The Battle for Las Vegas: The Law vs. The Mob

by Dennis Griffin

  In spite of his undesired prowess at the table, Michaels and his colleagues were able to drop enough money to accomplish what they wanted to do. Now that they knew their plan would work, the next step was to choose a time when the courier would be picked up and nabbed with the proof of the skim in his possession.

  The Cookie Caper

  In order to conduct electronic surveillance and searches and to make arrests, a judge had to approve and sign warrants. Some of the lawmen involved suspected that a certain judge might not be keeping the FBI’s operations a secret. They found it hard to believe, for example, that after bugging a table in a Stardust restaurant where the casino manager and assistant manager ate their meals every day, the only things the men seemed to talk about were golf and women. But the government was required to follow the law and obtain the appropriate warrants and authorizations regardless of their suspicions.

  “Harry,” a bail bondsman who came to Las Vegas in 1958, thinks he knows another method of how the bad guys found out about whose phones were being tapped. “I had a lot of juice with the phone company then. I know for a fact that a phone-company employee regularly provided a list of numbers that were going to be tapped. I know because I received a copy of those lists myself. There were a lot of people very glad to get that kind of information.”

  In addition to the phone-company employee, Harry alleges there was an even better source for leaks. “There was a concern at the phone company that a phone might be tapped without having full legal authorization. So the company hired a lawyer to review all the paperwork for each tap. It turns out that the lawyer they retained worked out of Oscar Goodman’s office. Did you ever hear of anything so outrageous?”

  Whether leaks resulted as Harry contends, were the work of an unscrupulous judge, or a combination of both, the bottom line is that the targets frequently knew ahead of time what the lawmen were planning.

  Stan Hunterton, the former Strike Force attorney, was involved in preparing and submitting warrant applications to the court and helping plan some of the law-enforcement activities, including when arrest warrants would be served.

  “Joseph Talerico was always the courier for the skim money from the Argent casinos,” Hunterton recalled. “The routine was for him to come to Vegas and get the money. His contact here was Phil Ponto. This Ponto was what we called a sleeper. That’s someone with no criminal record, but Ponto was actually a ‘made man’ out of Chicago. One of the agents thought he recognized Ponto’s name from a book written by mobster-turned-informant Jimmy Fratiano. It turned out the agent was right, only in the book the name had been misspelled as Ponti.

  “On January 3, 1982, not long after the indictments in the Tropicana case, the FBI was ready to arrest Talerico and Ponto when they exchanged the skim money. The day started off with a variation on the part of Ponto; he was carrying a box instead of a paper bag. I guess everybody assumed they’d decided to put the money in a box that day and didn’t think too much of it. But when the arrests were made, there was no money. The box contained cookies and wine.

  “It was obvious that the bad guys had become aware of what was coming down. They had set us up, no doubt about it. I can smile about it all these years later, but I can assure you there was nothing funny about it at the time. An awful lot of time and effort had been spent getting to that point, and then it all went down the toilet. Needless to say, we were the butt of a lot of jokes in what became known as the cookie caper.”

  Hunterton hauled Talerico and Ponto before a grand jury in 1983. Their first effort to avoid talking was to exercise their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. Hunterton countered that by granting both men immunity. Even with no legal reason to remain silent, the pair still refused to testify. They were each sent to jail for contempt, but their lips remained sealed. They never did answer the government’s questions.

  Strawman case agent Lynn Ferrin remembers the skimming investigations very well. “They were exciting times,” he said.

  “When we were watching Ponto and Talerico, we made high-quality films of their meetings. On one occasion we brought in three lip readers to try to figure out what their conversations had been. One of the experts came very close to what we believed had been said; we would have loved to be able to use his interpretation in an affidavit. But the other two had differing opinions. With that lack of agreement, we ended up disregarding all of their versions. I even rented an apartment next to Ponto’s residence for a while during the surveillance. I spoke with him occasionally. He was very quiet ... a real sleeper.”

