How One Snitch Destroyed the Mafia’s $63 Million Vegas Operation – HT

 

 

 

There is a scene in Casino that almost nobody talks about. Not the murder scenes. Not the money counting scenes with the cash piled up in back rooms. Not the car bombing. Not the cornfield. Not Sharon Stone in the poolside argument. A [bell] quiet scene. A young man in a nice suit sitting across a table from some of the most dangerous men in America.

Nodding along, agreeing to everything. Trying to seem confident. His name in the movie is Philip Green. He was played by Kevin Pollak. And in that role, he is a supporting character. A plot device. The useful idiot who holds the licenses so the real operators don’t have to. He exists in the film to give Robert De Niro somewhere to work and Joe Pesci someone to intimidate.

In real life, he was the most important person in the entire story. His name was Allen Glick. He was a 32-year-old real estate developer from San Diego with a law degree, a Bronze Star from Vietnam, and no criminal record whatsoever. And in 1974, he walked into a meeting with some of the most powerful mob bosses in America and walked out with a check for $63 million.

He didn’t know what he’d just agreed to. Not fully. Not yet. Allen Glick walked into this nightmare without knowing it was a nightmare. By the time he figured it out, people around him were being murdered to keep him quiet. By the time it was over, he had testified against 15 of the most powerful organized crime figures in America.

Sent the top leadership of the Chicago Outfit, the Milwaukee family, and the Kansas City family to federal prison. And dismantled one of the most lucrative criminal operations in the history of Las Vegas. The mob built a $63 million Vegas empire. Allen Glick destroyed it. This is that story. And it is nothing like the movie.

Not what it is now. Not the corporate entertainment complex with the shareholder reports and the publicly traded casino companies and the surveillance systems that track every chip on every table in real time. The Las Vegas of 1974 was something else entirely. It was, in the most literal sense, a mob town. The mob controlled virtually every casino worth controlling in Las Vegas.

The skim diverted millions into the coffers of the Outfit and to other mobsters. The skim. That word, simple and almost innocent-sounding, was the mechanism by which the most powerful criminal organizations in America extracted money from Las Vegas casinos without anyone in law enforcement being able to prove it.

Here’s how it worked. A casino counts its money. Before the official count, before the numbers go into the books, before the government sees anything, a portion of the cash is quietly removed. It never existed on paper. It was never taxed. It was never reported. It simply moved from a counting room in a Las Vegas casino to an envelope.

 And from an envelope to a courier. And from a courier to a mob boss in Chicago or Kansas City or Milwaukee or Cleveland. Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa created the pension fund in 1955 and he used it to finance mob-connected casino projects in Las Vegas. After Hoffa went to prison in 1967, the pension fund came under the supervision of Allen Dorfman, who was closely connected to the Chicago mob.

The Teamsters Central States Pension Fund was the financing mechanism. Hundreds of millions of dollars contributed by ordinary truck drivers and warehouse workers across America. Managed by men with deep ties to organized crime. Deployed as loans to casino projects that the mob would then use to generate untaxed income through the skim.

It was an almost perfect closed loop. Workers contributed pension money. The mob borrowed it to buy casinos. The casinos generated skim. The skim paid for everything else. The only problem was that you needed a front. You needed someone with clean hands and a legitimate license to stand in front of the whole operation and make it look like an ordinary business.

You needed someone the Nevada Gaming Control Board would approve. Someone without a criminal record. Someone who looked from the outside like exactly what he said he was. They needed someone like Allen Glick. He served in the US Army Special Operations Branch in which he was a captain in Vietnam and assisted in military search and rescue operations.

Glick was awarded the Bronze Star. After Vietnam, he went into real estate. He was good at it. He had the kind of mind that understood deals that could see the financial structure of a transaction and identify where the value was. By his early 30s, he had already made enough money to start thinking bigger. In 1972, the ambitious Glick used a $2.

3 million loan to acquire a major and later controlling share in the Hacienda Hotel Casino in Las Vegas and obtained a Nevada casino license. He got the license clean. No connections to organized crime. No red flags. Just a young veteran with a law degree and a legitimate business track record who wanted to operate in Las Vegas.

Nevada approved him. And that approval, that clean license, made him the most valuable man in the room the moment the Chicago Outfit’s people started thinking about their next move. In 1973, Glick met with Alvin Baron, asset manager of the Teamsters Union’s Pension Fund, and a close associate of former Teamsters president James Hoffa, and Ed Buccieri, a reputed money courier for mobster Meyer Lansky.

