The Balistrieri Tapes, Part 11: "Lure of casino funds outweighed hatred"

“The Balistrieri Tapes” was a twelve-part series originally published in the Milwaukee Sentinel beginning Oct. 31, 1988. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is republishing select excerpts from the series.

Frank Balistrieri died in 1993 and his son Joseph Balistrieri died in 2010. His son John Balistrieri was released from prison in 1989, after the publication of this series. In 2014, the Wisconsin Supreme Court denied John Balistrieri’s request to reinstate his law license despite the recommendation of a court-appointed referee who said his conduct had been exemplary since his release.

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Two big-city crime bosses put aside their hatred of each other so they could steal hundreds of thousands of dollars in a scheme that involved several crime families, death threats and a hoodlum referred to as the "crazy man."

Although they didn't trust each other, Milwaukee's Frank P. Balistrieri and Kansas City's Nick Civella joined forces and went after fortunes skimmed from Las Vegas casinos.

William Ouseley, a former FBI agent and an expert on organized crime families in the Midwest, said, "They had an intense dislike for each other."

Civella couldn't be picked out of a room full of ordinary-looking people. He was balding, wore thick glasses, never swaggered, wasn't natty, didn't like ties.

Balistrieri always looked freshly scrubbed and barbered, his hair slicked back. Dapper in his evening suit and tie, Balistrieri had a cold-looking paleness; a federal official who shook hands with him said it was similar to touching a dead fish.

Balistrieri, who had many friends, spent his nights going from bar to restaurant to girlfriend, while Civella kept the lowest profile he could.

"Frank Balistrieri wanted people to know who he was," Ouseley said. "Nick was the other way."

So this man who was behind the scenes in his city and this other man who was out front in his worked together to fleece Las Vegas.

The Civella-Balistrieri rift, which officials said went back decades, was set aside in 1974 when the two men realized how easily they could skim money.

Balistrieri and Civella controlled key Teamsters Union pension fund trustees who voted to give priority funding on certain Las Vegas projects, Ouseley said.

Balistrieri needed the trustee votes that Civella controlled in order to get a $62.7 million loan approved so that Allen Glick, a Las Vegas business­man, could purchase several Las Vegas hotels. Balistrieri wanted to start receiving skim money from casinos at Glick's hotels.

Civella agreed to cooperate, but needed votes controlled by the Cleveland organized crime family to get the loan approved, records showed. Eventually, the three families became involved in the scheme, as well as the Chicago outfit, which ended up mediating disputes between the other three.

"Talk about your soap opera," Ouseley said.

And Ouseley is an expert on Mafia soap operas. He once spent four hours with his ear jammed against a metal door frame as he listened to a Kansas City mob meeting which came through the frame loud and clear.

Several months after the teamsters' loan was granted, Balistrieri told Glick that he would have to make Frank Rosenthal an executive in one of Glick's hotels. A loud, sometimes obnoxious man, Rosenthal was occasionally called the "crazy man."

Then Rosenthal, an associate of the Chicago crime syndicate, told Glick that if he interfered, he would not continue breathing the air he had become accustomed to in Las Vegas.

In March 1975, Glick was ordered by Rosenthal to come to Kansas City immediately or "we are going to come and get you." Met at the airport by Rosenthal and Carl DeLuna, one of Civella's associates, Glick said he was told they were going to see someone "more powerful than Frank Balistrieri." That was Civella.

"It was like a parlor suite," Glick said of the meeting in court testimony. "The room was very dark. There were two chairs set up in the middle of the room and behind one of the chairs was a light, somewhat like ... stories you would hear about someone interrogating a prisoner in a police room ....

"He (Civella) said, 'You don't know me, but it would be my choice that you would never leave this room alive. However, because of the circumstances, if you listen, you may.'

"He said he wanted to inform me of a couple of facts, because it was apparent that Mr. Balistrieri, Mr. Frank Balistrieri, did not get the message to me that the reason that I was given the loan by the Central States Pension Fund was his. (Civella's) doing and without him and the others, the loan would have never come forward ....

"I am sitting in a room with a light shining in my eyes with someone that is telling me if I don't listen, I am not going to get out alive. He wants to know my understanding with Mr. Frank Balistrieri. I said, 'The only understanding that I have is that on a businesslike basis I would have an arrangement with the two attorneys, his sons.' He said, 'Well, that is not the case .... I don't think I believe Mr. Frank Balistrieri anyhow.'"

Civella then told Glick that Glick owed him $1.2 million and that he was not to interfere with Rosenthal.

"With that he (Civella) said, 'Get out,"' Glick said. He directed Mr. DeLuna, again in graphic terms, to get in his car and go up to Milwaukee and yank Mr. Balistrieri out of bed and bring him back."

In a subsequent conversation Glick had with Balistrieri, Balistrieri appeared upset and advised Glick not to attend any future meetings with Civella.

"It's out of my hands," Balistrieri said.

As different as they were, officials said, Civella and Balistrieri had ties going back to the 1940s. Once, long ago, shots were fired at Civella as he sat in a car, federal officials said. Civella blamed a faction of the Kansas City mob controlled by the late "Big Jim " Balestrere, reportedly a relative of Balistrieri's.

