By Beachwood Books
In advance of a two-part authorized excerpt – starting Wednesday – about the mob murders of fellow Outfit men Tony and Michael Spilotro from Tribune reporter Jeff Coen’s Family Secrets: The Case That Crippled The Chicago Mob, we’ve taken a look through a host of other books in the mob pantheon to see what others had to say about how the Spilotros got to where they did – before they got to be too much for Outfit elders to take.
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Casino/Nicholas Pileggi:
Tony “the Ant” Spilotro grew up in a two-story wooden gray bungalow in an Italian neighborhood just a few blocks from Lefty [Rosenthal’s] home. Tony and his five brothers – Vincent, Victor, Patrick, Johnny, and Michael – slept in one room in three sets of bunk beds.
Tony’s father, Patsy, owned Patsy’s Restaurant at the corner of Grand and Ogden Avenues. It was a small place famous for homemade meatballs that attracted customers from all over town, including Outfit guys like Tony Accardo, Paul “the Waiter” Ricca, Sam Giancana, Gussie Alex, and Jackie Cerone. Patsy’s parking lot was often used for mob meetings.
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Tony said he never saw anybody as tough as Billy McCarthy.
“Finally, Tony said he dragged Billy over to a workbench and put his head in a vise and he started screwing it tighter and tighter,” [said Frank Cullotta.]
“He said while Phil [Alderisio] and Chuckie [Nicoletti] watched, he kept tightening the vise until Billy’s head began to squish together and one of his eyes popped out. Tony said that’s when Billy gave up Jimmy Miraglia’s name.
“Tony really sounded like he was very proud of what he accomplished that night. It seems as thought it was the first time he had ever killed anyone. It was like he made his bones. That’s the way it appeared to me at the time. Like he was recognized now that he participated in a mob hit. I remember he was really impressed with Chuckie Nicoletti.
“‘Boy this is a heartless guy,’ Tony said about Chuckie. ‘This guy was eating pasta when Billy’s eye popped out.'”
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Cullotta: The Life of a Chicago Criminal, Las Vegas Mobster, and Government Witness/Dennis Griffin and Frank Cullotta:
So, by the early 1960s, Tony Spilotro – only in his mid-20s and recently married to Milwaukee-born Nancy Stuart – had risen from school bully to a made man in the powerful Chicago Outfit. His reputation as a ruthless enforcer was in place and some of his best years were still ahead.
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Fortune magazine article as excerpted by Bill Roemer in Accardo: The Genuine Godfather:
Beginning in 1970 (it was actually 1971), strongman Anthony Spilotro was stationed in Las Vegas to monitor casino skimming and to see that the money flowed smoothly back to his bosses in Chicago. Known as “The Ant” because of his squat, close-to-the-ground appearance, he did not keep an appropriate low business profile, operating out of a Las Vegas hamburger joint called The Food Factory.
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Spilotro: The Chicago Mob’s Man Over Las Vegas/Bill Roemer:
When Tony arrived in Las Vegas to take up his duties for the Chicago mob, he settled in at Circus-Circus, the nice casino located midway on the Strip, set back a little toward I-15. Circus-Circus, in 1971, was the one hotel catering to families, a trend which today is much more pronounced.
Tony set up his operation in the gift shop at Circus-Circus. He bought the concession for $70,000 and operated there under the name of Anthony Stuart, Stuart being his wife Nancy’s maiden name.
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When Corruption Was King/Robert Cooley:
In Vegas, Tony, Herbie [Blitzstein] and I would hang out at Jubilation, a disco that was like Faces, the club on Rush Street. For dinner, we would go to Villa D’Est, a fancy restaurant owned by a Joey Pignatelli, another Chicago South Side guy. I was there with Tony one night when he met up with Frank Sinatra.
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Accardo/Roemer:
[Spilotro] shaped things up by killing five people as soon as he arrived.
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Cullotta/Griffin & Cullotta:
In Tony’s first three years in Vegas, more gangland-style murders were committed there than in the previous 25 years combined.
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Roemer: Man Against the Mob/Roemer:
[A] tavern called RagTime, east of Harlem Avenue on Roosevelt Road, was a hangout for Tony Spilotro when he was in town reporting on the mob on his Las Vegas activity.
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Cullotta:
He moved his operations from Circus Circus to the Dunes, then the Las Vegas Country Club, and finally another jewelry store, the Gold Rush.
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All the stress Tony was under may have been slowly driving him crazy, but in spite of that he continued to play out the role in public. The women still flocked to him and when they went out to dinner, an entourage of groupies, wiseguy wannabes, and sometimes entertainment celebrities followed along.
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Casino:
“We were in the kitchen,” [Murray] Ehrenberg said. “Nancy [Spilotro] went home. Geri [Rosenthal] started washing dishes. Like nothing was wrong. She was just standing there. She’d settled down. You know. Frank and I were talking and he looks up at her. She had just turned around, as if she’s looking for cigarettes, and he says, ‘What?’
“And out of the clear blue sky, she said, ‘I just fucked Tony Spilotro.’ That’s’s exactly what she said. I was there. In the house. I heard it. She said, ‘I just fucked Tony Spilotro.'”
. . .
There were stories about Rosenthal and Spilotro in the Chicago newspapers . . .
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On January 27, 1983, Richard Daley, state’s attorney for Cook County, Illinois, and Chicago mayoral candidate, held a press conference. He announced publicly that Tony Spilotro had been indicted for the 1962 torture killings of James Miraglia and William McCarthy, the so-called M&M murders . . . Following the press conference, Spilotro was arrested in Las Vegas and jailed without bail to await extradition to Illinois.
Oscar Goodman learned of Tony’s troubles when he returned to Vegas after winning a major but unrelated case in Florida . . .
Editor’s Note: Goodman is now the mayor of Las Vegas.
He rushed from the airport to his office, then over to the jail to see his client. A few hours later, the accused murderer was released on bail. Goodman’s ability to spring a client facing extradition on such serious charges raised some eyebrows in law-enforcement and legal circles.
Preparing for the trial, Goodman conferred regularly with Herb Barsy, an attorney who had long represented Spilotro in Chicago. Barsy had the reputation of knowing how to work the system and being able to get things done.
When Judge Thomas J. Maloney was assigned to hear the case, Barsy and Spilotro were so impressed that they conviced Goodman to forego a jury trial in favor of letting Maloney decide Tony’s guilt or innocence . . .
In the end, Maloney ruled that the prosecution hadn’t proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt.
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Cullotta:
In spite of being almost continuously under investigation and a suspect in some 25 murders and countless other felonies, Tony conducted his affairs in Las Vegas for more than a decade without being convicted of even a minor offense. Part of the reason for that impressive run could be his skills as a criminal; another likely factor was that his reputation and willingness to use violence made witnesses against him scarce.
Posted on April 28, 2009