"Don't Go to the Lakers": We Unraveled the Case of the Mob Hit That Saved Vegas

When the body of a Vegas power broker showed up in the back of a Rolls Royce in 1979, the new sports capital of America was born. Why the hell did superstar UNLV coach Jerry Tarkanian's guy really get whacked? Correspondent Sean Carey unearths police reports, a thrown fight against Sugar Ray Leonard... and a bag man on the skim who re-legitimized Sin City — and proves HBO's hit show wrong. (Additional reporting by Kris Belman) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre and today we're gonna find out what this sound is.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Whenever there was a big murder, especially a brutal murder like this where a guy is hogtied and is shot twice in the back of the head and found in the truck of his car, that sounds like a Tony Spolatro shit.

• 0:19Pablo Torre?

  And if you listen to our show on Apple Podcasts, you can now watch video there as well. Just update to the latest iOS, head over to our show page to start watching. But for right now, just a quick word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Apollo.io. A lot of the stories on this show start the same way. Something that looks pretty simple turns out to be a mess, once you look under the hood. Well, it's no different in the sales world. Your team has a tool for finding prospects, a different tool for reaching out to them, and a third for keeping track of it all. On paper, that's a system. In practice, it's a salesperson spending the better part of the day copying names from one tab into another, and not much of it

• 1:02Pablo Torre?

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• 1:42Pablo Torre?

  I mean, look, we just don't start many episodes with documents that say at the top, "First homicide investigation progress report." And this is an episode that's gonna be fundamentally about a dead body.

• 1:54Pablo Torre?

  In the trunk of a Rolls Royce, Sean. And thank you for being here, by the way.

• 1:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, thank you for having me.

• 1:59Pablo Torre?

  But we're talking at a point at which the city of Las Vegas has never been warmer or cuddlier. We're talking the week after the NBA's Board of Governors just officially said, "We are going to explore an expansion team in Las Vegas."

• 2:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's become a corporate boomtown. It's become a place that's one of the fastest growing cities every year, to start as casino kind of outpost. It's exploded, you know, over the last few decades into, you know, this mecca, the sports capital of America.

• 2:30Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, 2017, the Las Vegas Golden Knights, the NHL team, they're founded. 2020, the Raiders move to Vegas. The NFL team in 2028, the Oakland A's are relocating. And Las Vegas just won a bid to host the Final Four.

• 2:44Speaker 03

  And F1.

• 2:45Pablo Torre?

  It's endless. It's endless. And, and I think the thesis that I want to establish at the top here, Sean, is that none of this, none of these boom times in sports would be possible without a single person by the name of who?

• 2:59Speaker 03

  Tark the Shark.

• 3:04Speaker 04

  I'm here tonight with Jerry Tarkanian, the head coach of the Running Rebels. Don't let him con you, by the way, about talking about inexperience, because the Running Rebels will be loaded this year. We're picking them very hot.

• 3:15Speaker 05

  Well, I think they're the type of team that's gonna really play tough.

• 3:17Speaker 03

  I mean, he was the winningest coach of his era.

• 3:22Speaker 05

  But play as hard as you can play so you don't get bad habits. Create good habits, have good concentration, get good execution.

• 3:29Speaker 03

  They made it to four Final Fours, 1977, 87, 1990, 1991. Most notably, this iconic championship game over Duke. They won by 30. It was the largest margin of victory in a championship game to this day.

• 3:46Speaker 05

  This win is for the kids, but it's mostly, it's for the great people in the state of Nevada. The whole state supports us, and I'm just so happy for them.

• 3:54Speaker 03

  They were one of the most electric, high-flying teams, known for breaking offensive records.

• 4:01Speaker 03

  At one point, you know, scoring 110 points per game without a three-point line.

• 4:13Speaker 03

  And I think what people haven't experienced is how entertaining they were.

• 4:17Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  It was this wild pre-show. They had fireworks. They had red carpet. They had music videos, hip-hop videos.

• 4:33Speaker 03

  Walter Payton, Frank Sinatra was one of the biggest boosters. Whoopi Goldberg, Eddie Murphy, Mike Tyson, Tupac was wearing the gear.

• 4:39Pablo Torre?

  It's unbelievable.

• 4:40Speaker 03

  They had the number-one merchandise revenue of any program, you know, competing with Notre Dame.

• 4:47Speaker 06

  Denver, Colorado greeted the Rebels with freezing temperatures and snow, plus a horde of reporters, all wanting to know more about the so-called "bad boys" of basketball.

• 4:57Speaker 07

  Well, you know, when we got off this plane, it was all business. There was no more, you know, fun. Came out here to do a job.

• 5:05Speaker 03

  It was like NWA and meets casino.

• 5:13Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, look, the branding exercise of "You want us to be the bad guy, we'll happily play the role," in contrast to Duke.

• 5:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:21Pablo Torre?

  In contrast to Notre Dame, and Tark the Shark's wars with the NCAA.

• 5:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, he was an outlaw. He was an outsider. He connected with misfits. He, you know, he was unapologetically himself. He was, you know, so eccentric. He was, you know, sucking on a towel.

• 5:36Pablo Torre?

  What was the towel deal about?

