Casino

by Nicholas Pileggi

  On trial in this case were the Chicago bosses Joe Aiuppa, seventy-seven, and Jackie Cerone, seventy-one; the Cleveland acting boss, Milton Maishe Rockman, seventy-three; and the Milwaukee boss, Frank Balistrieri, sixty-seven, and his lawyer sons John and Joseph. A conviction would almost certainly mean the elderly bosses would die in prison.

  Glick took the stand and testified for four days, laying out in great detail how he had encountered Frank Balistrieri and how he had gotten his loan. He also spoke about being forced to sign over a 50 percent option on the corporation to Balistrieri’s sons in return for $25,000. He testified about being forced to promote Frank Rosenthal and about being threatened by Nick Civella in a darkened Kansas City hotel room and by Carl DeLuna in Oscar Goodman’s office in downtown Las Vegas.

  Glick was a devastating witness. He was precise and incapable of being ruffled. He projected total honesty. Carl Thomas had become a government witness as well, in the hope of obtaining leniency on his fifteen-year sentence in the Tropicana case. He testified about the skim and about the mob’s influence over the Teamsters. The feds also got Joe Lonardo, the seventy-seven-year-old Cleveland ex-underboss, who testified that he had served as a courier with Rockman and explained how Glick’s loan had been arranged and who had profited from it.

  Even Roy Williams, after having been handed down a fifty-five-year sentence in the Cannon bribery case, decided to cooperate with the Argent prosecution. He was wheeled into the courtroom clinging to an oxygen tank and testified that he had received $1,500 a month in cash from Nick Civella for seven years in return for his vote to give Glick the pension fund loan.

  During the trial, Carl DeLuna had enough. He pleaded guilty before a verdict was even returned. He was already facing thirty years in the Tropicana case. What else could they do to him? Give him another thirty years? And why remain in court and watch the prosecutors showing blowups of his note cards to the jury while 21, 22, Stmp, and Fancy Pants watched incredulously at the wealth of damning detail DeLuna had managed to cram onto those tiny cards.

  Frank Balistrieri was already facing a thirteen-year sentence for an unrelated case. He, too, pleaded guilty.

  Tony Spilotro, who had been indicted in the Argent case along with everyone else, mostly on the basis of the phone calls he made to Stardust executives pleading for jobs and comps, was severed from the case because of his heart condition. Government doctors determined that Spilotro was not using his health as a ruse, and he was given time to have the necessary bypass surgery. He would be tried later.

  When the guilty verdicts were handed down, it was no surprise, and neither were the stiff sentences: Joe Aiuppa, the seventy-seven-year-old Chicago boss, and his seventy-one-year-old underboss, Jackie Cerone, got twenty-eight years each. The seventy-three-year-old Maishe Rockman got twenty-four years. Carl DeLuna and Carl Civella received sixteen years, to run concurrently. John and Joseph Balistrieri were acquitted of all charges.

  Nineteen eighty-three was a turning point in the history of Las Vegas. The Tropicana and Argent cases were wending their way through pretrial hearings and on to trials and eventually to convictions. The last Teamster pension fund loan was paid off. The mortgage on the Golden Nugget was bought by Steve Wynn and paid off with junk bonds. The mob’s main muscle—as far as controlling the financing of casinos—was over.

  In 1983, slot machines became the largest casino revenue producer, surpassing all other forms of gaming. Las Vegas, which had begun as a town for high rollers, became a mecca for Americans looking for low stakes and ALL YOU CAN EAT FOR $2.95 buffets.

  In 1983, the Nevada Gaming Commission suspended the Stardust’s license because of yet another skim investigation and installed one of their own Gaming Control Board supervisors in Lefty’s old office to run the Stardust. State officials were able to fire or force into early retirement many of the employees who had been a part of the various skims that had been going on for years.

  And in 1983 Lefty Rosenthal and his family moved to California.

  “I was playing with the stock market a little bit and handicapping a little, strictly as a player,” Lefty said. “But the kids, especially Stephanie, had become a world-class swimmer. She had been pretty good in Las Vegas, and she had entered and won dozens of competitions.

