Casino

by Nicholas Pileggi

  Warrants were also served in Las Vegas on Joe Agosto, Tropicana stockholder Deil Gustafson, and Don Shepard, and in Kansas City on Nick Civella and Carl Civella. “Nick Civella knew we had a warrant and he stood back,” said one agent. “I don’t think he’d ever had his house searched before. We came up with absolutely nothing pertinent. The only thing we found were diamonds. Bags full of cut diamonds. Maybe that’s where he put his money. And we found a clipping from an unknown publication that I’ve never forgotten. Civella had apparently cut it out—it was unsigned and undated—and kept it because of its sentiment. When we read it we were chilled. We understood how seriously he took this Old World code and business of his. The clipping said, ‘This monster—this monster they’ve engendered in me—will return to torment its maker, from the grave, the pit, the predestined pit. Hurl me into the next existence. The descent into hell won’t turn me. I’ll crawl back to dog his trail forever. They won’t defeat my revenge. Never. Never.”

  Two days after the search, DeLuna met with three of his gang at Wimpy’s, a restaurant in Kansas City. The FBI bug in the restaurant picked up the entire conversation, which included an admission by DeLuna that he expected to be sent to jail for a few years. “But I think, in a course of time, it might take a year, year and a half, and, and we’re all gonna wind up with three, four. I know I almost have to. I already started brainwashing Sandy.” He urges the others to prepare their wives as well.

  DeLuna was eventually sentenced to thirty years in prison. His arrest and the recovery of his notes provided the FBI with a blueprint of the skim conspiracy; in fact, it would probably not be an exaggeration to say that the Marlo meeting and Carl DeLuna’s notes are responsible for knocking the mob out of Las Vegas casinos.

  20

  “I know the voice. I’ve known it all my life. It was Tony’s.”

  “SHE WAS DRINKING and taking pills,” Lefty said. “She didn’t seem to care that I was under a lot of pressure. One night my ulcer had been acting up and I was upstairs in bed. I had called her on the intercom and asked her to get my dinner ready. My pain was beginning to show.

  “After a while, I said over the intercom, ‘Geri, is it ready?’ She said, ‘Any second, dear.’ What she didn’t tell me was that she was so fucking drunk she never started dinner. Then, in a panic, she put the soft-boiled eggs on, burnt the fucking toast, and brings it up half-assed.

  “When I look at it, I’m literally in pain. I gave her some shit. And I’m leaning back in the bed. She’s facing me, and she leaps toward the cabinet.

  “I’m in a prone position. I did my best to leap with her in a kind of roll, but she got her hand on the cabinet before I did. I was probably a half second behind her, but she already had her hand on the pistol.

  “We bumped heads and I was bleeding from the forehead, but she started bleeding from the nose. I had hit the bridge of her nose.

  “The two kids came from their bedrooms in the rear. They saw we were struggling. I said, ‘Geri! Geri! The kids. Stop it!’ And I finally got the gun away, but she still wouldn’t stop struggling because she was so fucking drunk.

  “I called Bobby Stella to come over right away to help me with the kids and the blood and everything. I told him to call my doctor, who rushed over right away. He took us to his office, where he patched me up pretty easily, but he had to give her a couple of stitches.

  “She started mumbling about how I had broken her nose. I asked her, ‘Geri, what did you intend to do with the gun?’

  “‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I was just drinking. I was wrong. I shouldn’t be drinking.’

  “And by the time we got home, everything was calm.

  “The next morning I’m going to work and she walks me out to the car and you’d think she was the perfect suburban housewife.

  “‘Take care of yourself,’ she says, and gives me a kiss.

  “I’m at work about an hour and I call the house. I ask her how she’s feeling and she says, ‘I feel great. How are you, my love?’ I detected her drunk voice.

  “I got in the car and went back to the house. I parked the car down the block and snuck into the house. I wanted to see what was going on. Geri was on the phone. I think she was talking to her daughter Robin.

  “I hear her say, ‘You’ve got to help me kill this motherfucker. Please help me.’

  “‘Hey, she can’t help you Geri,’ I said, walking into the room. ‘Here I am.’ She almost died.