"This may have been where his rift and distrust of Frank Balistrieri began," one veteran FBI agent said.

In the 1960s, the agent said, Buster Balestrere, a relative of Big Jim, came to Milwaukee to help Balistrieri with some business problems.

Two men were slain during this period, and no one was charged.

"Civella would never have reached outside of his own organization for a hit," the agent said. "He would have seen that as a sign of weakness."

While Glick was in Chicago "attending a meeting with the Central States Pension fund... Mr. Balistrieri contacted me," Glick said.

"We went up to a particular floor and on that floor into a suite ... And when he opened the door Mr. Civella was sitting in the hotel room .... He told me ... that his preference was he would rather see me dead than alive, but out of necessity for him and his associates he was instructed to keep me alive. He informed me that Mr. Rosenthal would be granted permission to return to the hotel shortly as an employee."

The Nevada Gaming Commission had removed Rosenthal as an employee of Glick because of Rosenthal's underworld connections. However, Rosenthal won reinstatement through the courts.

If Glick didn't agree to take Rosenthal back, Civella said Glick wouldn't leave Chicago alive.

In 1976, Glick hired a private detective agency to watch Rosenthal. Six months later, Balistrieri came to Las Vegas and told Glick he would die if he continued to have someone watch Rosenthal.

"Mr. Balistrieri was somewhat nervous when I walked in," Glick testified. "He said this is a difficult trip to make and it was something he didn't want to do, but something he was asked to do because he knew me well."

The detectives Glick hired "reported to Tony Spilotro," a mobster who represented mob interests In Las Vegas. Spilotro also was a friend of Rosenthal.

According to Glick, Balistrieri said, "'I am here to tell you that I don't know if I can prevent something happening to you, but if you ever think of, or do something like this, I can tell you definitely I cannot prevent what will happen to you.' He said I would be killed.”

Glick also testified that before he received the Teamsters loan, Balistrieri told him he wanted his sons, lawyers Joseph and John, to have "an active role within the corporation."

An option agreement, which would have allowed the sons to obtain 50% of Argent Corp. for $30,000, was drawn up and signed but never executed. Argent was the umbrella organization under which Glick owned the hotels.

"I had to sense from Mr. Frank Balistrieri that (the option agreement) was something he wanted and without this option I perhaps would be precluded from receiving the loan .... " Glick testified.

"They (the sons) felt that their consideration of owning, or an opportunity to own 50% was correct, since through the efforts of their father that is how I was obtaining the loan."

Later, Glick said that out of a sense of obligation to Joseph and John he appointed them as attorneys for Argent. Joseph agreed that he would represent Argent for a retainer of $50,000 a year.

"I probably would not have paid those type of fees to an outside law firm for the work that I received," Glick said.

During a taped conversation in 1979, Frank Balistrieri said he had discussed skimming with the man who succeeded Glick. Balistrieri referred to the skim as "the white stuff," but the skim was definitely green.

One of the main men in the skimming operation was Carl Thomas, who was a well-dressed, well-manicured model of the successful businessman.

"You have to compromise the people within the casino," Ouseley said. "You have to get a security guard to work for you and protect you, and you go in the morning and you get into the cash cage and you open the box and you take the cash out and close the boxes before the count team comes in."

The FBI taped Thomas discussing how in the past he avoided security cameras by crawling on his belly to get to the casino cash box in the count room.

During an April 28, 1980, wire­tapped conversation, Frank Balistrieri said: "I guarantee Carl Thomas'll talk."

In the same conversation Frank and Joseph Balistrieri indicated that they suspected they were on the brink of their own downfall.

Referring to federal officials who arrested Mafia leaders in Kansas City, Joseph said: "They got KC wrapped up, they got 'em."

Frank: "Yeah, they're gonna tie us in."

Joseph: "They got 'em wrapped up, bedecked and beribboned."

But it wasn't for a party.

In court, a half-dozen mobsters involved in skimming in Las Vegas were sent to prison in 1986.

Meanwhile, on the street, four people associated with those involved in the skimming scheme have been murdered since 1975: two Chicago gangsters who worked in Las Vegas, a former business associate of Glick and a pit boss who worked for Glick.

The bodies of Tony Spilotro and Spilotro's brother, Michael, were found buried in a cornfield in Indiana in 1986.

Tamara Rand, a San Diego businesswoman who invested in businesses owned by Glick, was shot to death with a .22-callber pistol in 1975.

Edward (Marty) Buccieri, the pit boss, was shot to death in 1975 in Las Vegas on orders of Frank Balistrieri, according to a federal document filed in court. No motive was cited, and no one was charged.

After Balistrieri pleaded guilty in Kansas City to skimming, he was sentenced to 10 years, which runs concurrently with his sentence of 13 years on extortion, gambling and tax charges in Milwaukee.

Before Balistrieri was sentenced Civella, his associate and sometimes adversary, died. And Rosenthal nearly lost his life in his car, but it wasn't in a traffic accident.

A bomb exploded.

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Read the final selected excerpt: The Balistrieri Tapes, Part 12: "Balistrieri convictions left void in local Mafia, FBI agents say"

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: The Balistrieri Tapes, Part 11: "Lure of casino funds outweighed hatred"