law partner]—oh, yeah, Carl, I told you about the public announcement. Remember the point I told you, that Genius was there the night that Joe went to cash the check and Jay Brown was there at the Stardust. Genius was looking at Jay Brown … the way Joe was. He said Genius is all for this deal. He wants it to go through. He wants to make a public announcement, right. Which, those were my words to him, do what you got to do, boy. Make your public announcement that you are getting out of this for whatever fuckin’ reason you want to pick and get out. I put that in his head. Make a news conference.”

  “Correctly interpreting this conversation was the key,” said Mike DeFeo, “but it was Carl DeLuna who made the case for us in the end. He was an inverted, compulsive note taker. He kept notes on everything. Every twenty-dollar roll of quarters. Every trip. Every gas tank filled. He did it so that he could never be questioned about his expenses, because he would be able to show where the money went. DeLuna’s notes and the telephone tap at Spilotro’s Gold Rush and later at Allen Dorfman’s insurance company in Chicago all confirmed what we knew all along—that there was a strong link between the mob, the Teamsters’ Central States pension fund, and Las Vegas—only now we were in a position to maybe do something about it.

  “We broke ground in some areas. We began the largest and most complicated wiretap and bugging investigation ever to uncover the mob’s influence in Las Vegas. The standards for electronic surveillance, for instance, were expanded from fifteen to thirty days, and we managed to get coverage on that bank of phones at the Breckinridge, even though there was only probable cause on, say, four out of ten of them.

  “We got permission to vandalize DeLuna’s car if there was any possibility of our bug being discovered. We got permission to burglarize the home of Civella’s relative Josephine Marlo to get the car door opener from her car so we could get the garage door open to plant the bug that would turn out to be the most important bug in the case.

  “We also had to deal with the traditional privacy and respect aspects of the law. The rules had always been that there would be no bugs in bedrooms or bathrooms, but during our investigation we found that Allen Dorfman would immediately go into the bedroom or bathroom to talk. We had to ask permission to get around that. And of course we got into the Quinn and Peebles law firm.”

  The man the FBI was tapping at Quinn & Peebles was Nick Civella, who had been released from federal prison on June 14, 1978, and had established his offices at his lawyer’s firm. There he was known as Mr. Nichols. Civella and his partners were facing a crisis, no question of that: the Tropicana Hotel, which was the source of thousands of dollars in skim money for the Civella crew, was in financial difficulty; in the course of licensing a new owner, the Gaming Commission had discovered that Tropicana skimmeister Joe Agosto was also a man named Vincenzo Pianetti, and the U. S. Immigration and Naturalization Service had been trying to deport him for ten years. Agosto himself did not help matters: he promptly called a press conference and went berserk, screaming and yelling in Sicilian dialect. Agosto’s fears—that Lefty Rosenthal’s problems would eventually splash over onto him—turned out to be well founded: in July, when the Gaming Control Board ordered Rosenthal to apply for a key license in spite of his title as entertainment director, it ordered Joe Agosto to apply as well.

  Though he was a famously guarded man, Civella was probably as open as he would ever be using the phones in his lawyer’s office to solve these problems. He was convinced that even the FBI wouldn’t tap the privileged conversations of a lawyer and client.

  19

  “Gentlemen, these are the hazards of doing business. Sometimes people are going to steal even from you.”

  ON NOVEMBER 28, 1978, Carl Thomas and Joe Agosto arrived in Kansas City for a meeting with Nick Civella. Thomas had recently been put in charge of the skim at the Tropicana Hotel, and now there was a problem: Civella believed that he was being skimmed by the very people Carl Thomas had put in charge. Casino manager Don Shepard—who was known by
the code name “Baa Baa” and was one of Thomas’s most reliable count room skimmers—had lost $40,000 in cash in a card game; when Civella heard about it, he immediately concluded that Shepard could never have accumulated that kind of money unless he was stealing it. Civella declared a secret moratorium on the skim; the idea was to expose the leakage: if the house’s win did not increase by the amount that was usually skimmed, Civella and Agosto would know the skimmers were skimming the skim. But after six weeks, the moratorium had proved inconclusive, and Civella wanted to call it off. The problem was how to control the skim when it began again. Had they explored all the possible methods of skimming? Was there a way to do it to keep people like Shepard from stealing?

