Anthony "The Ant" Spilotro

Spilotro was sent to Las Vegas around 1971 to look after Chicago's interests on the street and became, within a decade, the single greatest threat to the money those interests existed to protect.

The arrangement was simple and he broke it. The Outfit's business in Nevada was the quiet removal of cash from casino counting rooms. That required licences, front men and the absence of attention. Spilotro provided attention.

What he actually ran

A burglary crew the newspapers called the Hole in the Wall Gang, for the way it went through walls rather than doors. Loansharking. A jewellery shop that served as an office. Violence used freely enough that Nevada put him in the Black Book and barred him from every casino in the state, including the ones his organisation was quietly emptying.

By the early 1980s the federal attention he had drawn was general rather than personal: agents watching Spilotro were watching everybody around him, and everybody around him included the men moving the money.

June 1986

Anthony and his brother Michael were reported missing in June 1986. Their bodies were found on 23 June in a cornfield in Indiana.

For twenty years the accepted account had them beaten to death in that field. The 2007 Family Secrets trial in Chicago established otherwise on the testimony of Nicholas Calabrese, a member who had turned: the brothers were lured to a basement in Bensenville, Illinois, killed there, and driven out to the field afterwards.

On screen

He is Nicky Santoro in the 1995 film, played by Joe Pesci, and the cornfield version is the one it shows, because in 1995 it was the only version available. The film is not wrong so much as early.