Read Cullotta: The Life of a Chicago Criminal, Las Vegas Mobster and Government Witness Online
Authors: Dennis N. Griffin
Cullotta: The Life of a Chicago Criminal, Las Vegas Mobster and Government Witness
The Life of a Chicago Criminal, Las Vegas Mobster, and Government Witness
Dennis N. Griffin and Frank Cullotta
With contributions from Dennis Arnoldy
Huntington Press
Las Vegas Nevada
Published by
Las Vegas Review-Journal
, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be translated, reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright owner.
To the memory of my mother Josephine, who passed away in 1990. And to Ashley, my granddaughter, who left us in 2005. She was the light of my life.
Acknowledgments
The information contained in this book was derived from many sources, primarily from Frank Cullotta himself and retired FBI agent Dennis Arnoldy. But there were many others who contributed to this project and I want to mention and thank them here. They include, but are not limited to, former Clark County Sheriff John McCarthy, Commander Kent Clifford, Detective David Groover and Lt. Gene Smith, former Strike Force Special Attorney Stanley Hunterton, and former FBI agents Joe Yablonsky, Charlie Parsons, Emmett Michaels, Donn Sickles, Lynn Ferrin, and Gary Magnesen.
The newspaper archives of the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District held stories from the
Las Vegas Sun
,
The Valley Times,
and
Las Vegas Review
-
Journal
that provided key information regarding events and incidents of the Tony Spilotro era in Las Vegas. A series of 1983 articles by Michael Goodman of the
Los Angeles Times
further illuminated those times. My special thanks go out to Las Vegas TV station KVBC for allowing the use of their investigative report of Tony Spilotro’s trial for the killings of Billy McCarthy and Jimmy Miraglia (the M&M Murders).
The Illinois Police and Sheriff’s News Web site www.ipsn.org provided a wealth of information relating to organized-crime history in both Chicago and Las Vegas. The well-researched book
Of Rats and Men
(John L. Smith) was an invaluable resource. The movie
Casino
—in which actors Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro portray characters based on Tony Spilotro and Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal— proved to be extremely informative.
Others deserve mention, but for various reasons they desire to stay in the background. Respecting their wishes, they will remain nameless, but not unappreciated.
Contents
Murder in Las Vegas
The Early Years
Bigger Things
The M&M Boys
Crime Wave
In and Out of Prison
The Straight Life Fails
Together Again
The Law
The Beat Goes On
Warning Signs and Murder Plots
Bertha’s
Switching Sides
The End of Tony Spilotro
Looking Back
Where Are They Now?
Surprise Indictments
Frank Cullotta is the real thing.
I found that out when I was working on
Casino
, a book about the skim at the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas. The story was about Anthony Spilotro, the mob boss of Las Vegas, and his relationship with Frank Rosenthal, the man who ran the mob’s casinos. Cullotta was an invaluable source for me, because by the time I started writing the book, Spilotro had been murdered and Rosenthal, who’d miraculously survived getting blown up in his car, was reluctant to give interviews.
But Frank Cullotta was alive and he’d not only known all of the major characters central to the book, he’d been one of them. He and Spilotro had been boyhood pals back in Chicago and it was Spilotro who convinced Cullotta to migrate west to a felony paradise. Cullotta had run the robbery, extortion, and murder departments for Spilotro’s Vegas mob.
Spilotro and Cullotta extorted cash from every illegal bookmaker, drug dealer, and burglar operating in Las Vegas. Those who refused wound up buried in the desert. Soon, no one refused and Spilotro became the indisputable boss of Las Vegas.
The police called Cullotta’s high-tech burglary crew “The Hole in the Wall Gang,” due to their penchant for breaking into buildings by blasting through walls.
The gang operated with very little trouble for years. Ultimately, however, one of the crew turned police informant to stay out of jail. He blew the whistle and Cullotta and his Hole in the Wall Gang were arrested in the middle of burglarizing Bertha’s, a large Las Vegas jewelry store.
The size and sophistication of the Cullotta crew surprised many in Las Vegas, especially when it was revealed that Cullotta had access to all the local police and FBI radio frequencies, not to mention a former Las Vegas police sergeant stationed outside Bertha’s as a lookout. While sitting in jail, Cullotta concluded that he’d been set up by Spilotro to take a hard fall. After much agonizing, he decided to roll and testify against his former partners and friends.
By the time I contacted the Justice Department, Cullotta had already testified and served his time. He was now a free man. The only way for me to personally contact him was through Dennis Arnoldy, the FBI agent who had debriefed Cullotta in safe houses and federal prisons.
Arnoldy said he couldn’t guarantee anything. Cullotta was in the Federal Witness Program living “somewhere in America.” But Arnoldy did say he’d somehow get Cullotta my number.
When Cullotta called the next day, I was surprised to find that he wasn’t hiding somewhere in America. In fact, he was in Las Vegas, the city where some of the most dangerous men in the state had already tried to kill him. He suggested that we meet in the morning in the parking lot of a Las Vegas shopping mall not far from the Strip.
