Las Vegas in the 1970s looked like paradise. Bright lights, packed casinos, endless money flowing through the strip. But behind all that glamour was a hidden world controlled by the mafia. And one man stood at the center of it all. Anthony Tony the Ant Spelotro. Small, soft-spoken, and almost forgettable at first glance, Tony hid a level of violence that shocked even people inside organized crime.
From torture chambers in Chicago basement to secret casino skimming operations in Vegas, his rise through the outfit became one of the darkest mob stories America had ever seen. Tony Spelotro might be remembered today as the guy who helped protect the mafia’s casino empire out in Las Vegas. But his story didn’t start under the bright lights of the strip.
Nah, it started way back in the rough streets of Chicago, where he came up from the bottom like a whole lot of other legendary mob figures before him. Tony was born on May 19th, 1938, right in the middle of the Winnie City. According to FBI agent William Roman’s biography, Enforcer, he grew up as the fourth of six boys in a traditional Italian household.
His father, Paci Spelro, owned a busy Italian restaurant on Chicago’s west side. And that little spot wasn’t just serving pasta and wine. It was basically a gathering place for some of the biggest gangsters in America. Heavy hitters like Sam Gian Connor were regulars there. And Sam Gian Conor wasn’t just another mob boss either.
The man’s story sounded almost too wild to be real. He went from running the streets to becoming one of the most powerful racketeers in the country. And somewhere along the way, his name got tangled up with the CIA and even rumors surrounding President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. That’s the kind of energy young Tony was growing up around.
The restaurant itself almost felt like mafia headquarters. Even Al Capone used to stop by Paty’s place back in the day. Right across the street, mob figure Joey the Clown Lombardo reportedly handled criminal business out in the parking lot like it was just another office. And only a few blocks away lived Anthonyo, one of the outfit’s most feared bosses.
For Tony, organized crime wasn’t some distant world he heard about in stories. It was right outside his front door every single day. Things only got rougher after Tony’s father died while the boys were still young. Without that structure in the house, most of the Spyotrol brothers drifted toward the streets and started running with dangerous crowds.
Only one brother managed to completely avoid that life, eventually becoming a respected doctor. Tony went the opposite direction. As a teenager, he built a reputation as a bully before eventually dropping out of school altogether. Petty crimes quickly became normal for him. Shoplifting, purse snatching, whatever could put money in his pocket or earn him respect in the neighborhood.
He carried himself with this aggressive little man energy that made people remember him. Folks around the neighborhood started calling him Piss Ant, which eventually got shortened to just Ant. The nickname fit in more ways than one because Tony was tiny, barely 5’2 and around 160 pounds. In a world filled with towering tough guys, he stood out immediately, earning names like Tony the Ant and the Little Guy.
And honestly, that made him even more dangerous because if somebody saw him walking down the street, they probably wouldn’t have thought twice about him. He didn’t look like some terrifying underworld enforcer. He looked more like a regular businessman heading to work. But people who spent enough time around him noticed something colder underneath it all.
There was this icy confidence in his blue eyes, like he was completely detached from normal people and normal emotions. By the time Tony was around 16 or 17, depending on who was telling the story, he caught his first major arrest on grand lost charges. That opened the floodgates. Before he even turned 22, he’d already been arrested more than a dozen times.
At that point, the Chicago outfit saw exactly what they needed to see, a fearless young street guy with no real limits. That’s when Tony caught the attention of Sam Mad Dog Dphano. And Dphano was pure nightmare fuel. Mike Corbett, a former Chicago cop who later worked errands for the mafia, once described the Stephano as a complete psychopath.
According to Corbett, the man would humiliate people just because he enjoyed it. He’d walk into bars and do disgusting, disrespectful things right in front of people’s wives just to show dominance and make folks uncomfortable. That was the man who decided to mentor Tony Spilotro. And once Dphano took him under his wing, it didn’t take long before Tony reached the next brutal chapter of his criminal rise. Murder.
Working under the violently unpredictable Sam Dphano turned out to be the biggest break of Tony Spelo’s young criminal life. This was the moment he’d been grinding toward ever since he started running the streets of Chicago. The outfit was finally given him a shot at becoming a made man, a fully initiated member of the mafia.
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But in that world, nobody just handed over that kind of honor. It had to be earned in blood. The opportunity came through two reckless little hoodlims known around Chicago as the Eminem boys. Billy McCarthy and Jimmy Moralia. These weren’t major players or respected gangsters. They were just small-time street guys who got drunk, lost control, and made one of the dumbest mistakes possible in mob territory.