  Regarding the cookie caper, “It was a real bad day for us and me personally. If I’d been living in feudal Japan I’d have been required to fall on my sword. We’d been doing these Sunday surveillances on those guys for several months and everything had always gone like clockwork. But on that day the crooks were so confident and comfortable; we’d never seen anything like that before. We didn’t know for sure who, how, or why, but someone had obviously ratted us out to the mob. We were highly confident that the leak wasn’t from any of our people. Many of us believed that the federal judge who signed the order authorizing the electronic surveillance at the Stardust was the culprit. That was only speculation, but after that it seemed like the bad guys were aware of what we were doing. We had to call Washington and tell them what happened and that we couldn’t say for certain why it had gone wrong.

  “Prior to that day I had been in favor of simply stopping Ponto one of those mornings and grabbing the bag from him. He certainly couldn’t have complained to the police and it would have given us the probable cause we were looking for. But headquarters and DOJ [Department of Justice] were afraid something would go wrong and never approved the snatch. If they had, it would have caused a lot of ripples in the various crime families. They may have even taken action against some of their own if they suspected them of being involved in stealing the skim.”

  Another incident that Ferrin described as “sensitive” involved aerial surveillance. “Our plane developed some problems and was forced to land on the golf course at the Las Vegas Country Club. It turned out to not be a very discreet surveillance.” This scene was depicted in the movie Casino.

  But other covert operations went very well. “Our guys did a tremendous job. Agents posing as maintenance men bugged a table in a restaurant at the Stardust in front of a room full of guests and casino employees. It was a good placement.”

  After the cookie caper, the FBI changed tactics from covert to overt and went after the Stardust’s new owners, the Trans Sterling Corporation, openly. “We had enough information to start going over their records,” Ferrin said. “The Carl Thomas method of the skim primarily involved stealing from the count room. We found that another method of theft was also going on at the Stardust. This one involved the cashier’s cage.

  “We looked at thousands of fill slips from the Stardust for the years that we knew the skim was going on. The fill slips were used when chips were removed from the cage to replenish the supplies at the gaming tables when they ran low on chips. The slips were required to have the signatures of four different casino employees. The money involved was about $20,000 per slip, and was presumed to reflect [casino] losses at the tables. We eventually discovered a pattern of forged signatures on the fill slips. That discovery led to the next step. We took handwriting samples from over two hundred Stardust employees and sent them to the FBI lab in Washington. Analysis revealed that the casino manager, Lou Salerno, was responsible for most of the forgeries.

  “We got some good convictions in this phase. More important, though, through our investigation we were able to help the Nevada Gaming Control Board seize the Stardust. They revoked the licenses of the Trans Sterling people and fined them $1 million. The Stardust was eventually purchased by the Boyd Group, ending over a decade of mob control.”

  That wasn’t the entire story for Lynn Ferrin, though. “The cage manager was a guy named Larry Carpenter. During the course of the investigation, he came
to hate my guts. We lived in the same neighborhood and some mornings I’d come out to go to work and find that someone had spit all over my car. I’d have to clean the car off before heading for the office. I suspected that Carpenter was responsible.

  “Carpenter was gay and had full-blown AIDS. I thought maybe he was trying to infect me by having me come in contact with his body fluid and absorb it through my skin. Anyway, I stayed up all night to see if I could find out who was sliming my car. Around 5 a.m. I caught Carpenter coming around the corner on his bike. I could tell by the look on his face that he was the one. It never happened again after that morning. Carpenter later committed suicide, hanging himself when he went to jail.”

  But there was more. “Lou DiMartini was a floorman at the Stardust. He claimed that during the investigation I caused him to suffer irreparable harm by asking his employer questions about him. He filed a $1 million civil suit against the government and me individually. It took seven years and the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court where it was decided in the government’s and my favor.”

  How does Ferrin sum up the results of the Strawman investigations?

