Skim Casino

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This is a story about the Mafia in its heyday. If you have watched the movie Casino then you got a lesson in how the casino skim went down. This is about the real men behind the skim of the Stardust Casino.

In the 1970’s a clean cut man in his 30’s, Allen R. Glick, first bought the Hacienda Hotel and Casino for somewhere around 5 million dollars. He did well with it and he showed promise as a casino operator.

Glick controlled the ARGENT company that soon got a Teamster loan for 140 million dollars to purchase the Stardust, Fremont and the Marina Casino’s.

Skimming refers to the illegal transfer of funds from casinos to outside personnel without official documentation. Skimmed money is usually transferred in cash to evade taxes and to fund organized crime anonymously. When this scam was exposed by the FBI, this skimming operation was the largest skim ever exposed. A number of organized crime figures were convicted as a result of the skimming. The story of the casino operations and the cash skimming was featured in the Martin Scorsese movie and best selling book Casino by Nicholas Pileggi. Uncovering the Casino Skim The fact mobsters were skimming monies from Vegas casinos was known to the FBI as far back as the 1960s. It was no a well kept secret. It was no a well kept secret. Knowing it and proving were two far different things, a situation that continued on as the years passed.Fortunately it was in Kansas City that the break. Casino Skimming Trial to Begin Monday DEB RIECHMANN September 22, 1985 KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) Nine people accused of skimming nearly $2 million from Las Vegas casino profits are to go on trial Monday, two years after they were indicted, in a case the government says reflects ties between organized crime and Teamsters officials in the late 1970s.

He then put Lefty Rosenthal in charge of the Stardust, but he was really the point man for the Chicago Outfit, Kansas City and the Milwaukee families. Lefty had one job and that was to increase the skim and keep it coming.

The Outfit was not happy with the skim coming out of Las vegas because they had been hit hard by the Feds and it had become harder to get cash from their own casinos.

When Bugsy had built the Flamingo a casino owner could just walk into the room where they brought all the cash before it hit the count room and grab stacks of cash.

They could go to a table and sign a marker, play and then cash out. Later they would have the marker disappear.

In the 1970’s a casino owner was not allowed in the count room and all the cash had to be accounted for that came in or went out.

They could no longer gamble at their own casinos.

They had to come up with a better method. Where there is a will, there is a way.

They had to go low. Instead of going for the bills, they went for the coins.

The slots were bringing in so much cash that they could not count it everyday. So they purchased scales that could weigh them in bulk. They then recalibrated the scales to under weigh the coins.

Skin Casing

They had the coins from the other three casinos brought to the Stardust everyday. They then had a guy to set the scales so they registered 10% less when they were weighed.

They started to do this with the dollar tokens and silver dollars that the dollar slot machines used back then.

So now they had a steady stream of cash coming in. How did they get it in a form that they could spend? Coins might be legal tender, but nobody is going to walk around with hundreds of dollars in coins.

The key was the change girls that used to walk around the floor taking customers bills and swapping them out for rolls of coins.

The girls used to get the coins from the cashier's cage, but the Stardust installed coin cabinets along the walls that had coins and a dropbox for the bills.

They also set up a change booth that was not accountable to the gaming control board.

They filled both places with the 10% skim coins and they got back bills!

They were able to steal three hundred thousand dollars a week using this system. It is believed that they had this going for 5 years, with fifteen million dollars a year going to the mob families.

These guys took down seventy five million that they know about.

Born: May 19, 1938, Chicago
Died: June 14, 1986, Bensenville, Ill.
Nicknames: The Ant, Tough Tony
Associations: The Outfit, Hole in the Wall Gang, Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, Frank Cullotta, Teamsters Union, Tony Accardo, Frank “Bomp” Bompensiero

Anthony Spilotro was a soldier and enforcer for the Chicago Outfit who was assigned to protect the Las Vegas “skim”: the illegal diversion of casino profits to the Mob. However, Spilotro’s violent extracurricular activities, as documented in the movie Casino, hastened the demise of the Mob’s influence in Las Vegas.

