While some TV shows and movies may show the elegance of committing a felony in Las Vegas, there is nothing glamorous about some of the major crimes that have taken place here. With 21 being a lucky number at the blackjack tables, in part 2 we bring you numbers 14 through 21 of the most notorious crimes that have ever taken place in our fair city.
14. The Mob Enforcer and his Associates Tony “The Ant” Spilotro is considered the most notorious mob enforcer Las Vegas has ever known. Throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, Spilotro was the man for the mob. Bosses from across the country trusted him implicitly to protect the investments they had made in local casinos. And when a troublemaker or an informant needed to be silenced, Spilotro was the man hired to do the job. But Tony “The Ant,” being the ruthless and enterprising criminal he was, decided to start his own criminal venture. He put together a group of ex-cops, conmen and professional thieves to carry out a crime wave across Las Vegas. Not only did they rob local drug dealers and engage in loan sharking, but the group was infamous for carrying out high-end burglaries, usually of jewelry stores. The press dubbed the group “The Hole in the Wall Gang” for their method of making holes in the walls or the ceilings of the stores they robbed in order to bypass the alarm systems. Spilotro conveniently had his own jewelry store called the Gold Rush, where he fenced most of the stolen property. Anyone who didn’t want to work with Spilotro was removed from the equation. According to the book Family Affair: Greed, Treachery, and Betrayal in the Chicago Mafia by Sam Giancana and Scott M. Burnstein, “Anyone who resisted Spilotro and refused to get with the program was outright done away with – killed in cold blood. During Tony’s first six months in town, there were six unsolved homicides of local loan sharks who scoffed at the notion of lining up behind the new regime. Over the next five years, there would be more gangland-related murders than in the previous twenty-five years combined. Jerry Delman, a Vegas-area bookmaker and former Chicago associate of Spilotro’s; Joseph ‘Red’ Klimm, a casino pit boss; Marty Bucceri, and Outfit-connected blackjack dealer; Rick Manzi, an Outfit associate; and Tamara Rand, a silent investor in one of the mob-run casinos and hotels, were all suspected to have been murdered either by Tony himself or by his crew on his orders.” Spilotro was never charged with the murders even though he had been investigated on six separate occasions by the police for his alleged involvement. They knew. They just couldn’t pin anything on him. “The Hole in the Wall Gang” finally met their demise in July 1981, when six of their members were arrested during the burglary of an upscale furniture store. The Feds charged Spilotro with crimes related to the gang, but the trial produced a hung jury, and no verdict could be reached. Meanwhile, Spilotro’s bosses back in Chicago were not very happy with all the attention his planned retrial was bringing to their operation. Plus, in addition to the unwanted press, Spilotro was having an affair with the wife of another Vegas mob boss – Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal. In 1983, an assassination attempt was made on Rosenthal and Spilotro was believed to have ordered the hit. Having had enough of his drawing too much attention to their business, in June 1986 shortly before his retrial, Tony’s bosses called him back to Chicago for a meeting. Spilotro and his brother Michael, also a mob enforcer, went to a home in rural Indiana where a group of hitmen beat and strangled them. Having met their demise, their bodies were buried in a nearby cornfield. As for the rest of the gang, most were sentenced to long prison terms on racketeering and burglary charges, while others met the same fate as Tony “The Ant” and his brother. Some of Spilotro’s exploits were dramatized in the 1995 movie “Casino,” in which Joe Pesci portrayal Nicholas “Nicky” Santoro, a hot-tempered mob enforcer.
