On the evening of October 10, 1979, Sherwin Jerry Lisner opened his front door in the east side of Las Vegas. He recognized the man standing on his porch. He let him inside.
As Lisner turned to lead the man toward the back of the house, Frank Cullotta pulled out a .22 caliber pistol and fired twice. Lisner didn’t fall. He turned and asked why, then ran.
Cullotta chased him through the house, firing repeatedly until the gun was empty. Lisner was still moving. Cullotta grabbed a water cooler cord and tried to strangle him. The cord snapped.
By the time it was over, Lisner had been shot nearly ten times. Outside, crew member Wayne Mattei sat waiting in the car. Hours later, Lisner’s body was found floating in his own swimming pool. The water around him had turned pink.
The killing was supposed to be quick and clean. It was neither. It wasn’t a professional hit carried out by a hired gun. It was a favor requested by Tony Spilotro, the Chicago Outfit’s man in Vegas and the most feared enforcer in the desert.
Cullotta carried it out because Tony was his best friend in the world. They had been together since they were boys on the streets of Chicago. Cullotta was the leader of the Hole in the Wall Gang. He admitted to killing at least four men.
Here is the strange, twisted, almost impossible part. Sixteen years after killing Jerry Lisner, Frank Cullotta walked onto a Martin Scorsese film set to play a hitman in the movie Casino. The scene he appeared in, a killing of an informant inside his home, was a reenactment of the murder Cullotta had actually committed.
The actor hired to play the killer couldn’t make the scene look real. So Scorsese turned to the man who had actually done it and said, “Show him how.” Cullotta showed him. Then Scorsese put him in front of the camera to do it for real. He acted out his own crime for pay, with a union card.
This is the story of how a kid from Chicago’s West Side became Tony Spilotro’s right hand, ran the most daring robbery crew in Las Vegas history, killed for friendship and for work, then turned on everyone he loved, joined the Witness Protection Program, left it, and ended his life as a film consultant cashing checks from the same director who immortalized him under a pseudonym.
On screen, Frank Vincent played a lieutenant named Frank Marino, a character built directly on Frank Cullotta. The man behind that character was Cullotta, and his story is the most surreal full-circle tale in mafia history.
But here is what the documentaries usually leave out. Cullotta didn’t just survive. He profited from his betrayals twice. Once when the government paid him for his cooperation, and once when Hollywood paid him to act out the crimes he had confessed to. That is a level of American grift the mob itself could never have imagined.
Frank Cullotta was born on December 14, 1938, in Chicago. His father Joseph was also a criminal, a skilled driver and armed robber, though not officially part of the mob. His father died when Frank was young, leaving the family poor and the son with a single inheritance: the understanding that the straight world was for other people.
By the time Frank was a teenager, he was spending his time on the corners of Grand Avenue, running errands for older men and learning the geography of opportunity. There he met a small, sharp-tempered Italian kid with fast hands and faster eyes. Anthony Spilotro.
They were born the same year, Tony in May and Frank in December, but Tony was younger and tougher, already the kind of kid others learned not to mess with. They became inseparable. Brothers in everything but blood. They robbed stores together. They fought together. They split their first earnings evenly on the sidewalk under a streetlight.
Whatever happened to one, the other handled the response. By the late 1950s, Cullotta had graduated from teenage theft to serious work. He ran a robbery crew in Chicago, hitting jewelry stores, fur warehouses, and anywhere with merchandise and a back door.
He had a talent for it. He could scout a building in twenty minutes and tell you where the alarm wires were, where the safe was, and when the night guard took his coffee break. He wasn’t muscle. He was a planner, a thief by trade, not by accident.
His first arrests came early, and prison refined him into exactly the man the mob needed. By the early 1960s, Tony Spilotro was rising. He became a made member of the Outfit around 1963. Cullotta never did because his background wasn’t fully Italian, but the relationship never needed a title to be real.
