October 10th, 1979. Evening on the east side of Las Vegas. Sherwin Jerry Lisner opened his front door because he recognized the man standing on his porch. He let him in. And as Lisner turned to lead him toward the back of the house, Frank Cullotta drew a .22 caliber pistol and fired two rounds. Lisner did not drop.
He spun around, asked why, and ran. Cullotta chased him through the house firing again and again until the gun was empty and still Lisner was moving. Cullotta grabbed the cord off a water cooler and tried to strangle him with it. The cord snapped. By the time it was finished, Lisner had been shot close to 10 times. Outside, a crew member named Wayne Matecki sat waiting in the car.
Hours later, Lisner’s body was discovered floating in his own backyard swimming pool. The water around him gone pink. The killing was supposed to be quick and clean. It was neither. This wasn’t a professional hit by some imported gun. This was a favor called in by Tony Spilotro, the Chicago Outfit’s man in Vegas, the most feared enforcer in the desert.
And Frank Cullotta did it because Tony was his oldest friend in the world. They had been running together since they were boys on the streets of Chicago. Cullotta was the leader of the Hole in the Wall gang. He was a confessed killer of at least four men. And here is the strange, twisted, almost impossible thing about him.
16 years after he killed Jerry Lisner, Frank Cullotta walked onto a Martin Scorsese movie set and played a hit man in the film Casino. And the scene he stepped into the on-screen killing of an informant hunted down inside his own home was a recreation of the very murder Cullotta had committed in real life. The actor hired to play the shooter couldn’t make it look right.
So, Scorsese turned to the man who had actually done it and said, “Show him how.” Culotta showed him. Then Scorsese put Culotta himself on camera to do it for real. He played his own crime for pay with a union card. This is the story of how a child of the West Side of Chicago became Tony Spilotro’s right hand, ran the most brazen burglary crew in Las Vegas history, killed for friendship and for business, then flipped on everyone he ever loved, entered the witness security program, walked back out of it, and ended his
life as a movie consultant cashing checks from the same director who immortalized him under a different name. On screen, Frank Vincent played a lieutenant named Frank Marino, a character built directly on Frank Culotta. The man under the character was Culotta, and his story is the most surreal full circle in mob history.
But here is what the documentaries usually miss. Culotta didn’t just survive. He profited from his own betrayals twice. Once when the government paid for his cooperation, and once when Hollywood paid him to reenact the crimes he had confessed to. That is a level of American hustle that even the Outfit could never have imagined.
Frank Culotta was born December 14th, 1938 in Chicago. His father, Joseph, was himself a criminal, a skilled wheelman and stickup artist, though by most accounts never a formal part of the Outfit. He died when Frank was still young, leaving the family poor and the son with a single inheritance, the understanding that the straight world was for other people.
By the time Frank was a teenager, he was hanging on the corners of the Grand Avenue neighborhood, running errands for older guys, learning the geography of opportunity. That is where he met a small, intense Italian kid with quick hands and quicker eyes, Anthony Spilotro. The two were born the same year, Tony that May, Frank that December, but Tony was the smaller, harder one, already the kind of kid other kids learned not to push. They became inseparable.
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Brothers in everything but blood. They shoplifted together. They fought together. They split their first scores down the middle on a sidewalk under a street light. Whatever happened to one of them, the other one answered for. By the late 1950s, Collata had graduated from teenage stickups to serious work. He was running a burglary crew in Chicago, hitting jewelry stores, fur warehouses, anywhere there was inventory and a back door. He had a gift for it.
He could case a building in 20 minutes and tell you where the alarm wires ran, where the safe sat, where the night watchman took his coffee break. He wasn’t muscle. He was a planner. A thief by craft, not by accident. His first arrests came young and prison hardened him into exactly the man the outfit needed.
By the early 1960s, Tony Spilotro was climbing. He became a made member of the outfit around 1963. Collata never was because his bloodline wasn’t fully Italian, but the relationship didn’t need a button to be real. They stayed close through the ’60s, through Tony’s rise as an enforcer and collector for the outfit.
