Casino

by Nicholas Pileggi

  “It was all going bad,” Cullotta says. “You’ve got that nut job Kent Clifford knocking at Lomby and Aiuppa’s door. I don’t want to know what Aiuppa heard from his old lady when he got home that night. Some Metro cops got loaded one night and pegged a couple of shots at John Spilotro’s house and just missed hitting his kid. They out-and-out murdered Frankie Blue and everybody knew that, no matter what they said. And on top of everything, Tony’s under a lot of pressure for money and he puts the pressure on us to earn.

  “Joey Lombardo had just been indicted along with Allen Dorfman and Roy Williams for trying to bribe the senator from Nevada on some Teamster pension stuff, and Lomby needed cash. Tony had me driving my guys nuts. We were knocking over jewelry stores every other week. We ran out of places in Las Vegas. We were flying out to San Jose, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix. Usually I brought all the swag to his brother Michael, in Chicago, but now even Michael got eighteen months on a bookmaking case, so we were fencing the stuff all over the place.

  “I first heard that there was over a million in cash and jewelry in the vault at Bertha’s Jewelers on West Sahara Avenue from Joey DiFranzo, about a year before. We knew it was a family business and there was a safe with at least five hundred thousand dollars in cash. You could see the jewelry in the place just by looking in the windows every day.

  “The place was fully alarmed, but I went inside pretending to buy something just to case the place. As I talked to the woman waiting on me, I kept maneuvering her so I could see inside the vault. I saw that inside the vault they had no alarm.

  “I told Tony about the score and he said for me to ‘fill in’ Joe Blasko. Blasko had been a cop, but he got kicked off when they found he was working more for Tony than the Sheriff, so Tony always made sure he was earning.

  “Tony said maybe Blasko could make a quick fifty thousand dollars on the Bertha score so he could get the guy off his back for a while.

  “Unfortunately, one of the guys in on the deal was working for the Gee. It was that asshole Sal Romano. We didn’t know it at the time, but the feds had Sal on a drug case and he was trying to skate by giving up Tony and us.

  “I always knew there was something wrong with him, but everybody thought he was fine, and Ernie Davino said he was a great pick man and a lock expert.

  “There was Ernie Davino, Leo Guardino, and Wayne Matecki, who were going to go in through the roof.

  “Sal Romano, Larry Neumann, and I were going to be driving up and down the street keeping our eyes out, plus we all had police scanners and walkie-talkies to the guys inside and each other in the cars.

  “Across the street from the place we had Blasko, the cop, in a truck he used for cleaning cement, with a great big Superman painted on it. Blasko was sitting in there with a police scanner and a walkie-talkie, too.

  “We picked the Fourth of July weekend because we expected no one would be around, and if we had to make a blast or something, people would think they were fireworks. Plus, since Monday was a holiday, nobody would probably get into the place until Tuesday, giving us even more time to get rid of the merch.

  “We started during the early evening. I remember when we got there it was still almost light.

  “In Bertha’s we went in through the roof to circumvent the alarms. I had already cased the place for motion detectors. They’re the little boxes with little red lights on the wall or door. They look like home fire alarms.

  “Bertha’s didn’t have motion detectors, but there were other regular alarms. I could see the tape. All the doors had tape.

  “Normally, you could pull your truck up to the side of the building and make a hole. At Bertha’s, though, we figured if the vault wall was steel, not just cement, we needed torches, and that could take forty-five minutes. And that’s why we decided to go in through the roof.

  “But right when we got started, I get signaled by Sal Romano. He says his car is stuck in the parking lot in the rear of a shopping center a little down the block from Bertha’s. He says he can’t start the damn thing.

  “I drive over and pick him up, and I don’t understand it, because I had just checked the car out before the robbery. It’s wrong. I’m pissed. I use my Riviera to push his car out of the way. Far away. We don’t want it anywhere nearby the score.

  “Also, I radio Larry Neumann and I tell Larry to pick up Sal on Sahara Avenue on the other side of the street from Bertha’s so they can go up and down the street watching out together. I mean, four eyes are still better than two.

  “Meanwhile, I hear from the guys that they have broken through the roof and they’re going inside.