They stayed close through the 1960s. During Tony’s rise as an enforcer and collector, killings were linked to his name, like the 1962 murders where William McCarthy and James Miraglia were found dead in a car trunk. McCarthy’s head had been crushed in a vise. The scene would later appear in Casino almost exactly as it happened.
Cullotta was present in the setup. He later admitted he was the one who made the phone call that lured McCarthy to his death.
Then in 1971, Tony Spilotro received the assignment that would change both their lives. Chicago sent him to Las Vegas. The mob had a problem. The skimmed money from casinos, the cash stolen from counting rooms at places like the Stardust, was the lifeblood of the operation, and it needed protection.
Tony was sent west to make sure nobody got greedy and the money kept flowing to the bosses in Chicago, Kansas City, and Milwaukee. He opened a jewelry store called the Gold Rush near the main strip. From that small shop, he ran an empire of extortion, loan sharking, and terror.
By the mid-1970s, he had a grip on Las Vegas, and he needed his old friend. In 1978, Frank Cullotta got the call: “Come to Vegas. There’s work.”
By then, Cullotta had moved between Chicago and the federal prison system more than once. He was approaching forty and looking for new ground. He drove west and went to the Gold Rush. Tony hugged him. They drank together. Then Tony explained the situation.
Las Vegas was a gold mine, but it needed organization. There were independent thieves, jewelry burglars, and robbers working the valley without structure or tribute. Tony wanted Frank to bring them under one umbrella, run them, take a cut of every job in town, and handle the dirty work Tony, under constant FBI surveillance, could no longer do himself.
Cullotta agreed. Within months, he put together a crew that would become legendary. The press called them the Hole in the Wall Gang.
The name came from their signature method. They would scout a luxury home or jewelry store, find a wall or ceiling not visible from the street, and cut a hole straight through it to bypass alarms on doors and windows. Fast and effective.
They worked at night in teams, wearing dark clothes with police scanners. They hit the homes of doctors, casino executives, and anyone whose address suggested wealth. By 1981, by Cullotta’s own later estimate, the crew had robbed between 250 and 300 homes and businesses across the valley.
Cullotta took his cut. Tony took his. The rest was split among the crew.
Here is how a typical job went. First, the opportunity. A scout would case the target home, noting the alarm system, the dog, the interior layout, and entry points. A bookie, maid, or pool cleaner with gambling debts would confirm whether the family was traveling.
Then the execution. On the chosen night, the men would cut through a back wall or ceiling in minutes. One stood watch with a radio. Another waited in a running car. They moved in and out quickly. Jewelry went to a fence who paid a fraction of its value. Cash was clean.
Most of the planning and dividing of spoils happened in the back of the Upper Crust Pizza on Flamingo Road, which Cullotta owned as a front.
The problem was that the crew became famous. The Las Vegas police set up a unit to watch them. The FBI tracked their cars. The more powerful Tony Spilotro became, the more attention he drew to everyone around him, including Frank.
But robbery wasn’t the only work. There were bodies too.
In 1979, Tony asked Cullotta to do the Lisner favor. Sherwin Jerry Lisner was a small-time hustler who had been charged and started talking to the government. Word reached the crew that he was ready to testify against Tony and Frank. Tony decided he had to go.
Tony couldn’t pull the trigger himself because he would be the prime suspect the moment the body dropped. So he asked Frank. Frank agreed the same way he had agreed with Tony since they were boys.
The Lisner killing happened the way it was described at the start of this story. It was clumsy, long, and nearly failed completely. Cullotta brought Wayne Mattei as the driver. He shot Lisner in the head, chased him through the house when he didn’t die, emptied the gun, then grabbed a cord that snapped in his hands. Lisner’s body was found in his own pool. The case went unsolved for years, until the only man who could explain it decided to tell everything much later.
There were other killings. Accounts vary on the exact number, but Cullotta later admitted under oath to involvement in at least four murders. He killed for work. He killed for Tony. He killed because that was the nature of the job.
He grew up understanding that work is work. He felt no remorse. He didn’t romanticize it. He did the job, went home, and slept. That was the trait even seasoned FBI agents noticed later. He wasn’t a sadist. He wasn’t a thrill killer. He simply listed murder as part of his profession.
