Development of the Vegas Poker Mafia Family; Mid-1980's Golden Nugget

Friends of ours: Tony Spilotro

The below is from an email that someone sent me that seems to pick up in the middle of a story. I have requested some answers to some questions that I had for the reader who sent this to me, but I wanted to provide this to all my readers to see if anyone else had some information on this.

The "Honored Society" as the Mafia is commonly known among its members is structured much like a modern corporation in the sense that duties and responsibilities are disseminated downward through a "chain of command" that is organized in pyramid fashion.

1. Capo Crimini/Capo de tutti capi (super boss/boss of bosses)
2. Consigliere (trusted advisor or family counselor)
3. Capo Bastone (Underboss, second in command)
4. Contabile (financial advisor)
5. Caporegime or Capodecina (lieutenant, typically heads a faction of
ten or more soldiers comprising a "crew.")
6. Sgarrista (a foot soldier who carries out the day to day business of
the family. A "made" member of the Mafia)
7. Piciotto (lower-ranking soldiers; enforcers. Also known in the
streets as the "button man.")
8. Giovane D'Honore (Mafia associate, typically a non-Sicilian or
non-Italian member)

In the early 1980s the Vegas family of the Poker Mafia was in place. The "real Mafia" was losing its hold on the casinos. Soon after Tony Spilotro was killed Mike O'Connor and David Cutter were sent to the joint for extortion and blowing up a car. The "real" Mafia was out, but a new "Poker Mafia" took its place. All had been cheating for approximately 10 years when they went into the Golden Nugget. Thus the Vegas family line survived to take full control.

Other events contributed to the ascent of the Vegas family. In 1982 the Los Angeles Times came out with a front-page article that revealed cheating in California cardrooms. Gardena lost its hold on poker in California. The Vegas family was more than happy to fill the void. Steve Wynn had Jimmy Knight running the casino and after the Silverbird closed in 1981 hired Eric Drache in 1982 to run the Nugget cardroom. Then in 1984 Wynn renovated the Golden Nugget. [In 1984 Steve Wynn revamped the Golden Nugget casino with funding raised by Mike Miliken and Drexel Burnham Lambert, provided jobs for more than 5,000 employees. The 44 million Spa Tower's foyer resembled the Garden Room of the Frick museum.]

With Jimmy Knight as the casino manager, Eric Drache as was the cardroom manager, and Doug Dalton running the floor, the door was wide open. This group consisted of Mike O'Connor's right hand man Chip Reese, Doyle Brunson, Jimmy Shehady and a few others. They spilt up the games. It became very well organized and the Las Vegas group controlled everything.

Doyle and Chip were business with Jack Binion. Doyle had been one of Benny Binion's boys and Jack Binion had grown up with this racket. Doyle was like an older brother to him. The Golden Nugget was the same as the Horseshoe. Eric Drache had control of the Golden Nugget and with Jimmy Shehady as his take off man, millions were made. Archie Karas, Lou Olejack and more cheats than you can count were in the casino.

I can only speculate when Bobby Baldwin [President of the Golden Nugget] became apart of this. But he did become a major part of this "cheating conspiracy". With no one having a chance to win in the Hi-levels of poker in Vegas the cheats also took advantage of cheating the casinos in many different ways. Management connections through poker provided dice cheats to "shoot the shot" and "marker scams" to go on. John Martino was implicated in a marker scam. With a bribe to a NSGCB agent [$25,000] he was able to avoid going to jail. This is discussed in the tapes [The Cheating Tapes]. It is also documented as this went to court.

Eric Drache was put in charge of the WSOP. What a joke this was. Poker was now controlled by cheats. It was always controlled before, but it was not this well organized. Eric Drache was a compulsive sports better and soon was losing more at sports than he could steal or cheat. On the occasion that he was let go from the WSOP after running it for years, he had sold many seats for a discount for a quick monetary fix. He must of sold twenty to thirty WSOP $10,000 seats for $8,000 cash before the event. After losing the money he was in a bad situation. Jack Binion covered the loss and nothing was told to the public. However, Eric Drache was no longer running the WSOP. This is the reason that Eric Drache was no longer in charge of the WSOP.

