Screengrab via YouTube/Coffee With Cullotta
Frank Cullotta pictured during a news report in the 1980s.
Frank Cullotta, the former member of the Chicago Outfit and Las Vegas mobster, died on August 20 at the age of 81.
Cullotta’s death was confirmed through a video that was published on his official YouTube channel, Coffee With Cullotta. According to the video, Cullotta has been in the hospital during the last weeks of his life. Cullotta’s cause of death was not made public. A video that was published on the site on August 16 said that Cullotta was “not feeling well.”
Cullotta tales from his mobster life in Chicago and Las Vegas helped to inspire the movie, Casino. In 1979, Cullotta, a native of Chicago, relocated to Las Vegas to join fellow mafia member Tony Spilotro. In 1982, Cullotta became a government witness against Spilotro and other Las Vegas gangster after federal agents played him a tape featuring his former partner saying the gang needed “clean [their] dirty laundry,” according to a United Press International report from 1983. During the trial, Cullotta confessed to having killed people on Spilotro killed.
For the 1995 movie Casino, Cullotta was renamed Frank Marino and portrayed by Frank Vincent. Cullotta served as one of the film’s technical advisors and appeared in a small role. Cullotta told the Las Vegas Sun in 2015 that author Nicholas Pileggi, who penned the book the movie was based on, had told him there would not have been a Casino movie without Cullotta.
When asked about killing people for a living, Cullotta told the Sun, “It’s like fighting a war. I hate to use the military as a comparison, but that’s how it felt; I was carrying out an order.” Cullotta said in the same interview that he often suffered tension headaches when he thought about his career in the mafia. He said, ” I used to have headaches all the time, from tension, and I don’t have headaches anymore. I’m clean today. I’m very clean.”
In July 2017, Cullotta was the subject of a Daily Beast feature that detailed his life as a tour guide in Las Vegas.
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