“She was a beautiful person, but he drove her to drink,” Geri’s friend Suzanne Kloud, a makeup artist on Lefty’s TV show, recalls. “He’d drive anybody to drink. He’d come home after his show at three or four in the morning, kick her out of bed, and talk to one of his girlfriends on the phone for two hours.
“He didn’t care about her feelings. He was always screwing around with the dancers, and he flaunted it. She told me that one time he flew into Los Angeles and he spent fourteen thousand dollars at Gucci for some dancers and he bought another one a seventeen-thousand-dollar necklace.
“She said she found the receipts in his pockets when she’d take his clothes to the cleaners. I mean, here’s a guy who’s not exactly looking for a quiet evening at home.
“He was always abusive to her, almost like he hated her. One night after the show she thought she was having dinner with him. He was surrounded by all his flunkies and she went up and interrupted him.
“She grabbed his arm. She wanted to know, in front of all those people, when they were leaving. It was stupid. He pulled his arm away.
“He says, ‘Don’t you fucking touch me,’ to his own wife in front of a whole crowd.
“I grabbed her and we went off to eat. I asked her why she did such a thing—it was only going to create a scene. But Geri seemed to always cause scenes with him. She knew what drove him nuts, but she’d do it anyway. She told me she didn’t know why. She just had to do it.
“But as miserable as he was, he’d also bring her stuff. He gave her the most incredible jewelry. He gave her a pink coral-and-diamond necklace and she had a cat’s-eye necklace surrounded by diamonds. The necklaces were worth two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand dollars. And she lived for that. If you were a hustler, that’s your God.”
“I remember I was watching football,” Lefty said. “She knew I was preoccupied. She said, ‘I’m going to my sister’s.’ She said she was dropping Steven off at some neighbors and taking Stephanie to Barbara’s with her.
“She wanted to know if I might want some Mc-Donald’s on her way home. I said maybe. She knew I liked McDonald’s. She gave me Barbara’s number. I didn’t have her sister’s number. I didn’t give a fuck about her sister. She left the number near the phone and left.
“About halftime I decided to call her sister. I was going to tell her to bring me back some McDonald’s.
“I called and Barbara said she was at McDonald’s getting lunch for Stephanie.
“I said okay, have her call me when she gets back.
“I go back to the game, but after a half hour I still haven’t heard from Geri, and the mental computer starts clicking time.
“I called Barbara back and asked if Geri got back.
“‘No,’ she says.
“Now I’m a little annoyed. She was supposed to be getting a McDonald’s for Stephanie and she hasn’t done it. What about Stephanie’s lunch?
“I tell Barbara, ‘Make sure she calls me when she gets back.’
“Fifteen minutes. No Geri.
“I call back. ‘Okay Barbara,’ I say, ‘get in your car and bring my daughter home.’
“I then go and get Steven, and Barbara brings Stephanie back, and now that I’ve got the kids home, I can try and find Geri.
“On that day Geri had taken my car. It was bigger than hers. I had a mobile phone in my car. So I rang my mobile number just in case. The phone gets picked up, but it’s a man’s voice. Muffled. Covered up. But I know the voice. I’ve known it all my life. It was Tony’s. I knew Tony’s voice no matter what.
“I hung right up. Uh-oh. What the hell do I have here? Just to make sure, I called the number right back, but this time I get the operator saying that the mobile number is not in service at this time.
“Now I’m not able to watch the football game. I’ve got a real problem coming up. It gets to be about seven or eight o’clock at night. No Geri. Finally I get a call from her manicurist.
“‘Frank,’ he says. ‘Geri is hysterical,’ he says. ‘She ran out of gas and she had to get towed, and she feels she’s in trouble with you.’
“I stayed calm. ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘Put her on.’
“She’s crying. ‘I love you. I’m sorry.’
“She didn’t sound right, and I didn’t think she knew it was me who got Tony on the car phone, but I didn’t want to say anything right then.
“I had to go to Los Angeles for a few hours the next day. I asked her if she wanted to come. Do some shopping. She said she didn’t feel like it. She wanted to get a manicure. So off I went while she stayed home.