By 1981, the Hole in the Wall Gang was too exposed. The FBI planted bugs in the Upper Crust. They photographed Cullotta meeting Tony at restaurants along the strip. They managed to flip at least one crew member.
On July 4, 1981, Independence Day, the FBI and Las Vegas police arrested the entire crew during an attempted burglary of Bertha’s Gifts and Furnishings on East Sahara Avenue. They had the place under surveillance based on a tip. They watched the men break in. Then they moved in.
Charges of burglary and conspiracy followed. And here is where something began to change inside Frank Cullotta that no one around him expected.
Because at the moment Cullotta needed Tony Spilotro most, Tony backed away. Word reached Frank through investigators and street sources that there was a contract on his life. The logic was simple by mob standards. Cullotta knew everything. He knew about Lisner. He knew about the bodies, the jobs, the bribes. If he broke under pressure, the whole Vegas operation could collapse.
Tapes captured mob bosses discussing the need to clean up their mess. Frank understood exactly what that meant.
You have to understand what this meant to him. This wasn’t a business partner turning on him. This was his childhood companion from Grand Avenue. This was a brother. The one person in the world Cullotta had trusted completely since childhood. That friendship was the foundation of his entire life. Tony Spilotro was the ground Frank Cullotta had stood on for thirty years. Now that ground was deciding whether to drop him.
In the spring of 1982, while in federal custody, Frank Cullotta did something no one who knew him expected. He contacted the FBI. He wanted to talk.
The agents who came to meet him couldn’t believe their luck. They had been chasing Tony Spilotro for a decade and had gotten no closer than wiretaps. Now the man who knew everything was offering to tell them everything.
The deal was made that July. Full cooperation. Full disclosure. In return, reduced sentence, relocation, and a new identity. He accepted.
He testified before a federal grand jury and confessed to the Lisner murder. He named names, one after another. He revealed the structure of the Hole in the Wall Gang. Most importantly, he placed Tony Spilotro at the center of the murders and extortion in a way the wiretaps never could.
The information was devastating. In September 1983, Spilotro was charged with conspiracy and obstruction of justice in the Lisner murder case. At the trial in October, Cullotta took the stand and admitted involvement in more than 300 crimes, including four murders.
Cullotta’s defection helped Las Vegas police and the FBI dismantle mob operations in the desert. The broader casino fraud cases, which eventually sent bosses in Kansas City, Chicago, and Milwaukee to prison, relied mainly on years of FBI wiretaps. But Cullotta’s flip was part of the same wave that finally broke Chicago’s hold on Las Vegas.
Tony Spilotro never made it to trial on the final charges. On June 14, 1986, Tony and his younger brother Michael were beaten to death in Bensenville, Illinois. Nine days later, their bodies were found in their underwear, buried together in a cornfield in Indiana near Enos.
Chicago killed Tony because he had caused too much trouble and was facing trial on multiple cases. Cullotta’s cooperation helped build those cases. Cullotta always insisted he never ordered or carried out the killing. But he never denied that what he said in court helped decide his old friend’s fate. The brother who had been Frank’s support for thirty years became a corpse in northwest Indiana soil.
Cullotta was released on parole into the Witness Protection Program around 1984. New name, new life. The government moved him through places like Texas, Colorado, Mississippi, and Alabama. He tried to disappear.
But here is the strange thing about a man like Frank Cullotta. The old life never really let go of him. He missed its rhythm. He missed being known. He didn’t last long in the program. Within about two years, he left it, drifted back to his old life and his real name, and eventually settled near Las Vegas, of all places, the city where he had killed Jerry Lisner.
By then, Tony was dead. Most of the bosses who wanted Frank dead were dead, in prison, or too old to care. He calculated that no one who mattered was still coming for him. He was right.
Then in the mid-1990s, the phone rang. It was Nicholas Pileggi, the journalist who wrote Wiseguy, the book that became Goodfellas. Pileggi was working with Martin Scorsese on a new film, Casino, based on Pileggi’s reporting on the Vegas mob and the skim.
