Tough Guy

PHOTOGRAPHS by Michael Robinson Chavez

My friend Frankie Citro got an award the other night -- from his backgammon club, as one of its most loyal, longest-serving members.

Forty-five years of kicking ass and taking names.

He was given a plaque at a bar so far off the Strip it made your eyes hurt. This crowd of fellow backgammon players was tough, let me tell you, the kind of old crows who would walk around a body on the sidewalk and comment on the blood spatter.

Frankie looked debonair in a deeply-purple suit.

He always dresses for the occasion. When he was put on Nevada's Casino Black List all those years ago, given that Scarlet Letter for being a so-called nefarious character, he wore an ice-blue tuxedo.

On this night, he pulled a one-liner out of his suit breast pocket.

"I wanna thank the Academy," he said.

The boys guffawed.

Frankie was rightly proud. It was another example of his tenacity.

Because Frankie doesn't get many awards in this gambling town.

He's been treated like a pariah.

In the eyes of the establishment, Frankie's got leprosy, his crimes so bad he can't even be allowed inside any one of Nevada's casinos.

Anywhere.

But he takes it all in stride, this guy who looks like he just walked out of a “Goodfellas” casting call. He's fire hydrant stocky, well oiled, with a Goombah accent he adopted as a lawless predator on the streets of Jersey City, N.J.

Frank Citro Jr. is a tough guy.

He made his mark with a pair of menacing, oversized hands; at first boxing professionally and later using those same fists to get people’s attention outside of the ring.

The first time we met, one of those man paws was clenched right in my face. I was at a bar called The Tap House, sitting with a female friend, when this guy breezed in — a cocky-looking little spark plug dressed in a fedora and pressed suit. 

But it was the cologne that spoke to me. 

It smelled like menace.

“How ya doin’ beautiful?” he said in my friend’s direction.

Well, I’m sort of a wise guy myself.

“Are you talking to me?” I smiled.

And then there it was, that fist, more animal hoof than human hand. It was so close I could count the individual hairs on his fingers.

“No, “I’m not talkin’ to you,” he said, his tone signifying that the conversation was over.

Later, I approached my friend Sam Wagmeister, a former journalist who, like a 1940s gossip columnist, knows everyone on the 65-and-over cocktail circuit. Not Walter White, but Walter Wagmeister.

“Who is that guy?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s Frankie Citro,” he said. “You don’t wanna mess with him.”

Fair enough, I’d been forewarned. 

Soon afterwards, I was researching a story about Nevada’s Black Book, officially known as the “Excluded Person’s List,” an index of desert undesirables blackballed by the state’s casino regulators.

The book was created in 1960 as a public-relations ploy to reassure tourists that Vegas was not indeed overrun by the mob, as most suspected. Soon, the list included such names as William “Icepick Willie” Alderman, Murray “the Camel” Humphries and Chicago crime boss Sam “the Cigar” Giancana, as well as bit players caught up in the dragnet, many of them Italian, whose crimes barely registered as a public threat.

Black Book membership means you can’t own, manage or even set foot inside a casino anywhere in Nevada. The only way off the list is to die, and even then state regulators require a death certificate as proof you’ve truly left this world.

I wanted to find one of these guys.

I called Sam.

“Remember Frankie from the Tap House?” he said.

“He’s on the list.”

From the start, Frankie ruled out any telephone conversations. In his line of work, he'd probably been wiretapped up the wazoo. When I brought along a friend, he insisted I vouch for the guy's character. 

When he felt comfortable, Frankie told his story.

In 1985, he and six others were convicted in Southern California of bookmaking and loan-sharking, an operation prosecutors said charged 1000% interest. In the end, he spent a few years behind bars in the federal pen. Worse, upon his release, the sentence landed him in Nevada’s dreaded black book, even though none of his crimes in any way involved Las Vegas casinos.

