Packin

I thought that the tour leaders on the Vegas Mob Tour were going to be actors dressed up like mobsters.  Boy was I wrong!  Our tour leaders, Frank Cullotta and Robert Allen are the real deal.  And we were in a van with these guys and 12 other people who had paid $100 each to see where mobsters ate, blew up cars in parking lots, murdered people and committed robberies.  Here is a video of Robert interviewing Frank.

These guys would answer any questions we asked with honesty and well, some crudeness.  In our group was someone from 97.1 CBS Radio Detroit who was on the tour as part of a piece he's doing.  The interviewer from Detroit never asked the question that I wanted to know.  So I blurted it out!

"What happened to Jimmy Hoffa?" I asked, and then worried about the answer I was going to get.  I was told that within 3 hours of being shot, Jimmy Hoffa was ground up like ground beef at a butcher near where he was shot and thrown in the dumpster with some old ground beef.  Geez.  I'm not sure if I should be sharing that.  Am I supposed to adhere to that "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" thing?

Anyway, Robert also confided to us that the mob knocked off both of the Kennedy's and Marilyn Monroe!   So when it was time for us to have a picture taken with Robert in front of the house where Casino was filmed, I asked Robert another question.  "Bobby, are you packin'?"  He said nah.  So I wasn't worried about squeezing his arm too hard. 

An interesting thing we learned about the movie "Casino" which is based on a true story, is that Frank was Martin Scorsese's advisor on set to make sure things were authentic in the film.  Towards the end of the movie is a scene where Ginger Rothstein is assassinated in Costa Rica.  And the hit man actually was Frank Cullotta in real life.  During the filming, the actor playing the hit man kept flubbing it up and not doing it right time after time.  Frank, who was sitting there next to Martin Scorsese, got pissed, took a prop gun, walked onto the set and re-enacted how he himself had shot the guy.   Then said to the actor, "That's how it's done!"  Scorsese kept that in the film. You can see Frank at 2:17 in the clip below shooting the guy in the back of the neck.

Meanwhile, we have 1 more day left in Vegas.  Consequently, we ARE packin!