In the movie Casino, the hit man chases the informant, who is to be whacked, all around his Las Vegas house. “Lisner and I are coming out of the den, and I pull the stick out and pop him two times in the back of the head. He turns around and looks at me. ‘What are you doing?’ he asks me. He takes off through the kitchen toward the garage, I actually look at the gun, like, ‘What the fuck have I got? Blanks in there?’ So I run after him and I empty the rest in his head. It’s like an explosion going off every time. But he doesn’t go down. The fuck starts running. It’s like a comedy of errors. I’m chasing him around the house and I’ve emptied the thing in his head. I’m thinking, what am I gonna do with this guy? I grab an electric cord from the water cooler and wrap it around his neck. It breaks. Finally I catch him in the garage and he hits the garage door button, but I hit him before it goes down and it’s like he just deflates. There was blood all over the place. My worry was that I’d leave a print in blood somewhere on his body or clothes. I hadn’t worn any gloves, because Lisner wasn’t dumb. He wouldn’t have let me in the door if he saw me wearing gloves. Because of the danger of prints being on his body or clothes, I dragged him to the pool and slid him, legs first, into the water. He went in straight, like a board. It was like he was swimming.” ~from the book – “Cullotta”

The man you see in the film Casino, is the real Frank Cullotta, the same man who did the actual murder for which he was given immunity. Scorsese had Cullotta act out the scene rather than Frank Vincent, who portrayed Cullotta in the movie,” says Casino author/screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi.

Frank Cullotta is the real deal. He and Tony “the Ant” Spilotro were boyhood friends back in Chicago and it was Spilotro who convinced Cullotta to migrate to Vegas. During the 1970’s and into the mid 1980’s, the dominant organized-crime family operating in Las Vegas hailed from Chicago. Known as “the Outfit”, they removed large amounts of money from the Sin City casinos they controlled. In Tony Spilotro’s first three years in Vegas, more gangland-style murders were committed in the city than in the previous 25 years combined. Cullotta ran the robbery, extortion, and murder departments for Spilotro’s Vegas mob. Police called the burglary crew “The Hole in the Wall Gang” (a name that described the way in which the crew barreled their way into a job – if there was an alarm on the door, they’d break a hole in the wall beside it). For three years, Spilotro, Cullotta, and their crew, ruled the Las Vegas underworld. Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal was a big-time oddsmaker from Chicago who was the casino boss of the Stardust. Cullotta was often the third person in the room during domestic disputes between Spilotro, Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, and Rosenthal’s wife, Geri. Spilotro started having an affair with Geri and he became afraid that Cullotta would tell the Chicago bosses about the affair. So in the end, Spilotro tried to kill Cullotta. When the FBI obtained wire-taps of Spilotro ordering Cullotta be whacked, Frank Cullotta switched sides and became a government witness. The man assigned the task of debriefing was Dennis Arnoldy, the FBI’s Las Vegas case agent for Spilotro. For the next five years he debriefed Cullotta, gathering information about Spilotro, and transporting Cullotta to appearances before various grand juries and courts. During that time, a personal relationship developed between the two men that continues today.

Recently SLV sat with Frank Cullotta while he relayed stories that appear in the book, Cullotta, and about life in the Witness Protection Program.

SLV: Your book Cullotta claims that your father was a very violent man.
CULLOTTA: Yes. My father was a very violent man. He was a very jealous man with my mother. He loved her a lot, and I guess he was insecure with his relationship with my mother, which he shouldn’t have been. He was very strict with us. He was an excellent provider and unbeknownst to me at the time, everything he provided was stolen. I loved my father and just idolized him.
SLV: But why, when he was also so violent to you?
CULLOTTA: He wanted to see the best out of me, like in school. The only way the people in those days used to handle the situation was by spanking. Now, you go to jail if you spank your kid. He was firm with me. He was as firm with my sister, but more so with me, because I was the boy.
SLV: Do you think your temperament came from your dad?
CULLOTTA: Absolutely. It was born in me. Of course, I’ve learned to control it through the years, but sure, when you grow up and see that stuff and you hear that screaming and that hollering, it gets imbedded in your head. You react the same way you saw him react, ‘cause you think it’s the normal way to react. Violence towards a woman—no, I never beat up a woman. I may have screamed at them and hollered where they thought I was going to beat them up, but I never hit them.
