In 1995, a man sat next to Martin Scorsese on the set of Casino, telling him which scenes got the details wrong. He played a hitman in a snowy parking lot. He fixed the dialogue. He watched Joe Pesci pretend to do things um he had done himself. The movie reduced him to a silent sidekick, uh Frank Marino, a guy who follows orders.
Casino never told you that this adviser was the FBI’s single most important witness against the Chicago outfit in Las Vegas. He was the reason Tony Spilotro uh ended up in an Indiana cornfield. And Scorsese knew uh Frank Cullotta met Tony Spilotro when they were 12 or 13 years old fighting over shoe shine territory on Chicago’s Grand Avenue.
Two kids throwing punches over who got to polish shoes for nickels. That dispute turned into a 40-year criminal partnership that included torture murders, hundreds of burglaries, and the systematic looting of Las Vegas casinos. It also turned into a betrayal so complete that Cullotta would spend decades leading mob tours past the same streets where he once helped dispose of bodies.
But the betrayal did not start with Cullotta. It started with Spilotro. By 1971, Spilotro had moved to Las Vegas to oversee the Chicago outfit’s interests. The casinos were skimming millions for the bosses back home, and Spilotro was there to make sure the money kept flowing. He opened a pawn shop at 228 West Sahara Avenue called Gold Rush Limited.
The jewelry came in through the front door. The stolen goods came in through the back. By 1978, Nevada had added him to the black book of excluded persons. He could not legally set foot in a casino. He ran Vegas anyway. In early 1979, Spilotro called his old friend from the shoe shine days, “Frank, come to Vegas. I need someone I can trust.
” Collata came. He assembled a crew. They called themselves the Hole in the Wall Gang because they didn’t bother with doors or windows. They cut through exterior walls and ceilings to bypass security systems entirely. Between 1979 and 1981, uh Collata estimated they burglarized between 250 and 300 homes in Las Vegas.
The film shows Joe Pesci’s Nicky Santoro personally leading heists with a drill in his hands. Uh the real Spilotro never touched a tool. He took a cut of the profits while Collata did the actual breaking and entering. That’s the first thing Casino got wrong. Spilotro delegated. Collata executed. The crew had an inside man at the Las Vegas Metro Police Department.
Detective Joe Blasco had been on the force for 18 years before the FBI uh wiretaps caught him feeding Spilotro surveillance details and identities of undercover agents. Metro fired him in 1978. Spilotro hired him the same week. Blasco handled counter surveillance during burglaries and monitored police scanners while the crew worked.
A cop who spent almost two decades protecting the city was now helping rob it. The gang also had an alarm specialist named Sal Romano. Romano knew how to bypass every security system in Las Vegas. What Collata did not know was that Romano had been an FBI informant since Chicago cops caught him at O’Hare Airport with stolen furs.
The FBI had set him up in a Vegas apartment with an undercover agent posing as his girlfriend. The apartment was wired for sound and video. Every time Romano came home and talked about the crew’s operations, the FBI was recording. Collata warns Spilotro about Romano. He told Tony that Chicago cops had mentioned Romano’s name in connection with a stolen property case that mysteriously disappeared from the system.
Cases do not disappear unless someone makes them disappear. Spilotro brushed him off. That was the second betrayal. Spilotro ignored the warning that would have saved him. I’d argue this is what actually doomed Tony Spilotro, not the FBI heat, not the skim collapsing, the arrogance of brushing off the one man who knew his crew better than he did.
On October 10th, 1979, Collata murdered his friend, Jerry Lisner. Lisner had been informing a grand jury about a money exchange scam the crew was running. Spilotro gave the order. Collata walked into Lisner’s Las Vegas home and shot him twice in the back of the head with a .22 caliber handgun. Lisner survived the shots.
A fight broke out. Lisner ran through the house with two bullets in his skull, bleeding and screaming. Collata chased him and tried to strangle him with a power cord from a water cooler. The cord snapped. His accomplice, Wayne Matecki, who had flown in from Chicago specifically for this job, held a cushion over Lisner’s face while Collata reloaded.
They finished it. They dumped the body in Lisner’s backyard pool. They cleaned the blood off the furniture and floors. They searched for documents and security cameras. They found nothing. Matecki flew back to Chicago the same night. That’s what Collata’s friendship with Spilotro actually looked like.