  “‘You told me less than two hours ago you loved me and now you’re trying to get me killed.’ She hangs up the phone.

  “‘Look what you did to my nose,’ she says, right back to my face. There was no winning with her. This is the way our lives had been going for a couple of years.

  “After a while, when I’d get home, I’d come home very cautiously. Not just because of her pistol, but I was concerned that she would really hire someone.”

  “Both Geri and Frank had terrible tempers,” Geri’s sister, Barbara Stokich, recalls. “They had tantrums. There was ketchup and mustard on the ceiling. Geri was spoiled. Even as a child when she got mad she would scream and fall to the floor and beat her hands and feet into the ground.

  “Geri was too strong willed. To her, life was not a two-way street. She needed to dictate the terms. And Frank was exactly the same way.

  “Once, in my house, after they had another fight, she admitted that it wasn’t always Frank’s fault. She admitted that she wasn’t always fair to him. But she said he wanted her to give up drinking, and she said she’d rather die than give up alcohol.

  “I think Geri’s original plan was to divorce Frank right away if it didn’t work out, but nine months after the wedding she had Steven and he was everything to her. She adored Steven. She hadn’t understood how things would change when she had a kid. Now she could never leave Steven.

  “She felt alone. I’d get calls at three in the morning. Why wasn’t he home with her and the kids? Lefty was living the big life. She heard that he was going out with showgirls. She knew it. She found receipts for jewelry in his pockets when she took his clothes to the cleaners.

  “She’d come over to my place and let off steam and say if he could fool around, she could fool around. And she did.”

  “Geri took the kids on a vacation to La Costa,” Lefty said. “When she left we weren’t getting along too well. On the second day she was drunk and couldn’t get on the phone. I didn’t talk to her for the next two days.

  “Then, just before they were supposed to come home, I still hadn’t heard from them. I checked the hotel and was told they had moved out two days ago. I really began to panic. I couldn’t even find them on any of the airline manifests.

  “I called Robin’s boyfriend. He was a decent kid. I told him I was looking for my wife and kids. At first he said that he didn’t know anything. Then he told me that Geri and the kids were with Lenny Marmor and Robin. He gave me a phone number.

  “Lenny Marmor answers the phone. He sounded sharp. Slick. A smooth way of talking. He had a fake slight Southern accent.

  “I said, ‘Lenny, this is Frank Rosenthal. I want to talk to Geri.’ He said she was not there.

  “‘Lenny,’ I said, ‘I want to talk to Geri. It’s very important. I want my kids. I want her to put them on a plane, quick.’

  “He said, very sincerely, ‘Frank, believe me, I don’t know where she is. But can I call you back in a few minutes?’

  “‘Fine,’ I say, and I hang up.

  “That was it. They all hit the road. Geri, Robin, my kids, and Marmor.

  “That night Geri calls Spilotro. He calls me right away and says she’s worried that I was going to have them traced and killed.

  “He told her: ‘I can’t help you. Just send the kids back now. Frank’s in a panic.’

  “She calls. ‘Hi.’ ‘Hi.’

  “I told her I wasn’t going to ask where she was; just put Steven and Stephanie on a plane as quickly as she could. Then call me back and give me their arrival tim
e. Then you can do what you want to do.”

  “Geri then asks, ‘If I were to come back, would you forgive me?’

  “I told her I didn’t know. I said I’d try. I know I still cared for her, but I said, ‘Right now you’ve got to send me the kids.’

  “She hung up and talked to Lenny and Robin. And what does Lenny say?” Geri later told Rosenthal. “He tells her to get the money out of a safe deposit box I had in Los Angeles, dye her hair, and take off with him and the kids for Europe. Geri told Lenny no because she knew me and said that I’d hunt them down until I found them. She called me back and said she was sending the kids. She called later with their flight number. The housekeeper and I went to the airport and we got the two kids.

  “A little while later Geri calls. She’s feeling me out. I said to her, ‘You didn’t go to the box, did you?’ She didn’t answer me. I said, ‘Geri, what happened to the money?’ She said she made a mistake.

