June 23rd, 1986. A cornfield outside Enos, Indiana. A farmer walks his property near the Willow Slough Preserve and notices something wrong. Freshly turned earth. A patch of dirt that does not match the rest. He figures a poacher buried a deer. He calls the authorities. What they pull from 5 ft underground is not a deer.
It is two men stripped to their undershorts, beaten so badly their faces are barely recognizable. Bruises covering every inch from head to ankle, lungs filled with blood. They suffocated on it. Dental records confirm what investigators already suspect. The bodies belong to Anthony and Michael Spilotro, the Chicago Outfit’s most feared enforcer and his younger brother.
Found. Most people know this ending. Martin Scorsese filmed a version of it in 1995. Joe Pesci and his on-screen brother beaten with aluminum bats in a cornfield, buried alive in broad daylight. It is one of the most iconic death scenes in movie history, but almost none of it happened that way. The real murder was worse.
And what Casino could not show you, what it did not have time to show you, was the 25 years that came before Las Vegas. The torture sessions in Chicago basements, the ice picks, the vice, the bodies in car trunks, the trail of at least 22 suspected murders that made Tony Spilotro the most dangerous man the Outfit ever produced.
Casino showed you half the story. Here is the rest. Anthony John Spilotro was born on May 19th, 1938 in Chicago, the fourth of six boys. His parents, Pasquale Senior and Antoinette, were Italian immigrants who ran a small restaurant called Patsy’s on Grand and Ogden Avenues on the city’s West Side. The place was famous for its homemade meatballs.
People came from all over town. But the men who filled those booths most nights were not there for the food. Sam Giancana ate at Patsy’s. Jackie Cerone did, too. Gus Alex, Frank Nitti. They used the parking lot for sit-downs. Tony Spilotro grew up watching the most powerful criminals in Chicago walk through his family’s front door.
He didn’t need to be recruited. He was raised in it. His father died of an aneurysm in 1954. Tony was 16. He dropped out of Steinmetz High School that same year and never went back. By then, he had already partnered up with a kid named Frank Cullotta. The two had met shining shoes on the street. And the pair had moved into petty theft, shoplifting, and street-level muscle work.
Tony was small, 5’5, but he fought like he had something to prove. And he did. His first arrest came at 17. By his 20th birthday, he had been arrested 13 times. Five of the six Spilotro brothers eventually went into crime. Only Patrick, the youngest, took a different path. He became a dentist. That detail would matter later in ways nobody could have predicted.
Around 1962, Spilotro found his way into the crew of Sam DeStefano, known as Mad Sam, one of the most violent men in organized crime history. DeStefano was a loan shark and enforcer, too unstable for real leadership, and too sadistic to ignore. The Outfit used him the way you would use a weapon you could not fully control.
He tortured people for sport. And young Tony Spilotro did not just tolerate it. He thrived in it. He had already married Nancy Stewart in 1960, a petite waitress who worked in a mob hangout, and in 1966, the couple adopted a son they named Vincent. But domesticity did not slow him down. If anything, it gave him something to protect.
And to protect it, he needed power. The only currency that bought power in this world was violence and reliability. Spilotro had both. The early 1960s outfit was at peak influence. Tony Accardo sat at the top. Joey Aiuppa was rising, the hierarchy was set, the rackets were running, and the rules were clear. But what Tony Spilotro understood better than most men twice his age was that rules were for people who had not yet proven themselves.
The way up was not through patience. It was through blood. And that is exactly what he offered. In 1962, two young burglars named Billy McCarthy and Jimmy Miraglia made a mistake that would cost them everything. The pair were part of Frank Cullotta’s theft crew, low-level guys working the suburbs. After a bar fight with the Scalvo brothers at a place called the Black Door in Elmwood Park, McCarthy and Miraglia went back with guns.
They killed both brothers and an innocent cocktail waitress who happened to be there. This was a catastrophic violation. Elmwood Park was where the outfit bosses lived. It was off limits. No crime, no attention, no heat. And now there were three bodies in their neighborhood. The bosses wanted the killers found and eliminated.