“When I got back late in the afternoon she was home, and I noticed her hands.
“‘Gee,’ I said, ‘you didn’t get your manicure?’
“‘No,’ she said. ‘I didn’t feel like it. It was raining.’
“‘What did you do?’
“‘Oh, nothing. I had lunch with my sister.’
“‘That’s nice,’ I said, but I’m ninety percent sure she’s on the bullshit. ‘Where’d you go?’ I’m being casual, but I sense she’s catching on.
“‘The country club.’
“‘What’d you have?’
“And she told me some salad or something.
“‘And what did Barbara have?’
“She told me what her sister had.
“‘Okay,’ I said, ‘get your sister on the phone. I want you to ask your sister what she had for lunch.’
“Geri gets a piece of paper and writes down her sister’s phone number and starts to go down the stairs to give the paper to our housekeeper to call Barbara.
“I grabbed the paper.
“‘You didn’t have lunch with Barbara, did you?’
“‘Yes I did,’ she says.
“‘Okay,’ I said, ‘then I’m calling her.’
“I pick up the phone.
“‘All right, all right,’ she says, kind of annoyed. ‘I didn’t have lunch with Barbara.’
“‘Then what were you doing?’
“‘I was just fooling around with some of my old pals. I know you don’t like them, and I didn’t want to say. That’s all.’
“I said, ‘Look Geri, the best thing is for me to tell it the way it is. I feel you’ve been with somebody. I know it. We both know it. I just hope it wasn’t with one of two guys.’
“‘What two?’ she asks, looking me in the eye. Almost a smile.
“‘Tony or Joey,’ I say. She just looks at me with a little smile. ‘Geri,’ I say, ‘this is no fucking game. I’m not going to listen to any more games. You go down the line with me right now, or you’re out of here.’ I’m telling her if she bullshits me the marriage is over.
“She was full of Tuinal. She told me it was Tony. She told it straight. No big deal. She said they had been half boozed when it began. I’m listening to her and I’m getting sick inside.
“Then she says, ‘Oh, by the way, he’s gonna be calling up at six o’clock.’
“Now I want to die. I’ll have to talk to him like I don’t know what she’s just told me. I tried to explain that we were all in danger. I told her not to tell Tony she’d told me about it. If Tony suspected I knew, he might think I’d make a beef back home, and she and I would both be killed. I knew him. We’d both just disappear. She said she understood. It had been a crazy thing. She’d get us all out of this. But she needed a little time to back him off. She couldn’t just stop seeing him in the morning. He’d get suspicious I’d found out. The plan was to let it die out nice and smoothly.
“At six o’clock the call came in. It was the loudest ring I ever heard. She told Tony that I just got back and wasn’t feeling well and that she’d talk to him in the morning.
“She filled me in on the background. She said that they had been seeing each other for six months to a year. I remembered when Geri and I were dating. I remembered taking her with me to Chicago. One of my first stops was to see Tony and Nancy and his brothers. I walked into Tony’s house with Geri. S
he was in a classy miniskirt. I remembered he said, ‘Holy shit! Where did you find her?’
“I took her to see my friends back home. We went to the country ranch and saw Fiore. I could see he was pleased and approved.
“But now it was over and I had a choice. I could go to Chicago and take a position against Tony, but I was trying to prevent a war. I felt there would be no winners. I told her that. She said she understood and that it was over and that she would break it off.
“I asked what if Tony didn’t want to break it off, and she said that would be no problem. She’d just back him off. If you listened to her she was really convincing.
“Instead, I later found out, they went right on meeting—in motels, or his apartment in the Towers across from the club, or wherever.
“Plus, he starts asking me all the time: ‘Is anything wrong? Is everything okay?’ He’s poking. I know him. One night I’m at the Stardust. One of the guys says to me, ‘Our buddy’s gonna call.’
“I knew he would be calling on one of the six booths in the back of the casino. I went back and waited for the call.
“‘How are you?’ he asks me.
“‘Fine,’ I say.
“‘I just wanted to ask you something,’ he says, and he starts talking to me about some horseshit thing he would never pay attention to. Then he gets around to why he called.
“He asks: ‘How are you and Geri getting along?’
