The Hole in the Wall Gang: Every Member of Nicky’s Crew and How They Died – HT
Nicky Santoro’s crew in Casino is a montage. That’s all Scorsese gave them. A handful of nameless guys cutting holes in roofs, grabbing furs, loading vans, background action behind Joe Pesci’s performance. The film doesn’t name them. It doesn’t tell you what happened to them.
It treats them like set dressing for the real story, interchangeable muscle that exists only to illustrate Nicky’s recklessness before the outfit buries him in a cornfield. The real crew behind that montage had a dozen men in it. One was a corrupt Las Vegas Metro detective named Joe Blasco, who played minor league baseball in the San Francisco Giants organization before feeding Tony Spilotro the names of undercover agents while still carrying a badge.
One was a triple murderer named Larry Newman, who stood 6’4, had a tested IQ of 169, and did a thousand situps a day in a prison cell he didn’t need to occupy. He had a family trust fund. One was an alarm specialist named Sal Romano, who could disassemble any lock ever manufactured, and who was working for the FBI the entire time the crew existed, wearing a wire to every planning meeting, reporting every target to his handler before the job began.
One was a man from New Jersey named Ernie Davino, whose father had been an enforcer for Albert Anastasia, and who would eventually find a rosary on his prison bunk and spend the rest of his life in ministry. Every one of them has a documented name, a documented role, and a documented ending.
Almost nobody who’s watched Casino can name a single one. That’s the version Scorsese told, a crew without faces. Here’s the real roster, how the machine they built actually worked, and the specific way it consumed every man inside it. Tony Spilotro arrived in Las Vegas in 1971. He was 33 years old, sent by Tony Accardo to replace Marshall Caifano as the Chicago Outfit’s representative west of the Mississippi.
His primary mandate was protecting the casino skim, the untaxed cash flowing out of the Stardust, the Fremont, the Hacienda, and the Marina, all controlled through Allen Glick’s Argent Corporation, and financed by approximately $146 million in Teamsters Central States Pension Fund loans. The scale of that skim was staggering.
The Stardust alone was yielding roughly $400,000 a month in cash that never appeared on any official count. Before the numbers reached the Gaming Control Board, trusted employees removed the money and placed it in separate containers. Couriers, Outfit associates traveling on commercial flights in business attire carrying briefcases that appeared ordinary, transported the cash from Las Vegas to Kansas City, to Chicago, to Milwaukee, to Cleveland on regular schedules designed to avoid patterns.
One Teamster official was observed by the FBI stuffing bills into pockets sewn inside his suit coat at a highway rest area in broad daylight. The skim required one thing above all others, silence, absolute structural invisibility. The man they sent to protect it couldn’t stay quiet. In 1976, Spilotro opened the Gold Rush Limited Jewelry Store at 228 West Sahara Avenue. On paper, it was retail.
In practice, it was a fencing hub, a bookmaking center, and a loan sharking office, >> >> and the operational headquarters of a burglary crew that would come to be known as the Hole in the Wall Gang. The man he trusted to run it day-to-day was a childhood friend from the Grand Avenue neighborhood in Chicago, a man named Frank Cullotta.
And that friendship would survive everything except one phone call from an FBI agent named Charlie Parsons. The FBI would later determine that roughly 70% of the Gold Rush’s inventory had been reported stolen. Agent William Roemer wrote that most of the top thieves in the country, especially in the western half, fenced their goods through that store.
But the store’s alarm specialist, a self-taught electronics genius recruited specifically for his ability to defeat sophisticated security systems, was recording every conversation for the FBI from the day he set foot >> >> in Las Vegas. And the Outfit’s with Spilotro’s side operation would last exactly until January 1986, when boss Joey Aiuppa heard his 28 and a half year sentence in the Strawman Casino skimming trial and decided who was to blame.
The crew included a man who’d killed three people in a bar because the bartender shortchanged him and had a tested IQ of 169. Lawrence Newman, Crazy Larry, was born around 1928 in McHenry County, Illinois, to a family with money. He had income from a trust fund. He chose crime not from necessity, but from something deeper and darker than economics can explain.
In 1956, enraged over being shortchanged at an uptown bar in Chicago, he left, uh, returned with a shotgun, and killed the bartender, a waitress, and a newsboy who happened to walk through the door. Convicted of triple murder, sentenced to 125 years, paroled after roughly 12 to 16 years, the details of the parole itself remain poorly documented, which tells you something about how the Illinois correction system worked in that era.
