Book Review: Cullotta
Thursday, June 7, 2007
Cullotta: The Life of a Chicago Criminal, Las Vegas Mobster, and Government Witness, by Dennis N. Griffin and Frank Cullotta
I can’t say I was dying to read this book. Sure, mobsters make great cinema, and sure, I watched the last episode of “The Sopranos” along with the rest of the country. But I still don’t find hit men very appealing, and that’s what Frank Cullotta is, an old killer who ratted out his former cohorts when it looked like he was going to get the same bullet-in-the-head treatment he’d been dishing out himself.
So why did I read Dennis Griffin’s latest true crime exposé? Simple. He’s a good writer, and I had heard him speak about how he had sat at his kitchen table with Frank Cullotta for months on end to learn his life story. If he thought Cullotta’s biography was worth the effort, well, the least I could do was read the resulting narrative.
Now I’m glad I did. I still can’t admire Frank Cullotta, even though he seems to have mended his brutish ways and now operates a legitimate business “somewhere in America” with a little help from the Federal Witness Protection Program. But I do appreciate his collaborative efforts with Griffin, because his story provides a new window on the Las Vegas of the seventies and eighties, when Tony “The Ant” Spilotro was at the height of his career, and now-Mayor Oscar Goodman was helping him stay out of prison.
Cullotta is a straightforward chronological account of Frank Cullotta’s life, beginning with his childhood in Chicago. That’s where he first hooked up with Tony Spilotro, and Tony is the reason Frank eventually ended up in Las Vegas. Cullotta clearly didn’t pull any punches in his reminiscences of the burglaries and murders he committed during his tenure as Spilotro’s underling, because Griffin has described them with photo-realistic precision. The result is a vivid look at a man’s life as the man himself remembers it.
Others might recall things differently, but what makes this book compelling is the glimpse not only into the Vegas of the mob years, but also Cullotta’s head. If you have ever wondered how someone can rationalize murder as a routine task and burglary as a career choice, Cullotta provides some creative answers. “Frank didn’t consider the people whose homes were burglarized as victims,” Griffin writes. “His gang never stole from anyone who was really poor…The targets all had good insurance and usually ended up better off after the burglary. He thought that in reality he was doing them a favor.”
In addition to Cullotta’s memoirs, Griffin has included comments by Dennis Arnoldy, a federal agent who now considers Frank Cullotta a personal friend. A foreword by Nicholas Pileggi includes a macabre account of how Cullotta reenacted a murder he committed and Martin Scorsese incorporated it into the film Casino.
Cullotta is a compelling read. In addition to divulging the life story of a career criminal who survived lousy odds to tell it, it provides a look at the mob years in Las Vegas from the bottom up and inside out.
(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
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