  “‘How serious a mistake?’

  “‘Serious,’ she says.

  “Remember there’s over two million cash in that box.

  “‘What’s it under?’ I ask.

  “‘Twenty-five,’ she says.

  “Twenty-five thousand?

  “‘Yes,’ she says. She bought him some clothes. A new watch. Junk. Real pimp stuff.

  “I said: ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s no big deal. I’ll have a Lear out there in a couple of hours to pick you up. Just hold that key. Don’t let Lenny near the key. If he gets the key, he’ll be able to open the box.

  “‘You’ve lost twenty-five thousand dollars to that pimp,’ I said. ‘I can handle that. I can’t handle any more.’

  “Geri said when she told Robin she was coming back to me, Robin said she felt like she had no mother. Robin’s loyalty had always been to Lenny Marmor, her natural father.

  “Len had never married Geri. He had gotten married three times, but he never married Geri, the mother of his daughter. Still, Geri was as loyal to him as she could be to anyone. It was unreal.

  “In a few hours I get a call from the pilot, who gives me the time he expects to land, and I get out to the airport and she wobbles off the plane. She’s got a big smile. Like nothing happened.

  “On the drive home we’re talking about the box. She said she couldn’t get the safe deposit key from Robin. But there was no danger since the banks had been closed.

  “We started arguing, again. When we got home the phone was ringing. It was Spilotro.

  “‘How are things?’ he wants to know. I tell him things are okay. Geri says: ‘Is that Tony? Can I talk to him?’ I said no.

  “Tony says: ‘I want to talk to her.’

  “I say no again.

  “Tony now says, ‘I want to talk to her. Do you hear me?’ He’s sounding a little strong.

  “I said no again, and I thank him for his help, and he interrupts.

  “‘But I said I want to talk to her,’ he says.

  “I hung up on him.

  “‘Was that Tony?’ Geri asked. ‘I wanted to talk to him.’

  “I told her I wanted to talk about the money in the box. The next morning we waited for a call from Robin. I didn’t answer it because I didn’t want to spook anything.

  “Robin said that Lenny had been trying to get Robin to give him her key to the box.

  “Geri says, ‘I am begging you with my life, don’t do it. Don’t listen to your father.’

  “Geri is crying on the phone and begging Robin. A terrific performance. Robin surrenders … She promises she won’t raid the box.”

  “As the marriage began to fall apart,” Geri’s sister, Barbara Stokich, said, “Frank would beat her up and she’d come to my place. She’d have a black eye. A black-and-blue face. Ribs. One night it was so bad we took pictures. Right in my house.

  “Then Geri and Robin got mad at me because I wouldn’t give them the pictures. They wanted to take him to court. I didn’t give them the pictures, because the pictures didn’t prove it was Frank who beat her. They just showed she had been beaten. I remember I destroyed them. She thought she was going to be able to use the pictures to prove that he beat her when she took the case to court. Robin used to tell me everything that went on, until she turned on me for not turning over the pictures.”

  “Lefty made her life miserable,” said a retired FBI agent familiar with the case. “He cheated on her all the time, and he didn’t care if she found out. He started to keep tabs on her like she was a Vegas version of a Stepford wife.

  “He used to tape her schedule for the day onto the refrigerator in the morning, and he wanted to know where she was going to be every minute of the day. He also made her check in with him during the day.

  “He even bought her a beeper so he could always get ahold of her, but she kept ‘losing’ it, and that drove him even more nuts. One time she was about a half hour late coming home with the kids. She said she got caught behind a long freight train that used to come through late in the afternoon. He made her stand there in front of him as he called the railroad freight yard and got the dispatcher just to double-check the time the freight went through.

  “But no matter what he did to her, she’d never leave him, because there were always presents. Geri was an old hooker. He bought her when they got married, and she stayed bought.”

  “Looking back,” Lefty said, “I realize we probably had three or four months of peace in our whole marriage. That was it. I was a fool. I was naive. I had really wanted a family. I never understood I couldn’t control her.