  “In an effort to help her pursue that goal—and she was already prepared for Olympic qualifying meets—I moved to Laguna Niguel so they could train and compete with the Mission Viejo Nadadores, one of the top swim teams in the country.”

  The Rosenthal house was in Laguna Woods, in Laguna Niguel, a wealthy community about midway between Los Angeles and San Diego. It was one of nineteen houses cut into the lush coastal hillsides, with panoramic views of the ocean, the Crown Valley, and El Niguel County Club. Security for the Rosenthal house included several closed-circuit television monitors controlled by a wall-sized panel in the garage.

  For most of 1983, Lefty’s life revolved around the extraordinary feats his children performed as competitive swimmers.

  “You see a headline about your child that says ROSENTHAL WINS TWO MORE GOLDS, and there can’t be a moment of greater pride,” Rosenthal said. He still has the clippings.

  “Stephanie was really in a class of her own. She was just a marvelous athlete. With a level of tolerance for pain that was … I can’t describe how … I can’t tell you how much pain she took. I used to watch her train. I took her to both the morning and afternoon practice sessions. That was at four thirty in the morning and three thirty in the afternoon. You know, I just loved it. And I would watch my daughter train. And I saw the veins popping, and I saw her eyes were red, and she practiced in sleet and rain and cold. I was just in tremendous awe of what she was willing to sacrifice to get where she was at. You know, I really had great respect for her.

  “Because no matter how talented you are, you need to have that endurance, that strength, that stamina. You know, to win. And Stephanie wanted to fucking win. You know, you’re not going to beat that girl. She would not let you beat her.

  “And this is not some proud poppa talking. This is the handicapper talking. She was the best. I mean, she kicked ass wherever she went. Oh yeah.

  “I mean ribbons, medals, trophies. And Steven, unfortunately, had to be a part of that. And I didn’t understand how deep the resentment became. They were just kids. He’s only thirteen and she’s ten. He was hurt a lot because I had to give Stephanie a hug. I had to put my hand on her head. I had to give her a kiss. I had to shake her hand. I had to cheer her on.

  “And her brother would be in the same meet and would finish up the street. And what can you do? You know, sometimes I would say, ‘Hey, Steve, okay. You need to train harder.’ But Steven resented all of us. Us meaning me and Stephanie.

  “Steve was a talented swimmer. More so than Stephanie, technically. That’s the truth. Coaches around the country, his own coach, used to say, ‘Frank, if you get that kid off his ass and we can get him to train, ain’t nobody going to touch the guy. This guy’s better than Stephanie.’

  “But he lacked the willingness to get out there and take the pain. To train. To go fifteen thousand meters per day. To run. To do dry land exercises. To lift weights. He wasn’t willing to pay the price. Consequently, when Steven went into competition, he wasn’t prepared. And he’d get his ass kicked.

  “But, you know, everybody’s not meant to do that. I didn’t disrespect him for that. I think he should have quit. Become a social swimmer.

  “But Stephanie wanted the gold. These were the finest years of my life. I told Stephanie and some close friends, if Stephanie qualified for the nineteen eighty-four Olympics and gets a medal, my fucking life is complete.

  “And I don’t give a shit if I get a stroke one minute after. I won’t want to come back. And I meant it. In other words, let me have that one thing. And I said, ‘Stephanie, that’s all want. I want to see it.’

  “I told her, ‘I caught a miracle getting out of that car with the bomb. Let me see you win a gold,
Stef, and after that, I’m willing to say good-bye.’

  “And she understood me. But she was young. She was just, you know, a kid. She had been training since she was six years old. Well, we went to Austin, Texas, where they started the Olympic trials. She was qualified in three events, but during her training period coming up to the time in Austin, I watched her. You know, I’m a handicapper. I use a watch.

  “And I figure she’s got two chances, slim and none, and slim was out of town. I was told by coaches, ‘Frank, don’t discourage her. You’re going to kill it. Frank, be careful. Frank. Frank.’