Not loyalty in some romantic sense. Work orders. Kill this guy because he’s a problem. Dispose of the body, clean the house, catch a flight. On July 4th, 1981, the Hole in the Wall Gang made their last run. The target was Bertha’s Gifts and Home Furnishings, a store the crew believed was sitting on a million dollars in merchandise.
They used cutting torches and sledgehammers to smash through the ceiling while fireworks crackled across Las Vegas. Perfect cover noise. Sal Romano slipped away during the heist and never came back. The FBI was already outside. The crew was arrested on the roof mid-burglary, surrounded by cops who knew exactly where they’d be and exactly when they’d be there.
Collata went to jail. He expected Spilotro to help with his legal bills. He expected the organization to take care of his family while he was inside. That’s what you do for your guys when they go down on a job. Spilotro did nothing. In July 1982, FBI agents sat Collata down and played him a wiretap recording.
The voices on the tape were Chicago bosses discussing Spilotro. The phrase they used was clean his dirty laundry. That was mob code and it meant Collata was next. His childhood friend had ordered his murder. Collata could have done what most wise guys do when they hear they’re marked. He could have run.
He could have tried to make peace. He could have waited to see if the hit actually came. Instead, he called the FBI back and asked what kind of deal they were offering. The deal was simple. Tell us everything. Names, dates, bodies. in in exchange, you get to live. Collata became a government witness, not an informant.
He insisted on that distinction for the rest of his life. An informant wears a wire. An informant gathers evidence while pretending to still be in the game. Collata never wore a wire. He testified after the fact in open court looking at the men he was putting away. It’s Spilotro’s trial. trial in October 1983, Collata took the stand and admitted involvement in over 300 crimes, four murders, hundreds of burglaries, and decades of racketeering.
The prosecution had their star witness. The defense had a problem. Except the defense had something better. They had the judge. Thomas J. Maloney summarily acquitted Spilotro after discounting Collata’s testimony. Uh the case was thrown out. Spilotro walked free. Years later, Maloney became the only Illinois judge ever convicted of fixing a murder case.
Not Spilotro’s case, technically, other ones, but he went to prison for taking bribes from organized crime figures to rig verdicts. And the man assigned to judge Tony Spilotro just happened to be the most corrupt judge in the state. Draw your own conclusions. I think the Maloney verdict tells you everything about what Collata was actually up against.
The system was not broken. It was working perfectly for the people paying to keep it broken. FBI handler Dennis Arnoldi called Collata the single most important witness in the breakup of Spilotro’s criminal organization. Despite the acquittal, Collata’s cooperation had given the Bureau intelligence they could not have gotten any other way.
He knew the organizational structure. He knew the money flows. He knew where the bodies were. That information fed into cases that eventually sent outfit bosses to federal prison. Spilotro did 2 years at a federal lockup in San Diego, then got paroled into witness protection. Texas first, then Estes Park, Colorado, then Biloxi and Gulfport, Mississippi, then Mobile, Alabama.
A new name every time, a new backstory, um the kind of life where you check the rearview mirror before you check the weather. He lasted 2 years in the program before he walked away from it. Most people who leave witness protection do it because they missed the old neighborhood, the old faces. Uh Spilotro just got bored.
The Chicago outfit had bigger problems by then. In January 1986, Joey Aiuppa and Jackie Cerone went down in the Las Vegas skimming case. The whole operation Spilotro was supposed to be protecting had collapsed under federal indictments, and the bosses blamed him for it. His affair with Lefty Rosenthal’s wife had embarrassed the organization.
His crew’s arrests had drawn exactly the kind of attention the outfit spent decades trying to avoid. On June 14th, 1986, Tony Spilotro and his brother Michael drove to a house in Bensenville, Illinois. Michael had been told he was going to be made. Tony had been told he was getting promoted to capo. Both of them walked into a basement believing they were being rewarded.
More than a dozen men were waiting. According to Nicholas Calabrese, a made member of the Chicago outfit who later testified at the Family Secrets trial in 2007, he tackled Michael Spilotro and held his legs while Louie the Mooch Eboli strangled him with a rope. The others beat Tony.