It was a sentence tantamount to life in prison without parole, leading to both personal and financial ruin. Frankie’s a stand-up guy; a comedian with pace and timing. He’s owned bars, served as emcee at fundraisers and loves to sing his beloved doo-wop music in public.

Rarely anymore. Being banned from venues connected to any type of live casino gaming rules out most places.

My friendship with Frankie has provided an entrée into the world of a complex man with far more depth than any cardboard Hollywood wise guy.

Early on, he invited me for home-cooked pasta at his double-wide trailer near the Rio hotel. A step-down from his former luxury homes, he would later even lose that place because he could not afford the rent. 

Always the family man, he introduced me to his wife Cookie, son Francesco and daughter Bettina — a cast of characters I first tagged as the “Sopranos” meets “Married with Children,” until I got to know them.

Since that time, the black book inclusion has affected his health, but Frankie soldiers on. I’ve watched him recover from open-heart surgery and a painful shoulder operation without once taking pain medication. I’ve seen him struggle to find any kind of work, even swallow his pride to call people he’d once written off as enemies. 

Yet not once has he lost his sense of humor. I’ve never told Frankie a joke he hasn’t heard before.

During his days on the Black List, he’s never been arrested, hasn’t even gotten a traffic ticket. His son Francesco was just a one-year-old when Frankie started his federal sentence, and he vowed then he’d never go back to prison and face such painful time away from his family, even if it meant cleaning toilets. 

One of his first gigs on the outside was running a janitorial company.

Since then, he’s endured a succession of lackluster jobs — including strip club manager, plumber and carpenter — but nothing has worked out, especially once bosses found out about the Exclusion List, which many in this town view as a more-serious mark than any racketeering conviction.

Yet Frankie is stubborn.

To him, leaving Las Vegas would be tantamount to surrender.

Not only that, while always a tough guy, he insists he was never a made guy, never a bona fide member of organized crime. Yet he continues to embrace a shoulder-shrugging streetwise persona that seems part of his New Jersey genetics. 

But enough is enough, he says.

People change.

“I don’t belong in this book,” he once told me, an unlit Camel cigarette dangling form his lips. “I never cheated a casino, never had a fight there. I’m supposedly a notorious felon. There are lots of felons in this town. Why me?”

Now he wants to do something never achieved in the history of the Nevada Black Book: 

Frank Citro Jr. wants to get off that list — while he’s still alive.

The youngest of three sons in an Italian enclave in northern New Jersey, Frankie shined shoes for street thugs and learned a valuable lesson: most tough guys aren’t as tough as they talk. He vowed he would never fear another man.

A product of a neighborhood that spoke with its fists, he began a modest professional boxing career, fighting as a light-heavyweight — working as a bouncer and making collections to earn some cash on the side. While he did jobs for some pretty disreputable characters, he says he never joined the mob because he didn’t want those guys telling him what to do — only his mother had that power.

So he got by, doing a little bit of this and a little bit of that. 

Badda-bing, baddah-boom.

In 1987, he finally got his reckoning with those federal charges. A newspaper story at his sentencing was headlined “Brass Knuckles Therapy.” In true form, Frankie considered that an insult: he’d never hit a man with anything but his own bare fists.

After serving his time in California, Frankie figured he’d paid his dues. Then came a disastrous one-two punch: the federal government confiscated his luxury Las Vegas home.

Then Nevada put him on its black list. In a gesture of mock reverence, he showed up for his Gaming Control Board hearing in 1990 dressed in a tuxedo. “I’ve never been invited to join anything in my life,” he told the panel. “I just wanted to show the proper respect.”

Since then, however, Nevada has gotten the last laugh.

Frankie eventually figured he might as well put his notoriety to work. He’s considered all kinds of schemes — from hosting a frank-talk podcast where he would recommend products that earned the tough-guy seal of approval to running a wedding chapel that offered mob-style ceremonies, officiated, of course, by Frankie himself.

In 2008, he briefly starred in an Internet reality-show called “Tough Guy with Frankie Citro,” in which he played a version of himself, a wronged man struggling for redemption. In the show’s opening scene, Frankie provides a voice-over to the sound of accordion music and a series of photos of well-known mobsters — both living and after they were whacked. 

