The Everything Mafia Book (23 page)

Al Capone missed the boat vis-à-vis Las Vegas. In the 1930s he had interest in a gambling joint in Reno, Nevada, but did not have the foresight to see the potential millions to be made. Santo Trafficante Jr. lost his casinos in Havana, but was preoccupied with opening another Caribbean resort, thus missing the Vegas gravy train.

Skimming Their Way to the Bank

After the demise of Bugsy Siegel, less flamboyant but more efficient mobsters flooded Las Vegas. The less publicity hungry Lansky took over the Flamingo and had it running smoothly and profitably within a year. He also was the brains behind the Thunderbird casino. Other gangsters filled out the mob roster of hidden ownership of Las Vegas’s biggest casinos. The Cleveland mob owned the Desert Inn. The Chicago Outfit had an interest in the Stardust resort. The Detroit Mafia had a piece of the Frontier. Sinatra’s compatriot Sam Giancana had interests in the Sahara and the Riviera, along with the Fischetti brothers. The Fischettis—Joe, Rocco, and Charlie—were cousins of Al Capone and ran huge gambling operations for the Chicago Outfit. Known for their political influence as well as their talent for running successful nightclubs, the Fischettis were also close friends of Frank Sinatra.

The Last Shout

The Mafia reasserted itself in the post–Howard Hughes days, but the 1970s and 1980s saw the mob under attack from both the feds and the Wall Street crowd. FBI probes and indictments sent many a mobster packing, and legitimate businessmen and corporations filled the void. The main investigations were aimed at breaking the mob’s control of skimming. (Basically the gangsters were stealing money before it was officially counted by the staff at the casino.)

The Teamsters Pension Fund, as administered by the notorious Jimmy Hoffa, loaned millions to the Mafia to build their casinos up and down the Las Vegas Strip. The hardworking Teamsters, however, shared in none of the booty.

When the oodles of cash and coins were collected and taken to the “counting rooms” of the big casinos, a certain percentage was “skimmed” off the top and sent as tribute to the big crime families. This was cold cash free and clear, not subject to the grasping talons of the Internal Revenue Service. In a cash business where the money was flowing, the profits made via skimming were astronomical.

It was a simple racket, and one that didn’t require any violence or threats. The Mafia simply walked out of the casino with bags of cash. The lucrative operation was shared among Mafia families from Chicago, Kansas City, St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, and Milwaukee.

Tony the Ant

Anthony “Tony the Ant” Spilotro was the Chicago Outfit’s representative in Las Vegas and one of the most powerful Vegas crime figures in the 1970s. The Ant grew up in Chicago and fell into petty crime as a juvenile. He caught the attention of some Outfit soldiers and they brought him in as an associate. Through the 1960s Spilotro grew from a leg-breaker and strong-arm man to leading his own crew of robbers and bookmakers. In the early 1970s he was sent out to Vegas. He made a name for himself, teaming with the late Lefty Rosenthal, a noted bookmaker and casino owner, and running up the city’s crime stats with his crew. But as Tony the Ant’s stature grew and he became more of a law enforcement target, he was beginning to be viewed as a liability by his superiors. On June 14, 1986, Spilotro and his brother were beaten to death in a suburban Chicago basement then dumped in a shallow grave in an Indiana cornfield.

Strawmen

The Mafia always had a problem with loudmouths and big shots who drew attention. Both of these mob types brought the heat, as usual. The FBI started an investigation into the skimming, and through a combination of wiretaps and turncoats, the mob’s hold on Sin City quickly started to slip away. The Tropicana, the Stardust, Desert Inn, Circus-Circus, Caesar’s Palace, the Fremont, the Aladdin, the Sands, the Riviera, and the Sundance all fell out of mob hands, and the Dunes and the Marina were demolished in the inexorable juggernaut of respectability. The Golden Age of Vegas had come to an end. Chieftains of the Kansas City, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Chicago mobs felt the long arm of the law unceremoniously shove them into an eight-by-ten cell.

“Tony the Ant” often ran foul of Las Vegas police and the FBI. Criminal defense attorney Oscar Goodman represented him. Oscar was elected mayor of Las Vegas in 1999. As of this writing he is still in office.

Today, Las Vegas resembles more of a giant theme park for adults than the naughty “Sin City” of its heyday. Millions of people still flock there every year and drop billions of their hard-earned bucks on the gaming tables and in the slot machines. The Strip has started to gain back some of its hip and cool allure. Celebrities are flocking there again, and gangsters from Russia and Japan are making the casinos their personal playgrounds. The Rat Pack may be gone, but their cultural impact on Vegas will not be forgotten. Although the mob was taken out at the knees by the skimming cases, where there’s money, the Mafia always finds a way to sneak back in.