He stood 6’4, weighed 250 pounds, had hands so large that authorities had difficulty getting clean fingerprints. He was a fitness devotee. The thousand daily situps were documented by multiple sources. Even Spilotro was afraid of him. According to Cullotta’s later testimony, Neumann would fly into Vegas specifically for scores and depart immediately from airports in California or Arizona, never from Las Vegas itself, never leaving a local travel record.
He was the crew’s enforcer and its most dangerous member. During a jewelry store robbery in Chicago with Wayne Matecki, after the score was already completed and the merchandise secured, Neumann grabbed a machete off the wall and hacked the store’s owner, a jeweler named Bob Brown, to death.
He told Matecki afterwards that he wanted it to look like a crazy person had done the killing. That wasn’t an excuse. It was a description. Frank Cullotta moved to Las Vegas in early 1979 at the direction of Joey Lombardo, who told him Spilotro needed a trusted man. Cullotta and Spilotro had known each other since boyhood.
A territorial dispute over shoeshine spots on Grand Avenue in the neighborhood Chicagoans called the Patch. Cullotta’s father, Joseph Raymond Cullotta, >> >> had died during a police pursuit when Frank was eight years old. He dropped out of Steinmetz High School in ninth grade and never went back. In Vegas, Cullotta became the crew’s day-to-day operational leader, the man who recruited members, identified targets, planned the entries, and managed the logistics.
With Leo Guardino, he opened the Upper Crust Pizza restaurant at 4110 South Maryland Parkway using $65,000 from three residential burglaries. The restaurant, which Cullotta credited with introducing Chicago deep-dish pizza to Las Vegas, functioned as the crew’s planning headquarters. He later admitted involvement in over 300 crimes, including four murders.
The most documented was the October 1979 killing of Sherwin Lisner at his home on Rawhide Avenue. Lisner was about to testify before a grand jury. Cullotta shot him approximately 12 times in the head with a .22 caliber handgun. When Lisner survived the initial shots and fought back, Cullotta attempted to strangle him with a water cooler cord before finishing him off.
Herbert Blitzstein, Fat Herbie, was Spilotro’s right-hand man, rarely seen more than a few feet from him. Born in 1934 in Chicago, Jewish, roughly 300 pounds, he drove a white 1973 Cadillac Eldorado, and dressed in a way that people remembered. He served as secretary-treasurer of the Gold Rush. His primary function within the crew was fencing the stolen jewelry and valuables, running the bookmaking lines from behind the counter, and phoning odds to contacts in Chicago.
His ending would come 11 years after Spilotro’s death, and it would arrive from a direction nobody in the original crew saw coming. Joe Blasco had played minor league baseball in the Giants and Red Sox organizations before becoming a Las Vegas Metropolitan Police detective. While on the force, FBI wiretaps caught him passing intelligence directly to Spilotro.
Surveillance schedules, home addresses of potential burglary targets, the identities of undercover agents working Outfit cases. Fired from Metro in 1978, he walked directly from the police department into Spilotro’s operation. During jobs, he sat in a white commercial van with police scanners monitoring law enforcement frequencies, spotting tails, and using his training to keep the crew clear of surveillance.
He was the crew’s eyes and ears on the outside of every building they entered. Wayne Matecki was an anomaly. Born around 1951 in the Chicago suburbs in the Northridge and Rolling Meadows area, he had no prior criminal record of any kind, which made him operationally valuable because Las Vegas law enforcement had no file on him and no face to match.
He never moved to Vegas permanently. He flew in for specific scores and departed immediately. Cullotta tested him early by having him hide inside a Las Vegas store after closing, collect furs and expensive items, break out through a back entrance, and load a waiting car. He passed.
He became an integral part of the entry team alongside Guardino. Leo Guardino was a career burglar from Chicago who’d spent a lifetime in and out of jail. He co-owned the Upper Crust with Culotta and specialized in the physical work of the break-ins, the climbing, the cutting, the dropping through ceilings. Ernie Davino came from New Jersey, the only core member who wasn’t from Chicago. His father, Ernest Davino Sr.
, had been an enforcer for Albert Anastasia in the 1950s. Davino later claimed that he and Guardino had started their own burglary operation in Las Vegas before Culotta and Spilotro absorbed them into the larger crew. Spilotro at one point ordered Neumann to kill Davino, suspecting he was cooperating with law enforcement.
