The Battle for Las Vegas

It seems almost quaint when you discuss the days the mob controlled Las Vegas. But when you realize it was only a little more than 20 years ago that the mob lost its last hold on Sin City, there’s a little more urgency to the story.

Anyone who is a fan of mob movies has seen "Casino," with Robert DeNiro as Lefty Rosenthal and Joe Pesci as Tony Spilotro. Based on the non-fiction book of the same name by Nicholas Pileggi, the movie was a violent story about high stakes in Las Vegas casinos.

In The Battle for Las Vegas, Dennis Griffin gets back to the facts of the case and explains why it took nearly two decades to catch up with Spilotro, and then when they did, the antagonist goes down in a blaze of gunfire.

Spilotro was sent to Vegas to keep tabs on Rosenthal, who was running the “skim”—taking money out of the cash drop before it gets counted—for the Chicago crime family, which distributed cuts to other Midwestern crime groups. While Rosenthal was an effective manager, the mob was worried about his public persona, and Spilotro was dispatched to keep an eye on him.

The problem was, Spilotro expanded his Vegas empire to include loansharking, burglary, robbery and murder. And when his public persona eclipsed even that of Rosenthal, the mob got more than it bargained for.

The Battle for Las Vegas gives a face to the police, the FBI and the media personalities who pursued Spilotro for decades. It describes the facts—something the movie didn’t worry about—and how the mundane day-to-day operations were built into a powerful case against Spilotro.

A key figure in the book is Frank Cullotta, an associate of Spilotro, who rolled over on his boss. (Huntington Press recently released Cullotta, almost a companion book to The Battle for Las Vegas.) The capture and turning of Cullotta is the turning point in the battle to get Spilotro.

For anyone interested in the history of the gaming industry and the last gasp of organized crime as part of that industry, The Battle for Las Vegas is a must-read.

—Roger Gros