  “I think that our investigation basically broke the back of the mob’s efforts to control the casinos in Las Vegas.”

  That last statement seems to say it all.

  13

  Time Running Out

  As his cohorts in the Midwest went to prison or died, Tony Spilotro remained alive and free. But the sand in the hourglass was beginning to run out for him. Tony and Oscar Goodman had won a mistrial in the first Hole in the Wall Gang trial when two jurors were heard discussing something to do with money during a break outside the courtroom. Although this technicality gave the Ant a temporary reprieve, it did nothing to improve his chances for acquittal when the case was finally heard. A new trial was scheduled to begin on June 16, 1986.

  The evidence against the Bertha’s burglars was overwhelming. Spilotro’s strongest argument would be that he wasn’t present at the scene, leaving it up to turncoats Frank Cullotta and Sal Romano to implicate him in the burglary. Perhaps Goodman would be able to come up with another miracle and get his client off one more time. The odds were against it, though.

  Two other cases were hanging over Spilotro’s head as well. He still had to face the Argent charges and, based on the verdicts against the other defendants, it didn’t look good for him. And the Lisner murder of 1979 had yet to be resolved.

  As though Tony didn’t have enough problems, he also came under investigation for allegedly attempting to bribe a caterer into poisoning members of a sitting grand jury. Nothing resulted from the investigation and it didn’t get a lot of ink. But it did serve to enhance Tony’s reputation as a dangerous killer and that’s not the image a defendant wants in the minds of potential jurors.

  Tony and the Media—Ned Day

  In addition to law-enforcement’s efforts to get the best of Spilotro through the legal system, those familiar with the situation believe that the intense media coverage Tony received was instrumental in his eventual downfall.

  Bob Stoldal, News Director at KLAS-TV, believes his station was the leader among the electronic media in their Spilotro reporting. “In the early days we had three reporters who did the primary reporting on Spilotro. They were Ned Day, Gwen Castaldi, and George Knapp. They were very aggressive in gathering and reporting information.”

  Ned Day in particular proved to have the ability to get under Tony’s skin. Day moved to Las Vegas from Milwaukee in 1976 and took a job as a reporter with The Valley Times newspaper. Bob Stoldal subsequently hired him at KLAS. While there, Day moonlighted as a columnist for the Review-Journal.

  “Ned developed the reputation of being a man of his word. If you shook Ned’s hand on something, you had a deal. In that regard, he was respected by politicians, entertainers, and organized-crime figures alike,” Stoldal said. “In Tony’s case, when Ned reported on him either on the air or in print, he invariably referred to him as ‘the Ant.’ Ned had an idea Tony wasn’t particularly pleased about that, but he made it a point to use the term regularly. Just in case Tony got too upset, when we went to a mob bar for a drink, we’d order unopened bottles of beer and glasses. We carried our own bottle opener with us to be on the safe side.”

  Former Sheriff John McCarthy shares Stoldal’s opinion of Ned Day as a straight shooter. “I had a great deal of respect for Ned. On occasion he would strip some bark off me, but for some reason I wasn’t offended. Ned was always professional and had a great sense of humor.”

  All the pressure was having an impact on Tony emotionally and physically. He was spending an increasing number of mornings staying in bed with the covers pulled up over his head. And the news media kept the attention on him. The persistent Ned Day had a number of reliable FBI and Metro sources and not only generated news about the gangster, but he also made fun of him at times. The reporter’s articles didn’t always sit well with Tony.

  On the serious side, Day wrote a biting piece in the Review-Journal after Spilotro was acquitted of the M&M murders, had evidence in other cases thrown out on technicalities, and delayed other trials on procedural issues. The headline was, “How Can Spilotro, Incredibly, Still Walk the Streets?” That column read in part:

  “Take, for example, the case of Tony Spilotro, the stubby kahuna of the Las Vegas streets. He still struts around town, despite a decade of government charges that he commands a cutthroat gang of burglars, arsonists, extortionists, leg breakers, and other career terrorists.