Tony Spilotro volunteered. This was his chance to become a made man, and he was not going to waste it. He went to Cullotta first. He told him the outfit suspected his crew. He gave Cullotta a choice, set up McCarthy or die with him. Cullotta set the trap. What followed was 3 days of torture that would become the stuff of mob legend and one of the most famous scenes in Casino.
Spilotro and his crew beat McCarthy with everything they had. They stabbed him with ice picks including through the testicles. McCarthy would not talk. He would not give up Maraglia’s name. So Spilotro put his head in a machinist vise and he started turning. He tightened it slowly, deliberately until one of McCarthy’s eyeballs burst from its socket.
That is when McCarthy broke. He gave up Maraglia. Then Spilotro slit his throat. Maraglia was found the next day and strangled. His throat was cut, too. Both bodies turned up in the trunk of a car on Chicago’s South Side on May 14, 1962 maggot covered and mutilated. Law enforcement dubbed them the M&M murders and Tony Spilotro at 24 years old had earned his button. He was a made man.
But he wasn’t done. In 1963 on DeStefano’s orders Spilotro murdered real estate broker Leo Foreman. He dragged Foreman into a basement, hammered his genitals, stabbed him repeatedly with ice picks, then shot him in the head. When the body was discovered investigators found chunks of flesh carved from Foreman’s body while he was still alive.
Spilotro was indicted for the Foreman murder in 1972. He was acquitted in 1973 after the key witness was killed with a shotgun blast before he could testify. DeStefano, also indicted, died the same way before the trial. A shotgun. April 14th, 1973. FBI agent William Roemer believed Spilotro was one of the men who killed his own mentor.
The student eliminating the teacher. Spilotro’s famous nickname, Tony the Ant, came from agent Roemer himself. He had publicly called Spilotro that little piss ant. The media could not print that, so they shortened it to the ant. Spilotro hated the name. It followed him to the grave. In 1971, Tony Accardo, the outfit’s elder statesman, the man whose word was final, sent Spilotro to Las Vegas.
He was replacing Marshall Caifano, another brutal enforcer whose effectiveness had been undermined by his entry into Nevada’s black book. Vegas in the early 1970s was a different world. The mob controlled virtually every casino worth controlling, and the money was staggering. Here’s the setup casino built its plot around.
The outfit held hidden interests in four casinos on the strip, the Stardust, the Fremont, the Hacienda, and the Marina. All were operated through a front company called the Argent Corporation with a man named Allen Glick as the public owner. But the real boss of those casinos was Frank Rosenthal, known as Lefty.
He was a sports betting genius, an obsessive manager, and Spilotro’s childhood friend from Chicago. Lefty ran the day-to-day operations earning roughly $250,000 a year as executive consultant without ever holding a Nevada gaming license. He hired a ringer named Jay Vandermark to rig the coin weighing machines. Every month, reportedly $1 million came off the slot machines alone, and another $75,000 came off the table games.
The skim was distributed to outfit bosses across the Midwest, in Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Kansas City. Cleveland’s share alone was reportedly $40,000 a month. In total, federal investigators estimated that somewhere between $7 million and $15 million was stolen over a 2-year stretch. Spilotro’s job was simple.
Protect Rosenthal, keep the skim running, handle problems. He and Lefty went way back. Rosenthal had once saved Spilotro’s life in Chicago by persuading an outfit boss, Fiore Buccieri, known as Fifi, not to strangle Tony after Tony mouthed off during a meeting. But here is what the movie underplayed. Spilotro was not content being a watchdog.
Almost from the moment he arrived, he started building his own criminal empire that he did not have to share with Chicago. Loan sharking, extortion, protection rackets, bookmaking. In his first 3 years in Vegas, according to the Los Angeles Times, there were more gangland-style murders in the city than in the previous 25 years combined.
In 1974, Spilotro was indicted for stealing from the Teamsters pension fund. The principal witness was killed by a shotgun blast. Charges were dropped. This was becoming a pattern. And then came the part the casino only sketched. Spilotro opened a jewelry store on West Sahara Avenue in 1976 called The Gold Rush.