  “One night I was in the Jubilation doing my TV show and Geri was in the audience. I see that Tony was also there. I see her go to the ladies’ room. I see Tony tried to stop her, but she fluffed him off. I didn’t know why, but the whole little thing didn’t sit right with me. I didn’t say anything.”

  “Geri was a disaster,” Tony Spilotro’s pal Frank Cullotta said. “She was drinking a lot. She was doing a lot of coke, uppers, downers, everything.

  “She caused Lefty a lot of embarrassment right at a time when he was having problems of his own with the Gaming Commission.

  “Nobody liked Lefty. He was egotistical and he’d walk through a joint without acknowledging one person. He was arrogant. Lefty paid his dues to Chicago, but he acted like he didn’t have to acknowledge Tony any longer.”

  “It was about two in morning, and Tony comes into the Stardust with another guy, and they’re loaded,” Murray Ehrenberg, the Stardust casino manager, says. “He’s not even supposed to be in the place, but everybody pretended like we didn’t know who he was.

  “He goes over to a hundred-dollar blackjack table and starts playing five blacks [$500] a hand. He’s playing all alone and he’s losing. I see him go for ten thousand dollars out of his own kick in about twenty minutes.

  “He starts to abuse the dealer. When he gets a card he doesn’t like he skips it back at the guy and asks for another. The pit boss nods for the dealer to do it. If that card’s no good, Tony throws it back and tells the dealer to shove it up his ass. We’re praying he gets good cards, but one after another are bad, and he’s getting very pissed. We’re just trying to get out of the night alive.

  “Then Tony asks the pit boss for fifty thousand dollars credit. He knows the pit boss can’t extend that kind of line, and pretty soon I’m dragged in.

  “‘Call you-know-who and get me my money,’ Tony says.

  “I called Lefty on a special phone line we had set up at home. I tell him the Little Guy was in the place and wanted fifty credit. I told Lefty the guy had already lost ten of his own.

  “Lefty was mad. Tony wasn’t even supposed to walk in the Stardust, forget about play and ask for credit. Lefty told me to put Tony on the phone and told Tony he’d make him even. Give him back the money he lost. But he ordered Tony to get out of the casino that instant, before some rat who worked in the Stardust tipped off the control board and he got everybody in trouble.

  “Tony wasn’t that drunk. He didn’t want
to create a war. Because of the skim and Lefty’s license and everything else, the control board was already coming down very hard on the Stardust.

  “I okayed Tony’s ten thousand, which, of course, he never paid back, but Lefty didn’t care about that. Lefty just wanted to make sure that I didn’t put Tony’s name down on any credit slip or anything in the place.

  “When Tony left he was really angry, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. Deep down he might have known Lefty was right, but he didn’t have to like it.”

  “It was a Friday or Saturday night,” Lefty said. “It was after the TV show, and I was at the Jubilation. Joey Cusumano was standing next to me. I called the house. No answer. It’s two o’clock in the morning and there was no answer.

  “I told Cusumano I was going home. It was only a five-minute drive.

  “When I got there I found Geri and Steven missing. My daughter’s ankle was tied to the bed with a clothesline rope.

  “I can’t believe this. I’m untying the kid and the phone rings.

  “‘How ya doing?’ It’s Tony.

  “‘Not good. What’s on your mind?’

  “‘Relax. Relax. Everything’s okay. She’s okay. You two have been fighting. She wanted to discuss your problems.’

  “He said Geri had dropped Steven off with a neighbor. He said I should relax and come over to the Village Pub.

  “I drove over there raging. It was kind of crowded. Tony was waiting inside the front door. He tried to quiet me down.

  “‘Don’t make a scene,’ he says. Tony is standing between me and the door, but I know Tony, I’m not going to brush past him disrespectfully. I tell him I’m okay and walk all the way around him.

  “Inside, she’s in a booth with her back to me. I have to go past her and turn around to confront her. I sat down.

  “I called her a few names. She was being careful. She was loaded. She just kept saying I should let her alone. After a while, I took her home. On the way out, Tony told me not to be too rough on her. ‘She’s only trying to save your marriage,’ he said.”