That meeting was when the nightmare began. Not that Glick knew it yet. He was meeting with pension fund people about a potential loan. That’s what it looked like. That’s what it was presented as. What it actually was was organized crime introducing itself to the man it had decided would be its next front in Las Vegas.

In 1974, Glick set his sights on the Stardust Hotel Casino on the Las Vegas Strip. Top leaders of the Milwaukee and Kansas City families took a meeting about Glick. As it happened, Glick knew Joseph Balistrieri, son of Milwaukee mob boss Frank Balistrieri, from college. Glick then convened privately with Frank Balistrieri that April.

Think about what that meeting must have looked like. A 32-year-old real estate developer from San Diego sitting across a table from the boss of the Milwaukee crime family. Frank Balistrieri, who law enforcement called the Mad Bomber, a man with a decades-long history of violence and intimidation. And Allen Glick, Bronze Star veteran, law school graduate, with his business plan and his ambition and his complete failure to fully understand what the man across the table actually was.

Frank Balistrieri sought the help of Kansas City, Chicago, and Cleveland bosses to get a Teamsters Pension Fund loan. Finally, Glick, at age 32, received a $62.75 million loan from the Pension Fund. $62 million, $750,000 to a 32-year-old with a Nevada gaming license and a college connection to a mob boss’s son.

On August 14th, 1974, Argent officially gained control of the Recrion Corporation, which then owned the Stardust and Fremont. On August 23rd, 1974, Argent received a 62 .75 million dollar loan from the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund to finance control of Recrion and the casinos. Argent, named from the initials of Allen R.

Glick’s name combined with the word enterprise. His company. His license. His name on every document. At his peak, only Howard Hughes had more hotel casino holdings than Glick. And not a single dollar of actual control. Chicago crime bosses Tony Accardo and Joey Aiuppa installed a notorious sports better named Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal to run Glick’s casinos.

Rosenthal’s primary duty was to ensure that the skim a portion of the casino’s revenue removed before any official tallies occurred without any hiccups. Frank Rosenthal The man the movie turned into Ace Rothstein played by Robert De Niro. In real life not a made man not formally a member of any crime family but more dangerous in some ways than any of them because he was genuinely brilliant.

A mathematical mind. A man who had been called without irony the greatest living expert on sports gambling by Sports Illustrated. A man who understood how casino money moved better than almost anyone alive. Rosenthal operated through his close associate Allen Glick who held the official licenses. Rosenthal held the role of food and beverage manager a position that gave him de facto control over most of the casino operations.

Food and beverage manager. That was his title. The man who was secretly running four major Las Vegas casinos for the Chicago outfit earning a salary that would eventually reach $250,000 a year held the title of food and beverage manager because that was a position that didn’t require a Nevada gaming license. The skim from the Argent casinos was divided among the Mafia families in Chicago, Kansas City, Milwaukee, and Cleveland.

Four families. One skim operation. One front man. And one slot machine supervisor named Jay Vandermark who orchestrated the most audacious piece of it. Stardust slot manager Jay Vandermark orchestrated one operation using manipulated scales to count coins. That scheme fleeced an estimated $7 million to $15 million between 1974 and 1976.

When state gaming investigators discovered what Vandermark was doing he disappeared a suspected murder victim to ensure he did not speak to authorities. His body has never been found. He disappeared. One day Jay Vandermark was the slot manager at the Stardust. The next day he was gone. And his body has never been found to this day.

That is what the skim operation was built on. Not just greed and mathematics and the exploitation of a licensing loophole. Murder. The willingness to eliminate anyone who might talk. And standing in front of all of it with his name on every document and his face on every license was Allen Glick. Who was learning slowly and terrifyingly exactly what he had agreed to.

Anthony Spilotro was a soldier and enforcer for the Chicago outfit who was assigned to protect the Las Vegas skim. The FBI estimated that Spilotro was responsible for nearly two dozen murders in Illinois and Nevada. Nearly two dozen murders. That was the man the Chicago outfit sent to Las Vegas to make sure nothing interfered with the operation.

Not a careful man. Not a discreet man. The opposite of discreet. A man who even by the standards of professional organized crime was considered dangerously uncontrollable. Bored with his new assignment Spilotro formed a burglary crew later dubbed the Hole in the Wall Gang. The crew got its name from its penchant for drilling through the exterior walls and ceilings of the locations they burglarized.

He was supposed to be the protection for a $63 million casino operation. Instead he was drilling through the walls of Las Vegas jewelry stores at night with a burglary crew. He was running loan sharks and bookmakers out of the back rooms of casinos that were supposed to be generating legitimate appearing revenue.

