Friday, April 29, 2005 | 5:33 a.m.
WEEKEND EDITION
April 30 - May 1, 2005
Editor's note: As a reporter for the Las Vegas Sun in the 1970s and 1980s, Jeff German, now a Sun columnist, covered the colorful era when Tony "The Ant" Spilotro ran street rackets here for the Chicago mob. Last week top Chicago crime figures were indicted on federal racketeering charges in 18 old slayings, including those of Spilotro and his brother, Michael, in 1986.
Anyone who ran into Tony Spilotro during his days as the Chicago mob's overseer in Las Vegas could tell by looking at him that he wasn't someone to cross.
"He had those icy eyes," a former FBI agent who tracked Spilotro daily in the 1970s and 1980s once told me. "I could see he had the potential to become violent if he had to be."
Law enforcement authorities believe Spilotro may have killed as many as two dozen people during his rise to prominence within the Chicago mob, one of the most violent crime families in the nation.
Spilotro wasn't a big man. He was only 5-foot-5. But he was stocky and strong and, most importantly, he had a way of making it clear that he was backed by the muscle of the feared Chicago Mafia. He surrounded himself with an assortment of wise guys who had reputations on the street for violence.
Whenever he was in public, the late Herbie Blitzstein, his tall, burly friend from the South Side of Chicago, was usually at his side. Blitzstein, nicknamed "Fat Herbie" by Mafia watchers because of his girth, loved to play the role of the tough guy for Spilotro.
Spilotro, meanwhile, had picked up his own colorful nicknames during his life of crime in Chicago and Las Vegas.
Lawmen and journalists occasionally would refer to him as "Tough Tony" or "Little Tony." And FBI wiretaps overheard his underworld associates calling him "the Little Guy."
But none of those nicknames had the appeal to the media of "Tony the Ant" -- a phrase that a former Chicago FBI agent claimed to have coined to make fun of Spilotro's diminutive stature.
That stuck to Spilotro like glue after he arrived in Las Vegas in the early 1970s to take control of street rackets for the Chicago mob.
Spilotro hated being called "the Ant."
It simply didn't enhance his standing on the streets as a tough-talking, cold-blooded killer looking to make it to the top of the Chicago crime family.
In the last decade of his life, which ended in June 1986 when he was brutally murdered, allegedly by his own crime family members, Spilotro had earned an Al Capone-like reputation in Las Vegas, then only a town of around 500,000 people. He had become "Public Enemy No. 1."
Spilotro was really only a "soldier" in the Chicago family but, because his money-making territory here was so rich and dynamic, his status within the underworld was elevated.
So was the scrutiny he received from federal and local law enforcement authorities. The intense pressure regularly landed Spilotro on the front page of newspapers and the evening news.
Reporters in those days could write about the many murders linked to Spilotro, his extensive loan-sharking activities, his efforts to corrupt local police officers and his role in helping the mob skim millions of dollars from casinos. But rarely would they receive a complaint from Spilotro.
When you referred to him as "the Ant," however, the odds were that eventually you would hear about it. This could happen anywhere you encountered Spilotro -- from the steps of the courthouse to one of his favorite late-night watering holes.
Sometimes Spilotro would stare at you with those menacing eyes and vent his anger. And then there were times when he would beg like a puppy dog to get you to drop "the Ant" from your descriptive repertoire.
You never knew which Spilotro you were going to run into.
He maintained two separate personas, and sometimes even he got confused.
There was the real Spilotro -- the volatile, iron-fisted rackets boss who wouldn't think twice about using a baseball bat to break the knees of a poor sap who owed him money. This was the Spilotro who authorities say once killed a man in Chicago by squeezing his head in a metal vise.
Then there was the polite, civic-minded Spilotro -- the one his lawyer and mouthpiece, now-Mayor Oscar Goodman, helped create to improve his public image during his all-out legal war with the government.
This was the charming family man who went to church, contributed to charities and watched his son play little league.
It was the man who once took up a collection for a group of peace-loving nuns who had passed through town on a singing tour.
And it was the man Goodman was thinking about when he disingenuously told reporters back in 1980 that he'd rather have Spilotro in the company of the women in his life than the "average FBI agent."
"We posted that on our bulletin board," another former agent who investigated Spilotro told me. "It gave us more motivation."
But Spilotro didn't make it easy for FBI agents to nail him.
Goodman was at his beck and call to fight agents every step of the way. He would flood the court with motions seeking to suppress evidence agents had collected, frequently alleging misconduct on their part. And he was always available to attack the government in the media.
"It was liked a real war out there," said Dennis Arnoldy, a former FBI agent who made a racketeering case against Spilotro. "Every day there was a new battle."
Spilotro lived with his wife, Nancy, and son, Vincent, in a modest home in southeast Las Vegas, where he was said to be generous with his neighbors around Christmas time.
But most of his time was spent away from his family playing the role of the well-connected mobster.
He frequently could be seen dining out at fancy restaurants, often with beautiful women at his side. One of his favorite places was the old Villa d'Este on Convention Center Drive, which years later was renamed Piero's by its new owner.
