The Battle for Las Vegas: The Law vs. The Mob (17 page)

10

1982

T
he first quarter of the year began relatively calmly for Sheriff McCarthy, but things were brewing under the surface that would make for an exciting final eight months. An election battle loomed, which promised to turn nasty. There was more controversy involving the Intelligence Bureau and Commander Clifford’s tactics. And there was a major breakthrough in the Spilotro investigation.

John Moran Announces

In early April, John Moran formally announced that he was tossing his hat into the ring to challenge his former boss for the county’s top law-enforcement position. First though, he had to win in a primary contest against several other candidates.

Moran was 60 years old at the time and had been a cop in Las Vegas since 1948. He’d served as Chief of Police in the old Las Vegas Police Department from 1972 until the merger to form Metro in July 1973. As part of the consolidation agreement, Moran was installed as undersheriff to Ralph Lamb in the new department. Like John McCarthy, Moran was also a former Marine.

The apparent animosity between the two men, assuming both won their respective primaries, was bound to make for an entertaining election season.

Turning Point

On April 20, a jury convicted Frank Cullotta on the possession of stolen property charges from the previous November and he was sent back to jail. But this time, he faced the likelihood of being adjudicated a habitual criminal, for which he’d receive a possible sentence of life in prison.

Although his present incarceration had nothing to do with Bertha’s, Cullotta knew he was in big trouble over that case. The prosecutors had him and his fellow burglars by the short hair and they were all looking at some serious prison time. But it was worse for Cullotta. He’d been in charge of the Bertha’s gig and had bungled it badly. Why hadn’t he detected Romano’s treachery in time? Why hadn’t the law’s surveillance of Bertha’s been spotted? Romano had turned rat; how reliable would Cullotta be if the law turned up the heat? Tony Spilotro and the Chicago bosses were no doubt asking those questions.

Metro also liked Cullotta for the 1979 Jerry Lisner murder and attempted to interview him about that killing while he was locked up. He’d rebuffed them so far, but he knew what they wanted to talk about. The cops didn’t give up easily and kept the pressure on. And then the FBI arrived on the scene with new information that proved to be pivotal in the effort to attain Cullotta’s cooperation.

Even though he was keeping Metro at bay, having been around crime and criminals for most of his life, Frank Cullotta could sense when all was not well in his world. The fact that Spilotro had violated mob protocol and wasn’t taking care of him and his family spoke volumes. It was a bad sign indeed.

According to Gene Smith, “Frank and his girl had no money coming in and Tony wasn’t looking out for him. Frank told me later that he placed calls to Tony from jail and Tony wouldn’t come to the phone. Nancy would tell him that Tony wasn’t home. Frank saw the writing on the wall.”

Cullotta Rolls

On the afternoon of Friday April 30, FBI agent Charlie Parsons had a job to do before beginning his weekend. He contacted Cullotta’s lawyer—who also represented other organized-crime figures—and asked to meet him and his client at the jail. Parsons left his office at around 5 p.m. and drove to the meeting. He explained to the two men that he had obtained credible information that the Chicago Outfit had authorized a contract to have Cullotta killed.

“We had a policy that if we were aware someone’s life was in danger, we had to inform that person, regardless of who he was or what we thought of him,” Parsons explained. “I told them that it had been a long week and that I would be brief. I made my announcement and left. The threat was real, but my matter-of-fact delivery was intentional, designed to get Cullotta thinking.”

The strategy worked. Shortly after arriving at his office Monday morning, Parsons received a phone call. The caller said he was the man Parsons had talked with Friday afternoon. He wanted to meet again, this time without his lawyer.

For Tony Spilotro, things were about to start unraveling.

Frank Cullotta wanted to live, and preferably as a free man. In return for that chance, he was willing to talk. In just a few days, he had a new lawyer—one without mob connections—and an agreement with local and federal prosecutors. He would admit to various charges and serve a federal prison sentence determined by a judge and based on a recommendation from prosecutors. Any local charges that were not part of the plea arrangement would be dropped. After doing his time—which turned out to be eight years—he, his wife, and their daughter would be placed in the Witness Protection Program. To get that deal, Cullotta had to cooperate fully and honestly with law enforcement and testify in court proceedings as necessary.

