Shaking the Mob's Grip

Indictments tell of FBI bugs, loans and skimmed profits

So the Mob controls several Las Vegas casinos. So the gangsters bought the gambling palaces with huge loans from Teamster pension funds, using front men to disguise the Mafia connection. So the crooks reaped vast untaxed profits by skimming millions in cash off the top of the gambling take. So? Hasn't all that been widely known for at least 20 years? It has. But proving it is something else. After years of only sporadic success, the FBI and the Justice Department finally may be shaking the Mob's grip on Las Vegas.

That, at least, is the intended impact of indictments produced by a federal grand jury in Kansas City, Mo., against 15 alleged participants in a casino skimming conspiracy involving millions. The defendants include Mafia chiefs in Chicago, Kansas City and Milwaukee and the Chicago Mob's reputed enforcer of its operations in Las Vegas. The charges, stem ming from a five-year FBI investigation, challenge the repeated claims by Nevada casino regulators that skimming and the heavy hand of organized crime had been largely eliminated from the gambling capital. The indictment contends that the conspiracy was still operating as recently as Sept. 30, when the sealed pa pers were filed.

The Government's case, moreover, includes an allegation that an unnamed trustee of the Teamsters' Central States Pension fund helped a Mafia front man, Allen Click, then only 32, get $62.75 million in loans from the fund in 1974. The trustee advised Glick to see Frank Balistrieri, the Mafia's top man in Milwaukee. The indictment claims that Balistrieri and Joe Aiuppa, the Chicago boss, wielded their influence with other unnamed directors of the Teamsters fund to get the mon ey. Glick used the loans to buy four casinos, including the Star dust and the Fremont.

The federal investigators claim to have been aware of skimming operations since the early 1960s. The process is simple: a culprit pockets some of the gambling proceeds and reports the income to be less than it actually was. The result is to bilk federal and state tax collectors of millions. FBI bugs, planted without court approval in executive offices at the casinos, turned up evidence of both the skimming and the Mob's not-so-secret control. But this evidence could not be used in court.

Starting in 1974 with court-sanctioned bugs and wiretaps under new federal laws, the FBI began building cases that could stand up. Last July, the legal snooping, aided greatly by the testimony of Joseph Agosto, who turned Government informer and described his supervision of the skimming, produced federal convictions of five mobsters for siphoning off proceeds of Las Vegas' Tropicana casino. "You gotta be a thief to steal your own goddam money," Agosto had complained in one taped conversation. He died of a heart attack shortly after the Tropicana trial.

The new indictments reach 1 higher and more broadly into the ; Mafia hierarchy in the Midwest. The accused include the Milwaukee chief Balistrieri, 64, and his two sons, Joseph, 43, and John, 34. The defendants in Chicago, who supervise their Milwaukee subordinates, include Aiuppa, 75, and Jackie Cerone, 69, the underboss. The main Kansas City defendants are Carl DeLuna, 56, the underboss there, and Carl Civella, 73, whose late brother Nick had headed the city's Mafia operations. In Las Vegas, Defendant Tony Spilotro, 45, is described by investigators as a hitman and watchdog for the Chicago crime group.

The indictment traces the flow of illegal cash from the Stardust counting and cashier's cages through a number of bagmen for delivery to Mob leaders in the three Midwest cities. FBI agents, for example, claim to have followed Joseph Talerico, a Teamster business agent from Chicago, on monthly trips between Las Vegas and Chicago that sometimes took more than a week as he tried to throw off any trackers. The agents have sworn they watched Talerico pick up packages from a Stardust executive and then meet Aiuppa in Chicago.

One FBI bug in a Kansas City restaurant recorded DeLuna bragging that he had ordered Glick to sell his interest in the Stardust and Fremont in April 1978. Glick did so. A new corporation took control in 1979, headed by Allan Sachs and Herbert Tobman, who were cleared of Mob connections by the Nevada gaming commission. But FBI affidavits claim that the skimming has continued and charge that Tobman and Sachs are "figureheads" for the Chicago Mob.

With Informer Agosto dead, speculation on who will testify for the Government in the new case centers on two men not indicted. They are Glick, who lives as a retired multimillionaire on his huge and heavily guarded estate near La Jolla, Calif., and Frank ("Lefty") Rosenthal, who had been paid $250,000 annually by Glick to oversee his casinos, even though Rosenthal's only known previous legitimate business experience was running a Chicago hot-dog stand. A map of Click's estate had been sought by Triggerman DeLuna, according to testimony in the Tropicana case. A bomb exploded under Rosenthal's Cadillac last year. He escaped with slight injuries and moved to California.

Last week the FBI was hyping the latest indictments. "The impact is going to be tremendous," said an agency spokesman about the Midwest Mob. "It's a devastating blow." Patrick Healy, executive director of the Chicago crime commission, agreed. "The indictment pretty well knocks out the decision makers from Chicago, Milwaukee and Kansas City," he said. Perhaps. But first the defendants must be convicted in court. Meanwhile, there is no evidence that the casino games themselves are crooked, except for an occasional phony jackpot as a skimming tactic, and there is unlikely to be any shortage of gamblers in Las Vegas. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.