  This, of course, was a problem as old as the skim itself. “In the beginning,” Murray Ehrenberg, Lefty’s former casino manager at the Stardust, said, “the casinos’ owners did the count. But soon the state realized the owners weren’t giving them a fair count on the tax revenue, so they passed a law that outlawed the owners from even entering their own count rooms. Even today, a casino owner can’t go into the count room.

  “That law meant the owners had to pick front men to do their count for them, and after a while, the front men began to wonder, ‘Why am I counting the way I’m counting?’ Pretty soon, the real count never hit the door.

  “Front men like Charlie ‘Cuby’ Rich, who was a close friend of Cary Grant’s, had a lockbox that was so tightly packed with ten-thousand-dollar stacks of banded hundred-dollar bills that one time when I saw him open it up, the lid literally sprang open. There must have been three or four million dollars in that box.

  “In the early days, precredit, the fifties, the sixties, even the early seventies, people came to Las Vegas with cash. Everybody played with cash. You couldn’t get the paddle into the slot at the craps table, there were so many hundred-dollar bills crammed into the drop boxes.

  “That’s why the front men, who were the big shots in town, got the law passed that kept the wiseguys, who were the real owners back then, out of town. The front men set it up with the politicians and the cops so that the real owners, the racket guys, couldn’t set foot in town.”

  Front men like Meyer Lansky’s brother Jake had the first count for the New York people. “Moe Dalitz had the first count for the Midwest and Cleveland. And the bosses back home, the guys who were in the Nevada Black Book, had to stay home and take the word of their front men on the count.

  “That was the game. The first count meant twenty for Big Tony, and thirty went south, right into their pockets. After a while, why tell Big Tony it’s twenty?

  “The wiseguys might have been tough at home, but they were easy pickings out here. You can go as far back as Bugsy Siegel. Del Webb charged Bugsy fifty dollars for a five-dollar doorknob and sold him the same palm trees six and seven times. He also had a crew of Greek blackjack dealers from Cuba who had a lot of relatives, and they took enough out of the Flamingo in one year to open casinos all through the islands. The wiseguys never woke up to this.

  “Even when you know what can happen, it’s almost impossible to keep a casino from leaking cash. At the Stardust, for instance, you’ve got a dealer on the floor making fifty dollars a day. You’ve got the Eye in the Sky man making a hundred dollars a day. And there’s millions of dollars sitting on the floor. You don’t think people go to work scheming over that? The outfit had a thousand eyes and they still came up empty.

  “At the Fremont, the count room was on the second floor, and the security guards would take the drop boxes out from under the tables, put them in carts, and take them upstairs for the count. But on the way up, in the elevator, with the door closed, they had a copy of the key that opened the boxes, and they’d open them up and grab out a fistful of bills. They never took too many out of any one box, and they evened out the take.

  “They were smart. If they had a chance, they’d walk around the room and see which of the tables was hot and which weren’t, and then they would take the cash out of the active boxes.

  “No one would have ever caught them, except one day they accidentally grabbed a fill slip (the record of chips requisitioned by tables from the cashier), and when the auditors saw that a fill slip was missing from the drop box, they realized someone was getting into the boxes, and that was that.

  “We had engineers at the Stardust who made a fortune. They could go all around the casino without raising suspicions. Who’d ask them questions? They’re checking pipes. Checking electric circuits. Air conditioners. You wanna be hot? Who knows? Who cares?

  “Well, one of the places the engineers had to check a lot was the Eye, and they’d go up there, and if there was no one in the Eye—the bosses were so cheap they didn’t man the Eye around the clock—the engineer would come down with a blue card in his pocket. If the Sky was being manned, he’d come down with a red card. The blue card was the signal to steal. The engineer got a piece of everything the dealers in on the signal stole.

  “Today, cheating a casino is a felony, and a five-to-twenty-year bit. But in those days, if you got caught, they’d just slap the guys around and chase them out.”

  Agosto and Thomas met to discuss the Tropicana skim with Civella, his brother Carl, and Carl DeLuna at the home of Carl Civella’s sister-in-law Josephine Marlo. Marlo’s house was around the corner from Civella’s in an Italian neighborhood, and it had one big advantage: it was possible to drive into the garage, close the garage door, and enter the house from the garage, thus evading the eyes of neighbors and whoever else might be watching. But the FBI knew that Civella used Marlo’s home for meetings, and had managed to get authorization to put a tap into the basement dining room.