Less than two weeks after Charlie Parsons had informed him of the contract on his life, Frank Cullotta was out of jail and his family was under law-enforcement protection. Still technically in the custody of Clark County, he was housed in various hotel and motel rooms around Las Vegas. For security purposes, the longest stay in any one place was two nights. Debriefing, which began immediately, was a joint effort by Metro and the FBI from the start.

“We worked hand in hand with the FBI,” Gene Smith said. “Frank remained in our custody for about a month before we formally turned him over to the feds. Metro was responsible for his security during that stage and we knew the bad guys wanted him dead. I told my men, tongue in cheek, that if Cullotta got killed, there had better be a number of dead cops around his body to keep it company.”

In addition to hotel rooms, Cullotta spent some of his time as Metro’s guest in a well-equipped motorhome the cops had obtained during a drug bust. “Frank liked to fish and we took him out to Lake Mead for a couple of days so he could do some fishing. He really enjoyed that,” Gene Smith recalled.

The lawmen treated Cullotta with respect and a bond soon developed between them. “He called me Lieutenant Gene,” Smith said. “He came to think of himself as part of the team. I remember he’d say to me in his Chicago accent, ‘We’re gonna get these guys, ain’t we?’

During the Metro phase of his debriefing, Cullotta provided information that allowed the police to clear about 50 of their previously unsolved burglaries. He also admitted to the Lisner killing. But in order to get a murder conviction in Nevada, the law required that other evidence be presented to corroborate the suspect’s confession. In the Lisner case, no such hard evidence could be found.

“We tried,” Gene Smith said. “Frank took us out to where he said he threw away the murder weapon, but the gun wasn’t there. It had been almost three years, though, so that didn’t come as a big surprise.”

As the FBI case agent, Dennis Arnoldy worked the Cullotta debriefing with Metro from the start. He remained Cullotta’s primary interrogator after the feds took custody of the informant. “Once we took control of Frank, we got him out of Las Vegas. After that we only brought him back for legal proceedings. For Frank’s protection, we had to move him around regularly. I met with Frank hundreds of times during the following months in various locations across the country, including while he was in prison serving his sentence. Frank was treated courteously and our discussions were always civil in nature.”

Cullotta Outed

“We tried to keep Cullotta’s defection a secret,” former Strike Force lawyer Stan Hunterton said. “We were doing okay until Frank provided information that one of the other Hole in the Wall Gang burglars, Ernie Davino, had fallen out of favor with Spilotro and was going to be killed by one of his colleagues. The alleged hit man was in jail, but was trying to get out on bail pending an appeal of his conviction. We contested the motion, of course. During the bail hearing, Charlie Parsons testified and had to divulge that the source of our information was Frank Cullotta. A gasp went up from the spectators in the courtroom. The word was out, generating a buzz in the media.”

The hit man who Frank Cullotta said planned to kill Ernie Davino was fellow HITWG burglar Lawrence Neumann. Neumann was a very dangerous man. He’d been convicted of a triple murder in Chicago in 1956. In that incident he used a shotgun to kill a bartender, one Max Epstein. He then tried to kill the bartender’s brother Mickey, missed and blew away a female employee instead. When leaving the bar, Neumann bumped into a newspaper vendor named John Keller and killed him too. The local papers reported that the slayings were the result of a dispute in which Neumann thought he had been short-changed in the amount of $2. After the dispute he left the bar, returned with the shotgun, and opened fire. He was sentenced to 125 years in prison. For all practical purposes that should have been the end of Mr. Neumann’s criminal career. Incredibly, though, the killer was paroled in 1968, after serving only about 11 years of his prison term.

Frank Cullotta was also doing time in the same facility as Neumann and the two became acquainted. According to Cullotta, Neumann was a killer, plain and simple. He kept in top physical condition by exercising daily and “would dismantle you finger by finger.” In later years, Neumann intimidated even the ferocious Tony Spilotro himself. Cullotta recalls Spilotro saying of Neumann: “Jesus, don’t ever unleash that bastard on me.”