Through the killings Tony got tagged with, the M&M murders of 1962, William McCarthy and James Miraglia, found dead in the trunk of a car. McCarthy’s head crushed in a vise. The scene that would later make it into Casino, almost word for word. Collata was there for the lead-up. He later admitted he had made the phone call that lured McCarthy to his death.
Then in 1971, Tony Spilotro got the assignment that would change both their lives. Chicago sent him to Las Vegas. The outfit had a problem. The skim from the casinos, the cash being lifted from counting rooms at places like the Stardust, was the lifeblood of the operation, and it needed protecting. Tony was sent west to make sure nobody got greedy, to make sure the bosses in Chicago and Kansas City and Milwaukee kept getting their envelopes.
He set up shop in a jewelry store called the Gold Rush, just off the strip. From that little storefront, he ran an empire of shakedowns, loan sharking, and fear. By the mid-70s, he had Las Vegas in a chokehold, and he needed his old friend. In 1978, Frank Cullotta got the call. Come to Vegas, there’s work.
By that point, Cullotta had bounced between Chicago and the federal prison system more than once. He was pushing 40 and looking for fresh territory. He drove west and reported to the Gold Rush. Tony hugged him, they drank, and then Tony explained the situation. Las Vegas was a gold mine, but it needed organizing.
There were independent burglars and jewel thieves and stick-up men running wild across the valley with no structure and no tribute. Tony wanted Frank to put them under one tent, to run them, to take a cut from every score in town, to handle the messy business that Tony, now under constant FBI surveillance, couldn’t touch himself. Cullotta said yes.
Within months, he had assembled a crew that would become legend. They were dubbed by the press the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. The name came from their signature method. They would scout a high-end home or jewelry store, find a wall or roof that didn’t face the street, and punch a hole straight through it to bypass alarms on doors and windows. Quick, effective.
They worked at night in teams, dressed in dark clothes with radios tuned to the police frequency. They hit homes belonging to doctors, casino executives, anyone whose address suggested money. By 1981, by Collata’s own later estimate, the crew had burglarized somewhere between 250 and 300 homes and businesses across the valley.
Collata took a piece, Tony took a piece, and the rest got split among the crew. Here is how a typical score actually worked. The opportunity. A scout would case a target home, noting the alarm system, the dog if any, the layout, the inside connection. A pawn broker or a maid or a pool cleaner with a gambling debt would confirm whether the family was traveling. The execution.
On the chosen night, men would punch a hole through a back wall or cut through the roof in minutes. One stood watch on the radio. Another waited in a car with the engine running. They were in and out fast. Jewelry went to a fence who paid a fraction of the retail value. Cash was clean. Much of the planning and splitting happened in the back of the Upper Crust Pizza Parlor on Flamingo Road, which Collata owned as a front.
The problem. The crew got famous. Las Vegas Metro built a unit to watch them. The FBI tracked their cars. And the bigger Tony Spilotro got, the more eyes Tony brought down on everyone around him, including Frank. But burglary wasn’t the only work. There were bodies, too. And this is where the story stops being charming and starts being what it really was.
In 1979, Tony asked Collata for the Lisner favor. Sherwin Jerry Lisner was a con man and small-time operator who had gotten himself indicted and was talking to the government, and word reached the outfit that he was set to testify against Tony and Frank. Tony decided he had to go. He could not pull the trigger himself because he would be the obvious suspect the second the body dropped. So, he asked Frank.
And Frank said yes, the same way he had said yes to Tony when they were boys. The Lisner killing happened the way it was described at the start of this story, clumsy, prolonged, and very nearly a failure. Collata brought Wayne Matecki along as a wheelman. He shot Lisner in the head, chased him through the house when he wouldn’t die, emptied the gun, and reached for a cord that snapped in his hands.
Lisner’s body turned up in his own swimming pool. The case went unsolved for years until the one man who could explain it decided, much later, to explain everything. There were other killings. The accounts vary on the exact number, but Collata later confessed under oath to involvement in at least four murders.
He killed for business. He killed for Tony. He killed because that was the work. And he had grown up understanding that the work was the work. He didn’t agonize. He didn’t romanticize it. He just did it and went home and slept. That was the thing about Collata that even hardened FBI agents would later remark on.