  No one had a clue. The meeting began at 10:00 A.M. and ended at 6:00 P.M., and when it was over, there were eight reels of tape that became a landmark in law enforcement: the Civella brothers, DeLuna, Agosto, and Thomas ate spaghetti, drank wine, and laid out a primer on how to skim a casino. The Marlo tape was an extraordinary document, illuminating, hilarious, breathtakingly candid; it was ultimately responsible for the end of the role of the mob in Las Vegas. On it Carl Thomas described how the skim operated at the Tropicana and how it had worked at Argent. He took the Kansas City crew through the advantages and disadvantages of various forms of skimming, from Thomas’s favorite method, just stealing the cash, to his least favorite, filling out fill slips in triplicate and then removing the money. He talked about short-weighing coins and auxiliary banks. He described the method he used at Slots O’Fun, the small casino he operated on the Strip, and explained why it wouldn’t work in a larger casino. He spoke philosophically about how the men you trust to steal for you are bound to steal something for themselves. “Gentlemen, these are the hazards of doing business,” Carl Thomas said at one point in the meeting. “Sometimes people are going to steal even from you…. Every day [at Slots O’Fun] two guys count my money. And we only take a hundred dollars a day. But it’s still a hundred dollars—thirty thousand dollars a year; that’s a lot of money for us. A little joint. I know these guys are taking a hundred a day. They might be taking a hundred and thirty. But you’ll drive yourself crazy over whether the guys are collecting another forty-dollar skim. You gotta realize, what if they get nailed, Nick? You know what these guys are giving up? They’ll never work again…. We’re asking these guys to jeopardize their livelihood. But Nick, as much as I love you, as close as we are, you know better than anybody every time I come here to see you, I jeopardize everything I have…. Same way with these guys. They’re taking this money because they’re our guys. You gotta give them some leeway.” Carl Thomas talked and talked and talked. As he said years later—after being sentenced to a fifteen-year prison term as a direct result of that afternoon—“I must have been out of my mind.”

  Less than three months after the Marlo meeting, FBI agent Shea Airey and Gary Jenkins of the Kansas City police intelligence unit knocked on Carl DeLuna’s door and presented him with a search warrant allowing them to look for records and
papers. For months, the bureau had been watching DeLuna use the pay phones at the Breckinridge Hotel; they had been listening to him speak about the delivery of “packages” and “sandwiches”; they had seen him take notes on the wrappers from his rolls of quarters.

  Now they began to search his house. They found packages of cash—$4,000 in Sandra DeLuna’s lingerie drawer; $8,000 hidden under DeLuna’s underwear; $15,000 in an armoire. There were four pistols, a handbook on poisoning, a police scanner radio, a black wig, a key-making tool, 130 blank keys, a book on how to make silencers. All sorts of things, but no records or papers. And then they got to the basement.

  “You know how you go to a relative’s house and they haven’t thrown anything away for years?” said one Kansas City police officer. “That’s what the basement was like. He was probably one of those guys who said, ‘You’ll probably never know when you’ll need it.” In a locked room in the basement, agents found notebooks, steno pads, hotel note pads, index cards, all of them covered with neatly written notes in red or black ink, dated, and neatly itemizing all of DeLuna’s expenses. The messages are in code, but the code was easily deciphered once it was matched to surveillance and wiretapped conversations. The notes showed the breakdown and distribution of the skim—to 22, or Joe Aiuppa of Chicago; to Deer-hunter, or Maishe Rockman of Cleveland; to Berman, or Frank Balistrieri of Milwaukee; to ON, or Nick Civella of Kansas City.

  “As far as the search was concerned, DeLuna was the ultimate gentleman,” said FBI agent William Ouseley. “His wife made coffee and brought out cookies.”

  As Airey and Jenkins began to pore over the notes, FBI agents arrested Carl Caruso—aka the Singer—as he got off a plane from Las Vegas at the Kansas City Airport. Caruso’s legitimate business was running junkets to Las Vegas; at the same time, he carried the skim money from Joe Agosto at the Tropicana to the Civella mob. That night he was carrying $80,000 in his jacket pockets—money he had been given by Joe Agosto, who had been given it by Don Shepard.