Culotta recalled Spilotro saying he wanted to cut Ernie Davino up in little bitty pieces and dispose of him in Lake Mead. Bertha’s arrest likely saved Davino’s life, though he didn’t know that at the time. Before I get to how this operation actually worked at the mechanical level and to the man inside it who was recording everything for the FBI, I’d be curious what you think.
Looking at this crew, which one do you think survived the longest? Think about it. I’ll account for every ending before this is over. Here’s the detail that explains everything about how this crew operated. They never went through a door. The Hole in the Wall Gang earned its name from a devastatingly simple innovation.
Standard burglar alarms in the late 1970s and early ’80s protected doors and windows, the expected points of entry. Walls and roofs, the surfaces nobody anticipated anyone coming through, were typically unalarmed. Spilotro’s crew climbed onto the rooftops carrying acetylene torches, sledgehammers, power drills, saws, and ladders, cut through stucco walls and ceilings, and dropped directly into the target space above safes and merchandise displays.
They communicated between entry men and lookouts using two-way radios. They never triggered the alarm systems because they bypassed the surfaces those systems were designed to protect. Targets were identified through a structured network that functioned like a low-level intelligence operation. Hotel staff who noticed high rollers flashing jewelry, car valets who overheard conversations about weekend plans, casino employees who knew which guests kept large amounts of cash in their rooms, cocktail waitresses, bellmen, desk clerks, someone in Las
Vegas always knew someone worth hitting, and the crew had cultivated enough contacts that viable targets surfaced regularly. Tipsters received approximately 10% of the take from a successful job. Blasco used his law enforcement connections to pull home addresses, license plate registrations, and according to Culotta, the schedules of patrol units in specific neighborhoods.
Culotta himself had taken a locksmith course as a teenager and later invented a custom tool to access Ace alarm boxes, which gave the crew an additional edge on lower security targets. The crew evolved their targets systematically over time. Sears stores in the early days when they were still developing their technique, then drug dealers’ stash houses, victims who’d never file a police report, then jewelry stores, fur boutiques, and wealthy homes where they’d sledgehammer through the stucco exterior walls of
desert residences to reach safes and closets on the other side. Spilotro took an equal share of every haul, but never went on jobs himself. Crews kept all proceeds from scores under roughly $5,000. Anything above that required 10 to 20% sent up. The assumption from Casino, the way Scorsese plays the montage, is that the crew were reckless, impulsive thugs doing smash and grab work. Not quite.
The real operation was methodical, entry through unalarmed surfaces only, counter-surveillance by a trained detective in a van with five radio scanners, departures from out-of-state airports to avoid creating local travel records, scores that followed no predictable schedule. Metro Intelligence Commander Kent Clifford told state lawmakers in April 1981 that the crew had stolen more than $500,000 in documented cash and valuables.
Culotta later estimated between 250 and 300 burglaries in Vegas by the time it ended. That number, 500,000, exposes the structural absurdity of the whole enterprise. The Stardust skim alone moved roughly $4.8 million a year in untaxed cash. The entire documented haul of the Hole in the Wall Gang across 5 years of work barely exceeded what the skim produced in 6 weeks.
Spilotro was risking a billion-dollar operation for pocket change, and the outfit didn’t authorize it. Culotta testified that Spilotro told him in 1978 that no one back home knew he was taking a cut. The burglaries were a side hustle running underneath a silenced, dependent empire. Every job generated law enforcement attention that crept closer to the skim.
This is the contradiction that destroyed everything, the attention paradox. It didn’t matter how carefully individual scores were executed, how disciplined the entry was, or how methodical the counter-surveillance. The enterprise itself generated noise by its very existence, and noise was the one thing the skim could not survive.
The most important member of the Hole in the Wall Gang was working for the FBI the entire time. Salvatore Romano, Sal, was a self-taught electronics specialist fascinated by locks and mechanical systems since childhood. He’d buy locks and disassemble them to understand how they worked. His first exposure to organized crime came through breaking into laundry machines for Outfit boss Joseph Ferriola.
He’d been a confidential informant for the Chicago police since 1959, two decades before the Hole in the Wall Gang existed. He was brought to Las Vegas by associate Peter Basile specifically for his expertise in defeating sophisticated alarm systems that conventional tools couldn’t handle. What nobody in the crew knew was that the FBI’s Tucson office had turned on Romano after catching him at O’Hare Airport with stolen furs from a Vegas job.