They killed legitimate businessmen. Not only that, but they murdered men connected to the outfit along with a waitress during a violent mess in Elwood Park back in 1962. And that location made everything 10 times worse because Elwood Park wasn’t just another suburb. It was where some of Chicago’s top mob bosses actually lived.
The outfit hated attention. And now police cars, detectives, and reporters were suddenly circling their backyard. The bosses wanted the problem erased immediately. That’s when Tony Spelro got the call to track the Eminem boys down. Tony teamed up with his longtime friend Frank Colada, another Chicago street guy he’d been running with since childhood.
The two eventually managed to corner Billy McCarthy, but there was one big problem. Jimmy Moralia had disappeared, and McCarthy refused to give him up. That’s when Spyot Tro showed everybody exactly what kind of monster he was becoming. He reportedly strapped McCarthy into a chair and placed his head inside a vise.
Then he started tightening it slowly. Every time McCarthy refused to talk, the pressure got worse. The torture became so brutal that one of McCarthy’s eyes supposedly bulged out of his socket that finally broke him. McCarthy gave up Moralia’s location. And once Tony got what he wanted, he slit McCarthy’s throat.
The next day, he hunted down Moralia and killed him the same exact way. Later, police found both bodies stuffed inside the trunk of an abandoned car on Chicago’s Southside. Just like that, Tony Spelatro had officially made his name, and the violence only got uglier from there. In 1963, Spyotro took part in another horrifying murder.
This time involving a real estate broker named Leo Foreman. Foreman had apparently crossed paths with Sam Dphano the wrong way, and in that world, disrespect came with deadly consequences. Tony dragged the man down into a cellar, and what happened afterwards sounded less like a mob hit and more like pure torture.
Foreman was beaten mercilessly. He was attacked with an ice pick, brutalized for hours, and eventually shot in the head. When authorities later discovered his body dumped in the trunk of a car, the autopsy revealed horrifying injuries that shocked even hardened investigators. By then, Tony Spelatro’s reputation inside the outfit was spreading fast.
He wasn’t just known as violent. Chicago already had plenty of violent men. What made Tony different was how cold and methodical he seemed while doing it. There was almost no emotion attached to the brutality. And ironically, that reputation helped push him higher up the ladder. Because the Chicago outfit wasn’t some ordinary street gang.
This was one of the most powerful organized crime syndicates America had ever seen. When people said the outfit, they weren’t talking about random mobsters. They were talking about the machine that practically owned Chicago’s underworld for decades. By the mid 1960s, Tony Spelro was officially a maid member of that empire.
He started working gambling rackets in Chicago before briefly getting sent to South Florida to protect outfit interest there. But the bosses eventually called him back because they had bigger plans in mind. Vegas. At the time, Las Vegas was becoming one of the greatest criminal gold mines in America. Surprisingly, the Los Angeles mob never fully locked the city down, leaving room for Chicago to move in aggressively.
Under mob figure Johnny Rosselli, the outfit established major influence over casinos like the Stardust and the Fremont. And compared to everybody else, Chicago was making serious money, but there were constant problems with leadership out there. The bosses suspected Rosselli either wasn’t bringing enough cash back home or he was keeping too much for himself.
Either way, they replaced him with Marshall Kafano, who tried cleaning up operations under the name Johnny Marshall. That didn’t last long. Kafano became a headache almost immediately thanks to violent incidents and reckless behavior that attracted too much public attention. The outfit understood one important rule about Vegas.
Violence scared tourists, and scared tourists stop gambling. By 1971, Tony had officially been handed one of the biggest assignments in the Chicago outfit, overseeing the mob’s growing empire out in Las Vegas. This wasn’t some small promotion, either. Vegas was printing money at the time and the outfit needed somebody ruthless enough to protect the flow of cash while keeping everybody in line.
So when Tony arrived in Sin City, he wasted no time planting himself right in the middle of the action. He settled in the Circus Circus, the casino sitting right off the strip near I-15. Back then, the place had a reputation for being family-friendly, packed with carnival games and tourists dragging kids around.
But while families were out there chasing cotton candy and circus acts, Tony Spelatro was quietly building a criminal headquarters inside the gift shop. For $70,000, he bought the concession and started operating under the name Anthony Stewart, borrowing his wife NY’s maiden name to make things look respectable.
