In Casino, Martin Scorsese shows a handful of old men sitting around a table in the back room of a Kansas City grocery store, eating Italian food and complaining about their cut from the Tangiers. Joe Pesci’s voiceover calls them “greaseballs.” The film treats them like furniture. But one of those men — reduced to a background character named Vincent Borelli and played by Joseph Ragno for maybe ninety seconds of total screen time — was actually the single most important figure in the entire Las Vegas skim operation.
His name was Nicholas Civella. And the FBI recorded everything he did.
Why Scorsese Couldn’t Tell the Real Story
Scorsese didn’t erase Civella because his story wasn’t interesting. He erased him because he wasn’t legally allowed to tell it. Casino was forced to use the phrase “adapted from a true story” instead of “based on a true story.” Every real name was changed. Chicago was reduced to the phrase “back home.” Kansas City became a vague reference. And Nick Civella — the man who controlled the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund, who dictated which casinos received hundreds of millions in loans, who directed the skim from a federal prison visiting room — became an unnamed old man eating pasta in a grocery store.
The Pipeline
Civella was born Giuseppe Nicola Civella on March 19, 1912, in the North End neighborhood of Kansas City, Missouri, to Sicilian immigrant parents. He dropped out of school after his first arrest at age ten. Before he turned twenty, he’d been picked up for auto theft, illegal gambling, robbery, and vagrancy. By 1953, he had taken control of the Kansas City crime family.
The Nevada Gaming Commission placed him in the Black Book — one of the first eleven entries — banning him from setting foot in any casino in the state. That ban didn’t stop Civella. It just meant he couldn’t walk through a casino door himself. So he built something more valuable: a pipeline that could put other people’s money into casinos he secretly controlled, skim the profits before they hit the books, and send them back to Kansas City in suitcases.
The pipeline ran through the Teamsters. In Casino, Robert De Niro’s Ace Rothstein gets the Tangiers through a Teamsters loan. The film compresses the entire process into a single scene. The real version was far more complicated — and Civella was at the center of every step.
The Teamsters Money
In 1974, a thirty-one-year-old San Diego real estate investor named Allen Glick needed money to purchase four Las Vegas casinos, including the Stardust and the Fremont. Traditional banks wouldn’t touch Las Vegas gambling operations. The only source with that kind of capital was the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund, which by that year had approved over $1 billion in real estate loans.
Civella controlled the fund’s most important trustee, Roy Lee Williams, who would later become president of the Teamsters International. Williams testified under oath at the Strawman trial in 1985 that Civella personally asked him to approve the loan for Glick. The first loan was $62.7 million. Subsequent loans brought the total to approximately $146 million in Teamsters money flowing into Glick’s Argent Corporation.
Three other crime families — Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Chicago — each held influence over at least one pension fund trustee. Civella coordinated all of them. An FBI wiretap from 1978 captured Chicago agents expressing frustration with Civella’s control of the Teamsters.
Running the Skim From Prison
After the loans came through, Glick was required to install Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal in a management position. From that post, Rosenthal ran casino operations and made the skim possible. Tony Spilotro handled enforcement on the ground in Vegas.
What Casino never shows is Civella directing operations from inside a federal prison. In 1977, he was convicted on gambling charges. Even from behind bars, he continued to run the skim — issuing instructions through his brother Carl, his underboss Carl DeLuna, and through carefully orchestrated prison visiting room conversations that the FBI eventually recorded.
The Bureau’s investigation — codenamed “Strawman” — ran from 1978 to 1983. Wiretaps captured Civella and his associates discussing skim payments, Teamsters loans, and the management of their Las Vegas interests in remarkable detail. Those recordings became the foundation of the federal prosecution that ultimately dismantled the Kansas City family’s Las Vegas operation.
What the Film Couldn’t Show
The legal constraints on Casino weren’t cosmetic. Universal Pictures’ lawyers reviewed every frame. The use of “adapted from” rather than “based on” gave the studio a legal shield — it acknowledged the story was inspired by real events while denying it depicted specific real people. This is why Civella became Borelli, why the FBI’s massive Strawman investigation is reduced to a montage, and why the man who built and controlled the entire pipeline from Kansas City to Las Vegas to the Teamsters to the casino counting rooms is given fewer lines than the cocktail waitresses.
Civella died of lung cancer on March 12, 1983, before the Strawman trial began. He never faced a jury for the skim. His brother Carl and underboss Carl DeLuna were both convicted. Roy Lee Williams, the Teamsters president Civella had controlled, was convicted of conspiracy to bribe a United States senator and sentenced to ten years.
The real Casino story isn’t about a gambler and an enforcer. It’s about the man who sat in Kansas City and moved hundreds of millions of dollars through a pension fund pipeline while the FBI listened to everything. Scorsese knew the story. He just wasn’t allowed to tell it.
The Scale of the Operation
The skim that Civella orchestrated was not a petty theft. Federal prosecutors estimated that between 1974 and 1983, the Kansas City, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Cleveland crime families extracted between $2 million and $15 million from Las Vegas casinos — money that was carried out in suitcases, hidden in car trunks, and delivered to mob leaders across the Midwest. The skim worked because it happened before the money was counted. Casino employees loyal to the mob would divert cash from the counting rooms before it was recorded, making it invisible to both the IRS and the Gaming Commission.
The FBI’s Strawman investigation ultimately led to eighteen indictments and the conviction of fifteen defendants, including members of all four crime families involved. The trial, held in Kansas City in 1985, relied heavily on the wiretap recordings that had captured Civella coordinating the operation. Those tapes — hundreds of hours of conversations about money, loyalty, betrayal, and power — contained more dramatic material than anything in Scorsese’s film. But the legal restrictions that forced Casino to fictionalize everything meant that the most compelling true crime story of the Las Vegas era could only be told in fragments, disguised behind fake names and compressed timelines.