SLV: Did you ever see your father in any altercations?
CULLOTTA: Yes, I did. I remember coming back from the cemetery. I was riding in the front seat with him and my two aunts were in the back seat. We got to a stoplight and these guys spit out the window of their vehicle. They didn’t intend for it to land on my father’s car, but it did. With that, he immediately pulled his car in front of their car and curbed it. He jumped out, opened the door and yanked the one guy out, and as he started to come out, he started banging the door on his head. My aunts were screaming: “Joe, stop! Joe, stop!” The other guy got out of the car and my father dropped him and he was pretty much winning the fight, but I guess he got thinking that the police were coming. He got back in the car and we took off. This was the first time I’d experienced my father as a wheelman. He was very good, and it was very exciting for me to see him drive like that. At the time I thought he was a hero.
SLV: Was he part of the Chicago mob?
CULLOTTA: My father was a thief, an armed robber, burglar, and he killed a few people. At the time he was associated with the mob, but he was like what I always wanted to be, which I became, never really involved with the Outfit. I call it the Outfit, other people call it the Syndicate. Chicago refers to themselves as the Outfit. In his earlier years, I was told that he killed a few of the Black Hand. That’s the old grease balls that used to torment all the old Italians. He killed their boss and a few others of them. He had the opportunity to become a Syndicate guy, but he didn’t want that. He liked the way he was living and he didn’t want anyone to control him, and he made more money than he thought he could in the Outfit.
SLV: Did he talk to you about that? Is that where you got the attitude not to join them?
CULLOTTA: No, I watched him. Remember I was 6, 7, 8 years old, and I was watching all this nonsense going on. It was exciting, but then when my father died in an accident being chased by the police, I started hearing friends and relatives all talk about my father, and what a great wheelman he was, all the events and crimes he committed, how he robbed the Chicago Tribune. The police sat in our house for days at a time waiting for my father to come home. I started putting all the pieces together. I remember he used to hang out with a grease ball from the old country named Frank Covelli. He was a double tough guy, a boxer. On my birthday he brought me boxing gloves instead of a toy. Then one day Covelli was shot six times. He was my father’s partner. I went to the wake as a kid and they hadn’t put the formaldehyde in him. I was standing there with my father and his body stiffened up in the casket and he sat right up. I thought, everyone thought: “This man’s not dead.” They had to break him back down because he was dead. Everyone started screaming because it was a big shock. I always thought: ‘This was one tough guy. They had to shoot him six times to kill him.’ So instead of looking at it the way a normal person would, I looked at it another way.
SLV: You probably would have been a made man if you’d joined the Outfit. Tony Spilotro was always trying to get you to join. What was it about your personality that made you decide not to join during all those years in Chicago?
CULLOTTA: I guess I was thinking on the same terms as my father, that I could do better without them, and I could always have them in my pocket. I only shared large sums of money with them. If it was $100,000 or $60,000, I’d give them some, but not when it was $4,000, $5,000 or $10,000. If I was connected to the mob, I wouldn’t be able to go on these little scores. I could do the big ones, but not the little ones. If you’re causing heat, they want a big score. I would have had to muscle massage parlors, strip joints, and bars and anywhere they had game machines. I didn’t really want to do that stuff, because then I’m tied down. I wanted to drive what I wanted to drive. I’m a car fanatic. I must own, God only knows, fifty—fifty-five cars. There was a time that I had five brand new cars in one year.
SLV: Are you still into cars big time?
CULLOTTA: Not as much, but I still love cars.
SLV: What’s your favorite?
CULLOTTA: I like Mercedes. (laughter) They’re fine cars. I’ve got the S500. I’d always bought American cars until I bought a Mercedes, and it sort of spoils you. They’re very expensive and it’s such a waste of money, so you keep them a long time and people still think that they’re new.
SLV: Do you fiddle with them at all?