On the surface, he looked like another businessman trying to make money in Vegas. Underneath, it was pure mob business. Tony didn’t come to Vegas alone, either. He brought trusted associates from Chicago with him, along with a reputation so violent that people were already terrified of crossing him before he even fully settled in.
To help the operation appear legitimate, the outfit placed Frank Lefty Rosenthal in charge of the casinos themselves. Lefty was smart, polished, and understood gambling inside and out. His job was to make the casinos look clean on paper while the mob quietly vacuumed money out the back door. Tony’s role was different. He was the hammer.
If somebody stole from the outfit, skimmed extra money, or got out of line, Tony handled it personally. Sometimes with his fists, sometimes with weapons, sometimes with both. His main responsibility was protecting the skim. The massive stream of untaxed casino cash secretly pulled out before profits were officially recorded.
That skim was the whole reason the outfit loved Vegas so much. And interestingly, Chicago didn’t even pay Tony a normal salary for the work. Instead, they gave him something way more valuable, freedom. The outfit basically handed him permission to run his own criminal enterprises in Vegas, however he wanted, as long as Chicago got their cut.
The mafia worked less like a regular organization and more like a franchise system. Guys like Tony operated independently, but they kicked a percentage of every score back up to the bosses. Whether it was gambling, lone sharking, extortion, or robbery, the street tax always flowed back home to Chicago.
But even though Tony had relocated to Vegas, his bloody past in Chicago never stopped chasing him. In 1972, he got indicted for murder alongside his old mentor Sam Dfano and Sam’s brother, Mario. And by then, Mad Sam had become legendary for acting completely insane inside courtrooms. The man turned legal proceedings into straight up chaos.
Sometimes he showed up in pajamas. Other times he rolled in wearing hospital gear or sitting in a wheelchair pretending he was barely alive. At one point he reportedly used a bullhorn to address a judge in court. Nobody could ever tell if Sam was truly unstable or just performing like a lunatic to throw everybody off balance.
And honestly, that unpredictability terrified people in the outfit more than the actual charges. Even while locked up for perjury years earlier, Sam somehow managed to turn a hospital stay into a full-blown mob headquarters. Instead of undergoing surgery like officials expected, he allegedly hosted parties from his hospital room while continuing to run lone sharking schemes over the phone.
That was the kind of guy Tony ended up tied to in court. Thankfully for Spelotro, he and Mario Destano managed to get separated from Mad Sam during the trial. Still, mob figures all over Chicago were nervous because nobody knew what Sam might say if pressure got too high. Then something strange happened.
In April 1973, somebody broke into Sam Dphano’s house while he and his wife were away. The intruder reportedly used a pass key to slip through the kitchen door, disabled the security system, and walked off with expensive mint coats and a revolver. Police couldn’t figure out who did it. Most people would have taken that as a warning sign and disappeared immediately. Not Sam.
A few days later, on April 14th, he was found dead in his garage. Somebody ambushed him with the 12-gauge shotgun, tearing him apart with two devastating blasts before disappearing without a trace. Neighbors claimed they heard and saw nothing. Investigators believed the hit had been carefully planned for months.
Even with informants testifying against him afterward, Tony somehow beat the murder charges completely. Mario Destano wasn’t as lucky and ended up convicted. The legal heat kept coming. Soon after, Tony faced another murder case tied to the brutal 1963 killing of a Chicago lone shark.
Yet somehow, witnesses either disappeared, changed stories, or suddenly stopped cooperating altogether. Once again, Spyaltro walked away free. Then in 1974, he got indicted alongside several others for misusing money tied to the Teamsters Union Pension Fund. That case went to trial in 1975, but by the end of it, a federal judge ordered Spyot Tro acquitted again.
At this point, Tony was starting to look untouchable. And while all these courtroom battles played out, the money flowing out of Vegas kept getting bigger. Federal investigators believed Tony’s crew was skimming hundreds of thousands of dollars every month from casinos during the 1970s. The method was simple, but genius.
Mob connected employees inside casino county rooms quietly removed cash before official totals were recorded for taxes. That meant pure profit. And thanks to Tony’s ability to dodge prison while making everybody rich, his reputation exploded. The little street punk from Chicago had now become one of the most feared mob figures in America.
By 1974, newspapers were already reporting that organized crime violence in Vegas had reached terrifying levels, and Tony Spilatro’s name kept surfacing right in the middle of it. But Tony wasn’t satisfied with just Vegas. By 1977, federal agents believed he had expanded operations into Phoenix, Arizona, teaming up with mob associate Paul Shiro while battling the New York-based Banano crime family for territory.