“‘Why do you ask?’
“‘I just wanted to ask you something.’
“‘What?’
“‘Do you still love her?’ he asks me.
“‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Sure I do. Shouldn’t I?’
“‘No, no,’ Tony says. ‘I was just asking.’
“She had obviously told him we had been to see Oscar. I told her I was thinking about a formal separation. A divorce. Even without the Tony situation—which no one knew about—I had told her this thing wasn’t working.”
“In late 1979 and the early 1980s we were on Spilotro all the time,” retired FBI agent Emmett Michaels said. “It was routine. He’d think he slipped us, but we always had him from the surveillance plane. This time the plane tracked him to a mobile trailer he had way out on Tropicana Avenue.
“It was a hot day, and when we got there we just sat on him for a couple of hours. This was a place he used to go with his girlfriends. I knew his home life wasn’t the best because one time when I was bringing him in on some periodic questioning, he asked Nancy for some cigarette money. ‘Fuck you,’ she said, ‘get your own cigarette money.’
“On this day, Tony had no idea that the plane had taken him to the trailer and that we would be waiting there when he left. There wasn’t even a wire in the place. We were sitting in a van a couple of blocks away using glasses. I’ll never forget it. The door to the trailer opens and out comes Tony, and right behind him, out comes Geri Rosenthal. They had been in there over an hour.
“Geri was Nancy Spilotro’s best friend. We couldn’t believe it. We kept passing the glasses back and forth just to make sure. It was her, all right. She was about a foot and half taller than him. No mistake. We knew that it was only a matter of time before the word got out that Tony was having an affair with Lefty’s wife. I mean, who could keep a secret like that?”
“Even though Spilotro tried to be discreet, she didn’t,” retired FBI agent Mike Simon said. “It was the worst-kept secret in town. In no time, everybody knew. Geri began showing up at the beauty parlor and gym with presents that she said came from her new sponsor, which is hooker talk for a boyfriend or protector.
“She also began telling her friends that her new sponsor was Tony Spilotro. Geri did not keep up any pretenses.”
“Spilotro openly flaunted his relationship with Geri as a show of power,” Kent Clifford, the chief of Las Vegas Metro intelligence, said. “He could have had dozens of women younger and prettier than Geri Rosenthal, but power is an aphrodisiac.
“But Spilotro’s ego got in the way. I’m sure Spilotro felt, ‘I can do it and nobody can do anything about it. She’s my girlfriend, my moll.’ It was a stupid thing for him to do.”
“I go to Chicago,” Cullotta said, “and they heard about something. ‘What the fuck’s going on out there?’ Joey Lombardo says. ‘What’s he doing? Fucking the guy’s wife?’
“I lied. I said no. I played dumb. I said I didn’t know anything about that. What could I say—that Tony was fucking Lefty’s wife and that the FBI and Metro were all over everybody?
“‘We hope he’s not,’ they said, but I can see that they are perturbed.
“Next, Joe Nick, that’s Joe Ferriola, sees me. ‘What’s going on with that fucking Jew?’ he says. ‘He’s acting crazy. The Little Guy wouldn’t be fucking his old lady, would he? Because, if he is, that’s a problem.’
“I lied again. I said no. There’s nothing going on. The fucking guy is just crazy. Tony could have been called in and killed for jeopardizing everything, but by now they’re sure Lefty was a psycho. Only the bosses, like Joey Aiuppa, backed Lefty, but only because they had known him for so many years.
“Later that night, I was in Rocky’s Lounge, North Avenue and Melrose Park—that was Jackie Cerone’s joint—and I was at the bar with Larry Neumann and Wayne Matecki, two stone dead killers, scary looking guys, and Cerone comes at me at the bar.
“‘Is there a problem with the Jew guy and his old lady?’ Jackie Cerone asks me. Shit, I think, this is all over town. Somebody brought this story back, and the only person I knew who could bring the story back was Lefty.
“I told Cerone that Lefty and his old lady argued all the time, and that’s all. Then he looked at me and asked: ‘Is the little guy fucking her?’
“I said no. What could I say? Jackie Cerone was a boss and he hated both Tony and Lefty.