Spilotro also liked hanging out at the top nightclubs of the era, such as Jubilation on Harmon Avenue near the Strip, and Botany's on Flamingo Road south of Maryland Parkway.
He was treated like a VIP on the nightclub scene, always seated at the house's best table, covered with expensive bottles of champagne. And he was always in the presence of an entourage, which sometimes included celebrities of the day.
One of Spilotro's biggest passions was sports betting. He loved placing large wagers with illegal bookies and sports books not affiliated with casinos. An IRS sting once found that Spilotro was betting more than $20,000 a week with one illegal bookie.
For several years, Spilotro ran his rackets empire from a small jewelry store, the Gold Rush, just west of the Strip on Sahara Avenue. At first glance, it looked like any family retail business. The store was in a small strip mall next to the Golden Steer, one of the town's most popular restaurants and tourist sites in those days.
Officially, the Gold Rush was run by his brother, John. But there was a hidden side to this unassuming business -- the side that fenced stolen jewelry.
FBI agents raided the Gold Rush in 1979 looking for evidence of the fencing operation. A couple of years later, with the heat on the business, Spilotro closed the Gold Rush and moved his operations.
He started spending more time at the Food Factory, a hamburger joint run by his brother on Twain Avenue near Paradise Road.
And, of course, there were the bars he frequented.
Spilotro spent hours holding court in several dimly lit taverns in the UNLV area not far from his home. Those sessions usually lasted into the early morning hours when lawmen were scarce.
This was out of necessity, not choice.
In 1978 the Nevada Gaming Commission had placed Spilotro's name on its list of "undesirables" barred from gambling establishments. That meant that the man who, among other things, was overseeing casino skimming operations for the mob, couldn't set foot in a casino. He had to run things from afar.
One of his bases of operations was "My Place," a cozy, elegant bar on the southeast corner of Flamingo Road and Maryland Parkway. My Place was conveniently located next door to the Upper Crust Pizzeria, owned by Spilotro's childhood friend, Frank Cullotta.
Spilotro had brought Cullotta to Las Vegas from Chicago in the late 1970s to serve as a trusted lieutenant on the streets. Cullotta pulled off armed robberies and led a burglary ring, known as the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. He also killed for Spilotro.
Much of the jewelry Cullotta and his associates obtained in burglaries ended up going straight to the Gold Rush during the store's heyday, where it would be fenced. Spilotro also had fencing operations in other cities, such as Chicago and Arizona.
In a 1995 Sun interview, Cullotta said: "He (Spilotro) wanted me to be his back out here, his right-arm man. He had a lot of heat in the casinos. He couldn't go in and out of them like he wanted."
But Cullotta's days of covering for Spilotro didn't last long.
By 1980 federal and local law enforcement authorities had stepped up the pressure on Spilotro's organization. An entire task force of a dozen FBI agents was assigned full-time to the investigation here. They worked closely with Metro Police intelligence detectives who, along with agents, kept track of Spilotro's every move 24 hours a day.
Sometimes agents would stay in Spilotro's sight just to let him know that they were watching him. They even had a small plane in their surveillance arsenal that would fly over the city with the latest monitoring equipment.
The surveillance was so intense that Spilotro stopped driving to avoid being pulled over by the cops on traffic violations.
In those days authorities had planted bugs in every imaginable place they could think of to gather evidence against Spilotro. Cullotta once found a camera the FBI had installed in the ceiling of the Upper Crust.
During the course of the intense surveillance, agents discovered that Spilotro was carrying on a secret romance with Geri Rosenthal -- the beautiful wife of Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal, the man the Chicago mob had sent to Las Vegas to help Spilotro direct the skim at the Stardust and Fremont hotels.
Once the affair was made public, it created a major rift between Spilotro and Rosenthal, which fueled still more tension within Spilotro's organization here. Rosenthal later survived a car-bombing that authorities suspected was ordered by Spilotro.
But what turned the tide for lawmen in their onslaught against Spilotro was the arrest of Cullotta and several other members of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang in July 1981, as they were breaking into the exclusive Bertha's gifts on East Sahara Avenue.
"Everybody started going to pieces after that," Cullotta later told me. "Everybody was upset at everybody else."
Then, in the spring of 1982, Cullotta, fearing Spilotro wanted him dead, telephoned the FBI and sought to cooperate under federal protection.
And that's what he did over the next four years, helping the FBI bring several racketeering indictments against Spilotro. One indictment contained a murder charge stemming from the slaying of Jerry Lisner, a man Spilotro suspected of being an informant. Cullotta testified that he shot Lisner to death at Spilotro's request.
Thanks to Cullotta's cooperation, Spilotro was forced to spend more time fighting a host of charges in court. He also was indicted in Kansas City with top Midwest mob leaders on charges of skimming money from the Stardust and Fremont.
His rackets empire was falling apart and causing legal headaches for his bosses in Chicago. They summoned him to the Windy City in June 1986.
Not long after that, Spilotro's wife reported him missing.
Then, on June 16, the badly beaten bodies of Spilotro and another brother, Michael, were discovered buried in an Indiana cornfield about 70 miles from Chicago.
Spilotro's life in the mob had ended the same way it began -- in violence.
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