  “Then I get a call from Larry saying he’s driving up and down Sahara and he can’t find Sal. Sal was supposed to be standing out there at the curb waiting for Larry to pick him up.

  “Now Larry’s cursing Sal and saying he should have killed him long ago.

  “‘Uh-oh,’ I think. Then I see radio cars coming down the street, and I say over the walkie-talkie, everybody get out of there.

  “We had rendezvous spots for the guys inside and I told them to get out of there, that the cops are on the way. From inside I hear them say it’s too late; the cops are coming through the roof.

  “I get stopped right away, but they don’t get Larry until Paradise Road.

  “Finally, they bring us all in, and there ain’t no Sal Romano. That’s when I was certain he was the rat. The feds had set us up. They were on us from the first.

  “Sal walked the streets of Chicago for a week after that. I resented that Tony didn’t kill the guy for me. I told Tony that Sal was the rat, but he just put it off.

  “Anyway, the Gee had been waiting for us in a building right across the street. They had been watching us out of some windows with binoculars. We didn’t stand a chance. They were going to use the Bertha’s case to bring us all down, and they did.

  “The Bertha’s arrest was the beginning of the end of Tony’s crew at the Gold Rush. They got us all that day, and that left Tony pretty exposed.

  “On the morning of the score, I remember I saw the Gee go by. I knew most of their cars and faces. I said to Tony, ‘The Gee doesn’t work on weekends; why are they here?’

  “He said, ‘They might not be with you, they might just be on me.’

  “They were watching us constantly.

  “When I took off I said to him, ‘We’re either going to make a lot of money today or we’re going to be very famous.’”

  The arrests of Spilotro, Cullotta, the ex-cop Blasko, and the Hole in the Wall Gang were the culmination of a three-year investigation into Spilotro’s Vegas operation, according to Organized Crime Strike Force prosecutor Charles Wehner. And while the Justice Department did not exactly come up with the kinds of evidence that could support its original premise—that Spilotro ran casinos for the mob—there were thousands of bugged conversations and miles of audio and visual surveillance tapes that showed Spilotro ordered murders, armed robberies, burglaries, and shakedown plots as the town’s mob boss.

  Oscar Goodman, who accompanied Spilotro to his arraignment, at which he was freed on $600,000 bond—later reduced to $180,000—said the arrests were little more than a vendetta by law enforcement against his client. He said not one of his clients had ever been as harassed as Spilotro.

  “And these latest wiretaps too,” Goodman said, “are the result of a continuous fishing expedition by the government in an attempt to find some vague, misrepresented excuse to continue their campaign to come up with something that will incriminate Anthony Spilotro.”

  But according to retired FBI agent Joe Gersky, who spent years on Spilotro’s case, “This was different. This time we had a live witness, somebody who had been a part of the Hole in the Wall Gang, somebody who had been in on the planning of Bertha’s—we had Sal Romano.

  “We had never had a real witness against Spilotro before. Romano had told us about the robbery, who would be in on it, and when and where it would be carried out, and he had been right
a hundred percent. Plus we had him in custody, protected and alive.”

  23

  “I don’t really consider him a friend of mine anymore.”

  THIS WAS THE most dangerous time. Years of surveillance and phone taps had begun to bring in the indictments. In addition to the Hole in the Wall Gang indictments, Allen Dorfman, Roy Williams, and Joey Lombardo had been indicted for trying to bribe Nevada senator Howard Cannon. Nick Civella, Carl Civella, Joe Agosto, Carl DeLuna, Carl Thomas, and others had been indicted as part of the Tropicana skim, and Joe Aiuppa, Jackie Cerone, and Frank Balistrieri and his sons were expected to be among others indicted in the Stardust skim. Allen Glick had already been granted immunity by several grand juries in return for his testimony, but so far his lawyers had kept the prosecutors at bay.

  It was a time when the defendants and their lawyers would spend months poring over hours of wiretaps and bound volumes of typed transcriptions. The lawyers were looking for loopholes. The defendants were looking for potential witnesses to murder.

  It was a time when just being suspected of cooperating with the government was enough to get you killed. And even if you didn’t cooperate and got a long stretch in prison, you could still be in danger, because now you could be perceived as far more vulnerable to the government’s sweet deals.