Authorities claimed Tony was helping funnel narcotics from Mexico all the way into Chicago through Arizona, generating millions every year. The bigger Tony got though, the more enemies he created. His leadership style was pure intimidation. He bullied his own guys constantly, threatening them, humiliating them, and keeping everybody scared.
But instead of building loyalty, it pushed several associates straight into the arms of federal investigators looking for informants. On top of that, Tony had another dangerous habit, running his mouth. He constantly complained about the outfit bosses back in Chicago and hated sending huge chunks of money to men he felt weren’t doing any real work anymore.
That resentment slowly started isolating him from powerful people back home. Then came the arrest that changed everything. In late 1977, mobster Jimmy Deasel Frachiano got busted. And because the mafia had deep contacts inside law enforcement, word spread quickly that Fratziano might be talking to federal agents.
Tony immediately reached out, offering Fratziano cash and future protection if he stayed loyal and kept quiet. But panic spread after several Los Angeles mob leaders got arrested for the murder of Frank Bumpincier, a San Diego crime boss who had secretly been informing for the government.
Tony and LA boss Dominic Brooklier became convinced Fratiano had flipped too. According to Fratiano, he hadn’t even decided to cooperate yet. But once he learned Tony and Brooklyn were discussing killing him, that changed everything. Just like before, Tony’s obsession with violence pushed another insider straight toward the feds.
By the end of 1978, the government finally started closing in hard. Fatiano began talking extensively to prosecutors, exposing details about the outfit’s Vegas operations and placing Tony right at the center of the casino scam. Nevada authorities responded by officially placing Spilotro inside the state’s infamous black book, banning him from entering casinos altogether.
That should have crippled him. Instead, investigators uncovered even more. The following year, authorities tore apart the company, managing the Stardust and Fremont casinos. On paper, businessman Alan Glick looked like the owner. In reality, investigators believed he was simply fronting for Tony and the Chicago outfit.
Then the feds uncovered links to nationwide gambling rackets stretching through Ohio along with partnerships involving mob crews from Kansas City, Milwaukee, and St. Louis. By then, Tony Spilatro wasn’t just running Vegas operations anymore. He was becoming the face of a nationwide criminal network. By 1979, Frank Colada had completely run out of patience with Chicago.
The streets he grew up on was squeezing him from both sides. The crooked cops wanted a cut of every dollar he made, and the honest cops wanted him locked in a cage for the rest of his life. Either way, the pressure was non-stop. So, when Tony Spilotro reached out from Las Vegas with an invitation, Frank didn’t hesitate.
Vegas sounded like freedom, or at least a fresh start. The second Colada arrived in Sin City, Tony laid everything out. He wanted Frank to recruit trusted guys from Chicago and build a burglary crew strong enough to start pulling serious scores across the Southwest. But that wasn’t the only job.
Since Tony had already been banned from casinos and placed in Nevada’s infamous Black Book, he needed somebody loyal inside the gaming world who could keep him informed about everything happening on the floor. Frank fit perfectly. By the end of 1979, Colada had gathered a crew of experienced outfit associates and turned them into one of the most notorious burglary rings Vegas had ever seen.
Soon, newspapers started calling them the hole in the wall gang. The nickname came from their signature move. Instead of walking through doors and setting off alarms like amateurs, these guys would literally cut holes straight through walls or ceilings to bypass security systems completely. It was slick, bold, and almost theatrical.
And business was booming. The crew hit wealthy mansions, jewelry stores, fur shops, and luxury businesses all across the Southwest. Some jobs they picked themselves, others came directly from Tony Spelro. Either way, every score kicked money upward. Frank may have been running the day-to-day operations, but Tony always got paid and not just some small percentage either.