No bats, despite what the movie shows, punches, kicks, stomping. A room full of men in a basement, hands and feet only. The autopsy confirmed it, neither brother’s skin had been broken by a heavy object. The injuries were consistent with a beating, not an execution with weapons. According to Calabrese, Tony asked, “Can I say a prayer?” The request was denied.
Eight days later, a farmer in Indiana found two bodies in a cornfield, shallow graves. The Spilotro brothers had been driven across state lines and dumped like construction waste. The man who ran Las Vegas for the Chicago Outfit ended up rotting in farm country while the feds tried to figure out who had finally collected on 15 years of bad decisions.
Casino premiered in 1995. Scorsese needed someone who could tell him which details the script had gotten wrong. He needed someone who had actually been in the rooms where the real events happened. He called Frank Cullotta. Cullotta spent weeks on set. He told Scorsese when something was not the right way so the director could change it.
He corrected the dialogue. He explained how burglaries actually worked. He watched actors pretend to be men he had killed alongside. Scorsese gave him a screen credit as technical advisor. He also gave him a role. Cullotta appears in the film as a character named Curly, a hitman who shoots Andy Stone in the back of the head in a snowy steakhouse parking lot near the end of the movie.
Frank Vincent played Frank Marino, the character loosely based on Cullotta. In the film, Marino is Nicky’s loyal sidekick who stays faithful until ordered to participate in the cornfield execution. The movie ends with Marino helping beat Nicky to death with baseball bats in an open field. None of that happened.
The real Collata had flipped 3 years before the Spilotro murders. He was not in the basement. He was not in the corn field. He was in witness protection or already out of it living under a name the outfit did not know. Casino erased the betrayal that actually ended the Chicago outfit’s Las Vegas era.
It kept the violence but removed the testimony. It kept the murders but deleted the courtroom. The man who sat next to Scorsese for weeks correcting every detail watched the film write him out of his own story. I would say that’s [snorts] the real betrayal Casino committed, not the inaccurate execution scene with the bats in a corn field.
The decision to keep the violence Collata carried out and erase the testimony that ended it. Uh after Casino Collata did something that should have been impossible for a man on every outfit hit list uh in the country. He moved back to Las Vegas and turned himself into a tourist attraction. Uh he led mob history tours through Las Vegas pointing out the spots where he had committed crimes to busloads of people who had paid $40 a head to hear about it.
He worked with the mob museum. He co-authored two books with Dennis Griffin. His autobiography Collata came out in 2007. The rise and fall of a casino mobster followed in 2017. In January 2020 he started a YouTube series called Coffee with Collata. He would sit in front of a camera and answer questions about the old days.
Uh the comments were full of people asking about specific murders specific scores, specific names he had mentioned in court decades earlier. Uh he answered most of them. Seven months later, he was dead. Frank Cullotta died around 1:00 in the morning on August 20th, 2020 in a Las Vegas hospital. Covid got him.
He was 81 years old. The man who shot Jerry Lisner in the head, who cut through ceilings with a blowtorch, who sat across from federal prosecutors and gave them every name he had ever known, went out in a hospital bed hooked up to a ventilator during a pandemic. After everything he survived, after every contract that never landed, a virus finished what the Chicago Outfit could not.
James Marcello, the man who ordered the Spilotro brothers into that Bensenville basement, was convicted by a federal jury on September 27th, 2007. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Nicholas Calabrese, the hit man who testified about holding Michael’s legs while he was strangled, died at the age of 80 in March 2023. Calabrese became the first made member of the Chicago Outfit to ever testify against the organization.
Cullotta was never made. He was an associate, but he had been sitting in federal courtrooms naming names 20 years before Calabrese opened his mouth. The made guys got the headlines. The associate got the job done first. Casino is 3 hours long. It has room for the skim, the marriage, the cornfield, but not for the man who walked into a federal building and handed the FBI the names, the dates, and the bodies that ended the whole thing.
Scorsese sat next to him for weeks. He let Cullotta correct every scene, fix every line, um explain how the real version actually went. Then he gave him a bit part as a hitman and wrote him out of his own story. The real Frank Cullotta spent 40 years committing crimes, 4 years testifying about them, and 25 years charging tourists $40 a head to see where they happened.
He outlived every single person who wanted him dead. Subscribe for more of the stories the mob movies left on the cutting room floor. I’ll see you next week.
