history
Tony Spilotro’s last act Thirty years ago, the murder of the charismatic Vegas mobster marked the final act in the mob’s 40-year run in Las Vegas — but not the end of its lore B y G e o f f S c h u m a c h e r
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n Sunday, June 22, 1986, Indiana farmer Michael Kinz was spreading chemicals on his cornfield when he came across a newly dug grave. Suspecting a poacher had buried the carcass of a deer shot out of season, Kinz called biologist Dick Hudson from the Indiana Division of Fish and Wildlife. Hudson drove to the site that evening and started digging. He soon learned that the grave concealed not the remains of a deer but of a human body. “About three
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feet down, my shovel hit him in the midsection,” Hudson told the Chicago Tribune. “I thought to myself, this is a person. I’m not going to dig anymore.” The Newton County sheriff and his deputies arrived next at the site, about 60 miles southeast of Chicago. They continued to excavate the grave and found not one but two bodies, one stacked on top of the other. They had been badly beaten and stripped of all clothing except their underwear. The following morning the bodies
were taken to Indianapolis, where autopsies were performed. Dental records confirmed the victims were Anthony Spilotro, 48, and Michael Spilotro, 41. The press reported the story the following morning. The brothers were Chicago mobsters. Anthony — “Tough Tony,” “Tony the Ant” — had helmed the Chicago Outfit’s criminal operations in Las Vegas for 15 years. Authorities suspected him of committing and commissioning numerous murders. His younger brother had owned a restaurant, Hoagies, in Chicago and was linked to various criminal enterprises. Their deaths did not come as a big surprise. Both had trials coming up. They’d been missing for 10 days, and Tony Spilotro was on the outs with his mob bosses. The day after the bodies were found, the Los Angeles Times quoted Bill Roemer, a former FBI agent who investigated organized crime in Chicago: “Spilotro wasn’t doing his job in Las Vegas. He maintained too high a profile there. Mobsters flourish in darkness. Spilotro, facing three major trials, was obviously not following that dictum. He was under the glare of the harshest spotlight.” Las Vegas police officials had similar thoughts. “The department had been receiving intelligence that Tony’s days were numbered,” Metro detective Gene Smith told author Dennis Griffin. “He’d been falling out of favor with the bosses for quite a while, because he wouldn’t give up his street rackets and keep a low profile.” Spilotro’s attorney, Oscar Goodman, attended the funeral and noted the absence of several Outfit bosses for whom Spilotro had worked. “That said a lot to me about who was behind Tony’s murder,” Goodman writes in his memoir.
s p i l o t r o / g o o d m a n p h o t o C o u r t e s y UNLV S p e c i a l C o l l e c t i o n s , n o r t h l a s v e g a s l i b r a r y c o l l e c t i o n
The Outfit’s misfit: Tony Spilotro, left, with his attorney Oscar Goodman in April 1980.