  “But I would say driving home from a workout, ‘Stef, you’ve got to train harder.’ And she’d say, ‘Dad, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  “Anyway, I knew before we went to Austin. The main event. The hundred-meter backstroke. My nephew Mark Mendelson wanted to come down from Chicago, but I said wait until she makes the finals before flying down. He went to O’Hare waiting to see if Stef would qualify in the morning to make the finals in the evening. She had to finish in the first eight. There were a hundred and some people that would be swimming in that event. The top eight swim in the finals; the top two go to the Olympics.

  “So it worked out that he’d wait at the airport and I’d get a message to him whether to fly down or not. I knew in my heart she didn’t have a prayer. She came to me forty-five minutes before race time. She says her coach said she’d never looked better. I said to myself, ‘Fuck your coach for bullshitting you.’

  “He was playing a game with her. He was taking a shot. Maybe she could pull off a miracle. Well, there are no miracles in sports. It’s one on one.

  “I remember her time. It was two and a half seconds slower than she’d done six months earlier, when she qualified. She put her head down. I put my head down. Then I ran to the phone and got a message to my nephew, who was waiting at the airport.

  “I said, ‘Mark Mendelson, go on home.’”

  Lefty went home, too. His $375,000 house in Laguna Niguel had a rock fountain in the entrance, a spa, a gazebo, and a console made of African zebrawood in the bedroom. But when Rosenthal decided to hang wallpaper, he discovered it was impossible because the walls weren’t straight—a defect that also made it impossible to install upgraded doors, new windows and shutters. “The house is falling and creaking and sinking,” Lefty said at the time. “There is a big crack in the back wall, and even the mirror man had trouble because the place is not square. I have asked my general contractor to see whether the place even meets code standards.”

  Lefty sued.

  He had to, he explained. The builders “were not even accepting my phone calls anymore.”

  If Mike Kinz hadn’t been seated high on his tractor, he would never have noticed the bare patch of earth. Kinz had leased a five-acre cornfield in Enos, Indiana, about sixty miles southeast of Chicago; the corn was about four inches high and in a couple of weeks would have grown tall enough to cover the field and obscure the marks on the ground that made it look as though something had been dragged about a hundred feet from the road to the bare patch.

  Kinz suspected that a poacher had probably buried the remains of a deer carcass in the cornfield after removing the edible meat. It had happened before. So he called Dave Hudson, the wildlife preserve’s biologist and game warden.

  It took Hudson about twenty minutes of digging in the soft, sandy earth before he struck something firm. He looked into the three-foot-deep hole and saw a patch of white skin.

  “I scraped off some sand,” Hudson said, “and there were some skivvies.”

  Two bodies had been dumped on top of each other in a five-foot grave. They were naked except for the undershorts. Their faces were so badly disfigured that it was not until the FBI lab had had a chance to run through the fingerprints, four days later, that the men were identified as Anthony Spilotro, forty-eight, and his brother Michael, forty-one.

  The two had been reported missing nine days earlier by Michael’s wife, Anne, and there was some speculation at the time that the Spilotros, both of whom were facing trials within a matter of weeks, had purposely disappeared. Spilotro had gotten the court’s permission to visit the Chicago area for eight days to visit his family and to have his dentist brother do some work on his teeth.

  Spilotro was going to be a busy man. He was facing the Stardust skim trial. He was about to be retried in the Hole in the Wall conspiracy case; the first trial had ended in mistrial because of a bribe attempt made to one of the jurors. He was also scheduled to be tried for violating the civil rights of a government witness he was suspected of having murdered. His brother Michael was awaiting trial in Chicago on an extortion sting investigation that showed organized-crime links to sex clubs and prostitutes in Chicago’s western suburbs.

  Tony Spilotro’s standing with the Chicago mob had fallen considerably in recent years. “Tony had developed a lot of negatives,” Frank Cullotta says. And wiretaps of Spilotro rapping some of his associates, particularly Joe Ferriola—which were played in court—hadn’t helped. On the night of June 14, when Michael and Tony left Michael’s suburban Chicago home, Michael told his wife, Anne, “If we’re not back by nine o’clock, we’re in big trouble.”

  The grave was about four miles from a farm owned by Joseph J. Aiuppa, Chicago’s ex-mob boss, who was at the time in prison on charges that he had skimmed Las Vegas casinos.

