Casino

by Nicholas Pileggi

  She jumped in her car and took off at a fairly high rate of speed going southbound on Las Vegas Boulevard. At this time Mr. Frank Rosenthal and another WMA (White Male) who was also at the family disturbance scene earlier in the morning, arrived with Mrs. Rosenthal driving a yellow Cadillac which had been in the driveway at the original disturbance.

  At this time Sgt. Greenwood was conversing with Mr. Rosenthal for a couple of minutes while this officer was standing back a few feet. Mr. Rosenthal and the white male subject with him entered the bank and came out a couple of minutes later. They then got into their yellow Cadillac and also left the location. At this time, Sgt. Greenwood and also myself resumed normal patrol.

  “We pulled in and there were police all around there,” Murray Ehrenberg said. “They wouldn’t let Frank out of the car. They said, ‘We’re trying to stop any trouble.’

  “Frank got very hot. He tried to push through, but they stopped him. They leaned against the car doors and we couldn’t get out. He was trying to muscle his way out. I said, ‘Frank, be quiet.’ But he looks right at the cops and says: ‘Take your fucking hands off my car!’ He says that to the cop!

  “He’s yelling: ‘She’s stealing my money!’ but the cops still wouldn’t let him out of the car. They held him back until after Geri took off and then they said, ‘Okay, go ahead.’ The whole thing was an act the cops had concocted with her.”

  “That night she called from Beverly Hills,” Lefty said. “It was after midnight. I said, ‘Geri, this is no good. You can keep your jewelry, but I want my money and my jewelry.’ All I hear is a click. She hung up.

  “Then I get a call from Tony.

  “He says: ‘I heard what happened. Is there anything I can do to help?’

  “I sense here that he isn’t sure that I know about his situation with Geri, so I still don’t say anything. I still play dumb.

  “I say there isn’t anything. Things had been bad between us for a while.

  “Tony then says he wants to meet me. Famous last words. I don’t want to meet him. I know what can happen here.

  “I say that I’ll meet him, but I don’t want anyone to see us, so I give him the name of another lawyer—not Oscar—and we meet there.

  “Again he asks: ‘Anything I can do?’

  “I said that in the event he heard from Geri he should tell her to get my stuff back.

  “Tony knows things don’t look right. He has got to be thinking, ‘Oh boy, what a mistake.’

  “I’m smiling. My lifelong buddy. I didn’t understand it. There was nothing of his I wanted. I couldn’t conceive of his wanting my wife. I couldn’t shake it.

  “My attitude at the attorney’s office was calm. I know I’m safe. And he knows that if my friends in Chicago know what he’s done, he loses. If there’s a trial back there, he’s gone. He knows all that. That’s why I have to be so careful.

  “‘Thanks for meeting,’ I say.

  “‘I hope it works,’ he says.

  “Then Geri calls Tony.

  “‘Hey, you better listen to him,’ Tony tells Geri, ‘or we’re both getting killed.’ I only know this because Geri tells me later.

  “‘What do you want me to do, you fucking midget?’ Geri says.

  “‘You return half the money, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and his jewels,’ Tony says. ‘This is a direct order from me to you.’

  “Now that’s about as close to a mob order as you can get, and when Geri told me about it later she was pissed.

  “At the time, Geri says, she told him, ‘Fuck you!’

  “Geri then calls me.

  “‘Your little fucking friend called and gave me an order,’ she says.

  “I said, ‘Geri, you’re in very deep.’

  “‘You got somebody to pick up the money and jewels?’ she asks. ‘If I give them back, will you promise to leave us alone?’

  “I told her yes, and I sent a friend to L.A. to get them. But when he met her she only gave him two hundred thousand dollars and the jewels. Later she said Tony had stolen fifty thousand dollars out of her car when she went to rest at his house after she left the bank.”

  Rosenthal filed for a divorce on September 11, 1980, three days after Geri drove away from the bank. Three days later, he got a call from the Psychiatric Ward of Harbor General Hospital in Torrance, California. He was told that his wife, Geraldine McGee Rosenthal, had been arrested by LAPD attempting to undress on Sunset Boulevard. She was under the influence of alcohol and drugs.