He was [clears throat] not a sadist. He was not a thrill killer. He was a craftsman who had simply included murder in his trade. By 1981, the Hole in the Wall gang had become too visible. The FBI had bugged the Upper Crust. They had photographed Collata meeting with Tony at restaurants up and down the strip. They had turned at least one member of the crew.
On July 4th, 1981, Independence Day, the FBI and Las Vegas Metro caught the entire crew during a burglary attempt at Bertha’s Gifts and Home Furnishings on East Sahara Avenue. They had set up surveillance based on a tip. They watched the men cut in. They moved in. Arrests followed. The crew was indicted on burglary and conspiracy charges.
And then something began to shift inside Frank Cullotta that nobody around him saw coming. Here is where it gets interesting. Because at exactly the moment Cullotta needed Tony Spilotro the most, Tony pulled back. Word reached Frank through investigators and street sources that there was a contract on his life.
The reasoning was simple in mob logic. Cullotta knew everything. He knew about Lisner. He knew about the bodies, the scores, the payoffs. If he ever cracked under pressure, the entire Vegas operation could collapse. The bosses had been caught on a wiretap talking about having to clean their dirty laundry. Frank understood exactly what that meant.
You have to understand what this meant to him. This wasn’t a business partner turning on him. This was the kid from Grand Avenue, the brother. The one person in the world Cullotta had trusted absolutely since childhood. The friendship was the architecture of his entire life. Tony Spilotro had been the floor under Frank Cullotta’s feet for 30 years.
And now that floor was deciding whether to drop him. In the spring of 1982, sitting in federal custody, Frank Cullotta did the thing that no one who knew him would have predicted. He reached out to the FBI. He wanted to talk. The agents who came to meet him could not believe their luck. They had been chasing Tony Spilotro for a decade and never gotten closer than wiretaps.
Now the man who knew everything was offering to give them everything. The deal was finalized that July. Full cooperation, full disclosure. In exchange, a reduced sentence, relocation, and a new identity. He took it. He sat in front of a federal grand jury and confessed to the Lisner murder. He named names.
He laid out the structure of the Hole in the Wall gang. And crucially, he could put Tony Spilotro at the center of murders and rackets the way no wiretap ever could. The intelligence was devastating. In September 1983, Spilotro was indicted for conspiracy and obstruction in the Lisner murder. At trial that October, Kalata admitted on the stand to involvement in over 300 crimes, including four murders.
Kalata’s defection helped Las Vegas police and the FBI dismantle the outfit’s street operation in the desert. The broader casino skimming prosecutions, the cases that ultimately sent bosses in Kansas City, Chicago, and Milwaukee to prison, rested mainly on years of FBI wiretaps. But Kalata’s flip was part of the same wave that finally broke Chicago’s grip on Las Vegas.
Tony Spilotro never made it to trial on his last charges. On June 14th, 1986, Tony and his younger brother Michael in Bensenville, Illinois, and beaten to death by their own associates. Nine days later, their bodies were found stripped to their underwear and buried together in an Indiana cornfield near Enos. Chicago killed Tony because he had drawn too much heat and was facing trial on multiple cases, and Kalata’s cooperation had helped load those cases.
Kalata always insisted he never ordered or carried out the hit. But he never denied that what he said in a courtroom helped seal his old friend’s fate. The brother who had been the floor under Frank’s feet for 30 years had become a corpse in the soil of northwest Indiana. Kalata was paroled into the witness security program around 1984.
A new name, new towns. The government moved him through places like Texas, Colorado, Mississippi, and Alabama. He tried to disappear. But here is the strange thing about a man like Frank Collato. The old life never really left him. He missed the rhythm of it. He missed being known, and he didn’t last long inside the program.
Within roughly 2 years, he left it, drifted back toward his old life and his real name, and eventually settled near Las Vegas of all places, the city where he had killed Jerry Lisner. By then, Tony was dead. Most of the bosses who would have wanted Frank killed were dead, in prison, or too old to care. He had calculated that nobody who mattered was still hunting him.
He was right. And then, in the mid-1990s, the phone rang. The voice belonged to Nicholas Pileggi, the journalist who had written Wiseguy, the book that became Goodfellas. Pileggi was working with Martin Scorsese on a new film, Casino, based on Pileggi’s reporting on the Vegas mob and the skim. Scorsese wanted authenticity.