On the surface, it was a gift shop. Underneath, it was the nerve center of a fencing operation for stolen goods, rigged with security systems, round-the-clock surveillance, and four cops on the payroll. He brought Herbert “Fat Herbie” Blitzer out from Chicago as his right-hand man. Blitzer ran loan sharking and fencing at a serious level, and around The Gold Rush, Spilotro built the crew that would make him infamous beyond the skim.
The Hole in the Wall Gang, named for their technique of drilling through exterior walls and roofs to bypass alarm systems entirely. The members read like a criminal all-star team, Frank Cullotta running the day-to-day, Michael Spilotro in on the action, Larry Neumann, Wayne Matecki, Leo Guardino, Ernie Davino, Joe Blasco, a former Metro cop, and Sal Romano.
Over the next several years, they pulled off hundreds of burglaries, homes, businesses, hotel casinos, jewelry, furs, cash, all funneled back through the Gold Rush. Cullotta moved to Vegas full-time in 1979 to run the crew, and the operation accelerated. That same year, Spilotro ordered his first documented Las Vegas murder.
Sherwin Lisner, a mob associate suspected of talking to a grand jury, was killed on October 10th, 1979. Cullotta pulled the trigger on Spilotro’s orders. In 1978, state investigators put Spilotro’s name in the black book, banning him from all Nevada casinos. A year later, Metro raided the Gold Rush, but Oscar Goodman, Spilotro’s defense attorney, proved the cops had overstepped their authority, and the indictment was thrown out.
At the peak of his power, Tony Spilotro controlled the skim and his own independent empire. The Outfit was getting rich, but Tony was getting loud, too loud. Everything started to come apart on July 4th, 1981. The Hole in the Wall Gang attempted their most ambitious score, Bertha’s Gifts and Home Furnishings on East Sahara Avenue, a high-end store with reportedly $1 million in jewelry and cash inside the safe.
They chose Independence Day for a reason. Fireworks would mask the sound of drilling through the roof. Collata had scouted the store, found the alarm was wired to Metro, and identified motion detectors everywhere except inside the safe itself. It should have worked, but there was a problem nobody saw coming. Actually, someone did see it.
Sal Romano, one of the crew members, was an FBI informant. Two Chicago cops had tipped Collata that Romano had been busted at O’Hare Airport with stolen furs, and the case mysteriously vanished, a sure sign of federal cooperation. Collata brought the warning to Tony Spilotro. Tony brushed it off.
He told Collata to pair Romano with Larry Newman during the burglary. And if Romano did anything funny, have Newman kill him. That was Spilotro’s solution. The FBI and Las Vegas Metro were waiting inside and outside Bertha’s that night. Six crew members were arrested. Collata, Blasco, Guardino, Davino, Neumann, and Matecki.
The Hole in the Wall gang was finished, and the dominoes started falling. But the burglary was not the only betrayal destroying Spilotro’s position. Around 1981, he had begun an affair with Jerri McGee, Frank Rosenthal’s wife. She was the woman his best friend had married. This was not just personal recklessness. In the Outfit, sleeping with another man’s wife, especially a made associate’s wife, was a death-level violation.
And this was not a secret. Everyone knew. Nancy Spilotro knew. She physically confronted Jerri in September 1980, wrestling the larger woman to the ground in an altercation that drew police. Rosenthal knew as well, but he was afraid to confront Tony. He genuinely feared that Spilotro would kill both him and Jerry.
The bosses in Chicago were furious. Joey Aiuppa was reportedly incensed. On October 4th, 1982, someone placed a bomb under the driver seat of Rosenthal’s Cadillac Eldorado outside of Tony Roma’s restaurant on Sahara Avenue. The explosion should have killed him. It did not because General Motors had installed a metal plate under the driver seat to correct a balancing problem in that model.
The plate deflected the blast. Rosenthal survived. The bombing was never solved. Suspects included Spilotro, Milwaukee boss Frank Balistrieri, Kansas City mob figures, and even outlaw bikers connected to Jerry. Five weeks later, Jerry Rosenthal was dead. She was found on November 9th, 1982, in a Los Angeles motel with Valium, cocaine, and whiskey in her system.