CULLOTTA: There’s nothing to fiddle with, they’re too high tech. My father always fiddled with cars. He loved cars, too. I picked up a lot of knowledge about that when I was younger, but as the cars started getting newer and more high tech, you’d have to go to college to be a mechanic. So now I pay a mechanic.
SLV: You had secret compartments for guns and radio stuff in your car?
CULLOTTA: Let me explain. I’m like a manager. I hire all the experts around me. I knew what I wanted. I just needed someone to do it for me. I had an electrician named Ronnie DeAngelo, and I told him that there was nothing on the market like a portable police radio, and was it possible to make one. He looked into it and decided we could put it in a camera case. Then we could bring it with us inside the place we were robbing. You didn’t need a guy in the car with a walkie-talkie listening to the scanner. You knew right in the place what was happening and you could save a minute or two and you could be out of there. Ronnie also created these secret compartments. The speakers on the dash used to pop up. They were also in the armrests on the doors. You could use your turn signal to open them up. We never put the buttons on the floor, because if a cop got in the car and he hits it, the armrest would pop up and there’d be pistols in that armrest.
SLV: You spent most of your years in Chicago?
CULLOTTA: I was born and raised there and stayed until I moved to Vegas in 1979.
SLV: That was at Tony Spilotro’s request for you to come help him out?
CULLOTTA: Tony asked me several times. I owned a disco at that time and he said: “Bram, I need you out here.” He always called me Brahma because he always referred to me as a bull, Brahma Bull. I told him that if the place went bad, I’d come out. Well the place got raided and it did go bad, and they were killing a whole bunch of crooks. I think about ten got whacked in two months. There’s no honor amongst thieves! So, I decided it was time to go out to Vegas with Tony and get connected. When I saw Joe Lombardo (the head of the Outfit), I told him that Tony had requested me to move out there and asked Lombardo, “Is that alright with you?” He said: “Absolutely. You know you’re working for us now.” I told him I knew, and so now I was officially in the Outfit.
SLV: That was the first time you were officially connected?
CULLOTTA: Officially an under boss for Tony. All the boss guys in Chicago liked me. Joe Ferriola and Joe Lombardo would have to give permission to have me whacked. But they protected me. There was a time when “Louie the Mooch” wanted to get permission to whack me. Lombardo said he’d straighten it out, and I had to take a beating. After it was over, Lombardo said: “I don’t know how you took that. You’re a hell of a guy.” I let the guy hit me in the head with a brick, a bottle, and I was on top of him. I didn’t have to let him hit me, but I knew I had to take a beatin’ or die. I got up and Lombardo said to the guy: “Are you happy now?” The guy wanted to come with a bat, but Lombardo said no. So then “Louie the Mooch” said he was pleased and it was settled. Lombardo offered me money to go to the doctor, but I told him that I didn’t need no fuckin’ money to go to the doctor. I told him that I just wanted to get this guy. Lombardo said: “Listen, put it on the shelf today, ‘cause one day you may be able to take it off the shelf.” Meaning that one day Louie might mess up and I could be the guy to kill him. I told him that I would pray for the day. Louie died of cancer. The big guy upstairs got him before I did.

Sticking a gun in Cullotta’s face. “Where’s the fuckin’ money?” Frank acted confused. “What money?” “Listen, you prick, we could whack you right now and dump you out on the street. Nobody’d know better and they wouldn’t miss you, because you’re just a scumbag crook.” Frank hung tough. They took him to the 11th floor at the police station, where he was handcuffed to the back of a chair. They started violently punching him. Pape, a crooked cop who’d killed 30-40 crooks, grabbed a phone book from a desk and hit Frank in the head as hard as he could. That was followed by a punch in the chest, knocking both him and the chair over backwards. Pape called for the cattle prods. A few minutes later, the cattle prods were applied near Frank’s testicles. “Tell us, where’s the money?” Every denial was followed by a zap with the cattle prods. Screaming in agony, Frank told the cops what he thought of them, generating additional pain. But through it all, he didn’t talk. As Pape left the room, he said: “Throw the bastard out the window. Say he tried to escape.” Hanging out the window by his ankles 11 stories up, Frank prayed he wouldn’t be dropped. Finally he was pulled back in and let go. Afterwards, he met up with Tony Spilotro. “What’d you tell them?” Tony asked. “I didn’t tell them shit!” said Frank. Tony was impressed and from that point on, Frank was thought of as one tough guy.