• 5:38Speaker 03

  He got so parched during games, he needed something to help with his hydration. And, you know, he was very superstitious. He kept, you know, the seat next to him empty. He was so myopic, and he was so, you know, focused on basketball. He was just a very unique character.

• 5:55Pablo Torre?

  How Tark arrived in Vegas, you know, to take that job in particular? There's one story that I would like you to tell, and it's about the recruiting trip that Tark himself went on.

• 6:09Speaker 03

  You know, Tark was killing it at Long Beach State. I mean, they were top five in the country multiple years. He was on the national stage, so they were trying to make, you know, as good of an offer. And Sig Rogic.

• 6:21Speaker 08

  My name is Sig Rogic.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  He's a marketing guru. Everything Sig has done has been towards the reinvention of the image of Las Vegas and its growth.

• 6:30Speaker 08

  And I think we're doing an interview today on Jerry Tarkanian and his life.

• 6:38Speaker 03

  He saw the potential of what Jerry could bring in a winning sports program in Las Vegas in the byline. And he wanted them to understand, this is a community. It's not just gambling casinos, prostitution, drugs, all the Sin City vices you might expect. And so Sig took Lois Tarkanian and Jerry on a tour of Las Vegas.

• 6:58Speaker 08

  I was driving them around the community and showing Lois churches and pointing out the cultural side of this town because that was important to her.

• 7:09Speaker 03

  Lois Tarkanian is a very formidable woman. She was a very successful teacher in her own right. And she was very religious. She always had her rosary beads on her. She was very Catholic. So she had her reservations.

• 7:23Speaker 08

  We were driving and we came to a stoplight and I'm driving the car and I look over and a car pulls over. It's a convertible and there's three people in the car. There's a driver and a guy and this girlfriend and they're having sex right next to us. I was mortified after this big buildup. And Jerry pointed it out. He said, Sig. And I'm not gonna tell you what he said.

• 7:50Speaker 03

  I know what Jerry said to Sig.

• 7:51Pablo Torre?

  What did he say?

• 7:52Speaker 03

  He said, Sig, look, she's going down on him.

• 8:00Pablo Torre?

  A tactical, a tactical mastermind at all times.

• 8:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:04Pablo Torre?

  Observing the offense as well as the defense.

• 8:09Pablo Torre?

  What's crazy about the story we're here to do today is that as incredible as the Tark Dynasty would become, it was so close to not happening.

• 8:18Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 8:19Pablo Torre?

  At all. Because it's 1979 and his agent is his childhood friend, a guy by the name of Vic Weiss.

• 8:29Pablo Torre?

  And there is a job offer that Tark gets.

• 8:34Speaker 03

  It is to be the head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers. And that would have been the highest paid coaching gig in NBA history at that point. Over a million dollars, over four years. I've read that it was 350 grand a year, 700 grand guaranteed, you know, over five years. You know, included some luxury cars, one for Jerry, for Lois and their oldest daughter Pam.

• 8:57Pablo Torre?

  And it got so close, it sounds like, that the Tarkanians had actually picked out the house they wanted to live in.

• 9:03Speaker 03

  It was too good to pass up. You know, they knew Magic Johnson was going to be the number one draft pick. It was the LA Lakers. It was too good of a financial offer. So, yeah, I mean, it was too good of a situation.

• 9:13Pablo Torre?

  And the first place that I should say that I saw this codified in popular culture was on HBO. In this series they did called Winning Time, that was about the Lakers of this era. Came out in 2022. And in this scene, you have the new Lakers owner, Jerry Buss, played by John C. Riley, at this restaurant secretly closing the deal with Jerry Tarkanian and Vic Weiss.

• 9:36Speaker 09

  Did we just make a deal? That's what it sounded like to me. Couple cars, 750. Are we done? Because I would love to trade in this sludge for some bubbly. Champagne, sir. Jesus. You do get good service here. From the gentleman.

• 9:58Pablo Torre?

  And yet, Jerry Tarkanian, Tark the Shark, does not leave Las Vegas, as history will tell you, because something insane happens.

• 10:11Speaker 03

  Vic, on June 13th, 1979, goes to meet Jack Kent Cooke and Jerry Buss at Cooke's home in Beverly Hills. And they finalize the terms. They sketch it out on a notepad and Vic takes it with him. He's supposed to go meet Lois, along with his own wife, Rose, and Jerry Tarkanian at the Balboa Bay Club in Newport Beach to review the terms, but he doesn't show up. He's missing.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  June 17th, he's discovered in the back of a maroon and white Rolls Royce at the Sheridan Universal Hotel in North Hollywood. And they opened the trunk and he's wrapped in a blanket. His hands and feet are tied. His face is completely disfigured. He's been shot in the face twice and the body's completely decomposed.

• 10:58Pablo Torre?

  The police report here, it characterizes Vic Wees as having been, quote, "professionally executed." And Sean, you actually talked to the detective who co-wrote, who co-authored this very report.

• 11:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, Detective Leroy Orozco, who's a legend. You know, he's known for a lot of famous LA homicide investigations. The Night Stalker, he was there for the Bobby Kennedy assassination.