  Lefty flew to Torrance: “When I got to the hospital, I went into her room and she was in a straitjacket. She wanted me to loosen it, but I said I couldn’t do that. She started screaming at me. She was hysterical.

  “The psychiatrist suggested that Geri stay at Torrance for two weeks. From what I saw, I agreed. I flew back to Las Vegas that night, and then, a couple of days later, I found out that she had been released from the hospital and that her father and her daughter would try to get her to go for psychiatric care.

  “I filed for a divorce. It was uncontested.”

  Lefty got what he wanted: custody of the children. In return, he agreed to $5,000 a month alimony and visitation rights. Geri kept her million dollars in jewelry and the Mercedes she drove off in.

  “Almost anyone else would have let it go,” Murray Ehrenberg said. “I mean, the woman is sick and she’s gone. He’s getting a divorce. He’s got custody. He’s already got half of the money and all of his own jewelry back. Geri only kept about a hundred thousand dollars and her own jewelry. Anybody else would have thought of themselves lucky just to be rid of her, but not Frank.

  “With everything else he’s got all fucked up out there, he decides to sue the Las Vegas Metro Police Department for false arrest, and then he sues the cops who kept us from getting out of the car at the bank, for six million dollars. They’re cops. They don’t have six cents. It’s crazy. And, of course, he didn’t win. All he managed to do was get the whole damn soap opera rehashed in the papers over and over again.”

  22

  “We’re either going to make a lot of money today or we’re going to be very famous.”

  THERE WERE STORIES in the newspapers about Lefty and Geri, and Tony and Geri, and Lefty and Tony, and stories from anonymous law enforcement officials who “feared a Rosenthal-Spilotro mob war.” The FBI purposely exploited the publicity. William K. Lambie Jr., a director of the Chicago Crime Commission, received copies of the Rosenthal-Spilotro news clippings from a Las Vegas law enforcement source, who asked if Lambie could spread the story around Chicago with the “express purpose of upsetting Joe Aiuppa.”

  A Lambie memo on file at the commission said his Vegas source had “furnished copies of news clippings regarding the Spilotro-Rosenthal affair…. He asked that I contact a local member of the working press so that the story would appear in the local print media together with a paragraph indicating that federal authorities had long been aware of the Spilotro-Rosenthal affair because of their surveillance of SPILOTRO. This information is designed to further upset AIUPPA.”

  There were stories about Rosenthal and Spilotro in the Chicago newspapers, including one in Art Petacque and Hugh Hough’s Sunday column in the Chicago Sun-Times. But by that time, Joe Aiuppa had more to be upset about with Tony Spilotro than philandering.

  “Nobody knew that we were doing the burglaries until we got too notorious,” Cullotta said. “But as soon as I opened up that fucking pizza joint, Tony started coming around too much. It was better when I used to sneak off and meet him in different parks. Tony was a restaurant guy all his life, and my joint to him was like a pleasure. He loved the business and he wanted to be a part of any restaurant business, especially with his buddy, you know.

  “And there was nothing that he couldn’t do. He’d say, ‘Look, you need any money, you tell me. I’ll put whatever we need in this joint.’

  “It’s my joint, but he loved to be there with the recipes, and he was there all the time. He just loved it.
And meanwhile, he was just fucking destroying the business. You know, we used to have all the movie stars come in there. And the cops used to stop them on the street.

  “Like Wayne Newton. He’s coming into my place to eat, and he’s pulling up, and he’s got an entourage of people with him. The cops jump out of their cars and they tell Wayne, ‘You know where you’re going?’ ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘I’m going to the Upper Crust.’

  “They says, ‘Well, syndicate men own that place.’ He says, ‘I’m going in there to eat food, not talk to them.’

  “And it’s all because the cops saw Tony was there all the time. That’s when everything went downhill. I used to be able to move around. They were thinking I was nothing. Just a nobody guy out there. Until they put me in the joint with him. They put me there with him. ‘Hey, who is this guy?’ And then they checked me out and they see that we’re going back to when we were kids.