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Angry Son Knows the Mob's True Colors

Friends of ours: Frank "The German" Schweihs, Joey "The Clown" Lombardo, Nicholas Calabrese

Frank "The German" Schweihs played the tough guy in federal court, pleading not guilty to federal racketeering and extortion charges. Schweihs had been on the run, after top Chicago mobsters were indicted as part of the FBI's Operation Family Secrets investigation into more than a dozen unsolved Outfit murders.

So on Friday, resplendent in his orange prison jumpsuit and a cane, Schweihs decided to be amusing, to be funny like a clown, probably because "The Clown" wasn't there.

"Why's all the news media here?" asked the Outfit enforcer. "I dunno," said his lawyer. "Slow news day."

"Slow news day," Schweihs agreed. "They just like to [expletive] with me."

Not everybody laughed. The stocky man in the black shirt two rows away stared at the back of the German's head. He kept staring, and let the room know he was staring, by not sitting down when it was time. His hand clenched the bench in front of him. If eyes were baseball bats, Schweihs wouldn't have made it out of the courtroom alive.

The stocky man is Nicholas Seifert, a son of Danny Seifert. Schweihs also has been charged, along with fugitive mob boss Joey "The Clown" Lombardo, with the 1974 murder of Danny Seifert. And before Seifert left town over the weekend - to travel back home after the court appearance - he called me at the Tribune.

"I came to court to see Frank Schweihs, to see what he looked like, just to see him have his day in court. Because I know he's actually a participant in my father's murder ... I wanted to jump over that bench.

"He's crafty," Seifert said. "He portrays two different types of people. Once the judge walked in, he portrayed himself as a broken-down old man, but prior to the judge walking in, he portrayed a tough guy, making comments about the media. It was his demeanor."

You were staring? "Yes, I wanted him to look at me, so he could see the words that were coming out of my mouth."

What words? "I can't say that, because then the feds won't let me come to the trial."

So you wanted to let him know something that was on your mind. "Yes," Seifert said.

He called me years ago, after I wrote that mobster Nicholas Calabrese had disappeared from the federal prison in Milan, Mich., and had entered the witness protection program in what would become Operation Family Secrets. By then, the Chicago Outfit was in full panic. The bosses couldn't help their friends, the Chicago politicians, or be helped by them. And I hadn't talked with Seifert again until Friday night.

He hates Schweihs and Lombardo.

In September of 1974, Danny Seifert was about to testify as a government witness against Lombardo and six others, who were charged with bilking a Teamsters' pension fund of $1.4 million. Men in ski masks, carrying walkie-talkies, .38s and shotguns showed up at Seifert's plastics factory in Bensenville. A shotgun blast cut him down as he tried to run away. A hit man walked up, put a shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger. With Seifert dead, everybody walked.

"It's something I've never gotten over," Nicholas Seifert told me. "Growing up without a father is very rough for any child. Obviously, being in that kind of atmosphere, where everything was good, before the actual indictments, and then all of a sudden, things were going wrong and our so-called Uncle Joe [Lombardo] wasn't our uncle anymore. Then my father ended up getting killed.

"He [Lombardo] would take us to the circus, to ballgames, he was part of our family, he'd come over or we'd go over there for barbecues and stuff," Seifert said.

"My father wasn't afraid of the Outfit. They were friends. You're really not afraid of your friends, even if it comes to war, or whatever it comes to, my father wasn't afraid of those people, and thought ultimately that he didn't need government protection," Seifert said.

He miscalculated, I said. "Yeah," he said.

I told Seifert what the son of a murdered hit man told me a while back, that his father did their dirty work, that they killed him, perhaps to send a message to Calabrese, and that the son felt he was owed something.

Is that how you feel? Do you think they owe you anything? "They owe me my life," Seifert said.

"They destroyed our lives. My family's life. And in all reality, I pretty much want to do the same."

Will you attend Schweihs' trial? "A team of wild horses couldn't keep me away."

So why did you call me? "Because you don't make them out to be Hollywood stars, and they threatened your family and you still went after them," he said. "And I can't wait for this trial."

And the other ones. "And the other ones," he said. "I want to see justice done."

Thanks to John Kass

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Bad Cop Dies

Friends of ours: Frank Calabrese Sr.