The bureau set him up in a Las Vegas apartment wired for sound and video. An undercover female agent posed as his airline attendant girlfriend. Romano wore recording devices under his clothes and reported every planned operation, every target, every piece of the crew’s structure to his handler. A warning almost saved them.
Corrupt Chicago police commander William Hanhardt, himself later convicted in 2002 of running a nationwide jewelry theft ring that netted over $5 million, sent two officers to alert Culotta that Romano’s arrest records had vanished from the Chicago PD system. Vanishing records were the signature of a protected informant.
When the feds turned someone, the first thing they did was scrub the trail. Culotta brought the warning directly to Spilotro. He laid it out plainly, Romano’s file was gone, and that only happened for one reason. Spilotro dismissed it. He didn’t want to lose an alarm man he couldn’t replace. Instead, he ordered Culotta to pair Romano with Larry Neumann on the next job and told Neumann to kill Romano if anything seemed off.
Romano survived because the next job was Bertha’s, and by the time the crew arrived at Bertha’s, the FBI had been in position for hours. 40 federal agents and Metro officers were already in position when Leo Guardino dropped through the roof of Bertha’s Gifts and Home Furnishings. July 4th, 1981. The target was an upscale gift shop at 896 East Sahara Avenue, owned by a beloved local entrepreneur named Bertha Beggs Ragland.
The crew believed the safe held approximately $1 million in jewelry and cash. They chose Independence Day weekend deliberately. The store would be closed Saturday through Tuesday, fireworks noise would cover the sound of drilling, and police would be concentrated on the Strip handling holiday crowds.
Romano had given the FBI everything, the target, the date, the timing, the crew assignments. Agents positioned themselves on a nearby five-story building with video cameras, on adjacent rooftops behind air conditioning units, inside empty storefronts on the block, on a bank roof with a clear sightline, and most critically, inside Bertha’s itself to apprehend suspects the moment they entered.
An FBI surveillance plane circled overhead. Law enforcement used a secret radio frequency for genuine communications while broadcasting false chatter on regular frequencies to deceive any scanner the crew might be running. The operation began around 7:00 in the evening as Culotta and Neumann drove counter-surveillance loops around the area.
Blasco set up in his white van with scanners across the street. >> >> Metro Lieutenant Jean Smith, sitting at a traffic light on Sahara, dove to his car floor when Culotta’s Buick pulled up alongside. Around 9:00, a station wagon carrying an Mataki, Guardino, and Davino arrived behind a Chinese restaurant at 1000 East Sahara, where they unloaded tools and a ladder, Romano slipped away by radioing Culotta that his car battery was dead.
Nobody questioned it. The three entry men climbed onto the roof and spent roughly 3 hours drilling through it above the location of the safe. The sound of the power drill carried farther than they realized, but on July 4th in Las Vegas, with fireworks crackling across the city, nobody called it in. Around 10:40 in the evening, Guadino was the first through.
He penetrated the ceiling and dropped into the store carrying burglary tools, landing near the safe. That was the trigger agents had been waiting for. They needed evidence of intent to steal, not merely trespass, and a man standing next to a safe with a cutting torch in his hand was unambiguous. They came in from every side.
Davino and Guadino surrendered inside. Mobile teams arrested Blasco, Neumann, and Matecki outside without incident. Culotta attempted a brief car chase before being stopped. As the arrested men were transported to the county jail, an agent in the van casually mentioned that Sal Romano must have gotten away. The crew went silent.
They knew exactly what that meant. FBI special agent in charge Joseph Yablonsky held a press conference. Agent Emmett Michaels, who led the surveillance squad, >> >> called it the greatest night of his career. Six men were arrested and charged. Culotta, Blasco, Guadino, Davino, Neumann, and Matecki.
Spilotro, who wasn’t present, was tracked down and arrested approximately 2 weeks later. Once Culotta realized in that transport van what Romano had done, do you think flipping was inevitable at that point, or do you think there was still a version of this where he stays loyal? I’d be curious where you land on that. >> >> Within 5 years of Bertha’s arrest, every core member of the crew was dead, imprisoned, or in hiding.
And not one of them was destroyed the same way. Spilotro bailed out the crew, but within weeks wiretaps captured him talking about cleaning dirty laundry, and the people who needed cleaning were his own men. He ordered Neumann to murder both Culotta and Matecki. The logic was simple and lethal. Dead men don’t testify, and Bertha’s arrest had made testimony inevitable.