• 11:24Speaker 10

  From the perspective of an investigator, you know when you get the call, that's what it involves. But it's eerie when you get to the parking structure at the Universal Sheridan. You park, you walk around and you see all by itself, the Rolls Royce sitting there. As close you get, you can smell it. Ah, [BLEEP].

• 11:46Pablo Torre?

  Tark was devastated, obviously. I mean, there's this quote from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the paper in Vegas. Quote, "I feel left with a void in my life and I'm really overwhelmed with hurt and grief." End quote.

• 11:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, Tark gave his eulogy. And he said, uh, you know, Vic did a lot for him growing up, did a lot for him as a coach. And he said Vic did more for him than anyone in his life. Thank you, Vic.

• 12:11Pablo Torre?

  And so the next quote I feel like we should read is from the police report. It's about the rumor now coming out of Vegas about why all of this happened.

• 12:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is, uh, from Leroy Orozco's police report. "A rumor coming out of Las Vegas was that Vegas people were very upset about the possibility of Tarkanian leaving Vegas. All indications were that Tarkanian was going to accept the Laker position. It was just a matter of Wees negotiating the proper contract. Some sources believe this was the reason he was killed."

• 12:44Speaker 09

  Who were those guys?

• 12:45Speaker 10

  Come on, who do you think? Bing, bing, bing, bing.

• 12:48Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 12:49Pablo Torre?

  Not the most subtle depiction of mafia members, I would say. Raising glasses there. But just the basic thrust of it, though, was the mob, they wanted Tark to stay in Vegas. They wanted Jerry Tarkanian, the head of this very successful college program that was giving national attention to what was once simply this corrupt desert. And there were economic incentives for this to happen. It was good for Vegas to have Tark still at UNLV, and therefore it was good for the mob.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, the depiction in Winning Time, you know, they reveal that it's Jerry Buss's business card on Vic Wees's disfigured face. And it's there to send a message to Jerry Tarkanian. It's a warning, you know, don't go to the Lakers. You know, a mob hit like this is so violent, it's personal. And where the body was discovered, it was definitely to send a message. So this is possibly how, you know, the message was depicted or potentially received.

• 13:50Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, that has been the prevailing theory here. But these documents, all of this research indicates that turns out there's a lot more to the story.

• 14:16Pablo Torre?

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• 15:31Pablo Torre?

  So it is no exaggeration to say that our correspondent today, film producer Sean Carey, has spent years examining what is, on one level, a pretty simple story. Because there is no doubt that the murder of Jerry Tarkanian's longtime confidant and agent, Vic Weiss, was a mob hit.

• 15:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I have relatives that grew up in Vegas. It was mob, mob city. You know, everything is mob adjacent.

• 15:57Pablo Torre?

  But the big lingering question we're here to solve today is a lot more complicated. Why? Why did the mob really stuff Vic Weiss's body into that truck, scaring Tark away from the NBA, and, in a sliding doors moment, saving UNLV and big time team sports in Vegas? Although Tark, who died in 2015 at age 84, didn't exactly love talking about why he turned down the Lakers.

• 16:27Speaker 12

  You ever offered officially the head coaching job of the Los Angeles Lakers?

• 16:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, I was offered that, yes.

• 16:32Speaker 12

  Did you turn it down?

• 16:33Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 16:33Speaker 12

  What?

• 16:34Speaker 05

  Well, at the time, there was a lot of reasons, but I was very impressed with Jerry Buss. But it was just, the timing was wrong. It was the wrong time.

• 16:43Pablo Torre?

  This week, the same week Vegas also just got named host of the 2029 Super Bowl. It is time. It's finally time to dive into the unsolved mystery at the root of a major American city, which also meant that we needed to make a lot of calls about the influence of the mob, specifically.

• 17:04Speaker 03

  I've talked to all of the Tarkanian family, and they all have different stories, but we talked to George Tarkanian.

• 17:10Speaker 05

  You know, a lot of people ask me, what's it like growing up in Las Vegas? Or what's it like being a son of a famous basketball coach? And the interesting thing is, I have nothing to compare it to, so it seems normal.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  Who kind of shed light on his own experience.

• 17:27Speaker 05

  In high school, there was a person in my class called Anthony Spilatro, who was the nephew of Anthony Spilatro.

• 17:35Pablo Torre?

  And Anthony Spilatro, to be very clear, for those not familiar with Anthony Spilatro, is who?

• 17:41Speaker 03

  I mean, he's probably, you know, the most infamous, I guess you could call him crime boss, you know, in Las Vegas in the 70s and 80s. He was known as the enforcer, probably the most violent crimes of any mob figure of the time. He was depicted in Casino, the Joe Pesci character.

• 17:58Speaker 13

  I don't know whether you notice or not, but you only have your [BLEEP] Casino because I made that possible. I'm what counts out here.

• 18:05Pablo Torre?

  Wait, wait. So Anthony Spilatro, to be very clear, is the real life Joe Pesci in Casino?

• 18:11Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 18:12Pablo Torre?

  But for George, Tark's son, was it immediately obvious what this was like?