  “If things go according to form, it’ll be 1990 or beyond when his second case goes to trial.

  “But what about the rights of society, the rights of law-abiding citizens who want justice? How many burglaries, thefts and extortion schemes can be carried out by a group of career criminals in the next eight years? How many victims will there be?”

  Day’s humor was evident in another Review-Journal piece in March 1986. On that occasion he lamented that Spilotro might finally end up in prison. “Tough Tony Behind Bars: A Columnist’s Disaster,” read the tongue-in-cheek headline. In the column, Day pleaded with Oscar Goodman to keep the gangster free so that his own journalistic career could continue to prosper. Following are excerpts from that article:

  “So, lawyer Goodman, I made your important client my project. I learned everything I could about him. I wrote a lot about him. I wrote bad things.

  “In retrospect, I may have gone too far—like the time I dubbed him the ‘Fireplug Who Walks Like a Man.’

  “The point is that thanks to Mr. Spilotro’s presence in Las Vegas, my career as a newsman has been okay.

  “I’m pleading with you. Please do everything you can for Mr. Spilotro. My career may be riding on it.”

  According to John L. Smith’s Of Rats and Men, that particular Ned Day column caused Spilotro to lose his cool. When the reporter encountered Tony in a corridor at the courthouse, the irate gangster issued him a not very veiled threat. Smith cited a paragraph about the encounter that appeared in Day’s column a few days later.

  “‘I heard you want to be famous,’ Spilotro said, adopting a cold, steady stare that made me think being famous was not a good thing. ‘I know how to make you more famous than you ever thought about. You know I know how.’”

  Tony and the Media—Gwen Castaldi

  Gwen Castaldi arrived in Las Vegas from Cleveland in 1974. Based on her experience as a reporter in Ohio, she quickly landed a similar position with KBMI News & Information Radio. She became News Director for KNEWS Radio in 1977. Bob Stoldal hired her at KLAS-TV later that same year. In 2004, she recalled her days as a reporter covering the mob in Las Vegas.

  “Between 1974 and 1983 we saw probably the highest concentration of investigations, search warrants, affidavits, wiretaps, court appearances, Black Book hearings, and more on the mob-crackdown front. It was one occurrence after another ... major and minor ... a massive river of events and information flowing. There were super surveillances, snit
ches, backroom doings, dirty deals, raids, secret skims, and hidden ownerships. There was a constant cast of gritty characters, mouthy attorneys, and determined local and federal law-enforcement officers.

  “It was a war of sorts, especially between U.S. Strike Force attorneys and the mob suspects and their lawyers. Political lives were impacted and caught up in the mess, too. No doubt some innocent lives got tangled up in those activities. And there’s also little doubt but that some very guilty people got away. Some truths and secrets none of us will ever know.

  “That period was an oddly fascinating, but tough and grueling time. It was probably the most weird complex chunk of time in organized-crime history. And it occurred on the open neutral turf of Las Vegas. I don’t believe there was any other city where mob activity played out this way. That decade or so was definitely a major turning point that changed the face of Las Vegas gaming. It ushered out one era and brought in another. It holds many intense memories for those of us who covered it for the media or were involved from any angle ... law enforcement, or their targets and attorneys.

  “Covering those seemingly never-ending stories consumed huge amounts of time from everyone’s lives. Those years were, perhaps, the most unique and intriguing, but also distasteful, in recent Nevada history to observe and experience.”

  Tony and the Media—Andrea Boggs

  Andrea Boggs worked as a news anchor and reporter for Las Vegas station KORK-TV (now KVBC) from 1975 to 1981. Covering the exploits of Tony Spilotro and Lefty Rosenthal were part of her duties. In February 2005 she shared her memories of those times.

  “I was a newswoman, and one of my goals was to get an on-camera interview with Tony Spilotro. That would have been a major coup for me. I was never able to do it, but it wasn’t for lack of effort,” she said.