  “That’s when it was all over. It was too late. Then I said, ‘Fuck it.’ Until then I played real low. I lived high, but I was low profile. I was under investigation for different things, but not for being affiliated with Tony or OC. Until we were together too often.

  “I was a stubborn guy. I don’t believe that I have to register when I come to town because I’ve got a sheet or did time. So I never registered as a felon with the sheriff. And nobody bothered me until they spotted Tony with me all the time.

  “To me that was bullshit. Fuck it. Fuck this privileged town. I used to tell them to go fuck themselves. I wouldn’t tell them where I lived. And then they’d arrest me. And I’d get a rap. And I’d fight them. I didn’t give a fuck. The judge’d throw the cases out, but the cops arrested me all the time. And I’d still fight them. I would never tell them where I lived. I mean, they knew where I lived. I just refused to tell them.

  “I was busting their balls all the time.

  “Now Tony’s in my place all the time and he sends his kid and the baseball team in, and everybody’s there all the time. And to tell the truth, I don’t mind it. I love it. But so did everybody else, including the police.

  “They used to park in the lot and watch. And that’s where they got all their pictures. You see all those surveillance pictures of Tony coming out of a restaurant? They’re all coming out of my restaurant.

  “We did good up there until the night the cops killed Frankie Blue. Tony and I were sitting at the patio outside in front of the restaurant. Frankie Blue pulled up. He was a maître d’ at the Hacienda. His father, Stevie Blue, Stevie Bluestein, was a business agent with the Culinary Workers Union.

  “He was a good kid. I told him, ‘Frankie, take them fucking Illinois plates off that car.’

  “Tony told him, ‘It’s not a good idea to have them plates on there, Frankie.’

  “The kid says, ‘I’ll change them.’

  “Then he says, ‘I got a couple of fucking guys following me around.’

  “We say, ‘It’s probably the heat.’ We told him about the Illinois plates. That only means Chicago to the Vegas cops.

  “He says, ‘I don’t know. They’ve been following me around too much.’

  “He says, ‘I had a Bonneville just follow me around the corner to here.’

  “So he gives Tony and me a kiss and he leaves. He’s a good respectful kid.

  “I think now that he thought that some guys were trying to rob him. It turns out there were a couple of heist guys specializing in maître d’s because their pockets are filled with twenty-dollar bills. He didn’t know the guys were cops, because he never would have done what he did. He’s not stupid. That kid’s been around wiseguys all his life. And the cops killed him. They were in an unmarked car.

  “A half hour later, we get a phone call from Herbie Blitzstein. Herbie lived right over there where it happened. Herbie said, ‘They just killed Frankie.’ I said, ‘He just left.’ He said, ‘They fucking emptied two guns on him by my house.’

  “I said, ‘We’ve gotta reach these motherfuckers.’ He said, ‘They just declared war.’ ‘Well, whenever they’re ready,’ I told him. I said I knew it had to be Gene Smith. Because I knew Gene Smith’s going for him. Smith was a fucking gung-ho cop.

  “What happened was Frankie left here and they followed him. He had a gun in the car. He didn’t tell us that. He said that he didn’t know who was following him. They claim that when they tried to curb him he pulled the gun out. They jumped out of their car and they fired one nine-millimeter and a thirty-eight into the door of the car. Well, they killed him. Immediately. Then they said they found the gun in the car. ‘In his hand.’ This is what they said.

  “He might have made a rash move when he got near his security gates. He was in a guarded community, where there are gates that open and you drive in. And they killed him right out in front there.

  “So Tony and them go over. He tells me to stay at the place. ‘Listen for the phone,’ he says; ‘I’ll be right back.’ And they jumped in some cars and they went over there. It was horrible. The cops panicked. Everything was getting very tense. And the police out here are real fast on the draw. They’re scared. They’re always shaking. They’re shaky guys.

  “Then they all came back. Tony. Herbie. The father, Stevie Blue. Ronnie Blue, the brother. And they all came back over and they’re all crying and we’re talking, you know. Trying to talk out of sight. You know. And we didn’t see a fucking cop around. They just like pulled everybody off the street because they knew something was going to go down because Tony was fucking smoking.