She was 46. And then Collata flipped. After years of kicking up street tax to Spilotro, Collata could not even get help with his bail money after the Bertha’s bust. When the Outfit put a contract on Collata at Spilotro’s request, the FBI stepped in and warned him. Collata chose survival over loyalty. In 1982, he became a government witness, admitting to over 300 crimes, four murders, and linking Spilotro directly to the M&M murders for the first time.
Spilotro was indicted for the M&M killings in January 1983, 21 years after the fact. He was acquitted. The case was assigned to Judge Thomas Maloney, who would later earn the distinction of being the only Illinois judge ever convicted of fixing a murder case, caught in the Operation Greylord sweep. Another trial for the Lizner murder conspiracy resulted in another acquittal.
A A 1986 racketeering case ended in a mistrial. More federal charges were looming. A casino skim trial in Kansas City and another case in Las Vegas. Oscar Goodman, who would become one of the most famous defense attorneys in the country, said he was confident he could beat every one of them. The Outfit was not willing to gamble on it. By January 1986, Tony Spilotro had used up every last ounce of goodwill.
Aiuppa and Cerone had been convicted and imprisoned for the skim, and they blamed Spilotro’s high profile for the heat that brought them down. The upper echelon of the Outfit convened at the Czech Lodge in North Riverside, Illinois. Tony Accardo appointed Samuel Carlisi as the new street boss. Carlisi brought up the first order of business, the Spilotro problem.
Mob enforcer Rocco Infelice did not hesitate. Hit him. Everyone in the room agreed. Aiuppa’s order, according to later testimony, was blunt. I do not care how you do it. Get him. I want him out. The reasons piled on top of each other. The heat he had brought, his high profile, his arrests, his courtroom circus, had contributed directly to the skim convictions.
The affair with Jerry was a fundamental violation of mob code. His independent rackets, the hole-in-the-wall gang, the gold rush, and his loan sharking, were all generating attention and not enough tribute. The multiple pending trials, any one of which could produce another cooperating witness, made him a liability.
Frank Cullotta’s assessment, delivered years later, was the simplest summary anyone gave. Tony had caused the Outfit a lot of problems, and he had stopped generating money. He was not needed anymore. A hit team was initially sent to Vegas with explosives and automatic weapons. The plan changed. The brothers would be lured back to Chicago instead.
The pretext was irresistible. Michael Spilotro would finally be inducted as a full made member of the outfit. Tony would be promoted to capo. A celebration, a reward. Saturday, June 14th, 1986. Michael Spilotro’s townhouse in Oak Park, Illinois. 1102 South Maple Avenue. Before they left, Michael pulled his wife Ann aside.
He said if he was not back by 9:00 that night, it was no good. His daughter Michelle would later testify that her father told her he loved her at least 10 times before walking out the door. Both brothers removed their wallets, their watches, every piece of personal identification. They knew, or at least they suspected, and they went anyway.
They went unarmed. Around 2:00 p.m., Tony and Michael climbed into Michael’s 1986 Lincoln Continental and drove to meet James Marcello, known as Little Jimmy. He brought them to a house in Bensenville, a quiet DuPage County suburb about 20 minutes from O’Hare International Airport. Marcello led them to the basement.
Waiting down there were roughly 10 men. Nicholas Calabrese, James LaPietra, John Fecarotta, John DeFronzo nicknamed No Nose, Sam Carlisi, Louie Eboli nicknamed the Mooch, Louis Marino, Joseph Ferriola, Rocky Infelice, and Marcello himself. When the Spilotro brothers reached the bottom of those stairs and saw who was there, they understood.
Tony Spilotro, the man who had tortured Billy McCarthy for 3 days, who had squeezed a human head in a vise, who had carved flesh from living men, looked at the people who were about to kill him and asked if he could say a prayer. There was no reply. What followed was savage. They were beaten punches and kicks to the head, neck, and chest.
Not baseball bats despite what Casino showed. They used fists and feet. Nicholas Calabrese testified that he tackled Michael and held his legs while Louie Aboli strangled him with a rope. Calabrese had his back to Tony. He never saw exactly what happened to him. Forensic pathologist Dr. John Plass examined the bodies and concluded that multiple blunt trauma injuries caused death, but what actually killed them was suffocation.