• 18:17Speaker 03

  No, I think like most people, you know, it was a small community. They, you know, knew some of these people that see him at the supermarket. There weren't that many places to go, so everyone was kind of familiar with each other. So he didn't realize a lot of this till much later.

• 18:30Speaker 05

  The mob in Las Vegas kept a low profile. And they did that for a reason. They got away with so much because they kept a low profile. Now, I learned this by watching the movie Casino, which I jokingly say was a documentary, not a movie.

• 18:45Speaker 05

  Because so many events they had in there, I remember actually happening. It's, I'm putting two and two together watching them.

• 18:51Speaker 14

  What happened to the [bleep] tough guy told my friend stick it up his [bleep] ass?

• 18:56Pablo Torre?

  And this is where, by the way, the blending of fiction and nonfiction is a bit of a through line in this story. The cinematic adaptation of real life events that are also [bleep] insane.

• 19:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:05Pablo Torre?

  How central, how close is Vic Weiss to the life of Jerry Tarkanian when it came to negotiations with the NBA, but also in general?

• 19:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, it depends on who you ask about that. I mean, Vic, he did negotiate Tark's deal with Sig to come to Vegas. And if you ask Sig Rogic, the UNLV booster, the founder of the Rebel Club, you know, what he had to say about Vic, he'll tell you for himself.

• 19:32Speaker 08

  Oh, really? Didn't care for him very much, and he knew it. Jerry knew him from Long Beach, from the area down there, and they were friends. And I told Jerry one day I didn't want to deal with Vic Weiss anymore about anything, ever. You know, and Jerry was kind of oblivious to it. All he thought about was basketball. I said, I just don't trust him, and I think he's self-serving, and he's telling the world that he's your agent. You know, and Jerry said, well, I don't have an agent. And I said, well, he thinks he is your agent.

• 20:04Speaker 03

  The truth is, yeah, Jerry didn't, you know, he just like, you know, anybody who he knew was new business, he trusted. You mean, like, he didn't?

• 20:12Pablo Torre?

  He had a guy.

• 20:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, he had a guy.

• 20:13Pablo Torre?

  Jerry had a guy. Tark had a guy.

• 20:15Speaker 03

  I don't think he had an agent after Vic.

• 20:18Pablo Torre?

  But this is also part of the story, which is these deeply personal relationships in which he's kind of my agent. He's functioning, he's in, but he's also my guy.

• 20:27Speaker 03

  Right.

• 20:28Pablo Torre?

  And so when does Tark find out that his guy has been killed?

• 20:33Speaker 03

  He was in LA looking for homes with his family, and, you know, George remembers it well.

• 20:39Speaker 05

  I do know he probably would have took in the job because I remember going on a trip with him to Southern California, and we actually traveled around Palos Verdes looking for possible homes.

• 20:52Speaker 05

  It was that weekend where Vic Weiss disappeared.

• 20:56Pablo Torre?

  And so we find ourselves once again staring at the disfigured face of this question, which is why did Vic Weiss, why did Tark's guy get whacked? What did George think about why his dad's childhood friend was killed?

• 21:14Speaker 03

  Well, you know, George, as well as, you know, the rest of the family started to think it might have to do with his interests in another sport.

• 21:21Speaker 05

  After we know how, learned how he died. I remember conversations where I overheard that they speculated it was an organized crime hit. And they think, they were speculating, they think it was with his boxing ties. Because organized crime was very much tied to boxing and Vic was very much involved in boxing as well.

• 21:45Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, and this is where we turn back to our handy police report. And it turns out that one of the, one of the focuses of this investigation involved boxing, Vic Weiss, who was apparently lots of people's guy as well, not just Tark's guy, but these other boxers guy. And the question of gambling debts.

• 22:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, Vic got involved in boxing in the early 1970s. It started out with a high profile client, Armando Muniz, who was a 1968 Olympian. He was a title contender, four time welterweight title contender.

• 22:18Speaker 15

  Hello again, everyone. We're coming to you live shortly. You'll be seeing Sugar Ray Leonard against Armando Muniz at 10 rounds. Of course, there's been a growing.

• 22:28Speaker 03

  There are two detectives working the case, Detective Sergeant John Helvin and our guy we heard earlier, Detective Leroy Orozco. And specifically, they looked into a fight between Mondo Muniz and Sugar Ray Leonard. In 1978, Sugar Ray was top of his game, one of the greatest fighters of all time, Olympic gold medalist, he's undefeated. Mondo was at the tail end of his career. He was injured. And so it was a, you know, it was a high profile fight. And I think we can even look at the footage and see how it played out.

• 23:01Speaker 15

  These men are fighting. They ended the round. What have they done here? They have apparently stopped the fight. I don't believe this. They've called it a TKO. Boonies, at the end of six rounds. He had appeared to be coming on in the fourth and fifth rounds. Held his own in the sixth until that flurry we just showed you. And then, suddenly, the fight ruled ended. We've got to get to the bottom of this.

• 23:31Pablo Torre?

  We got to get to the bottom of this. I mean, Cosell kind of spells it out.

• 23:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:38Speaker 15

  Should that fight have been stopped? Did you want it stopped?