Following outfit tradition, Tony received an equal share of the profits, the same amount the actual burglars risk in prison took home. That’s how much power he held. During this period, the gang spent a huge amount of time around Upper Crust Pizza, a restaurant Frank himself owned. Colotta later recalled entire afternoons spent outside the place with Tony and the crew eating pizza, laughing, talking business, and planning scores like they were just ordinary neighborhood guys killing time on the block. But the feds were watching every move. Directly across the parking lot stood Pioneer Citizens Bank. And sometime in 1980, somebody quietly warned Colada’s wife that FBI agents had secretly set up surveillance operations upstairs inside the building. The government had literally moved in across the street. Then things got even crazier. One day, Frank’s business partner, Leo Guardino, noticed something strange hidden inside the restaurant storage room ceiling. It was surveillance equipment. An FBI camera and microphone planted directly inside the building. Instead of panicking, Colada traced the wires himself, following them into a nearby office. Then, he disconnected the whole setup and carried the gear straight to Tony Spelro’s house. When they scratched away some paint on the equipment, they
reportedly found the words property of the US government underneath. A few days later, federal agents showed up wanting their equipment back. Frank initially played dumb, acting like he had no idea what they were talking about. But after lawyers warned him he could catch serious charges for keeping federal property, he finally handed it over.
Later on, he joked that he thought about putting the whole thing on a Greyhound bus just to mess with him. The situation made one thing painfully clear. The government was obsessed with taking down Speed Lo and everybody around him. Frank later admitted that no matter how hard he tried to appear legitimate with the restaurant business, law enforcement simply refused to leave them alone.
And inside the My Place lounge, surrounded by loud music and drunken customers, Tony eventually gave Frank one of his most chilling assignments, the order to kill Jerry Lner. That’s how business got handled. Not in dark warehouses or secret hideouts. Sometimes it happened casually over drinks inside a crowded Vegas bar. But while the Hole in the Wall gang kept making money, investigators were slowly tightening the noose.
That tightening finally exploded in 1981 at a place called Bertha’s Gifts and Home Furnishings on Sahara Avenue. The shop belonged to Bertha Raglin, a successful Las Vegas businesswoman who had built a thriving business selling luxury home decor, fine china, and expensive jewelry. Like many old school Vegas operators at the time, she didn’t fully trust banks and reportedly kept huge amounts of cash and valuables locked inside the store safe.
To the hole in the wall gang, that safe looked like a jackpot. According to Colada, the crew believed it held around $1.5 million in jewelry and cash. They spent years studying the building and eventually came up with a plan to drill directly through the roof into the vault from above.
It sounded perfect, but there was a problem. One member of the crew leaked details of the plan to a connected associate named S. Romano. Frank immediately got suspicious and believed Romano was working with the FBI. He even warned Tony directly, but by then Tony wasn’t listening carefully anymore. Colada later described him as punch drunk from power and pressure, too distracted to notice the danger building around him. Then came July 4th, 1981.
The burglars climbed onto the roof and started drilling while Frank waited nearby in a getaway car with the engine running. Hidden in the darkness around the building were FBI agents and Las Vegas Metro officers silently waiting for the crew to finish breaking in. The second the burglars punched through the roof, the trap snapped shut.
Agents swarmed the rooftop and arrested everybody on the spot. Kulada instantly knew it was over. And just like he feared, Romano had already become a government informant months earlier. One retired FBI agent later recalled hiding behind loud air conditioning units on the roof waiting for the signal before rushing in the moment the burglary officially crossed the legal line.
After the birther’s disaster, the friendship between Tony and Frank started falling apart fast. Colada became convinced Tony planned to kill him. Then federal agents from Chicago confirmed his worst nightmare. The outfit had officially approved a contract on his life. At that point, Frank made the biggest decision of his life. He flipped.
The childhood friend who once helped Tony build his empire became a government witness instead. Meanwhile, federal agents kept trying to trap Tony himself. At one point, they attempted a narcotic sting operation, but Spyotro was too experienced and smelled the setup immediately. Back in Chicago, though, another problem was brewing inside Tony’s own family.
His younger brother, Michael, had started building a reputation of his own. 6 years younger than Tony, Michael idolized his older brother and tried following the same path into organized crime. Most of his money came from gambling rackets, but by the early 1980s, greed started taking over. Michael began bullying rival bookmakers, taking over operations aggressively, and throwing Tony’s name around like it made him untouchable.
Instead, it made him hate it. Then came January 27th, 1983. Cook County State’s Attorney Richard Daly held a major press conference announcing that Tony Spilatro had officially been indicted for the infamous 1962 Eminem murders involving Billy McCarthy and Jimmy Moraglia. The second the announcement ended, police arrested Tony in Las Vegas and locked him up without bail while waiting to extradite him back to Chicago.
That’s when Oscar Goodman entered the picture. Goodman had just returned from Florida after winning another unrelated case when he heard the news. He rushed straight from the airport, gathered his paperwork, and immediately headed to see Tony in jail. A few hours later, somehow, Spilatro walked back out on bail. The move shocked people across both legal and law enforcement circles.