Their lungs and airways had filled with so much blood they could not breathe. The bodies were stripped to their undershorts. John Fecarotta and several others loaded them into a vehicle and drove to Indiana. They buried Tony and Michael in a cornfield near Enos, roughly 5 ft deep. They were never supposed to be found.
9 days later, a farmer spotted the freshly turned earth. Their brother Patrick, the dentist, supplied the dental charts that confirmed what investigators already knew. They were buried together on June 27th at Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois in a family plot. Casino got the ending almost right, but the details were wrong in ways that matter.
The film shows the brothers beaten with aluminum bats in the cornfield in daylight. The reality was a Bensenville basement, dim and enclosed with 10 killers who had planned this for months. The film has Frank Marino, a character loosely based on Culotta, overseeing the murder. In reality, Culotta was in the witness protection program by then.
The film never shows Tony asking to pray. And the film never explains why the brothers went in the first place knowing, or at least strongly suspecting, they were walking into a trap. Maybe it was pride. Maybe denial. Maybe after a lifetime of beating every case and surviving every threat, Tony Spilotro simply could not believe the outfit would actually do it.
He was wrong. Here’s the thing that Casino could never fully capture. The movie started when Spilotro arrived in Las Vegas, but his story started a decade earlier in Chicago basements with ice picks and vices. By the time he got to Vegas, he had already tortured and killed his way to the top. The film showed a dangerous man.
The real Tony Spilotro was something else entirely. The FBI linked him to between 22 and 25 murders. And those were just the ones they suspected. The man who took his son to Disneyland and dressed up as Santa at family Christmas parties was the same man who squeezed Billy McCarthy’s head until his eyeball popped out.
Casino did not have 3 hours to show you both versions, but both versions were real. And the most bitter irony of all, Spilotro beat every single case the government threw at him. The M&M murders, the Foreman case, the Leisner conspiracy, the racketeering charges, he walked out of every courtroom a free man. In the end, it was not the FBI, the federal courts, or any of the agencies that spent 15 years trying to put him away, it was the same organization that made him.
Did Tony Spilotro know for certain he was walking into his own murder that afternoon and go anyway? Tell me what you think in the comments. The cornfield was just the beginning of the consequences. What followed Tony and Michael Spilotro’s murder stretched across decades and reshaped the Chicago Outfit entirely.
Michael’s 1986 Lincoln was found a few days later in a motel parking lot near O’Hare. His wife Ann reported both brothers missing on June 16th. Oscar Goodman flew in for the funeral. He looked around the room and noticed which Outfit bosses were not there. That said a lot to him, Goodman later wrote, about who was behind Tony’s murder.
Two weeks after the Spilotro killings, John Fecarotta was dead. The Calabrese brothers received the contract. Fecarotta had botched the burial and been sharing too much sensitive information with his wife and girlfriend. During the hit in the vestibule of a bingo hall, Nick Calabrese was shot in the shoulder and dropped a bloody glove as he fled to the getaway car.
That glove and the DNA on it would sit in an evidence locker for 16 years. It would eventually crack the biggest organized crime case in Chicago history. In 1987, just 1 year after Tony and Michael were beaten to death in that basement, their brother Victor was inducted into the Chicago Outfit as a made man, as if nothing had happened.
For nearly 20 years, the Spilotro murders remained officially unsolved. Then in 2002, the FBI showed Nick Calabrese the DNA evidence from that bloody glove. He had a choice, life in prison or cooperation. He chose to talk. Nicholas Calabrese became the first made member of the Chicago Outfit ever to testify against the organization.
In April 2005, the FBI filed a 43-page indictment, 14 defendants, 18 murders, naming the entire Chicago Outfit as a criminal enterprise. They called it Operation Family Secrets. The trial began in June 2007 and lasted 10 weeks. Calabrese took the stand for 5 days. He described the Bensenville basement. He named the killers.