“My name is Frankie Citro. I live in Vegas. I’ve been here a long time,” he says. “I’m in the black book, the list of undesirables. They say I’m associated with this guy and that guy; the mafia, the boys. Ah, they’re all full of it as far as I’m concerned.” 

Frankie eventually left the project after the producers failed to keep their word, which is important to him. Frankie lives in a world that values respect; something he knows he’s not getting in Las Vegas. That’s why he defends his streetwise shtick, even though some might see it as embracing an ethnic stereotype.

“It’s all I’ve got left,” he told me once. “They made it so I can’t find work in this town. It’s like I have leprosy.”

Frankie also has another trait, perhaps one learned in the old neighborhood: He’s a dedicated friend who elicits loyalty in return. Frankie is still close to one of his old cellmates, who now sits on Death Row in California.

When another friend, a six-foot-eight former Hells Angel nicknamed Peewee, was sentenced to prison, Frankie spent hours offering advice on how to stay invisible in the Big House.

He threw Peewee a going-away party at the Italian American Club, attended by both leather-clad bikers and older Italian men who kissed each other’s cheeks as a gesture of respect.

He and Peewee stood behind a cardboard prop of some jail bars and mugged for the camera.

It was that kind of party. 

After I left my big-city newspaper employer, I stayed on in Vegas. And I got to know Frankie better, a lot better. I know he’s politically conservative, that he’s never drank or done drugs in his life and recently quit smoking following a health scare.

I’ve learned not to make anything that resembles a promise to Frankie because he’ll hold you to it.

“John, ya cocksucka," he'll say. “I thought you were gonna call me.”

I’ve also seen him cry — overcome by the pain of his  ailments and the emotional burden of being declared an outcast in your adopted hometown.

But Frankie’s humor shines through.

Years ago, we sat at a table inside the Italian American Club, just a few days before my 2013 newspaper piece ran on Frankie’s black book predicament. 

On a whim, I called my editor on his night shift, and handed Frankie my cell phone. 

He didn’t miss a beat.

“Are you John Glionna’s editor? Well, from now on, I don’t want you to touch one word of his copy, ya understand?” I could hear my editor gulp on the line. “And another thing,” Frankie added. “If that story don’t run by Thursday, you’re gonna be runnin’!”

Frankie once offered to accompany me to my newspaper’s home office as I asked the top editor for a raise. As Frankie described it, he wouldn’t say a word. I’d just introduce him as my associate; he’d nod his head. 

I’d get the raise, he assured me.

I have come to passably imitate that hit-you-with-a-brick New Jersey accent that makes everything new and funny. 

I even have a Frankie glossary.

“He was trying to put me in short pants,” means disrespect.

“I’m not throwin’ flowers at myself,” means not bragging.

When I told Frankie that a mutual friend had a new girlfriend, he said: “That guy’s gettin’ laid? I know him. He ain’t no oil paintin’.”

After my father died, I gave Frankie an essay I’d written — an Italian son’s paean to his Dad. I knew he’d appreciate it.

He called me later. “John, you know I ain’t no readah,” he said. “I haven’t even read many of the indictments against me. But I read this.”

Classic Frankie.

A young journalist friend, among others, once challenged me on my relationship with Frankie.

“C’mon,” he said. “The guy’s a sociopath!”

Our friendship has crossed cultures: Frankie’s a tough guy; I’m not. I went to college; he didn’t. We’re both lousy spellers. Frankie respects my so-called intellect, even if he says he feels like strangling me when he reads my anti-Trump social media posts. 

I envy his chutzpah, the way he’s graciously dealt with his outlier’s role.

I guess we’re like an old Odd Couple in that way.

For now, though, Frankie remains a member of the dreaded Black Book, a gritty survivor who takes his victories where he can get them.

Which makes the backgammon club award all more precious.