15. The Hip-Hop Legend On September 7, 1996, 25-year-old hip-hop legend Tupac Shakur attended the Mike Tyson vs. Bruce Seldon boxing match at the MGM Grand with Suge Knight, the head of Death Row Records. After leaving the match, Travon “Tray” Lane, a M.O.B. Piru member and one of Knight’s associates, noticed Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, a Compton, California Crips gang member, in the MGM Grand lobby. According to reports, a few months earlier Anderson and a group of Southside Crips had attempted to rob Lane at a Foot Locker store. When Lane told Shakur, he attacked Anderson, punching him in the face and knocking him to the ground. Shakur and Knight’s entourage then assaulted Anderson. While the fight was broken up by hotel security, it was captured on the hotel’s video surveillance. Later that evening while being the passenger in a car driven by Knight, Shakur suffered fatal gunshot wounds when, while stopped at a red light, a white four-door late-model Cadillac pulled alongside them and opened fired. Shakur was hit four times – once in the thigh, once in the arm and twice in the chest. Although he was rushed to the hospital and survived his initial injuries, he succumbed six days later after respiratory failure led to cardiac arrest. While at the time of the shooting several vehicles were following Knight’s car, nobody stepped forward to offer an eye witness account. The year following the shooting, during an ABC Primetime Live interview, Knight said that he didn’t know who shot Shakur, but would never tell officers if he did. In 2002, the Los Angeles Times published a two-part story titled “Who Killed Tupac Shakur?” based on a year-long investigation by Chuck Philips. The journalist reported that “the shooting was carried out by a Compton gang called the Southside Crips to avenge the beating of one of its members by Shakur a few hours earlier. Orlando Anderson, the Crip whom Shakur had attacked, fired the fatal shots. Las Vegas police considered Anderson as a suspect and interviewed him only once, briefly. Anderson was killed nearly two years later in an unrelated gang shooting.” Philips’ article also implicated several New York criminals, as well as East Coast rappers including The Notorious B.I.G., Shakur’s biggest hip-hop rival at the time. In the second part of the story that was published, Philips conjectured that the murder investigation by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department was mismanaged. His article stated that the LVMPD failures were: “(1) discounting the fight that occurred just hours before the shooting, in which Shakur was involved in beating Anderson in the MGM Grand lobby; (2) failing to follow up with a member of Shakur’s entourage who witnessed the shooting, who told Vegas police he could probably identify one or more of the assailants, but was killed before being interviewed; and (3) failing to follow up a lead from a witness who spotted a white Cadillac similar to the car from which the fatal shots were fired and in which the shooters escaped.” In 2011, Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, reported that as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request, the FBI released documents to them revealing that an investigation took place in which claims were made that the Jewish Defense League was extorting protection money from Shakur and other rappers after making death threats against them. In 2017, Knight broke his silences and claimed he might actually have been the target of the attack that killed Shakur, saying that it was a hit on him as a staged coup in an attempt to take control of Death Row Records. Whatever the real truth is, the murder of Tupac Shakur devastated fans and the hip-hop community and remains officially unsolved to this day.
16. The Made Man Another Las Vegas mob legend who met his maker in Sin City was Herbert “Fat Herbie” Blitzstein. In 1987, Fat Herbie was convicted on federal charges, including credit card fraud, conspiracy, and receiving stolen property. He spent eight years in prison. Before his January 1997 execution-style murder in his home, Blitzstein had served as the bodyguard and lieutenant for the ultraviolent gangster Tony “the Ant” Spilotro, whose exploits are documented above. The murder of the 62-year-old former Chicago bookmaker and one-time right–hand man to Tony “the Ant” is believed to be connected to the havoc and chaos that Spilotro unleashed across Las Vegas during the 1970s. Seven mobsters from Buffalo and Las Vegas were arrested in connection with the gangland murder as it was believed the hit had been carried out as part of a joint effort between mob factions in Los Angeles and Buffalo. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that rival gang members wanted Fat Herbie out of the way so that they could divvy up and take over his lucrative street rackets, including loansharking, prostitution and insurance fraud. Fat Herbie was a fixture in the Las Vegas underworld and was a key member of the burglary ring known as “The Hole in the Wall Gang,” also noted above. The movie Casino memorialized the gangster with the fictional character Bernie Blue, who was created in his likeness, portrayed by actor Bret McCormick. In a strange homage to the legendary mob figure, the Ashland Leather Company out of Chicago sells a wallet named after Blitzstein for $325 called the Fat Herbie. It is described on their website as follows: “Big, Brash, Stylish: The Fat Herbie Double Bifold Our Fat Herbie wallet honors this legendary wiseguy with its imposing size and panache, like a Magnum in your pocket. With four full-sized card pockets hand-stitched n Horween Leather’s world-renowned Shell Cordovan, your cash and plastic will finally get the digs they deserve. And the rich grain of the equine leather will get better with age – unlike poor Herbie himself whose career ended with a .22 slug to the back of the head.”
