The Spilotro crime family legacy is a five-foot-deep make-shift grave in an Indiana cornfield.
Top hoodlum Tony Spilotro and his outfit brother, Michael, were beaten and buried alive 39 years ago this summer. Some of their four brothers continued in the family business, and all but one died natural deaths over the years.
On Thursday, NBC Chicago learned that the last of the Spilotro brothers is also dead, bringing to an end one of the Outfit’s most colorful criminal bloodlines.
It was in Las Vegas in the early 1970’s that Chicago’s Spilotro family and the word notorious became joined at the hip.
The Outfit had deployed tough guy Tony Spilotro to Vegas to shore up the four mob-controlled casinos here. Spilotro-known as “Ant” – not because of his tiny thorax or beady eyes – his nickname was just short for Anthony.
But by June of 1986, Tony Spilotro had become a flamboyant, Outfit liability. A mob hit team lured him back to Chicago with one of his brothers, Michael, and both of them were beaten and placed in a gangland grave here in northwest Indiana-found by a farmer a few days later.
There were six Spilotro brothers in all – not all of them mobsters, but this family picture on a mob Facebook page typified the broad-stroke attention the Spilotros received over the decades.
One by one they died off – until only this brother, the less notorious John Spilotro, was left.
Outfit investigators say that John Spilotro had played understudy roles for his more mobbed-up brothers, and although authorities believe he was in Tony Spilotro’s inner circle, he had a much lower profile.
He was charged in a federal racketeering case at one point with several other outfit-connected defendants, but John Spilotro’s case was overturned on an evidentiary appeal.
On Monday night at age 83, the last Spilotro brother died of natural causes–ending an era that connected the golden years of the outfit with today’s pared-down crime syndicate.
On Thursday, veteran Las Vegas mob expert and author John L. Smith said the Spilotro era is history.
“There’s the sense that this is something that is passed. But the family name, you know, became notorious long ago, and some of the family members have worked hard their whole lives to outlive it,” Smith said. “There is a time of transition,” he said.
John Spilotro lived in the shadow of his more infamous big brother, Tony. And it was a king-sized shadow.
Tony Spilotro was the inspiration for Joe Pesci’s bloodthirsty character in the 1995 movie casino – right down to the fact-based scene when a mob victim’s head was put in a vise. It is a gangland name that will live in infamy.