He told the jury about Tony asking to pray. For the first time, someone who was in that room told the world what happened. James Marcello was convicted of the Spilotro murders and sentenced to life in prison in February 2009. Joseph Lombardo, nicknamed Joey the Clown, the capo Tony Spilotro had reported to during his Las Vegas years, was sentenced to life in prison.
Frank Calabrese Sr. received life in prison. Patrick Spilotro, the dentist, gave a victim impact statement at Marcello’s sentencing. He revealed something nobody expected. He had personally encouraged Nick Calabrese to begin cooperating with the government. The brother who identified Tony and Michael’s bodies with dental charts had also helped set in motion the case that brought their killers to justice.
The other key players scattered across time. Calabrese served his 12 years and entered witness protection. He died on March 13th, 2023 at the age of 80. Collata eventually came out of hiding and returned to Las Vegas openly. He became an author, a mob tour guide, a consultant on casino, and he even played a small part as a hit man in the film.
He ran a YouTube channel called Coffee with Collata in his final years. He died August 20th, 2020 from COVID-19 complications. He was 81. Rosenthal, the man Spilotro was sent to Las Vegas to protect was never charged in the scam. After his death in 2008 at the age of 79 from natural causes in South Florida, a stunning detail emerged.
Lefty Rosenthal had been a secret FBI informant for years. His code name was Achilles. And Oscar Goodman, the defense attorney who kept Spilotro out of prison through trial after trial, went on to become the mayor of Las Vegas from 1999 to 2011. There’s a reason this story keeps pulling people back 40 years later.
It is not the violence, although there is plenty of that. It is the contradiction. Tony Spilotro was by every account a devoted father. He built a security room in his home so his family would be safe. He took his son Vincent to Disneyland and waited in line like everybody else. He played cards with the guys at family parties.
He was also a man the FBI suspected of at least 22 murders. A man who tortured people with ice picks and vices and showed no more emotion doing it than he did ordering dinner at Patsy’s. Nancy Spilotro stayed in Las Vegas after Tony’s death. She lived a reclusive private life, reportedly with health issues, and she was still alive in recent years.
Vincent Spilotro took it harder. In the years after his father’s murder, before anyone knew who was responsible, Vincent stockpiled guns and explosives. He was planning to find the killers himself and avenge his father. Family members talked him out of it. He struggled with alcohol and drugs instead.
In 2010, he said something that might be the most honest sentence anyone ever spoke about Tony Spilotro. He said, “I knew what he did. He was just, you know, just a loving father.” He also claimed the real target of the killing was actually his uncle Michael. And that Tony was murdered to prevent him from seeking revenge.
Most evidence contradicts this, but it tells you something about how a son makes sense of a father who was both things at once. The Spilotro murders effectively ended the Outfit’s Las Vegas operation. After Tony, the skim was finished. Corporate gaming was already taking over. And with the Outfit’s leadership imprisoned or dead, there was no one left to run the old system.
Donald Angelini, known as the Wizard of Odds, was sent to replace Spilotro in Vegas, but it was not the same. And it was never going to be the same. There is one detail from the Family Secrets trial that never got resolved. The exact house in Bensenville where Tony and Michael Spilotro were murdered has never been publicly identified.
Mob Watcher websites have listed several homes over the years. Investigators looked at every one of them and cleared them all. That basement, where roughly 10 men waited for two brothers who suspected what was coming and walked in anyway, could be on any quiet residential street in DuPage County.
The last family secret is still unresolved. James Marcello and Joey Lombardo are reportedly serving their life sentences in a federal supermax facility in Colorado. They will die there. Nick Calabrese already died in whatever anonymous corner of America the Witness Protection Program had placed him. The Outfit did not collapse when Spilotro died.
It adapted, contracted, and survived in smaller, quieter forms. But the era Spilotro represented, the era of the enforcer who was louder than the operation, more violent than the system could tolerate, more ambitious than the men who sent him, ended in a Bensenville basement on a Saturday afternoon.
Somewhere in Queen of At Queen of in Hillside, Illinois, Tony and Michael Spilotro share a family plot with their parents and other relatives. The headstones stand close together. Closer in death than the outfit ever let them be in life.