• 23:41Speaker 16

  Well, I personally didn't. My coroner said, "Why go on with a bad... You have a bad elbow. I have tendonitis or something like that. Every time I extended it, it's just unbearable pain. I wanted to go on, you know? And my coroner said, "Marla, look. One more fight. Am I going to ruin your elbow for the rest of your life? Why don't you just, you know, hang it up?"

• 23:58Pablo Torre?

  Super [bleep] fishing. You know, it's like, what? What are we doing? You're fighting Sugar Ray Leonard.

• 24:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, he's never stopped a fight before.

• 24:09Pablo Torre?

  So I get why Detective Orozco, Leroy, is very interested in this. And it sounds like, yeah, he had follow-up questions of his own.

• 24:17Speaker 03

  As did, you know, my colleague, filmmaker Chris Bellman, who sat down with Leroy and interviewed him.

• 24:23Speaker 10

  We were told that he guaranteed Vegas the fifth round or sixth round or something like that. And he says, "Well, we interviewed Mondo." The boxer? Yeah, he says, "I said I was good. I told him I was OK. He says, "No, you're hurt. And I want to save your life and do what's supposed to..." So he threw? He tallied? Yeah. And you see the... When you see the film, you see Vic talking to Mondo in the corner. In between rounds? In between rounds, they call it. They had to call the fight because... Yeah. So... You can't do that. Somebody made a ton of money. To me, it's a story that's...

• 24:56Pablo Torre?

  So just the theory here is that Vic Weiss is...

• 25:01Pablo Torre?

  Engineering the throwing of matches by Mondo against Sugar Ray Leonard, in particular in that case, in order to pay off what seemed to be gambling debts.

• 25:10Speaker 03

  Fixing fights would have been what the mob wanted. You know, that would have been, yeah, that would have been a, you know, that's what they, that's what they do. So he would have been doing that, you know, with their support. And even Lois Tarkanian, she had, I mean, she had heard a rumor. There's so many rumors that maybe, you know, they had mob wanted to buy into a boxer that Vic didn't want to let them in and refused. And they interviewed a guy named Harry Kabakoff. He's an eccentric, you know, fight promoter and trainer in Los Angeles. And he's also close friends and partners with Vic Wees. I'll read from the police report. According to Kabakoff, Wees made his money betting on some of the fights. He would occasionally bet against his fighter, knowing he was going to lose. But Kabakoff feels personally and from his sources that the death is not related to boxing.

• 25:55Pablo Torre?

  And this is where the story begins to escalate. We've gone through college basketball, the NBA and boxing. But it turns out that there is yet another sport, another professional sport of note, that may have gotten Vic Wees into trouble because he was also someone else's guy in a different context.

• 26:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, the NFL.

• 26:18Pablo Torre?

  So I just got to jump in here to establish that, no, Detective Leroy was not moved by the fixing fights theory of Vic Wees's murder. The question of why organized crime would kill the guy who was allegedly fixing fights for them to pay off his debts, it never totally added up in his view. But this NFL angle seemed different.

• 26:39Speaker 03

  Vic had an athletic career. He had a stint with the Green Bay Packers in the early 50s and then was a, you know, a semi-pro football player in Southern California for 10 years, kind of part-time.

• 26:51Pablo Torre?

  And something to know about pro football in the 60s and 70s is that as messy and mobbed up as gambling and sports seems now, as we've covered on this show previously, in the legalized era, especially of the NBA. In the NFL of the 60s, Commissioner Pete Rozell suspended future Hall of Famers Paul Horning and Alex Karas for a whole season for betting on NFL games and associating with gamblers. Rozell also forced Jets quarterback Joe Namath to divest his ownership stake in a New York bar called Bachelor's Three because it was frequented by bookies and gamblers.

• 27:28Pablo Torre?

  Yet the craziest character in all of this, arguably, wasn't even a player. It was an owner. An owner who became the subject of an FBI investigation as PBS Frontline in a piece called "An Unauthorized History of the NFL" reported back in 1983.

• 27:47Speaker 17

  No owner had more dubious associations than the late Carol Rosenbloom. He used to bet against his own team, the Baltimore Colts, and was even accused of fixing games by leaving key players at home. In 1972, Rosenbloom sold the Colts and bought the L.A. Rams, but he continued to play with fire, placing huge bets with mafia-linked bookies.

• 28:10Pablo Torre?

  And you'll hear, in fact, a familiar name emerging again.

• 28:14Speaker 17

  Rosenbloom used a bagman to courier his illegal bets in and out of Las Vegas. Identical briefcases would be exchanged in front of a newsstand.

• 28:28Speaker 17

  Victor Weiss was the man who carried Rosenbloom's cash and placed his bets.

• 28:34Pablo Torre?

  Who was Vic Weiss supposedly working with in Vegas when it came to this sort of a scheme?