Stan Hunterton knew that as long as Neumann remained free, he posed a threat to the public in general and to potential witnesses in particular. He also knew that Frank Cullotta was providing information that would eventually put Neumann away for a long, long time. What Hunterton needed to do was get a conviction against Neumann that would keep him locked up until he could be prosecuted on the new charges. To accomplish that goal, he went after Neumann on the still-unresolved 1981 charge of an ex-felon in possession of a concealed weapon. The gangster was convicted and sentenced to two years, the maximum sentence allowed at that time. During the appeal process from this conviction, Neumann was trying to attain bail so he could kill Davino. Bail was denied, and Neumann was subsequently convicted of murder in 1983 and put away for good.

As more people became aware of the Cullotta situation, the concerns for his safety increased. “Frank was one of the best protected witnesses I ever dealt with,” Hunterton added. “He had a lot of information we were interested in. He was a valuable asset and was treated as such.”

Differing Opinions

Cullotta also had a lot of baggage. He was a career criminal and an admitted killer who had turned against his friends and associates to get a better deal for himself. How credible a witness would he be?

When Oscar Goodman first heard about Cullotta cooperating with the authorities, he dismissed the matter as a non-event. He told a reporter that he wasn’t concerned about Cullotta saying anything detrimental about Tony Spilotro, because there wasn’t anything detrimental to say. He added that Tony wished his old pal the best. Goodman further supported his client in a 1983
Los Angeles Times
article. He said Spilotro was a gentleman, and, “He’s never lied to me ... [but] I don’t ask him things I may not want to know the answer to. I’m a need-to-know lawyer.”

The attorney had a somewhat different take on Cullotta when he later summed up the informant’s effectiveness as a government witness. Goodman told author John L. Smith: “Although you’ll never get them to admit it, the government never got squat in the way of convictions for turning Frank Cullotta. He admitted murdering four people and his testimony was useless, because he refused to tell the truth. If he told the truth, he would have had to admit that Tony called him a little girl. Nobody in Tony’s world trusted Cullotta, because all their lives he’d always been a little girl. It’s why even people like Herbie Blitzstein and so many other people in Tony’s life all warned him about Cullotta.”

The lawmen who worked with Cullotta totally disagree with Goodman’s analysis. In their opinion, Cullotta was honest in his dealings with them and his information and testimony resulted in numerous convictions. “We didn’t just take his word for things. Everything he told us was corroborated independently. If it couldn’t be verified, we didn’t use it,” Dennis Arnoldy explained. “We learned early on that Frank didn’t answer every question by telling us what he thought we wanted to hear. If he didn’t know about a specific incident, he’d say he didn’t know. When he did tell us something, we’d double- or triple-check it. In that regard, Frank Cullotta was honest with us.”

One of the methods used to check Cullotta’s veracity was by matching police reports with his claims of criminal activity. For example, Cullotta supplied the date and location of a burglary and the items taken. Records were then searched for an incident report confirming Cullotta’s statement and the witness was actually driven to the location to positively identify the site. In a couple of cases involving residential entries, they found that the burglars had actually been under surveillance at the time of the crime. But the crooks had been so efficient that officers thought they were in the home on a social call.

All the local newspapers covered the Cullotta story. Reporters said that anonymous sources “close to the investigation” told them Cullotta was spilling the beans on everything from burglaries and robberies to murder. And his information wasn’t limited to Las Vegas. It went back to Chicago and elsewhere. Local mobsters and others from across the country had to be squirming, the journalists speculated.

However, Cullotta’s revelations weren’t solely about what he and other mobsters had done. He was also talking about those who had facilitated the burglaries and robberies by identifying lucrative targets and providing information about the victim’s movements. The valet parkers, desk clerks, dealers, maids, and, in some cases, the casino executives who had been complicit must have also been sweating.

Sheriff McCarthy compared Cullotta’s deciding to become a government witness with similar decisions by Jimmy Fratiano and Joseph Valichi. He said Cullotta was having a rippling effect on those in the Mafia all across the country. “It’s opened up a new facet to organized crime being involved and tied to a lot of crimes—something many law-enforcement professionals, including myself, didn’t understand.”