Fat Herbie

Herbert “Fat Herbie” Blitzstein was one of the last remaining Spilotro soldiers in Sin City. After his bosses ended up in a cornfield under a couple thousand pounds of dirt, Blitzstein decided to lay low and rake in the cash. He ran a lucrative loansharking and insurance fraud operation out of his automotive repair business. At sixty-three years old he figured he could live out the rest of his years making a few bucks and living the life of a Vegas retiree. But low-level clowns from the Los Angeles and Buffalo crime families had different ideas. They wanted to muscle in on Herbie’s measly rackets.

Herbie’s End

Over a series of meetings recorded by the FBI, the gangsters plotted to rob Herbie and push him out of his business. The feds knew because they had a snitch, a con named John Branco, in on the action. Probably thinking that the bumbling gangsters wouldn’t actually go through with the hit, they failed to let Herbie know of the plot against him. But they underestimated the drive of the wise guys. For a few thousand dollars, the mobsters hired two hit men to rub out Fat Herbie. They hid in his house and shot him dead as he was relaxing in an easy chair.

The Last Stand

Not long after Blitzstein’s death the mob’s carefully constructed house of cards in Vegas fell apart. When the feds swept in, they busted a dozen of the last remaining mobsters on the Strip. From the fallout of Herbie’s murder and the parallel racketeering investigation, over a dozen mobsters, including Los Angeles underboss Carmen Milano, were convicted of a variety of crimes, many penny ante. The mob’s heyday in Vegas came to an end.

CHAPTER 12
Did the Mafia Kill Kennedy?

November 22, 1963, is one of the pivotal dates in American history. It may also be one of the most controversial. Since President John F. Kennedy was killed that day in Dallas, there have been millions of theories as to who killed Kennedy. The official report is that a former Marine, and practicing Communist, Lee Harvey Oswald, was the lone gunmen, shooting the president as the presidential motorcade drove by the Texas School Book Depository. But from there, the facts get messy. One constant among the various theories is that the Mafia was involved. Whether acting alone, or with the help of anti-Castro Cubans or the CIA, the “Mafia-did-it” theory is one of the more popular conspiracies in the Kennedy assassination.

Papa Joe and Booze

The Kennedy dynasty was founded in part on the bootleg whiskey trade during Prohibition. The family patriarch, Joseph Kennedy, was a rumrunner during the Golden Age of the mob. He was an associate of none other than Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky. He was part owner of a racetrack and a heavy gambler. Even after Prohibition his mob ties continued. This came into play during his son’s ascension to the White House and may also have played a role in the assassination.

Joseph Kennedy lived to bury three of his sons (Joseph Jr., John, and Robert), plus endure many other family tragedies, including a crippling stroke that left him paralyzed and speechless in his last years. This was after he promised the Mafia to reign in his son Bobby’s crusade against organized crime. He was never able to fulfill that promise to the mob.

Like many men with mob ties, Joe Kennedy craved respectability. His fortune was made in the underworld of violence and criminality, and he pushed his sons to succeed in the legitimate world. In 1938 he was appointed ambassador to the Court of St. James (a fancy phrase for England) by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This was ironic because Kennedy came to America as a poor Irish immigrant, and the relations between the English and the Irish had been strained over the millennia. Kennedy had to resign after he advocated the policy of appeasement regarding Nazi Germany. This gave him the reputation as a Nazi sympathizer at a time when Roosevelt was inclined to enter the war as an ally to Great Britain against Hitler. The Kennedy name became tarnished, but better days were on the horizon.

Sins of the Father

Joseph Kennedy’s firstborn son, his namesake and the first one on whom he had transferred his dreams, died during World War II. The burden then fell on his second son, John F. Kennedy. A hero in that same war, he was elected to the House of Representatives and then later the Senate. As a senator, he announced his intentions to seek the presidency in the election of 1960.

His opponent was Richard Nixon, who had served as vice president for eight years under the popular Republican president Dwight Eisenhower. In addition to his formidable wealth and good looks, Kennedy had an arsenal in the liberal glitterati of Hollywood. And foremost among the constellation of stars was Frank Sinatra and his pals.

Rumble in West Virginia

John Kennedy had one significant obstacle in his quest for the White House—he was a Catholic. There was a strong anti-Catholic sentiment among some, particularly in the Bible Belt Protestant South. The ostensible fear was that JFK would be taking his orders from the pope in Vatican City.