Casino: Five Tells the True Story
Casino was a movie made in 1995 by Michael Scorsese staring Robert De Niro. It tells the story Las Vegas, the casinos and the mob. It was ground breaking and won several awards but now Five is screening the true story, and truth is more frightening than fiction.
Five tells the story of how all of the casinos in Las Vegas were controlled by five Mafia families based in Chicago and known collectively as The Mob. The major casino was Stardust, and it was earning the Mafia $1,000,000 every month which they skimmed from the takings.
It was essential that the Mob left no traces of the skim though as transactions were all cash it was easy remove millions of dollars through the back but many of the employees started to skim some for themselves.
To control this, the Mafia installed Tony Spilotro as their front man. Although told to keep a low profile he set up his own criminal ring a burglary crew called the hole in the wall gang due to their modus operandi.
The police became interested and The FBI sent in forty or so agents who put the gang under surveillance with wire taps and bugs. Raking through many thousand hours of tape they eventually gathered evidence of a planned heist which involved massive amounts of money.
As a result the gang was caught in the act but they still needed proof of the skim and the Mob’s involvement. The FBI planted an agent as a high roller who played with marked money, setting a trap. But when they tried to spring the trap by intercepting the cash being transferred to the Mob al they got was a decoy; the Mob had been tipped off.
The FBI then raided the Stardust seizing accounts. They discovered that the key was ‘fill slips’; these were records of chips used on the tables. Twenty thousand of the slips were analysed and the Mob was implicated.
As a result the authorities took away their gambling licences and the Mob had to sell the casinos. Somewhat angered, the Mob took their revenge on Spilotro by beating him to death.
Over the next decades the old Vegas was pulled down and the new one we know today was created - some story.
Find the biggest Casino bonuses in seconds
