He was there through the bloodshed, the big business, and the mob’s eventual implosion.

The former mafioso-turned-witness had a contract on his head for at least a decade, and when speaking to him, it’s obvious that the remnants of his past boil the cuss stew escaping through the phone’s speaker.Ī Chicago tough guy in the mafia, Cullotta made his way to Las Vegas in the late ’70s, and became a part of the mob machine helping run the desert city. There’s a hazard to his huffs, even at his age. He drops his “R” pronunciations, and rifles off f-bombs with the grace of a hobbled Cirque de Soleil dancer. Still, the man’s words crackle and whip like the syllables were poisonous. Despite the inherent reservations, I felt no danger: Frank Cullotta is half-way through his 70s at this point, his days of pointing pistols are well behind him. There are certain thoughts that manifest when you’re engaging in conversation with a man that willingly took another man’s life.

Casino captures the era, the look, the personalities. He puts them through a rigorous round of training before introducing them to the Blackjack tables but doesn ’t play himself, rather observing and training his protegees whilst making a tidy profit from their winnings.My graduate advisor, who’s consulted on a couple of films, liked to say, ‘A word is worth a thousand pictures.’ You cannot exactly capture what happened in a movie. In the movie, exceptionally bright and talented students, especially in the field of Mathematics are observed by Micky Rosa, a professor of the university, who recruits and teaches them the art of card counting and other winning strategies. Chang remains involved in counting cards but has since been blacklisted in most casinos. The third person, John Chang, an MIT Electrical Engineering graduate joined them in late 1982. His chance meeting with Kaplan was timeous and together they managed the team throughout the 1980s. One of the first to join Kaplan was JP Massar, whose interest in gambling led him to attend a university short course entitled ‘How to Gamble If You Must ’. Kaplan himself was from Harvard as well as Jane Willis the real-life Jill Taylor in the movie. Unlike the movie, students were recruited from sources other than the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Having already recruited and trained a similar team in Vegas, he formed the MIT Blackjack Team employing the same business principles and practices as before.

In real life, the team was formed by three individuals, with the brains behind the initiative being Bill Kaplan, a Harvard Business School Graduate.

Real story behind the movie casino