• 28:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, all the bookmaking was running out of the hotels, you know, like the Stardust. And remember earlier when George Tarkanian mentioned being in school with the nephew of Anthony Spolatro? Spolatro, you know, he was intertwined with the Stardust. I spoke to a journalist named Dan Muldea who wrote about all this. He's an old-school crime reporter, he's got a Substack mobologist, he's an expert on the mafia, Jimmy Hoffa, the Bobby Kennedy assassination. He wrote a book called "Interference" about the NFL and its mob connections where he covered the Vic Weiss murder.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  The allegation was that Weiss was skimming. He was being sent with money from the layoff bookmakers in Los Angeles to Vegas. And the skim in Vegas was being centered at the Stardust Hotel Casino on the Strip, and ostensibly the manager of the Stardust was Lefri Rosenthal, the Robert De Niro character in Casino. And Tony Spolatro was his enforcer.

• 29:44Pablo Torre?

  Of course, played by Joe Pesci.

• 29:46Speaker 14

  What happened to the [bleep] tough guy? Told my friend, "Stick it up his [bleep] ass."

• 29:52Pablo Torre?

  So just to recap here, Muldeah, the mobologist, believes that Tony Spolatro, Joe Pesci in Casino, put a hit on Vic Wees because Vic Wees was skimming money.

• 30:04Speaker 03

  Yes. He was skimming, he got caught, he got whacked.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  To me, whenever there was a big murder, especially a brutal murder like this where a guy is hogtied and is shot twice in the back of the head and found in the truck of his car at the Sheridan Universal, that sounds like a Tony Spolatro shit.

• 30:23Pablo Torre?

  Which also brings up this other thing that happened that was insane to Carol Rosenbloom, the owner of the Rams, which was that Carol Rosenbloom, just two months before Vic Wees died in that brutal fashion, died suspiciously in a drowning. That was amid this FBI investigation into these allegations of fixed games during the 78 Rams season.

• 30:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, he dies two months before Vic. It's very suspicious. Our friend Howard Cosell was very close with Carol Rosenbloom. He thought it was suspicious. And yeah, there was an FBI investigation into the point fixing. And before they got a chance to talk to Carol Rosenbloom or Vic, they were both gone.

• 31:03Pablo Torre?

  So the other timeline that is, again, not accounted for in winning time, and it's not part of the NBA college basketball narrative, is that, yeah, the Lakers' job, cool, that's over here, but meanwhile, there's an FBI investigation in which Vic Wees would be a central possible witness for the government, and both Carol Rosenbloom and Vic Wees both mysteriously, suspiciously get killed within two months of each other. And so Detective Leroy Orozco, is this the theory that he finally lands on? Like, this explains why Vic Wees wound up in the trunk of that car?

• 31:43Speaker 03

  No, I mean, there's still yet another theory to this.

• 31:47Pablo Torre?

  Because of course there is.

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• 33:42Pablo Torre?

  At this point in the story, as we are retracing the steps of Detective Leroy Roscoe's investigation into Vic Wees's murder, it is worth remembering that looks can be deceiving. Leroy doesn't think that Vic Wees was killed by the mob because of gambling debts and fixed fights, despite all appearances. And Leroy also doesn't think that it was simply because Vic had been skimming money as a bagman for mysteriously deceased and mob-connected Rams owner Carol Rosenblum.

• 34:12Pablo Torre?

  In fact, Leroy had other questions here about how flashy Vic Weiss was able to habna with all these teams and celebrities from Muhammad Ali to Red Fox and even drive that maroon and white Rolls Royce where his corpse would ultimately be found. Which takes us to yet another classic Vegas sort of establishment from the 1970s. A car dealership. A car dealership whose owner was a memorable Las Vegas character in his own right.

• 34:44Speaker 03

  Uh, it was Gerald Cutter.

• 34:47Pablo Torre?

  Who is Gerald Cutter?

• 34:49Speaker 03

  Gerald Cutter portrayed himself as a pillar of the community. He was the president of the Chamber of Commerce in North Hollywood. He backed a boys' club at the North Hollywood YMCA. He had come to Southern California in the late 60s and he set up all these dealerships from Hermosa to Van Nuys across the valley and then in Vegas, Prestige Motors. And these were Rolls Royce dealerships, Fiat Agency, Ford. And, you know, he kind of discovered Vic Weiss and brought him in and he took him under his wing. He recognized, you know, Vic was very charming. He was very charismatic. So he kind of recognized that this guy, you know, can hang with athletes, high rollers, celebrities, and he was involved in promotions. And he even, you know, brought him in to, you know, present him as a general manager

• 35:34Speaker 03

  and give him a cut of all these dealerships.

• 35:36Pablo Torre?

  The spinoff show about Vic Weiss is itself this insane text. I'm imagining these scenes in which he apparently is bringing by Cutter Ford, Muhammad Ali, Reggie Jackson. Like again, he's everyone's guy. And it turns out that Jerry Cutter, to the surprise of perhaps nobody listening at this point in the story, had ties to another institution.

• 36:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is from Leroy's Police Report. "It is rumored that Cutter is connected with organized crime and allegedly was while in St. Louis. He has present employees who are listed as consultants that allegedly have organized crime connections. Cutter maintained throughout the investigation he had no knowledge of the murder and no organized crime ties."

• 36:21Pablo Torre?

  The murder, of course, again, the murder of Vic Weiss. And so, does this pass the smell test?

