Mr. Cullotta agreed to help the F.B.I. and testified that he had been following Mr. Spilotro’s orders when he killed a man named Sherwin Lister. Mr. Spilotro, he said, believed Mr. Lister had agreed to cooperate with the government in a case against him.
Mr. Cullotta was granted immunity for his previously uncharged crimes but sentenced to 10 years in prison. (The term was reduced to eight years). He was paroled in 1984 and entered the federal witness protection program.
In his 2007 memoir, “Cullotta: The Life of a Chicago Criminal, Las Vegas Mobster, and Government Witness,” Mr. Cullotta wrote that he had been involved in four murders, 20 arsons and more than 500 robberies and burglaries.
“I think that Frank saw his worst acts of crime — the murders he committed — in a similar way that soldiers in the Army see their duty,” Geoff Schumacher, the vice president of exhibits and programs for the Mob Museum in Las Vegas, said in a phone interview.
“That said, he was very careful about his remorse,” Mr. Schumacher added. “He didn’t go out of his way to apologize.”
Mr. Cullotta later returned to Las Vegas and began giving tours at the Mob Museum. After his first memoir, he wrote two more with the true-crime author Dennis N. Griffin. He was a consultant on Martin Scorsese’s 1995 movie “Casino,” which was loosely based on Mr. Spilotro’s career in Las Vegas, and had a cameo as a hit man.
Mr. Cullotta’s marriage to Ann Blandi ended in divorce, as did his marriage to Marie Giavonco. He later married Elaine Costanza, who survives him, along with a daughter from his first marriage, Angela Russo; a stepdaughter, Kim; and his brother, Joseph.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/24/obituaries/frank-cullotta-dead-coronavirus.html
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