SLV: What do you think made you so strong to not give in, compared to somebody else that wouldn’t stand up to that kind of beating?
CULLOTTA: The more they hit me, the madder I got. It showed me that they were disrespecting me. The guys that hung me out the window ended up in the same prison as I was. They were there for murdering a dope dealer. Don’t you think I beat this cop in prison? I beat his ass good. He’s lucky he’s alive!
SLV: Sometimes your temper saved you?
CULLOTTA: I fought back harder. If you hit me, I hit back. If you call me names, I’ll call you names back. That’s just a natural instinct for me, even to this day.
SLV: Compare your temper to Spilotro’s temper.
CULLOTTA: Equal tempers, as far as violent tempers. I’m sure he killed more people than me.
SLV: Was Rosenthal hot-tempered?
CULLOTTA: Ahhh, he was a jerk. He was good in his business, but he was very egotistical.
SLV: How were you able to control your temper when you had to testify? The other lawyers knew you had this temper problem and they tried very hard to get under your skin.
CULLOTTA: Because I knew their tactics, from being a defendant on the other end. I knew that they knew I had a temper and what they were trying to do was bring it out and show the court that I was the bad guy. So I turned it around and laughed at them.
SLV: So you were in control?
CULLOTTA: If I know what’s going on. If you hit me, it’s a different story. Now if you’d come up and slapped me, I’d have jumped over the thing and strangled them. There’s a difference in hitting me and just calling me names.
SLV: Did the lawyers for the Witness Protection Program tell you how to deal with these other attorneys?
CULLOTTA: No. They don’t coach you at all. They told me what questions they were going to ask. They don’t want the other attorney to ask if I had been coached and told what to say. I had transitional immunity, which is very good immunity. I had it in Illinois and in Las Vegas. That meant that I could talk about murders openly and freely, and not have to worry about getting indicted by them as long as I keep telling the truth. Once I lied in court, if I lied, they could take everything I said and try me for it. There was no way in the world I was going to get caught in a lie!
SLV: How did it get to the point where you decided to turn state’s evidence?
CULLOTTA: I moved back to Chicago for awhile with these trials. I met Tony in a parking lot and he was quite worried. He kept asking me questions like: “Where are you staying while you’re here?” I told him I was staying at the Woodridge Apartments on the second floor and that I was with my old lady. It was 2 o’clock in the morning and I told him that I had to go to court in the morning. He said: “Wait a couple of minutes, ‘cause I still want to talk to you.” At the time, there were no cell phones, so he goes in the My Place Lounge and I could see that he was making phone calls. He came back out and said that he had to call the house and tell Nancy that he’d be home for Vincent in the morning. That’s their son. We talked for about another hour and I finally said: ‘Tony, I have to go.’ I jump in the car and go to where I was staying. I park in the bottom and as I’m coming around the corner, I hear bang, bang. I’m walking up the stairs and a guy comes running down at me. He had a hood on and a gun and he flies over the rail. He hits the ground and a van pulls up and he jumps in the van and they take off. I think: ‘What the fuck is goin’ on here?’ As I walk up the stairs, I see legs hanging out of the apartment next to mine. My wife asks: “Did you hear that?” I said: ‘Yeah, the guy got shot next door.’ She said: “Don’t you think that was for you?” I said: ‘Oh please, don’t talk stupid.’ “Does he know where you live?” she said. ‘Elaine, you’re getting paranoid. He wouldn’t do that. Let’s go to bed,’ I said. She told me she didn’t trust him and we went to bed. About a half hour later, the phone rings. She picks it up and says: “Yeah, he’s right here.” Quietly she says to me: “It’s him. I told ya.” I took the phone and said: ‘What’s up?’ Tony said: “Oh, I can’t sleep.” I told him that it was 5 o’clock in the morning and that I had to sleep and that I’d talk to him tomorrow afternoon. Elaine said: “You don’t see that?” Meanwhile the cops are next door hauling this guy off, and I don’t want to be out there with all the police tape and stuff, but Elaine’s words stuck in my head. That morning when I finally got found guilty of possession of stolen property, the FBI approaches me and tells me there’s a contract out on me. I said: ‘Get out of here. You’re just trying to make me roll.’ He said: “I’m tellin’ you, this is our job. You can do what you want to though, but there’s wire taps on it and transcripts.” So he leaves. I’m thinking, and I’m thinking, about what Elaine said, and what he said—thinking I’m going to jail for the rest of my life for this meathead. They had the 3 strikes and you’re out law, and with my previous convictions it meant I would be locked up forever. So I decided to call Charlie Parsons who is with the FBI and I told them to say it was Frank Cullotta on the phone from jail. They said he’d be there in five minutes. I put the phone down, and he was there in three minutes. He came in the room and said: “I’m not going to read you your rights, and anything you say will not be held against you.” I don’t know this stuff and I think he’s conning me. I said: ‘I don’t believe you, ‘cause you’re writing everything down.’ He told me it didn’t mean anything and assured me that he’d have to read me my rights before they could do anything. I told him I needed to find some proof that this was actually happening. He said: “In order for us to help you, you have to cooperate, but you’re going to have to get rid of your lawyer. It’s up to you, but he’s an Outfit lawyer.” Oscar Goodman was my attorney. I gave him a little bit of stuff, but I didn’t give him any murders, and he wanted the murders. Then they let me listen to some tapes. They put me in a room all by myself and I thought maybe I should just kill myself. This was not the way I was raised. So I listened to these tapes. I could hear this guy talking to Tony and he’s asking: “What the fuck is going on over there? Everybody’s getting killed and there’s a lot of problems.” Tony answers: “It’s not me, it’s the other guy and I have no control over him, he’s a loose cannon (meaning me).
SLV: What was it about Tony that you liked?
CULLOTTA: Growing up, there were times I was on my ass and he’d be right there to help me out with money. He was always a friend. I knew he always had my back when I was younger. Of course, vice versa, I had his back. We used to shine shoes together. We started stealing together, and we did this all our lives together. I always felt it was a true friendship. I think he felt that too, until it was time for him to do something or get killed. On a trip to bring money back to Chicago and Joe Ferriola, (the Outfit’s boss from ’79-’89), Ferriola asked me: “Is Tony screwing the Jew’s old lady?” I said no and he told me: “Frankie, if you’re lying, you’re going to be in just as much trouble as him.” I had just found out the day before. Geri, Lefty’s wife, had come over and then Tony told me. I thought: ‘Oh shit, this guy’s really got me in hot water now.’ After seeing Ferriola, I saw Lombardo and he asks: “Frankie, who’s killing all these people out there in Vegas?” Well, Lisner was dead. I looked at him and said: ‘I don’t have any idea.’ He wouldn’t have asked me that question if he knew he’d given the order. Tony would have had to get the okay from Lombardo.
SLV: Did Tony tell you he’d gotten the okay to whack Lisner?
CULLOTTA: Tony said he did. I told him: ‘Lombardo didn’t act like he did.’ Well, I wanted to believe Tony, but he was getting shell-shocked. The guy was doing coke. One day he showed me a bottle and said: “Look what I found in the booth.” I’m not stupid. I know what he was doing.
SLV: You got into it pretty heavy too, a one point, didn’t you?
CULLOTTA: I did it for a year. I never lied. Vegas can make people do crazy things! But I used to get it for nothing. Do you think I’d buy it?! No way! You’d have to be nuts to spend $100 for a little bottle like that.
SLV: It was pretty crazy during that time period here in Vegas?
CULLOTTA: It was a fun time. It was more fun than Chicago. There’s more to do and Chicago’s the same grind.
SLV: Was Geri a knockout, like they portrayed her in the movie Casino?
CULLOTTA: She was a good lookin’ lady, but I didn’t think she was that beautiful.
SLV: Not like Sharon Stone?
CULLOTTA: I think the original woman they were going to use for the part was Spielberg’s wife. The production company said they had to use Sharon or they weren’t going to put up the $56 million to do the movie. Geri was a sexy woman, but you put makeup on anything and it looks good.