He was accumulating heat FBI attention, police investigations, newspaper stories at a rate that alarmed even his own bosses in Chicago. And then he started sleeping with Frank Rosenthal’s wife. Gerry Rosenthal the woman Sharon Stone played in Casino. Already a complicated figure already struggling with addiction already in a marriage that was deteriorating badly.

And Tony Spilotro who was supposed to be Rosenthal’s protector and the outfit’s enforcer was having an affair with her. Not quietly. Not discreetly. In a way that people knew about talked about reported back to Chicago about. In the mob sleeping with another man’s wife was not a personal matter. It was a structural violation.

A sign of contempt for the organization’s authority and for the man being cuckolded. It was the kind of thing that in an earlier era would have resulted in immediate consequences. Instead Chicago watched and calculated and grew increasingly furious while Spilotro continued to be Spilotro. Meanwhile Allen Glick was having his own problems with the people around him.

And they were considerably more immediate. Another investor wealthy California matron Tamara Rand would loan Glick $2 million and later on orders from mob leaders was killed gangland style. On November 9th, 1975 Rand was shot five times with a silencer equipped .22 caliber gun at her home in San Diego. She had filed a lawsuit against Glick for breach of contract.

The mob’s response to a lawsuit was a silenced gun. Five shots at her home in San Diego. Glick was beginning to understand the nature of the arrangement he had entered. During the 1970s Kansas City reputed mobster Carl DeLuna allegedly threatened Glick while they were in the office of attorney Oscar Goodman who would later serve as Las Vegas mayor.

Oscar Goodman. The man who would become mayor of Las Vegas later hosting his own television show and becoming one of the most recognizable faces in Nevada politics. At this moment he was the lawyer in the room. While a Kansas City mob enforcer threatened his client’s life. DeLuna in a gruff voice using graphic terms told me to sit down Glick claimed in testimony.

He said he was sent there to deliver one last final message to me from his partners. He stated that he and his partners were finally sick of having to deal with me and having me around. He informed me that it was their desire for me to sell Argent Corporation immediately. And then DeLuna delivered the message that removed all worry ambiguity about what kind of people Allen Glick had borrowed $63 million from.

Otherwise DeLuna allegedly threatened one by one to have each of my sons murdered. His sons. Not him. His sons. A man could potentially protect himself. He could have bodyguards, change his routines be careful. But his sons were children. They went to school. They played in neighborhoods. They were everywhere and protected by nothing.

That threat specific and delivered calmly in a lawyer’s office was what finally broke whatever illusion Glick might have had that he could navigate the situation on his own terms. He was not a partner. He was not an investor. He was a license holder. A name on documents. A face for a camera when the gaming regulators showed up.

He existed at the pleasure of men who were now telling him his usefulness was finished. Glick sold Argent. His gaming license was revoked in 1979 and he sold the properties the following year. He was out. Or he thought he was out. While Glick was being threatened and manipulated and used as a front the FBI had been watching.

They had wiretaps. They had informants. They had the patient slow methodical work of federal investigators building a case that would take nearly a decade to fully materialize. Glick was known as genius by FBI agents who had him under surveillance as they tracked organized crime figures. Genius. That’s what they called him.

Not as a compliment, exactly. As a recognition that Allen Glick, whatever mistakes he had made in borrowing from people he shouldn’t have borrowed from, was not stupid. He had kept records. He had documentation. He understood the financial mechanics of what had been done through his company better than almost anyone else who had been part of it.

And then Frank Cullotta flipped. This is the snitch the title promises. Not Allen Glick, who cooperated, but Frank Cullotta. Tony Spilotro’s lieutenant. The man who ran the Hole in the Wall gang. Who committed hundreds of burglaries and multiple murders in service of the Chicago Outfit’s Las Vegas operation. On July 4th, 1981, the Hole in the Wall gang attempted to burglarize Bertha’s Gifts and Home Furnishings.

 A high-end store on East Sahara Avenue in Las Vegas. The robbery was a bust as the FBI and the Las Vegas Metro Police had an inside informer named Sal Romano in the gang. Much of the gang was arrested in and around Bertha’s, including Cullotta. In 1982, Frank Cullotta was imprisoned again. And was approached by the FBI with a wiretap of Spilotro talking with someone about having to clean our dirty laundry.

Which Cullotta took as an insinuated contract on his life. That was the moment. Cullotta, sitting in federal custody, facing serious charges, listening to a recording of his childhood friend and boss discussing whether to have him murdered. The same man he had known since they were children on the streets of Chicago.