  “I mean he was smoking. He was planning stuff. He had an idea to start a race riot. He figured he’d use the blacks to start it up and then we can, you know, wipe a few of them out—and he didn’t mean blacks.

  “Use it as an excuse. Make it like a few blacks were killed by some cops and it’d just snowball, because in that town the cops really mess around with the blacks. They had them contained in certain areas, and we were going to go in and uncontain it.

  “That’s what Tony really wanted to do, but it never came about. Too many other things started happening. First, they tried to blame us for driving by and shotgunning a cop’s house. We didn’t do that. Somebody else did it and threw it on us.

  “At the time Tony said, ‘These motherfuckers are trying to frame me for shooting this cocksucker’s house up. They’re using a reverse on us.’ They did it on purpose to take the heat off them for the Bluestein killing.

  “So the cops killed the kid. I never saw Tony so upset. He was kicking chairs. Walls. Everything. He really loved that kid. At the funeral everybody showed. Tony commanded the kid got shown respect. Even Lefty went to the wake, but he was not standing next to Tony.”

  The questions raised by the killing even further strained the relationship between Spilotro and the Metro cops. Metro would do anything to get Tony, and he would do anything to embarrass them. In November, when a security guard at the Sahara casino tipped Metro intelligence that Spilotro was having lunch with Oscar Goodman in the coffee shop, chief of Metro intelligence Kent Clifford was delighted. Police officer Rich Murray, who was on patrol nearby, was rushed to the location. Spilotro was in the state’s Black Book and officially banned from entering any casino in Nevada. A violation could subject him to arrest and the casino to a fine of up to $100,000.

  The Sahara security guards had kept an eye on the Spilotro table ever since they got the tip from Special Agent Mark Kaspar of the FBI. Before calling Metro, the security guards had even called the FBI to make certain there was an Agent Kaspar.

  When Metro’s Rich Murray got to the coffee shop, the Spilotro table was pointed out to him by the security guards who greeted him. The security guards said that Spilotro’s lawyer, Oscar Goodman, had just gotten up and gone to the men’s room.

  When Murray approached Spilotro and asked for identification, Spilotro said he did not have any. When Murray said he suspected the man was Anthony Spilotro, the man denied that he was Anthony Spilotro. As Murray was about to take Spilotro into custody and
downtown for booking, Oscar Goodman returned and started insisting that the man was not Tony Spilotro. Murray arrested him anyway.

  Ten minutes later, as Murray was in the process of booking Spilotro, Detective Gene Smith arrived and realized Murray had arrested Tony’s dentist brother, Pasquale Spilotro. Of course, Pasquale Spilotro was immediately released, but not until the press had all been alerted to the fiasco.

  Metro intelligence chief Kent Clifford always believed the department had been set up. For one thing, Mark Kaspar denied, in a sworn affidavit, that he had ever made a call to the Sahara about Spilotro. For another, Goodman apparently had not told Murray that the man in question was Spilotro’s brother.

  The anger between Clifford and his Metro cops and Spilotro and his men escalated, and at one point they accused one another of shooting up one another’s houses and cars. It got so bad that one day, when Clifford received information that two of his detectives were on a hit list, he strapped on a gun, brought along an armed sidekick, and the two of them flew to Chicago.

  He went straight to the homes of Joe Aiuppa and Joey Lombardo—Spilotro’s two immediate bosses—in order to confront them. But when Clifford and his sidekick arrived at Aiuppa’s house, the only person at home was the boss’s seventy-two-year-old wife. They then went over to Joey Lombardo’s house, but his wife, too, was the only Lombardo at home.

  In later explaining his journey to Chicago to the Los Angeles Times, Clifford said he then “tracked down” Lombardo’s attorney and went over to see him, warning the lawyer: “If any of my men are harmed I will return to the homes I just visited and kill everything that moves, walks or crawls.”

  Clifford said he then went to a hotel and waited until 2:30 A.M., at which time he got a call wishing him a “safe trip.” This, he said, was the prearranged code with Lombardo’s lawyer that the alleged hit on the two detectives had been called off. Clifford, who is now a real estate salesman in Nevada, has refused repeated requests for interviews.