Plenty of folks wondered how Goodman managed to pull that off so quickly. As preparations for trial began, Goodman worked closely with veteran Chicago attorney Herb Barcy, a man known for understanding exactly how the system operated. When Judge Thomas Maloney got assigned to the case, Spilatro’s team made a risky gamble.
Instead of trusting a jury, they placed Tony’s fate entirely in the judge’s hands, and the gamble worked. Maloney eventually ruled that prosecutors failed to prove the case beyond reasonable doubt, allowing Spatro to walk free once again. But freedom didn’t last long. By October 1983, federal investigators finally unloaded a massive indictment, tying Tony and more than a dozen mile figures from Chicago, Kansas City, and Milwaukee to a giant casino skimming conspiracy. When Tony saw the paperwork, he reportedly joked about the odds of Anthony Spyatro versus the United States government. But underneath the jokes situation was deadly serious. The indictments disrupted millions of dollars flowing from Vegas casinos into Midwest mafia families. And when that kind of money disappears, mob bosses start looking for somebody to blame. Tony became the obvious target. His ambition had brought too much heat. His violence had pushed allies into becoming witnesses. His paranoia had damaged relationships everywhere. Even though his racketeering trial ended in a mistrial in 1986, the real decision about his future may have already been made behind closed doors. Because while prosecutors prepared for another trial,
Tony received a message from Chicago, the bosses wanted him back home for a meeting. In June of 1986, Anthony and Michael Spilotro suddenly disappeared without a trace. And almost immediately, people in Chicago started feeling like something terrible had happened. The first real alarm came from Anony’s sister-in-law, Anne.
She walked into a police station in Oak Park, one of Chicago’s western suburbs, and officially reported both men missing. According to her, the last time she’d seen Anthony was 2 days earlier when he left her house alongside her husband, Michael, driving her Lincoln Mark 4. What made the whole thing eerie was how little information there actually was.
Nobody knew where the brothers were headed. Nobody knew who they planned to meet. And Anthony disappearing like this, that just wasn’t normal. At the time, Tony had permission from the court to travel from Las Vegas back to Chicago for about a week. Supposedly, the trip was simple.
He planned to spend time with family and visit his brother Patrick, a dentist, to get some work done on his teeth. But once those missing persons reports landed on police desks, investigators move fast. Oak Park authorities immediately warned nearby departments that the Spyatro brothers were missing under suspicious circumstances and that foul play was strongly suspected.
Then a couple days later, another strange clue popped up. Police found Anne’s Lincoln parked at a motel lot near O’Hare International Airport in Schiller Park. But the vehicle didn’t look abandoned after some violent struggle. It was clean, parked properly, no blood, no broken glass, nothing dramatic.
Inside were only a few personal items, including golf clubs and workout clothes. Then came one of the coldest moments in the whole story. Chicago columnist Mike Royo joked in a newspaper column that the city should practically market his mob history to tourists. While talking about Tony’s disappearance, Roy sarcastically wrote that the Spilatro brothers were probably already resting peacefully inside the trunk of a car somewhere. Dark humor.
But the terrifying part was this. By the time readers actually picked up that newspaper, Anthony and Michael Spelro had already been found dead. Their bodies were discovered buried in shallow graves deep inside a corn field near Eno, Indiana. The discovery happened on June 22nd, 1986.
An Indiana farmer named Michael Kins was out spraying chemicals on his crops when he noticed a patch of freshly disturbed dirt. At first, he assumed somebody had illegally buried a deer caucus after poaching out of season. So, he contacted a wildlife biologist named Dick Hudson to check it out.
Hudson arrived later that evening and started digging, but after only a few feet, his shovel hit something soft. Immediately, he realized this wasn’t an animal grave at all. He later explained that the moment his shovel struck the body, he knew he needed to stop digging right there. Sheriff’s deputies rushed out to the scene and took over the excavation.
And what they uncovered was brutal. There were two bodies buried in the pit, one stacked directly on top of the other. Both men had been savagely beaten. Both had been stripped naked except for their underwear. The scene looked less like an execution and more like a message.
The following morning, the bodies were transported to Indianapolis for autopsies. It didn’t take investigators long to confirm what everybody already suspected. Dental records identified the victims as Anthony and Michael Spelro. Just like that, the rise of Tony the Ant Spelotro came to a violent end in an Indiana cornfield far away from the bright lights of Las Vegas he once helped