The same man he had moved to Las Vegas for, committed crimes for, committed murders for. Spilotro had put a contract on him or was considering one. The distinction, from Cullotta’s perspective inside a federal holding facility, was academic. In July 1982, Cullotta finalized an agreement with the prosecutors. At a trial in October 1983, Cullotta admitted that he was involved in over 300 crimes, including four murders, perjury, robberies, and burglaries.

300 crimes. Four murders. Everything he knew about the Hole in the Wall gang, about Tony Spilotro’s operation, about the mechanics of how the Chicago Outfit maintained its Las Vegas presence, about who had ordered what and when and why. A lot of people went to jail, at least in part, because of Frank’s information.

He helped us connect the dots. And Glick, who had been waiting in California, watching the investigation develop from a distance, now had a clear path forward. The mob’s own people were dismantling the structure from the inside. The FBI had what it needed. Prosecutors were ready. And Allen Glick, the man whose name was on every document, who had sat in every meeting, who had watched people be threatened and killed around him, was exactly the witness they needed to tie it all together.

Glick swore he was not aware of the skimming. And indeed, federal prosecutors never charged him criminally in return for his cooperation as a witness before two federal grand juries hearing evidence against the mob-connected defendants. The government defended Glick in court as a frightened tool of the underworld secretly responsible for loans from the corrupt Teamster pension fund used to buy the casinos.

A frightened tool. That was how the government described the man whose name had been on $63 million in Teamsters loans. Not a criminal mastermind. Not a willing participant in a knowing scheme. A frightened man who had gotten in over his head and then been too terrified to get out. Whether that characterization was entirely accurate is a question that has never been fully resolved.

But it was the characterization that served the prosecution’s purposes. And the prosecution had a list of targets that dwarfed anything Allen Glick could have represented. The 15 individuals indicted included many people in the top echelon of organized crime. Joseph Aiuppa, Jackie Cerone, Joseph Lombardo, and Anthony Spilotro from the Chicago Outfit.

Frank Balistrieri and his two sons from the Milwaukee crime family. And Carl Civella from the Kansas City crime family. 15 people. The top leadership of three crime families. Men who had spent decades building organizations that were supposed to be impenetrable. That used violence and corruption and the threat of death to maintain their secrecy.

Indicted. On evidence gathered from wiretaps, from informants, from the cooperation of the man whose name they had put on $63 million in loans because they thought he was too frightened to ever testify against them. The saga ended in 1986 with the convictions and federal prison terms for more than a dozen top US mobsters, including Milwaukee boss Frank Balistrieri, who pleaded guilty.

 Chicago Outfit leaders Joseph Aiuppa and Jackie Cerone. Carl DeLuna of Kansas City. And Milton Rockman of Cleveland. Carl DeLuna. The man who had sat in Oscar Goodman’s office and told Allen Glick that his sons would be murdered one by one if he didn’t sell his company. Federal prison. Joseph Aiuppa, boss of the Chicago Outfit.

Federal prison. Frank Balistrieri, the mad bomber of Milwaukee, who had arranged the loan and the whole structure. Federal prison. The skim was over. The Teamsters pension fund pipeline was exposed. The mechanism that had funneled untaxed mob money from Las Vegas counting rooms to organized crime families across the Midwest was dismantled and documented and entered into the federal record in devastating detail.

Frank Rosenthal never faced charges for his role in the skimming operations at the Argent casinos. For years, people wondered why. In 2008, Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Jane Ann Morrison, based on three former law enforcement sources, provided the answer. Rosenthal was an FBI informant. There it is.

 The final piece that the movie left out entirely. Sam Ace Rothstein, the Robert De Niro character, the supposed hero of Casino, the man whose story anchors the entire film, the man who walks away from the mob’s Vegas operation before it collapses. The real Frank Rosenthal was an FBI informant. He had been feeding information to federal law enforcement for years.

He survived the car bombing, survived the collapse of the operation, survived everything, and died in his bed in Miami Beach in 2008 at the age of 79. He was an American professional sports gambler, Las Vegas casino executive, organized crime associate, and FBI informant. That last part. FBI informant. The one thing the movie that was supposedly based on his life never mentioned.

The Spilotro brothers’ fate had been sealed in January 1986. In the wake of the imprisonment of Joseph Aiuppa and John Cerone for skimming Las Vegas casino profits, most of the upper echelon of the Outfit attended a meeting at the Czech Lodge in North Riverside, Illinois. At the meeting, Outfit boss Tony Accardo appointed a new street boss and then turned to the first problem, Spilotro, and how things had gone down since he took over Vegas.

Mobster Rocco Infelice said, “Hit him.” Everyone else at the meeting agreed. Spilotro and his brother Michael disappeared on June 14th, 1986, after they drove away together from Michael’s home. Their battered bodies were found several days later in an Indiana cornfield, brutally beaten and kicked to death. The organization that Spilotro had spent 15 years protecting ate him because the skim was gone.