17. The Desperate Daughter In 1998, 65-year-old Nevada resident Christine Smith disappeared. Three years later, her body was found inside of a storage unit owned by her daughter, stuffed into a trash can. According to police, the victim’s 48-year-old daughter, Brookey Lee West, allegedly killed Smith so that she could steal her $1,000 a month Social Security checks. In 2005 and 2012 author Glenn Puit penned and published two books on the case. Witch: The True Story of Las Vegas’ Most Notorious Female Killer, Berkley Books, and Witch: The Bone Chilling True Story of US Murderer Brookey Lee West, Ebury Publishing. According to Puit, West grew up with her father, Leroy Smith, who taught her witchcraft, Satanism and violence from a young age, while her mother had numerous affairs and often neglected her and her brother, Travis Smith. Although she has only been convicted of one murder, West is believed to be a serial killer responsible for the deaths of at least three people: Her brother Travis, who mysteriously disappeared in 1993, and although a body was never found, West was accused of having connections to his disappearance after it was discovered that a man had checked into Santa Clara Valley Medical Center using her brother’s social security number and the medical bill was sent to an address where West was living; her husband Howard Simon St. John, who in May 1994 filed a spousal abuse claim against West after allegedly being assaulted with a .32 caliber handgun by her. The charges were dropped, and two weeks later Simon’s body was found near Lower Coffee Camp in Springville, California. The cause of death was determined to be gunshot wounds. West is currently serving a life sentence at the Florence McClure Women’s Correctional Center in North Las Vegas. In 2012, West made Las Vegas headlines again when she tried to escape from prison.
18. The Supermarket Shooter During the early morning hours of June 3, 1999, a 23-year-old man named Zane Floyd raped an escort service employee after having a disastrous night at the blackjack tables and told her he planned to kill the first 19 people he saw. Later that morning at approximately 5:16, Floyd decided to act on his violent fantasy and began his rampage when he walked into a local Albertson’s supermarket with a 12-gauge shotgun. Wearing Marine Corps camouflage and having shaved his head, within seconds of entering the store, Floyd took the life of the first victim when he shot Thomas Darnell, 40, twice in the back. Immediately after, Floyd shot Carlos “Chuck” Leos, 41, and Dennis Troy Sargent, 31. Floyd then came upon Zachary Emenegger, 21, who tried to escape when he saw the shotgun pointed in his direction. Diving under a produce table, Emenegger avoided Floyd’s gunfire for 15 seconds before succumbing to gunshots from Floyd’s shotgun. Surveillance footage showed Floyd chasing Emenegger before shooting him in the back. Miraculously, while he was shot twice, he somehow survived. Floyd then encountered Lucille Tarantino, 60, who had been hiding near the back of the supermarket and who called 911 as she thought they were being robbed. Floyd shot Tarantino in the head at point-blank range. From the time he walked into Albertson’s to the time he fired his last shot, the entire ordeal took just 7 minutes. Having shot everyone he found, and thinking he had killed them all, Floyd attempted to make a run for it, but law enforcement surrounded the building. Following an 8-minute standoff with police, where Floyd threatened to commit suicide, he surrendered to police and was taken into custody. According to police records, while he was being interviewed, he told one detective, “Call me crazy, psychotic, whatever. I’ve just always wanted to know what it’s like to shoot someone.” During questioning Floyd repeatedly called himself a loser and was upset that although he received an honorable discharge from the U.S. Marines, he was told he could not re-enlist because he had a drinking problem. Floyd received four death sentences and currently awaits execution on Nevada’s death row.
19. The Personal Assistant and the Fitness Freaks In December 2005, an unsuspecting motorist accidentally came upon a burnt out Jaguar in the middle of the Las Vegas desert. When police arrived to examine the vehicle that had obviously been set ablaze, they discovered a body in the trunk. It was identified as 28-year-old Melissa James, who had moved to Las Vegas just four months earlier. Las Vegas Police Detective Dean O’Kelley told the press, “There’s a bathrobe tie around her neck, there’s also speaker wire – double-stranded speaker wire – that was wrapped around her neck as well. At autopsy, there was evidence of strangulation involved. Even with the extensive burning, the medical examiner was able to say that. We also had from above her eyebrows to below her lower lip, and her entire head was encircled with duct tape.” The coroner’s report also revealed that a 50,000 volt Taser had zapped James and that she had a toxic level of morphine injected into her leg. James was a professional dancer and a trained ballet, hip-hop and jazz instructor who pretty much grew up on the stage. When she was just 19 years old, she opened her own Florida dance studio, but finances as they were, she was not able to sustain the business. When Melissa’s friend, Craig Titus, offered her a job as a personal assistant for him and his wife, she thought she hit the jackpot. James thought that working with a bodybuilding “super couple” could put her back on track to earn enough money to get her dance studio back up and running. Like playing a poker game, James went all in and moved to Las Vegas to be the live-in personal assistant for Titus and his wife, Kelly Ryan. Titus and Ryan were fitness industry stars, holding multiple bodybuilding titles between them. While the 242-pound Titus was known as the “Bad Boy of Bodybuilding” and held titles like IronMan and Mr. Olympia, the 5-foot 3-inch Ryan was known to the fitness world as “Flyin’ Ryan,” and at one time held the title of Ms. Fitness America. Her dazzling routines not only wowed the crowds but landed her endorsement deals around the world. Her body control and strength put her at the top of her industry as she held nearly a dozen competitive titles, including Ms. Fitness Olympia and Fitness International. Although Titus and Ryan had initially denied any involvement and claimed innocence in the death of Melissa James, as evidence mounted against them, the power couple was eventually arrested, and at their 2008 trial, they pled guilty to second-degree murder. Ryan cut a plea deal for arson and assault and battery with a deadly weapon, and while in prison she divorced Titus. In October 2017, Ryan was released on parole after serving a nearly 9-year prison sentence after two consecutive 3 to 13-year terms. Titus, who received a sentence of 21 to 51 years, is still serving time in the Nevada prison system.