  “The bodies were not meant to be found,” Edward D. Hegarty, Chicago’s FBI agent in charge, said, “but whoever killed them didn’t count on the farmer coming to apply herbicide.” The brothers died from “blunt force injuries around the neck and head,” said Dr. John Pless, director of forensic medicine at Indiana University, who performed the autopsies. They had both been beaten severely, but there were no underlying fractures or broken bones. They appeared to have been beaten a few feet from the grave. Their clothes were found nearby. The hole had been dug deep enough so the bodies would not have been plowed up by farmers during the next spring.

  “The killers must have carried a tremendous grudge,” Spilotro’s old nemesis, ex-FBI agent Bill Roemer, said. “Usually, it’s one hole, two holes, three holes point-blank in the back of the head, probably a twenty-two. It’s quick and the guy doesn’t suffer. These guys were beaten to death. Tortured.”

  Today in Las Vegas, the men in fedoras who built the city are gone. The gamblers with no last names and suitcases filled with cash are reluctant to show up in the new Las Vegas, for fear of being turned in to the IRS by a twenty-five-year-old hotel school graduate working casino credit on weekends.

  Las Vegas has become an adult theme park, a place where parents can take their kids and have a little fun themselves. While the kids play cardboard pirate at the Treasure Island casino, or joust with knights at the Excalibur, Mommy and Daddy can drop the mortgage money and Junior’s college tuition on the poker slots.

  The intimacy of Bugsy Siegel’s 147-room Flamingo Hotel or even Lefty’s early 900-room Stardust has been replaced by the 5,008-room MGM Grand or a series of 3,000- to 4,000-room hotels lining the Strip and shaped like pyramids, castles, and spaceships. A volcano erupts every thirty minutes in front of the Mirage. Right next door on the Strip, a pirate boat appears on an artificial lake six times a day and battles the British Navy.

  Only twenty years ago, dealers knew your name. What you drank. What you played. How you played. You could walk right in to the tables and be checked in automatically. A bellman you knew took your suitcase upstairs, unpacked your bags, and filled the room with your favorite booze in ice buckets and fresh fruit. Your room would be waiting for you, instead of you waiting for it.

  Today, checking into a Las Vegas hotel is more like checking into an airport. Even the high-roller hospitality suites can get stacked up while computers check your credit line against your American Express number for verification that you are who you claim to be.

  The Teamsters pension fund has been replaced by junk bonds as the primary source of casino fund
ing; but while junk bond interest rates are high, they’re not as high as what the outfit charged. Casino executives who borrow the money don’t have to meet their stockbrokers in darkened Kansas City hotel rooms at three o’clock in the morning and be told they’re going to get their eyes plucked out.

  Tony and Geri are dead and Lefty is gone. Lefty now lives in a house on a golf course in a walled community in Boca Raton. He plays a little, watches his investments, and helps his nephew run a nightclub. Sometimes he sits in a small elevated area in the nightclub and aims a penlight at waiters he believes are not clearing tables fast enough. For years Lefty nursed a hope that he would be allowed to return to Las Vegas, but in 1987 he was placed in the Black Book and was forbidden to set foot in a casino ever again; years of fighting the decision amounted to nothing.

  “It should have been so sweet,” Frank Cullotta said. “Everything was in place. We were given paradise on earth, but we fucked it all up.”

  It would be the last time street guys were ever given anything that valuable again.

  Index

  The page references in this index correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.

  Accardo, Tony, 26, 125

  accounting records 213, 239

  advertising, prepaid contracts for, 244

  Agosto, Joe, 254, 266-67, 282, 285, 290, 292, 296, 297, 301, 304, 368

  conviction and death of, 389-90

  Airey, Shea, 303

  Aiuppa, Joseph “Joey Doves,” 30, 38, 119, 283, 286, 304, 328, 353, 361, 368, 388, 391, 399

  jail term of, 392

  Alderisio, Philip “Milwaukee Phil,” 30, 34, 35, 49, 65, 111, 115

  Alex, Gussie, 26

  Algiers, Hotel, 88, 89

  Amalgamated Insurance, 235

  Ambassador Hotel, 144