“‘Well,’ Cerone says, ‘we wouldn’t want to jeopardize anything with our friends.’
“When I got back to Las Vegas I told Tony about these questions and he got hot. We were walking back and forth in front of the Gold Rush on West Sahara, and he’s got his mouth covered because the Gee was using lip readers with binoculars.
“‘That fucking Jew motherfucker,’ he says. ‘He ran back there and cried. The Jew fuck is gonna start a war. I gotta think about it.’”
“I assumed she had backed Tony off,” Lefty said, “but when I suspected she was still talking to Lenny Marmor, I had my home phone bugged. I put the tapes in because when I’d get home and she’d be on the phone, she’d quickly hang up or say, ‘I’ll call you back.’ And I wanted to make sure she didn’t try and kidnap my children again.
“The tape reels had a one-hour limit. I had the unit set up in the garage. First couple of days I found out that she talked to Nancy Spilotro a lot. And I’d hear things like, ‘Guess what Mr. Know-It-All just said to me?’
“One day she called her father and said, ‘I wish you’d kill the sonofabitch.’ I could hear her glass tinkling in the background. Her father asked if she was drinking.
“‘Daddy,’ she says, ‘I haven’t had a drink in months.’
“As I listened to the tape, I had to eat a lot of shit. It was very hard. I couldn’t tip my hand that I knew what she was saying behind my back.
“And then, after a couple of days, I heard her talking to Tony on the tapes. He talked very quickly. She’d tell him when I was coming home. This was after she told me she was going to back him off. After I warned her of the danger and everything. And now I’m listening to her talk to Tony with my own ears, planning where they could meet. ‘I’ll meet you at the baseball field.’ ‘Vincent is playing tomorrow afternoon.’ ‘I’ll see you at the ball game; he’ll be working.’ ‘Frank’ll never call.’ That kind of stuff.
“I couldn’t even look at her, I was so angry with what I heard. She was going to get us killed.
“The kids had a swim meet the next day and went to bed early, and that night, I said, ‘Geri, level with me. If you’ve never leveled with me b
efore, tell me the truth. Are you still seeing our friend?’
“I told her, ‘You’re just as much at risk as I am. They’ll kill you before they kill me or him.’
“‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘It’s over.’
“Meanwhile, I know I’ve got her on tape and she’s still meeting the guy.
“I asked, ‘Do you have any contact at all with him?’
“‘No dear,’ she says.
“‘Are you sure?’ I say.
“‘After all we’ve been through, I’m surprised you could even ask,’ she says.
“‘Okay, Geri,’ I say. ‘Swear.’
“‘I swear,’ Geri says. ‘I would never. Can’t you ever let it go?’
“‘Swear to me,’ I say. ‘Swear to me on your son’s life and then I’ll let it go.’
“She looks right at me. She’s angry. ‘I swear on our son’s life,’ she says. ‘Now will you stop?’
“‘You bitch!’ I said. ‘I’ve got you recorded.’
“And I took out the small recorder with the cassette and I pressed the play button, and she heard herself talking to Tony.
“‘Turn that off!’ she screamed at me. ‘I don’t want to hear any more!’
“‘You bitch,’ I say. Now I’m really hot. ‘I’m gonna throw you out this fucking window!’
“She starts screaming. ‘Steven! Help! Steven!’
“The poor kid comes out half asleep. He’s about nine. Now Geri had me backed off.
“‘If you don’t get off me,’ she said, ‘I’m calling the police.’
“I walked out and went to the casino. I had some dinner and later went back home and fell asleep. I made my priority Steven and Stephanie’s swim meet.”
Lefty had already begun to divide things up shortly after Geri returned from her trip to Beverly Hills with Lenny Marmor. He’d filed a quit claim agreement in court separating the properties in preparation for the dissolution of the marriage. According to the terms of the agreement, Lefty got almost everything: the house at 972 Vegas Valley Drive; lots 144 and 145 at Las Vegas Country Club Estates on Augusta Drive; and the couple’s four Thoroughbred racehorses—Island Moon, Last Reason, Est Mi Amigo, and Mister Commonwealth.
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