• 36:28Speaker 03

  You know, Leroy told me a story about interviewing one of these guys who worked at Cutter Ford in the valley. And, you know, he came in and, you know, he's suspicious. He was a consultant, but he didn't know anything about cars. And, you know, he said he was a really nice guy, but he looked straight out of The Godfather. You know, he was smoking cigars and it was just a really interesting reaction. And then they started, you know, following organized crime figures in Vegas and in Southern California. They go to kind of the hotspots, Monty's Steakhouse in Encino and across, you know, LA and the Tower of Pizza in Vegas and in the parking lot of all these hangouts where, you know, Cutter Ford tags, Cutter Ford, you know, Rolls Royce and other cars, you know, fill the parking lots.

• 37:12Pablo Torre?

  I mean, this is a pretty good reason to be suspicious of Jerry Cutter, it seems, as a central character in why that body wound up in that Rolls Royce.

• 37:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. And they went on to interview Rose about it, Vic's wife.

• 37:28Speaker 10

  Well, the first things we did was go to Vic's house to talk to his wife. There was about 10 guys in there. Some suited up. Well, now that we introduced a guy named Jerry Cutter. He owns the Rolls Royce, the dealership. So that's all we know.

• 37:45Pablo Torre?

  He was already in the house?

• 37:45Speaker 10

  He's there. So we took her aside to the, like, the dining room. First thing he knows, I'm like talking to you. I ask you a question and you turn around and look at Cutter. So we picked up our partner. He was on this side. And he sees, every time she turned, he'd go, or what's happened? This guy's in control. Then we learned the house is his, the cars are his. This wasn't any of Vic. All this pretense of his kind of friendship with the Lakers, the Rams, it was all front. He didn't have anything. Everything he had was Cutter's.

• 38:28Pablo Torre?

  Wait, so just to clarify, so the performance of Vic Wee says?

• 38:33Pablo Torre?

  The guy behind these very high-profile guys.

• 38:36Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 38:37Pablo Torre?

  What Leroy is saying, Detective is saying, is that that's all our performance? Because the truth of it is that he's a front for this other guy.

• 38:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, even in the papers, Vic calls himself a millionaire. You know, he always wanted to, you know, present himself as incredibly successful, always had a lot of cash, jewelry, Rolex, Rolls Royce. But yeah, it was all a front and people discovered, including his family, after he died.

• 39:03Pablo Torre?

  And just to describe the body language and the power dynamic that Leroy is remembering from when they interview Vic's wife, Jerry Cutter is there.

• 39:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:13Pablo Torre?

  And she, Vic's wife, is basically asking with her body what she should be saying to the police.

• 39:19Speaker 03

  Yes. He believes that Cutter might have been involved in setting up Vic, and it's because another witness came forward. Susan Brow, who was an ex-girlfriend of Jerry Cutter. And her witness testimony was that day, June 13th, the day Vic went missing.

• 39:38Pablo Torre?

  Oh, wow.

• 39:39Speaker 03

  That he showed up in the Rolls Royce in the driveway, and she saw him pull in, and a Cadillac pull in behind it. And two guys, one a large, 6'7" blond-haired guy, talked to Vic and convinced him to get back in the driver's seat. And that was the last time anyone saw him.

• 39:57Pablo Torre?

  And now it's my turn to read from the police report, because this is what Detective Roscoe says. Quote, "According to her, sometime before darkness, she saw the concerned Rolls pull up and park behind her residence. Just as the car parked, a late-model white Cadillac pulled up behind the Rolls. Two Caucasian men emerged from the Cadillac, wearing three-piece suits and dark sunglasses. A short conversation appeared to follow. Wees then got back into the Rolls as the driver, the large man in the right front passenger seat, the other man in the rear of the Rolls. The Rolls then followed the Cadillac from the location." End quote. But I'm still left wondering, okay, but why? Why did allegedly Jerry Cutter set up Vic Weis?

• 40:40Speaker 03

  Well, you remember those alleged ties to the St. Louis outfit?

• 40:42Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 40:43Speaker 03

  According to our mobologist, Dan Muldea, you know, Cutter has, you know, family relations that tie back to St. Louis and bookmaking. His cousin served time for illegal gambling. And his uncle was a one-time manager of the Stardust.

• 41:02Pablo Torre?

  And of course, if that is true, then Gerald Cutter, through his family to the Stardust, ends up being connected to Tony Spolatro.

• 41:13Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 41:14Speaker 13

  I don't know whether you noticed or not, but you only have your [bleep] casino because I made that possible.

• 41:19Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, and that FBI investigation, which we talked about before, with the NFL and the gambling scheme and Carol Rosenbloom, it is worth pointing out that this also connects to this part of the story and to Tony Spolatro, because Gerald Cutter apparently also emerges in connection to that.

• 41:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is from Dan Muldea's book. "Like Weis, Cutter had also been mentioned in the 1979 FBI internal report. One car dealer in Las Vegas, Nevada, last name possibly Cutter, is also allegedly involved in this scheme. Cutter had a life insurance policy on Weis's life and also held the mortgage on his house, the FBI report stated."

• 42:02Pablo Torre?

  Which feels like a relevant detail, that in fact, Jerry Cutter, car dealership magnate and guy who was backing Vic Weis's performance of being a guy who matters, he also stood to profit, literally, from his death.