20. The Homeless Murders It started with a panhandler being fatally shot in the street while begging for change just before Christmas in 2005. To this day the cold blooded murder is still unsolved, and it marked the first in a series of deadly attacks against the homeless population of Las Vegas. Over the course of a few years five more homeless people had been shot, three of whom died, with two of the victims escaping with their lives. All of the victims were shot with small-caliber weapons, and all of the shootings appeared to be at random with nothing in common except that they were on or near bus benches and the fact that they were homeless. In 2011, after the last two victims were killed, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department formed a task force to investigate the similarities of the crimes in an attempt to identify a suspect. To date, that series of shootings and murders remained unsolved. In 2017 two additional homeless men were murdered at secluded intersections near where the original victims were found – surrounded by freeways, but far from the neon lights of the Strip. Daniel Aldape, 46, was found dead in January, wrapped in his sleeping blanket, while David Dunn, 60, was murdered on the opposite corner of the same intersection a month later. Both were victims of blunt force trauma to the head in an extreme manner; bludgeoned with a heavy object. Police set up a sting to catch the killer, surveilling the area with hidden cameras and officers. Like clockwork, in early March a shadowy figure wearing a hoodie showed up at the same intersection of the first two murders. Walking back and forth like an animal stalking his prey, his attention was drawn to a motionless body under a floral print blanket. The man, identified by police as 30-year-old Shane Schindler, then lifted a 4-pound hammer with both hands and to generate maximum force, brought the steel tool down on the horizontal figure “with the intent to kill.” And perhaps Schindler would have succeeded in doing just that if his target wasn’t already lifeless. Police used a mannequin to catch the would-be killer. Schindler was caught on camera bashing the dummy and was immediately arrested on charges of carrying a concealed weapon without a permit. During his trial, a plea bargain was struck, and Schindler was only charged with carrying a concealed weapon without a permit as prosecutors could not prove without a shadow of a doubt that he committed the two murders. District Judge Michael Villani ordered Schindler to spend 8 to 20 years behind bars for the crime. In 2018 over nine days, four more homeless men were shot, two of them killed, by 26-year-old Joshua Castellon, who attacked his victims while they were sleeping. Three of the four attacks took place in the same general area as the previous crimes. Castellon is in custody awaiting trial as we go to press.
21. The Jealous Boyfriend In May 2007, a pipe bomb exploded on the roof of the Las Vegas Luxor’s parking garage. The blast killed 24-year-old Willebaldo Dorantes Antonio but spared his girlfriend, Caren Chali. Dorantes Antonio and Chali could be seen on security cameras moments before the 4 a.m. blast, walking arm-in-arm from the hotel, where they both worked at a Nathan’s Famous hot dog stand. The bomb sat on top of the Dorantes Antonio’s car disguised as a 24-ounce Styrofoam coffee cup. A motion-activated sensor triggered the mechanism, which tore apart Dorantes Antonio’s hand and lodged a piece of metal in his head when it detonated. The piece of metal is what killed him. Throughout the trial, prosecutors said that the suspect, Porfirio “Pilo” Duarte-Herrera built the bomb for his friend and co-defendant, Omar Rueda-Denvers, who they said was jealous of the victim because he was dating his former girlfriend. According to news reports at the time, both Rueda-Denvers and Duarte-Herrera were both in the U.S. illegally. Duarte-Herrera was also accused of a bomb explosion in the parking lot of a Home Depot store months before the Luxor incident. There were no victims in that blast. Both defendants were sentenced to life in prison without parole. The violent act terrified the community as it had the potential to kill many more innocent people.
As would be the case in any city, whenever a high profile crime takes place, the mere mention of murder can send chills up and down one’s spine. But Las Vegas is not just any city. Some people come here to escape, to get away from their routine, drawn to the glitz and glamour of a promise they will have a good time and with a little luck, go back home with more money in their pockets than with which they came. Sometimes the fantasy, the dream of something better can turn into a nightmare as it did for the victims of these and other crimes.