The bosses were in prison. The operation he had been sent to Las Vegas to guard was dismantled. And in the accounting that followed, Spirotra was the one who had generated too much heat, caused too many problems, made too many enemies, slept with the wrong man’s wife, run a burglary crew when he should have been invisible, attracted FBI attention when invisibility was the only thing that kept the whole structure working.

His brother went with him, an innocent bystander in his own murder, killed to prevent revenge. As later testimony indicated, the Spirotra brothers were called into a meeting in Chicago with the understanding that Michael Spirotra would become a made man. That was the lie they used to get them there, a promotion, a ceremony.

Come to Chicago for good news. And Tony Spirotra, who had put scores of men in the ground, who had squeezed heads in vices, and ordered car bombings, and ran one of the most feared enforcement operations in American organized crime history, walked into that basement because he believed the people who had used him for 15 years were finally going to give him what he wanted.

The organization consumed everything eventually. The front men, the casino managers, the enforcers, even the bosses sitting in federal prison cells in their 70s, watching the empire they built get documented and prosecuted and entered into the permanent record. Not long after the FBI raided Glick’s offices in the Stardust in the summer of 1978, he sold Argent to Trans Sterling Corporation in December 1979 and returned to California and the real estate business.

He was never charged with a crime. He testified, told everything he knew, and went home. The man whose name had been on $63 million in in mob-connected loans, who had sat across tables from some of the most dangerous criminal figures in America, who had watched people around him be murdered to keep the operation running, walked away without a criminal conviction and resumed his career.

Allen Glick saw Las Vegas casinos as a business opportunity, but he was naive about the strings attached to the Teamsters loans he received. Naive. That word from Nicholas Pileggi, who wrote Casino and interviewed Glick for the book, carries a great deal of weight. Whether Glick was genuinely naive or whether he made a calculated choice to take the money and manage the consequences is something only Glick ever fully knew.

What is documented is that he cooperated, that he testified, that his testimony was central to the prosecution of some of the most powerful mob figures in American history. Allen Glick died last week. At the time of his passing, Glick resided in San Diego. He died in 2021 in San Diego, the city he had always lived in.

He was 79 years old. He had outlived Frank Rosenthal, and Tony Spirotra, and Frank Balistrieri, and Joseph Aiuppa, and Carl DeLuna, all the men who had used him and threatened him, and tried to control him. He outlasted the organization that had borrowed $63 million in the names of American truck drivers and used it to steal from casino counting rooms and murdered people to keep the machinery running.

He died quietly in his home city at a decent age. The mob didn’t. Casino is one of the greatest films ever made about organized crime. Scorsese’s direction is masterful. De Niro’s performance is extraordinary. The period detail is precise and the moral weight is genuinely felt. But it gets the most important thing wrong.

It presents the Vegas operation as something that ended because of internal dysfunction, because of Tony and Ginger and Nicky and the affairs and the addiction and the paranoia and the violence that consumed the people at the center of it. It presents the fall as personal, as the consequence of human weakness rather than institutional failure.

The real story is colder than that. The $63 million operation didn’t fall because the people inside it were flawed. It fell because one frightened man named Allen Glick agreed to tell a federal grand jury what he had seen. Because Frank Cullotta, when faced with a choice between prison and betrayal, chose betrayal.

Because Frank Rosenthal had been feeding information to the FBI for years while presenting himself as the mob’s loyal servant. Snitches, not violence, not hubris, not the tragic arc of a man too ambitious for his own good, just men deciding that the code meant less than they had claimed it meant when the consequences became concrete and personal.

The mob spent decades building a mythology around loyalty, around the idea that men in the life kept their mouths shut, that the code was real, that omerta was used something more than a word. In Las Vegas in the 1970s and 1980s, surrounded by $63 million in stolen pension money and a skim that moved tens of millions in untaxed cash from counting rooms to mob bosses across the Midwest, the code lasted exactly as long as it was convenient.

Then it dissolved one testimony at a time, one informant at a time, one frightened man telling a grand jury what he knew because the alternative was worse. That’s the real casino, not the glamour, not the money piled up in back rooms, not Sharon Stone in a sequined dress. A Bronze Star veteran from San Diego sitting in a federal courtroom describing in detail how the most powerful criminal organization in America used his name to steal $63 million and and how he had been too frightened to stop it, and how nobody murdered him for

testifying because by the time he testified, there was nobody left with both the motive and the freedom to do anything about it. They were all already in prison. That’s the ending Casino left out.