• 42:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, and I think it also shows he answered to somebody else.

• 42:22Pablo Torre?

  Right. This gets us to, I think... And there are lots of contenders for this, but I think this is the most damning piece of evidence in this entire investigation that we've been doing here. Because this involves an audio tape and a device that turns out to be quite consequential.

• 42:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, Leroy, they talked about being stonewalled by the FBI and law enforcement across Southern California and Vegas, but they got connected to a cop investigating mob activity out of the Tower of Pizza hangout. And so they got a wire from the guys talking at the restaurant.

• 42:59Speaker 10

  They were wired into Spolatro. And one of the conversations they had was Spolatro asked the person he's talking to, is the Vic thing taken care of? And he says, the guy says, "It's done."

• 43:15Pablo Torre?

  I guess I just have to borrow the quote that we just heard at the end there, which is, "It seems like the Vic thing has finally been taken care of." We have a guy saying on a wire to Tony Spolatro to Joe Pesci, "It's done." So finally, here it is. We, it's done.

• 43:33Speaker 03

  No, not even close.

• 43:50Pablo Torre?

  So I am trying to be done here.

• 43:55Pablo Torre?

  And I just got to say that Detective Orozco, Leroy, is on my side on this because he has now said, thanks to this wire that was being worn, that he now has been persuaded that Vic Wees, apparently, was skimming and Tony Spolatro, the famous Tony Spolatro, is the guy who ordered the hit, right? That's what Detective Orozco has concluded.

• 44:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it was that, that's the most personal thing you can do is to skim. And so that's why they had to send a message of violent murder. And George Charkanian thinks the same thing.

• 44:31Speaker 05

  I knew the mob probably, or someone from organized crime, killed him. By the way, he was killed. He was shot in execution style. He was thrown in the back of his Rolls Royce.

• 44:42Speaker 05

  We didn't know why, but no one sent a message to my dad.

• 44:47Speaker 05

  That had nothing to do with it. Winning time will make you think like, oh my God, Jerry Tarkanian got the message. I'm staying here. I'm not messing with. That had nothing to do with it.

• 44:55Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, it is funny to remember. Oh, yeah, we started this conversation with the Lakers.

• 44:58Speaker 03

  I've talked to a lot of players, people involved who came in after the fact. And yeah, a lot of people believe that Vic was warned, they didn't want Jerry to leave.

• 45:12Pablo Torre?

  And the Lakers, obviously, are their own sliding door scenario here as they were trying to replace their head coach, Jerry West, with Jerry Tarkanian. But now we're getting to the part of our story here where Detective Leroy Orozco even identifies the contract killer. The contract killer, he believes, carried out the hit that maybe only incidentally kept Tark away from the Lakers' job and the NBA. And the suspect in question was that aforementioned six foot seven blonde guy, whose name, it turns out, is Glenn Donald Stewart. But Leroy was never able to bring a case forward in the justice system about this, which eats away at him still today,

• 45:58Pablo Torre?

  even though he was pushing and pushing for it up until his own retirement back in 92. And if you were wondering why that effort finally stalled out,

• 46:09Pablo Torre?

  it is because one day Leroy Orozco found out that Glenn Donald Stewart, not unlike Vic Weiss, suddenly could not be located anymore.

• 46:22Pablo Torre?

  And was later found dead. No one disputes that the mob killed Vic Weiss at this point. We've established that. But the intent is what's not done. That's the thing that everybody can forever cling to, right? Like their own pet theory that maybe serves their own personal interests.

• 46:42Speaker 03

  Yes. I mean, I think some people know. I mean, Vic had a lot of friends and nobody seems to know what happened. And I think, you know, I think the answer is out there.

• 46:52Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I mean, I dare say the answer has already been presented. But what seems clear, though, is that like the reason you have been spending so much of your life looking into this is because what is not in dispute is that Modern Las Vegas, as it stands today, the new home of an NBA franchise, as well as an NFL franchise, and NHL franchise, and a Major League Baseball franchise. And the college basketball tournament, March Madness, in a couple of years, all of that was built on the body in the trunk of that Rolls Royce. And this is obviously horrific for Vic Weis's own family to contemplate. But that dude does deserve

• 47:37Pablo Torre?

  some amount of credit for this strange and very mobbed up chapter of sports history in America.

• 47:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, he took two bullets, you know, for this to happen.

• 47:48Pablo Torre?

  God.

• 47:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, this is the turning point. You know, this is the legitimization of Vegas after this. You know, Tark staying there and, you know, the Running Rebels, you know, rising in national prominence.

• 48:00Pablo Torre?

  What's interesting, as I realize now at the very end here, is that I've been obsessed myself with investigating gambling scandals and organized crime and corruption. And meanwhile, the place American sports is turning to next, Las Vegas, I cannot think about without thinking of Tony Spelletto now and Joe Pesci and the trunk of that Rolls Royce. And I have you, Sean, to thank for it. Which is to say that that story, not done. But this episode, finally, it is done.

• 48:30Speaker 03

  It is done.

• 48:31Pablo Torre?

  Thank you.

• 48:41Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.