Neumann was actively trying to post bail to carry out the killings when authorities intervened. Culotta, sitting in a cell, knew exactly what the silence from Spilotro’s end meant. On April 30th, 1982, FBI agent Charlie Parsons visited Culotta in jail and made it official. The Outfit had authorized a contract on his life.
Parsons didn’t sugarcoat it. The man who’d been Culotta’s friend since they were boys shining shoes on Grand Avenue had signed his death warrant. By July 1982, Culotta finalized his cooperation agreement with federal prosecutors. Agent Dennis Arnoldy, who became his handler later, called him the single most important witness in the breakup of Spilotro’s criminal organization in Las Vegas.
The defection was catastrophic, not just for Spilotro, but for the Outfit’s entire western operation. Culotta’s testimony produced 19 federal racketeering indictments, 15 convictions, and five Nevada state burglary convictions. In September 1983, a 17-count federal indictment named 18 defendants.
Five of Spilotro’s subordinates eventually became government witnesses. The man the Outfit had sent to Las Vegas to protect its most profitable operation had, through his own inability to resist running a side hustle, generated a chain reaction that produced more cooperating witnesses than any single FBI investigation in the history of the Chicago mob.
As journalist Jeff German later wrote of Spilotro, his fate was sealed years earlier on that 4th of July evening at Bertha’s. Neumann was convicted of the Bob Brown jewelry store murder, alongside Matecki, and sentenced to life without parole. He died in prison in January 2007 at 79 years old.
The double murder he committed in 1981 at the PM pub in Lakemoor, Illinois, a bar owner named Ron Scharff and a waitress named Patricia Freeman, killed because Scharff had ejected Neumann’s ex-wife from his establishment, was never charged during his lifetime. In 2009, McHenry County authorities posthumously named him the prime suspect.
>> [gasps] >> Blistein’s ending came from outside the original crew entirely. After Spilotro’s death, Fat Herbie pleaded guilty to credit card fraud, conspiracy, and tax evasion. Served 8 years. Suffered a heart attack in prison after being taken off heart medication. Returned to Las Vegas in 1991 and set up a loan sharking operation with roughly $200,000 on the street and an auto insurance fraud business called Any Auto Repair on Fremont Street.
On January 6th, 1997, members of the Los Angeles and Buffalo crime families conspired to take over his rackets. His own business partner, Joe DeLuca, provided the key and alarm code to his townhome on Mount Vernon Avenue. According to testimony, Blitstein raised his hands to his face and asked why before being shot three times in the head. He was 62.
His murder is considered the last major mob-related killing in Las Vegas connected to the Spilotro era. He’s buried at Shalom Memorial Park in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Blasco served approximately 5 years between state and federal sentences. At his federal sentencing, he told Judge Lloyd George that he was tired of embarrassing himself.
After prison, he worked as a bartender at the Crazy Horse 2 gentlemen’s club. Died of a heart attack in November 2002. He was 67. Survived by his wife, Diana, two sons, and a daughter. Davino received 37 years total for burglary and related charges. In [sighs] prison, he found a rosary lying on his bunk.
He said later that it changed his life. After release, he dedicated himself to prison ministry in New Jersey. By the most recent available accounts, he was still alive, one of only two core members to survive into old age. Matecki was convicted of the Bob Brown murder. His precise sentence details and death date are poorly documented.
He faded from the record. Guadino was convicted on burglary charges and likewise disappeared from documented history. The trail goes cold on both men. Romano entered the witness protection program and testified at multiple Outfit trials over the next quarter century. At the 2007 Family Secrets trial, he appeared in a wheelchair.
His famous anecdote: During a botched burglary attempt in Phoenix, when a small dog started barking, Romano backed out of the job. When asked why he didn’t just kill the dog, he said quietly, “I don’t do dogs.” He’s believed to be deceased. Culotta served 2 years at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego, entered the witness protection program, and lived under assumed names in Texas, Colorado, Mississippi, and Alabama, moving whenever he felt the walls closing in, which was often.
He voluntarily left the program in the mid-90s, returned to Las Vegas, the city where he’d committed hundreds of crimes and helped destroy the man who’d been his closest friend since childhood, and built a second career as a mob tour guide, a technical advisor on Scorsese’s Casino, and a co-author of three books with Dennis Griffin.