  “I’ve heard them go around a room,” Cullotta said. “‘Joe, whadda you think of Mike?’ ‘Mike’s great. Balls like iron.’ ‘Larry, whadda you think of Mike?’ ‘Mike? A fuckin’ marine. To the end.’ ‘Frankie, whadda do you think of Mike?’ ‘Mike? You kidding? Mike’d put his arm in fire for ya.’ ‘Charlie, whadda you think of Mike?’ ‘Why take a chance?’ And that’s the end of Mike. That’s the way it happens.”

  It is a dangerous time because the mob bosses know that in addition to the wiretaps—which can be argued over by attorneys—the prosecutors need witnesses or coconspirators who can explain what actually happened, who can point the finger, who can translate the impenetrable shorthand verbiage of most wiretaps.

  “Charlie Parsons, the FBI guy, came to see me,” Frank Cullotta says. “It was about eight months after we all got arrested in Bertha.

  “‘We’ve got some information,’ he says, ‘that your friend Tony Spilotro has a murder contract out on you.’

  “That was a Friday. I just nodded to the guy. I’m thinking about what happened a few weeks before. I was asleep. Boom! Bing! Boom! Boom! ‘What the fuck?’ I said. ‘What the hell’s all those shots?’ I got up real quick. I go look out the window. These guys in a van are going past. They shot the guy in the apartment next door.

  “He was walking to his apartment. Next door to me. This guy’s a square John. What is this shit? And I go back to sleep. I had to take it at face value at the time, but I started thinking about it.

  “Then Parsons plays me a tape. You can hardly hear it. But I could hear it. I could hear Tony asking for an okay.

  “Now mind you, when they ask for an okay, it’s not, ‘Hey, I’ll hit Frank Cullotta tonight?’ It’s more like, ‘I need to take care of some dirty laundry. The guy didn’t wash what he was supposed to the right way, which caused that problem I talked to you about …’

  “That’s me. I’m the problem because I was the only one who could tie Tony to everything. Sal Romano, that rat bastard, he never talked to Tony. Sal talked to me, and I talked to Tony. That’s how we had it set up from the start. None of my guys ever talked to Tony about anything. They didn’t even know I had to cut Tony in for a quarter; they just suspected it because we operated without any interference.

  “But now I’ve got to think Tony knows I’m facing a long stretch. I’m a predicate felon. I’m looking at thirty years. Tony’s got to think why wouldn’t I give him up for a deal? The man’s not dumb. I would have figured it the same way.

  “And the guy Tony’s talking to about laundry is aware of what Tony was talking about.

  “I hear the guy say, ‘Okay, then just take care of it. Clean your laundry then. No problem.’

  “But the guys Tony got to do the job missed. If he had me on the case, it would have been done right, but who knows where he was going for the work, now that my whole crew was buried?

  “He farms the job out, and they shoot the wrong guy. They shoot the guy next door to me.

  “I’m thinking to myself, ‘Hey, this guy tried to hit me in the head.’ If I beef on him now to the G, the most that he could do, tops, is a ten-year-sentence bit—do six, and he’s out.

  “That ain’t gonna hurt him. He’s a young guy; he’ll get out. How could it hurt him? They ain’t gonna give him RICO [federal racketeering charges that carry long prison sentences]. They’ll never be able to lay the RICO on him and give him life. Tony’s been too sharp for that.”

  Three days later, Monday morning at 8:15 A.M., FBI agent Parsons got a phone call.

  “Do you recognize my voice?” Cullotta asked.

  “Yes,” Parsons said.

  Within twenty minutes Cullotta was in a safe house guarded by a half dozen agents. They began to debrief him and took him to Chicago for a hearing.

  “I don’t know how I wound up with that transactional immunity, but I did. That’s the best kind of immunity you can get. In other words, when you’ve got transactional immunity, you can’t be tried for anything you talk about. No matter whatever it is. But the Chicago judge gave me that kind of immunity, and I didn’t even know what the fuck he was doing when he gave it to me. What do I know about immunity? I walk out of court and the FBI guy says, ‘I think the judge made a mistake.’