He wanted to know how the burglaries actually went down. He wanted to know how the killings actually happened. And the only living person who had been inside the actual rooms was Frank Collato. Collato signed on as a technical consultant and spent months on the set. He walked the production through the geography of The Gold Rush.
He explained how the Hole in the Wall gang punched into walls. He described, scene by scene, the things he had done. And then Scorsese gave him something almost no consultant ever gets, time on camera. In the film, there is a lieutenant named Frank Marino, played by the actor Frank Vincent, the same man who would later play Phil Leotardo on The Sopranos.
Marino is the loyal second to Joe Pesci’s character Nicky Santoro, the fictional version of Tony Spilotro, and Marino was built on Frank Cullotta. So, the real Cullotta stood on set watching an actor play a version of himself. Then, Scorsese cast Cullotta in a second role as a hitman. In one scene, an informant is hunted through his home and shot to death, a near replay of the Lisner murder.
The actor playing the shooter couldn’t get it right, so Scorsese asked Cullotta to demonstrate, then filmed him doing it. Cullotta also turns up as the gunman in another killing in the film. On screen, he was exactly what he had been in life. Cullotta later said in interviews that he didn’t find the assignment difficult.
He said it was just a job. He hit his marks, he fired the prop gun, he collected his check, the same craft performed for cash that had once been his profession in the dark. The whole thing happened on a sound stage. Nobody died. He went back to his room that night and slept like a baby. After Casino, Frank Cullotta became a minor American curiosity.
He co-wrote books. He did interviews. He appeared in documentaries about the mafia. He started a YouTube channel in his last years called Coffee with Cullotta, where he sat in front of a camera and told stories about Tony, about Chicago, about the hole-in-the-wall gang. He ran mob history tours in Las Vegas, driving customers around the city and showing them the spots where he and his crew had committed crimes.
The Gold Rush location, the Upper Crust site, the neighborhood where Lisner had lived. He even drove past the house where the murder happened and told the tourists what he had done there. Frank Cullotta died of complications from COVID-19 on August 20th, 2020 in a Las Vegas hospital around 12:50 in the morning. He was 81.
He died in the same city where he had killed Jerry Lisner and ridden shotgun for the most feared enforcer in the desert. He outlived almost every man he had ever worked with. Tony Spilotro was 34 years gone. Most of the Hole in the Wall crew was dead or in nursing homes. The bosses who had once wanted him executed were buried in cemeteries from Chicago to Kansas City.
Frank Cullotta had won in his own twisted way, the longest game. So, what does this story tell us? It tells us that the line between the men who commit crimes and the men who narrate them has always been thinner than the public wants to believe. It tells us that the American justice system, when offered information valuable enough, will pay a confessed killer to remake his life.
It tells us that Hollywood, when offered authenticity rare enough, will hire that same killer to reenact his own crimes for cash. Frank Cullotta killed at least four men. He helped destroy the Outfit’s grip on Las Vegas by talking. And then he turned around and sold the story of those same crimes in books, in tours, in films for the last 25 years of his life. The crime paid.
The cooperation paid. The performance of the crime paid again. Tony Spilotro never got to write a book. Tony Spilotro died at the age of 48, his body beaten and dumped in a cornfield. The boys from Grand Avenue had walked the same road for decades. One ended in the dirt. The other ended on camera.
The difference between them came down to a single decision in 1982 when one man decided that the friendship that had defined his entire life was worth less than the years he would otherwise spend in a federal cell. Friendship has a market price in the world of organized crime. Frank Cullotta found his and he never apologized for it.
Not once. He said in his last interviews that he would do it all again the same way. He said the only thing he regretted was that he could not call his old friend Tony and tell him how the movie turned out. That is the man under the character. The killer who became the consultant who became the tour guide who became the storyteller of his own crimes.
America had never seen anything quite like him and now that he is gone, it probably never will again. If you found this story as wild as we did, hit subscribe. We drop a new mob documentary every week. Leave a comment below. Which figure from the Spilotro era do you want us to cover next? We are listening.