He played the hitman Curly in the film. The scene where he shoots a character in a steakhouse parking lot, a murder loosely based on one he’d actually committed. In January 2020, he launched a YouTube channel called Coffee with Culotta. Seven months later, he died of COVID-19 in a Las Vegas hospital.
He was 81 years old, the last surviving operational member of the crew. If knowing the real name and the real ending of every man Casino turned into a background extra is the kind of thing you came here for, a like tells me to keep going deeper. The scene everyone remembers from Casino, the cornfield, the baseball bats, the shallow grave, didn’t happen that way.
The film shows Nicky and his brother Dominick lured to a cornfield, beaten with bats, and buried alive in broad daylight. The 2007 Family Secrets trial told a different story in every particular. On June 14th, 1986, Tony and Michael Spilotro were lured with the promise that Michael would be inducted as a made member of the Outfit and Tony promoted to capo. Michael was suspicious.
Before leaving his Oak Park townhouse, he gave his daughter Michelle his jewelry in a plastic sandwich bag and told her he loved her at least 10 times. He told his wife Ann that if he wasn’t back by 9:00, she should assume something was very wrong. Both brothers removed all valuables and personal identification.
They went unarmed. James Marcello picked them up from a hotel parking lot on West Irving Park Road in Bensenville and drove them to a house believed to be a suburban DuPage County property >> >> connected to an Outfit figure named Lee Magnifici. In the basement, approximately a dozen men waited wearing gloves.
Nicholas Calabrese, James LaPietra, John Fecarotta, John DeFranzo, Sam Carlisi, Louis Eboli, Marcello, Louis Marino, Joseph Ferriola, Rocky Infelice, and three men Calabrese said he didn’t recognize. Michael came down the stairs first. Calabrese testified that he said, “How you doing, Mike?” then dove and tackled him around the legs.
A body strangled him with a rope. Tony came down next and understood instantly what was happening. His last recorded words from Calabrese’s testimony, “Can I say a prayer?” Mob historian John Binder later noted that the top guys had made a point of being there and getting their wax in before the brothers were dead.
The forensic pathologist, Dr. John Plunkett, determined both deaths resulted from multiple blunt trauma injuries to the head, neck, and chest. Fists and kicks, not baseball bats. Their lungs and airways filled with blood. They died partly from asphyxiation. There was no evidence either had been bound.
They were dead before they were buried. Not buried alive as the film depicts. The bodies were stripped of their underwear and transported to Willow Slough Fish and Wildlife Area near Enos, Indiana, roughly 60 miles southeast of Chicago, about 12 miles from St. Anne, Illinois, where imprisoned boss Aiuppa had once maintained a hunting club. The burial was botched.
The 5-ft grave was dug in a newly planted cornfield where corn shoots were only 4 in high, leaving the disturbed earth clearly visible to anyone who crossed the field. On June 22nd, farmer Michael Kinz noticed the freshly turned soil while spreading chemicals. He thought a poacher had buried a deer. Wildlife officer Dick Hudson started digging.
About 3 ft down, Hudson later told the Chicago Tribune, “My shovel hit him in the midsection. Two bodies stacked one on top of the other.” Dental records supplied by the brothers’ sibling, Dr. Patrick Spilotro, confirmed identification. Three months after the burial, John Fecarotta was murdered for botching the grave.
During the killing, Calabrese was shot in the shoulder and dropped a bloody glove at the scene. That DNA evidence, recovered and preserved, became the leverage the FBI used years later to turn Calabrese into a cooperating witness. His testimony cracked open the entire Family Secrets case. In September 2007, all five defendants were found guilty.
James Marcello received life in prison for the Spilotro murders. Scorsese couldn’t have known any of this when he made Casino in 1995. The Family Secrets testimony came 12 years later. The correction isn’t a criticism of the film. It’s a completion of the record. The Gold Rush storefront at 228 West Sahara is a vape shop now.
Bertha’s is long gone, demolished, replaced, forgotten by anyone who didn’t know what happened there on a July night in 1981. Frank Cullotta spent his final years driving tourists past the places where he’d committed his crimes, selling cookbooks, and talking into a camera for a YouTube channel that accumulated a few thousand subscribers before the virus took him.
The cornfield near Enos, Indiana, where Tony and Michael Spilotro were found stacked one on top of the other 5 ft under the dirt, is still farmed. The corn grows back every spring. Nobody who drives past it knows what’s underneath.