A former Chicago police officer charged with conspiring with organized crime to commit 18 murders has died, his attorney said. Michael Ricci, 76, of Streamwood had been in a coma since undergoing heart surgery in November, said attorney John Meyer. Ricci died last week when his family chose to remove him from life support, Meyer said Monday.

Ricci was among 14 people charged with various crimes in an April 2005 indictment federal officials at the time described as the most far reaching they'd obtained against the Chicago mob. He and another retired police officer were accused of informing alleged mob figure Frank Calabrese Sr., also charged in the indictment, about possible mob members who helped federal investigators.

Ricci had pleaded not guilty and said at the time of the indictment that he had known Calabrese "as a person" since 1964. Meyer said Monday that a tape recording FBI officials made of a conversation between Ricci and Calabrese while Ricci visited Calabrese in federal prison proved only that the two men were good friends. "It's unfortunate that he had to die with this cloud hanging over his head," Meyer said. "Especially since he had a very winnable case."

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Bloom is Off Whitey's Rose

Friends of ours: James "Whitey" Bulger, Kevin Weeks, Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi

Probably no one should be surprised that federal authorities would mark the anniversary of Whitey Bulger's disappearance in such a low-key fashion last week. There were no press conferences, no dramatic announcements or updates, just a three-paragraph release assuring the world that the FBI and other agencies remain on the case.

Bulger's former criminal protege, Kevin Weeks, theorized to the Globe's Shelley Murphy that Boston's most legendary mobster has been marooned in Europe since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which is probably as valid a theory as we're likely to hear. Weeks, after all, was the mobster's surrogate son.

There's something anticlimactic about these anniversaries, these nonupdates to one of the most dramatic tales in the city's recent history. If there's one thing James J. Bulger never was in his presence, it was monotonous. Yet that is exactly what he has become in his extended absence.

One thing has changed in his decade-plus on the lam: His cult of personality, the blood-soaked romance of his exploits, has utterly collapsed. Few kid themselves anymore that Bulger kept the drugs out of South Boston, or kept its streets safe with his unique brand of do-it-yourself justice. As that image has receded, as the keepers of the flame have faded away and 19 murder indictments are what's left of his legacy, Bulger has come to be seen for what he really is. If he's returned to Boston, it'll be as a serial killer - that's if there's a return at all, which has to be considered less likely than it was a decade ago.

Meanwhile, his exile has taken police on a wild ride from California to Chicago to Uruguay to New Zealand.

I've always been amused by the story of his brief, early-exile stay in Louisiana, where he befriended his neighbors and bought one couple a washing machine before his instincts told him it was time to move on. Just think: For him the ultimate disguise was as a nice guy.

As some predicted at the time of his last vanishing act, Bulger's everyman appearance has proved to be a nightmare for investigators. He has been sighted everywhere, and nowhere. On nearly every continent someone has thought they may have seen him, one dead end after another.

Coincidentally or not, his time in flight has been difficult for many of those close to him. His equally famous brother, William M. Bulger, has left politics and been driven from the presidency of the University of Massachusetts. Another brother, Jackie, is embroiled in a long fight to have his $65,000-a-year state pension restored after his convictions for perjury and obstruction of justice. Former FBI agent John Connolly is serving time on a racketeering conviction, and has been indicted for murder. Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi is serving a life sentence and cooperating with the authorities. Weeks, who served five years in prison, is writing a book. When Whitey Bulger went down, a lot of people went with him.

Pity the poor investigators, chasing a man who has been hiding from the police for decades. If there is anyone who knows where and how to hide, it's him.

But that sympathy has to pale next to the suffering of the survivors of his many alleged victims. For them, anniversary is probably too cheery a word to describe these annual reminders of law enforcement futility.

Catching Whitey still matters, of course. Now that the world knows how he manipulated the FBI to facilitate his felonious career, and how thoroughly certain officials sold out their public trust on his behalf, we need the public accounting that only a trial can bring. And there's the more personal accounting, too. His victims -- the survivors of his victims are, themselves, victims -- deserve the day they can face him in court.

Not much is left in Boston of the mob culture that made Whitey Bulger possible. The whole notion has become an anachronism. One of the few remaining pieces is the search for Bulger. His capture will be its epilogue, and it can't come soon enough

Thanks to Adrian Walker

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