Scorsese wanted authenticity. He wanted to know how the robberies were actually done. He wanted to know how the killings actually happened. The only living person who had been inside those actual rooms was Frank Cullotta.
Cullotta joined as a technical consultant and spent months on set. He took the production crew on a tour of the gold rush geography. He explained how the Hole in the Wall Gang broke through walls. He described, scene by scene, the things he had actually done.
Then Scorsese gave him something almost no consultant gets: time in front of the camera.
In the film, there is a lieutenant named Frank Marino played by actor Frank Vincent, the same man who later played Phil Leotardo in The Sopranos. Marino is the loyal aide to Joe Pesci’s Nicky Santoro, the fictional version of Tony Spilotro. The character of Marino was built on Frank Cullotta.
So the real Cullotta stood on set watching an actor play a version of him. Then Scorsese gave Cullotta a small role as a hitman. In one scene, an informant is chased through his home and shot to death, a near-exact reenactment of the Lisner murder. The actor playing the killer couldn’t get the scene right. Scorsese asked Cullotta to show him how. Then he filmed Cullotta doing it.
Cullotta also appears as a gunman in another murder scene in the film. On screen, he was exactly as he was in real life. Cullotta later said in interviews that he didn’t find the task difficult. He said it was just a job. He hit his mark. He fired the prop gun. He collected his pay. The same craft he had practiced for money, once his profession in the dark, happened on a soundstage. Nobody died. He went back to his room that night and slept fine.
After Casino, Frank Cullotta became a curiosity in America. He co-wrote books. He gave interviews. He appeared in mafia documentaries. He started a YouTube channel in his later years called Coffee with Cullotta, where he sat in front of a camera and told stories about Tony, about Chicago, and about the Hole in the Wall Gang.
He organized mafia history tours of Las Vegas, driving customers around the city to show them the places where he and his crew had committed their crimes. The Gold Rush location. The Upper Crust location. The neighborhood where Lisner lived. He even drove past the house where the murder happened and told tourists what he had done there.
Frank Cullotta died of complications from COVID-19 on August 20, 2020, at a Las Vegas hospital around 12:50 a.m. He was 81 years old. He died in the same city where he killed Jerry Lisner and worked as an escort for the most feared mob enforcer in the desert.
He outlived almost every man he ever worked with. Tony Spilotro had been gone for 34 years. Most of the Hole in the Wall Gang were dead or in nursing homes. The bosses who once wanted him executed were buried in cemeteries stretching from Chicago to Kansas City. Frank Cullotta won the longest game in his own twisted way.
So what does this story tell us? It tells us that the line between the men who commit crimes and the men who tell stories about them has always been thinner than the public wants to believe. It tells us that the American justice system, when offered information valuable enough, will pay a confessed killer to rebuild his life. It tells us that Hollywood, when offered authenticity rare enough, will hire that same killer to act out his crimes for money.
Frank Cullotta killed at least four men. He helped destroy the mob’s grip on Las Vegas by talking. Then he turned around and sold the story of those same crimes in books, tours, and films for the last twenty-five years of his life.
Crime was profitable. Cooperation was profitable. Acting out the crime was profitable again.
Tony Spilotro never got to write a book. Tony Spilotro died at 48, his body beaten and dumped in a cornfield. The boys from Grand Avenue walked the same road for decades. One ended up buried in the dirt. The other ended up in front of cameras.
The difference between them comes down to one decision in 1982, when a man decided that the friendship which had defined his entire life wasn’t worth the years he would spend in a federal cell. Friendship has a price in the organized crime market. Frank Cullotta found his price and never apologized for it, not once.
He said in his final interviews that he would do the exact same thing if he could go back. He said the only thing he regretted was that he couldn’t call his old friend Tony to tell him how the movie ended.
That is the man behind the character. The killer who became a consultant, then a tour guide, then a narrator of his own crimes. America had never seen anything quite like him before. Now that he’s gone, it probably never will again.