SLV: When you got asked to portray yourself in the movie scene of Casino where you killed Lisner, it must have been nuts.
CULLOTTA: I originally got contacted through Arnoldy to call Pileggi. Then I met with Nick Pileggi and before he said two words to me, he handed me $1,500. I asked what it was for and he said: “I’m the kind of guy who pays for his interviews right up front.” I had snuck up on him in the parking lot and he was shocked. He asked: “How will I know it’s you?” I told him that I’d be right on him and I was. He wondered how I did it and I said: ‘Nick, it’s my life. I look around me.’ So after that, I did an interview with Scorsese two times, an interview with De Niro two times, once with Pesci, once with Sharon Stone, and they gave the okay on it. I told De Niro: ‘Are you comfortable with this?’ De Niro said: “I’m not worried. It’s you they want.” Scorsese fictionalized it, because that’s what the audience wants to see. I told him that the scene where the guy’s head was in the vice wasn’t right. I told him that his head was just jammed in the vice and then they turned it and made the guy’s eyeball pop out. He wasn’t lying down. Scorsese said he had to do it that way to get it by the editors. Then there was a language discrepancy. They said “Jerk off”, but that’s New York. In Chicago, we say “Jack off”. They changed a lot of that around. I used to sit next to Martin Scorsese and he’d look for things like that. Other movie stars would come on the set and they couldn’t figure out who I was, sitting there. James Woods came up to me and said: “You gotta be somebody, because I can’t even sit next to Marty when he’s doing a movie. So who are you?” I laughed and said: “It’s none of your business.”
SLV: I read that you and Dennis Arnoldy of the FBI became friends. Is that true and what’s your friendship based on?
CULLOTTA: It’s based on trust. I have great trust in him because he never lied to me. He was very honest with me when he was interrogating me. He never promised me anything that he couldn’t fulfill. He never misled me, which was very important to me, because at that time I had no friends. My life was gone. This was the only guy that was my family now. If he lied to me one time, it’s all over. Then I’m not going to roll over, I’m through.
SLV: Describe what it was like to be in prison with a bunch of informers.
CULLOTTA: They were a bunch of rats! They can’t wait to talk about anybody. Everybody was jailhouse informants. What a terrible place to be. It was like the loneliest place in the world.
SLV: Oscar Goodman (currently the Mayor of Las Vegas) was your lawyer at times. What did you think of him?
CULLOTTA: Oscar Goodman is a good mayor. He had connections in this town and he was very good at prolonging the inevitable, which is going to jail or dying.
SLV: Do you have any regrets turning state’s evidence and joining the Witness Protection Program?
CULLOTTA: At first I did. Then as my life started changing… I don’t now. It’s probably one of the smartest moves I’ve made in my life. As my family would say: “If I’d used my criminal mind in the legitimate world, I’d have been a tremendous business man.” So now I’ve taken the knowledge of being a good thief and turned into a good business man.
SLV: Do you still have to look over your shoulder?
CULLOTTA: It’s a habit. I’m going to do that until the day I die. Am I scared? Let me put it like this: I know what to expect. If I get shot in the head, they gotta catch me in a way that I don’t see it coming, because if I see it coming, I’m not going to run, I’m just going to go after them. Take as many bullets as I can until I get my hands on one of their throats. When I do the talks, they’re all in front of me, and you can see if someone’s coming at you.
SLV: If you could take back one day of your life and not have to live through it, what day would that be?
CULLOTTA: The day my granddaughter died at 19. She had a liver transplant at 9 and at 18 the liver started going bad again. She died right in front of me at the UCLA hospital entrance. That’s the day I would never want to see again, the worst day of my life.

Cullotta’s thoughts on Vegas today: “People always want to know if the mob is in Las Vegas today. They’re not, at least not the Outfit. Today you’ve got the white-collar criminals. They don’t use guns, but they’ll empty your pockets and bank account and put you in the soup line without batting an eye. Maybe someday, they’ll all be gone—the mob, the gangs, and the scam artists. And then the world will truly be a better place.” SLV

Issue 61 featuring: Julia Bond, Alexis Ford & Rebecca Miller