The FBI estimated that Spilotro, a high school dropout who was first arrested at the age of 17 for shoplifting in Chicago, was responsible for nearly two dozen murders in Illinois and Nevada.
Spilotro grew up among mobsters in the Chicago area, and four of his five brothers were involved in various criminal activities. By his 21st birthday, Spilotro had been arrested 13 times, the Las Vegas Sun reported in 2008, and Sam “Mad Dog” DeStefano, an Outfit enforcer, found him reliable enough to bring him into the Mob.

In 1962, Spilotro was put in charge of the torture and murder of a pair of thieves who had victimized an area of suburban Chicago that was home to mobsters and off-limits to crime. The M&M murders, as they were known to law enforcement and the press, would come back to haunt Spilotro and his associates years later. One anecdote from those murders would be dramatized in Casino: Spilotro put one of the thieves’ head in a vise, tightening it until his eye burst from his skull.

While Spilotro was brutal even by the standards of the Mob, he was a dependable soldier. The Outfit’s Tony “Joe Batters” Accardo put Spilotro in charge of its Las Vegas interests in 1971, replacing Marshall Caifano, another solider with a brutal history who was rumored to favor the blowtorch as an educational tool, but whose effectiveness may have been limited due to his entry into Nevada’s “Black Book” of those excluded from entering casinos.

Skin Carcinoma Types

The early 1970s were a heady time for mobsters, when the Mob controlled virtually every casino worth controlling in Las Vegas, and the skim diverted millions into the coffers of the Outfit and to other mobsters. The Outfit placed Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal in charge of the Stardust, with front man Allen Glick, and Spilotro was in charge of keeping Rosenthal happy and the skim operational.

Almost from the beginning, Spilotro attracted attention. He was indicted in 1972 in the murder of a Chicago real estate broker and sometime Mob associate on behalf of his mentor, the reportedly sadistic and unstable DeStefano. The murder itself, in 1963, was again notorious for its brutality: The victim had chunks of his body carved out before he was killed. In 1973, after shuttling between Las Vegas and Chicago for the trial, Spilotro was found not guilty. DeStefano, who was also indicted, died by means of a fatal shotgun blast before the trial; FBI agent William Roemer believes Spilotro was one of the killers.

In 1974, according to the Los Angeles Times, there were more gangland-style killings in Las Vegas than the previous 25 years combined. In the same year, Spilotro was indicted for theft from the Teamsters Union’s Central States Pension Fund, but Spilotro beat those charges as well after the principal witness died, also by shotgun blast.

His main job was protecting the skim, but Spilotro found that street crime could generate a healthy profit that he did not have to send back to the Midwest. He branched out to the theft of jewelry, furs and anything of value that he could burglarize from residential and commercial properties (including hotel-casinos) with his Hole in the Wall Gang. In 1976 he opened a Las Vegas pawn shop, the Gold Rush, to fence the stolen property.

In 1978, state investigators put Spilotro’s name in the Black Book, and a year later Las Vegas Metropolitan Police raided the Gold Rush. However, the court found that Metro had overstepped its authority in the raid and prosecution, and Spilotro, with the help of defense attorney Oscar Goodman, beat the indictment. The heat, however, was on.

In 1981, six members of the Hole in the Wall Gang were arrested in the burglary of a furniture store. Spilotro and Goodman again beat the resulting charges, but one of those arrested in the burglary, Frank Cullotta, had become an informant.

Cullotta named Spilotro as one of those responsible for the M&M murders almost 20 years earlier, and in 1983 Tony was on trial again. And again, Spilotro beat the charges.

But Spilotro’s situation was not helped by his alleged affair with the wife of his old friend Lefty Rosenthal; Spilotro was also suspected of being involved in the 1982 car-bombing of Rosenthal.

In 1986, Las Vegas police again arrested Spilotro and other members of his gang for multiple burglaries.

By now, the Mob, which was losing its ability to control casinos and continue the skim as federal and state agents increased their scrutiny, had had enough of its troublesome agent. In June, Spilotro and his brother Michael were called back to the Midwest for a conference. Their battered bodies were found several days later in an Indiana cornfield.

Tropicana Casino Skim

In 2007, a federal court found James Marcello, a top man in the Outfit, responsible for the murder of the Spilotro brothers along with other murders and various crimes. With Marcello, who received life in prison, a number of other top Outfit members were indicted and convicted of other crimes in what were known as the Family Secrets trials, facilitated by testimony from Cullotta and other former mobsters-turned-informants.