  “They were shocked.”

  After Rosenthal was forced out of the Stardust, you could set your watch by his schedule. So could a car bomber.

  He got up early in the morning to take the kids to school. He then spent almost all of the day at home working on his handicapping picks for the weekend and doping out some stocks he had become interested in. Two or three days a week he would go to Tony Roma’s restaurant on East Sahara Avenue at about six o’clock at night and meet his old bookmaking pals Marty Kane, Ruby Goldstein, and Stanley Green. They would usually stand at the bar and have a couple of drinks while discussing the week’s sports picks, and shortly after 8:00 P.M. Lefty would order some ribs to go. He and the group usually broke up about 8:30, or whenever Lefty’s takeout order was ready. Lefty would then leave the restaurant, get into his car, and go home before the children went to bed.

  On October 4, 1982, Lefty followed his usual pattern. But when he got into his car with the takeout order, it exploded. He remembers seeing tiny flames shoot out from the car’s defroster vents, and he also remembers that the inside of the car began filling with sheets of flame as he struggled to get out the door.

  He grabbed the door latch and rolled to the sidewalk, rolling around on the ground for a while because his clothes were on fire. Then he stood up and saw that his car was entirely on fire. Suddenly two men raced up to him and forced him to the ground, urging him to stay calm and to cover his head.

  Just as the three of them hit the ground, the flames reached the gas tank and the four-thousand-pound Cadillac Eldorado rose about four feet off the ground. A fireball of shredded pieces of metal and plastic shot about fifty feet into the sky and then began to rain blackened shards and soot over hundreds of square feet on the busy parking lot. (The two men who had forced Lefty to the ground turned out to be two Secret Service agents who had just finished dinner.)

  The explosion was so intense and loud, according to Barbara Lawry, who lived across the street, that it “sounded like a train fell through my roof.” Lori Wardle, the cashier at Marie Callender’s Restaurant, across from Tony Roma’s, said, “I ran outside, and the parking lot was mobbed with cars. Rosenthal’s car shot right up in the air, and flames went about two stories into the air. It was a huge explosion. It blew the windows out of the back of the restaurant.”

  A local TV news crew was having coffee nearby when the explosion occurred, and they took pictures of Rosenthal, minu
tes after the explosion, wandering dazedly around the parking lot and holding a handkerchief to his bleeding head. He was also bleeding from cuts on his left arm and leg. He can be seen asking Marty Kane and his other pals to call his doctor and make sure his children were assured that he was okay and that they be brought to the hospital.

  Alcohol, Tobacco agent in charge John Rice, investigating the case with Metro, said Lefty was “very fortunate” to have survived the blast.

  “Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a bomb like that should have killed him,” Rice said. “Except, in this model of an Eldorado Cadillac, the manufacturer installed a steel floor plate beneath the driver’s seat for added stability. It was that steel plate under the driver’s seat that saved Lefty’s life.

  “The steel plate deflected the bomb upwards and toward the rear of the car instead of up and forward. He should change his name from Lefty to Lucky.”

  The press and police arrived at the emergency room while Lefty was being treated for his cuts and burns. As Lefty’s head cleared, he looked up from a hospital bed to see a circle of concerned faces looking down.

  “It was all the hotshots from the FBI and local cops,” Rosenthal said. “And they were not there out of friendship.

  “I was still being treated when the first two guys from the FBI came in,” Lefty said. “They were polite. They said, ‘Jesus, we’re sorry about this. Can we be of any help?’

  “I said, ‘No you can’t. Will you please leave me alone?’ They said, ‘Are you sure?’ I said I was sure. They left.

  “Then came the Metro guys. At that time John McCarthy was the sheriff. Anyway, they walk in. They said, ‘You ready to talk now?’ I said, ‘Get the fuck out of here.’ That’s a quote. ‘Get the fuck out of here.’

  “After they treated me at the hospital, I told my doctor I needed more help. I needed more painkillers. I was really in terrible pain. So he gave me a second shot, and then he helped get me out through a back way he knew about so I could avoid the newspaper people who were piled up in the lobby and front of the building. When I got home my housekeeper was there and I was grateful that the kids were already sleeping.