The next morning I was there. No Cullotta. I checked my watch. He was five minutes late. Then, suddenly, Cullotta appeared. He just popped up. I was startled. I didn’t see him coming until he was right on top of me. He stood close. He was solidly built and wore a small narrow-brimmed canvas rain hat. I was even more surprised when I realized he was alone. No federal marshals or FBI agents were watching his back. He leaned against a car fender and listened to my pitch about the book. He agreed to meet again, but mostly he said he wanted to make sure I got it right, especially the part about why he decided to testify against his former pals.
Cullotta turned out to be an invaluable resource. His memory was phenomenal. He’s the kind of person who remembers his license-plate numbers from decades ago, and this is a man who usually owned three or four cars at once. Equally important to me, Cullotta had been either a participant in or an observer of most of the book’s important events. He either set up or committed robberies and murders. He was often the third person in the room during domestic disputes between Spilotro, Rosenthal, and Rosenthal’s wife, with whom Spilotro was having an affair. In fact, Spilotro’s fear that Cullotta would report back to the bosses in Chicago, who’d forbidden the affair, caused Spilotro to try and kill Cullotta. The failed murder attempt turned Cullotta into a government witness.
One of a non-fiction writer’s major concerns is knowing if the people you’re interviewing are telling the truth. That problem becomes even more acute when dealing with cops, lawyers, and crooks, to whom lying is not unknown.
In Cullotta’s case, however, he’d already been debriefed by the FBI and testified under oath in court about everything we were discussing, which could all be checked in the public record or in the volumes of FBI summaries. I felt confident that Cullotta was telling the truth, because his extraordinary immunity deal depended upon it. Cullotta’s freedom would end the minute he was caught in a lie and he’d immediately be sent to prison, where he was bound to get killed. Therefore, I was in the unique position of interviewing someone whose life literally depended upon his telling the truth.
Martin Scorsese, the director with whom I wrote the script for
Casino
, realized Cullotta’s value immediately and hired him as a technical advisor during the production of the film, which was shot on location in Las Vegas.
Before he could start working on the film, however, Universal Pictures insisted that Cullotta hire a bodyguard. They would pay for the extra protection, but they insisted he have security around the clock.
Cullotta hired an attractive young security guard he knew who had a serious crush on him. He also got her to carry two guns. As a convicted felon, he couldn’t legally carry a gun. There was no law, however, that said someone couldn’t carry a gun for him.
Cullotta had either been involved in most of the mayhem depicted in the film—his character as Joe Pesci’s right-hand man was played by Frank Vincent—or knew the participants well enough to help the actors and director with the kinds of details necessary to capture the characters and mood.
During the film, the Joe Pesci character decides to kill one of the gang’s associates who had become an informant. Pesci sends a hit man to do the job, but chaos erupts and the hit man winds up chasing the informant all around his Las Vegas house, in and out of rooms, until he finally kills him near the swimming pool and dumps the body into the water.
Before shooting the scene, Scorsese asked Cullotta how such a bizarre murder might have happened. Cullotta explained that Jerry Lisner, the victim, had failed to go down after he’d been shot because, “I didn’t have a silencer at the time and I had to use ‘halfloads,’ bullets where you take out some of the powder to lessen the noise.
“Lisner and I are coming out of the den and I pull the stick out and pop him two times in the back of the head. He turns around and looks at me. ‘What are you doing?’ he asks me. He takes off through the kitchen toward the garage. I actually look at the gun, like, ‘What the fuck have I got? Blanks in there?’ So I run after him and I empty the rest in his head. It’s like an explosion going off every time.
“But he doesn’t go down. The fuck starts running. It’s like a comedy of errors. I’m chasing him around the house and I’ve emptied the thing in his head. I’m thinking, what am I gonna do with this guy? I grab an electric cord from the water cooler and wrap it around his neck. It breaks.
“Finally I catch him in the garage and he hits the garage door button, but I hit him before it goes down and it’s like he just deflates.
“There was blood all over the place. My worry was that I’d leave a print in blood somewhere on his body or clothes. I hadn’t worn any gloves, because Lisner wasn’t dumb. He wouldn’t have let me in the door if he saw me wearing gloves. Because of the danger of my prints being on his body or clothes, I dragged him to the pool and slid him, legs first, into the water. He went in straight, like a board. It was like he was swimming.”
Scorsese dismissed the actors. He had Cullotta recreate the Lisner murder scene on film. The man you see in the film, chasing the victim around the house, emptying bullets into his head, and finally tossing him in the pool, is the real Frank Cullotta, the same man who did the actual murder for which he was given immunity. I cannot think of another film in which the killing being depicted on screen is reenacted by the man who committed the original murder.
It was much later, after the movie was done, that most of the people working on the film realized what had happened that day. But by then Cullotta was writing his own book and living somewhere in America.
During the 1970s and into the mid-1980s, the dominant organized-crime family operating in Las Vegas hailed from Chicago. Known as the Outfit, they removed large amounts of money from the Sin City casinos they controlled before it was ever recorded as revenue. This particular form of theft was referred to as the “skim.” They also received income from street crime rackets such as burglary, robbery, and arson. This era was dramatized in the 1995 movie
Casino
.