Jerry Tarkanian’s Lakers coaching contract vanished after a suspected Mob hit

After a meeting that might have brought Jerry Tarkanian to Los Angeles to coach the NBA’s Lakers decades ago, a 51-year-old middleman hoping to complete the deal was shot to death and left in the trunk of his car.

Today, the June 1979 murder of Tarkanian’s agent and longtime friend Victor J. Weiss of Encino, California, remains a cold case with no arrests, though some suspect Las Vegas mobsters were involved.

Dan Moldea, an author and journalist now writing the “Mobology” Substack site, said Tony “The Ant” Spilotro came to mind after the Weiss killing was first brought to his attention. During the 1970s and early ’80s, Spilotro was the Chicago Outfit’s enforcer in Las Vegas.

“When I first heard about the circumstances of the Weiss murder, I said to a colleague, ‘Only Spilotro kills like that,’” Moldea told The Mob Museum.  “As a cold-blooded Mob assassin, Spilotro was the Al Capone of our generation.”

Though he was never convicted of murder, Spilotro was thought to have had a hand in several killings over the years. During his time in Las Vegas, Spilotro frequently was the subject of news stories highlighting the underworld’s involvement in Las Vegas casinos and street rackets. In 1986, Spilotro and his brother, Michael, were ambushed by mobsters in the basement of a home near Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport and beaten to death. The brothers were buried together in an Indiana cornfield. Some of his exploits are depicted in the 1995 film Casino, in which Joe Pesci portrays a character based on Spilotro.

In Southern California, the Weiss death scene had the signs of a Mafia hit. According to Moldea, Weiss’s body was discovered June 17, 1979, wrapped in a yellow blanket in the trunk of his maroon and white Rolls-Royce at MCA’s Sheraton-Universal Hotel in North Hollywood. The father of eight children had been missing for four days. He’d been shot twice in the back of the head, and his hands were tied behind his back. The body was so decomposed that he could only be identified by his fingerprints.

In Mafia vernacular, a killing like this is called “trunk music.” In 1989, a decade after Weiss was slain, author Michael Connelly, then a Los Angeles Times crime reporter, dug back into the incident for the newspaper. Under the heading “Trunk Music,” that Times story is reprinted in Connelly’s nonfiction book Crime Beat: A Decade of Covering Cops and Killers.

“Los Angeles police believe Weiss was the victim of an organized crime hit, the most difficult of murder cases to crack,” Connelly wrote at the time.

Described by Connelly as a stocky, energetic “sports promoter, sometime agent and businessman,” Weiss had racked up large sports-betting debts. According to authorities, he also skimmed from the money he was delivering to mobsters in Las Vegas. Police believe these “indiscretions” cost Weiss his life, Connelly wrote.

Moldea’s reporting led to a similar conclusion. He noted that organized crime informants and others told police Weiss had incurred gambling debts and was involved with mobsters in Nevada and Florida.

Eighteen years after Weiss was shot dead and left in his trunk, Connelly’s crime novel Trunk Music was published. Although the novel doesn’t deal with the Weiss case, it is set in Los Angeles and Las Vegas and involves a body found in a trunk.

The Lakers contract that disappeared

On June 13, 1979, Weiss had been at a meeting in the Beverly Comstock Hotel in Los Angeles with business moguls Jerry Buss and Jack Kent Cooke. At the time, Buss was purchasing Cooke’s California Sports Incorporated operations, which included the Lakers. Weiss was at the meeting to nail down a commitment that Tarkanian, his longtime friend from their school days in Pasadena, would be brought in to replace Jerry West as the Lakers’ head coach.

Tarkanian, then coaching the UNLV Runnin’ Rebels basketball team, was waiting at a Long Beach hotel for word on whether he would be signed to lead the Lakers. According to Moldea, Weiss had reached a tentative agreement with Buss and the Lakers that Tarkanian would take over for West, the legendary former Lakers player whose silhouette still is on the NBA logo. With that, Weiss left the high-powered meeting, planning first to go home in Encino before connecting with Tarkanian.

“Weiss had the paperwork for the deal in his pocket when he was killed,” Moldea wrote.

Four days later, a security guard at the hotel alerted authorities to the abandoned Rolls-Royce. When Weiss’s body was discovered, there was no briefcase in the car and no Tarkanian contract. Weiss was rumored to have been carrying as much as $38,000 in the briefcase. Investigators noticed that Weiss still had an expensive diamond pinkie ring on his finger and a $6,000 gold and diamond-studded Rolex watch on his wrist. The fact that the ring and watch had not been stolen led police to rule out the possibility that Weiss was killed in a robbery, Moldea reported.

Moldea added that after Weiss’s body was found, Tarkanian withdrew as a candidate for the Lakers’ head coaching job. The team instead hired Portland Trail Blazers assistant coach Jack McKinney for the top job.

The search for Weiss’s killers

While dismissing Buss and Cooke as suspects, authorities followed several leads in seeking to arrest whoever might have killed Weiss. As Connelly reported in the Los Angeles Times, Weiss was driving his Rolls-Royce home from the meeting with Buss and Cooke when he pulled over at a curb in Encino. Three men in a white Cadillac were following him. Two men exited the Cadillac, including one described as “a 6-foot, 6-inch blonde.”  A witness told authorities that the blond man angrily pointed a finger in Weiss’s face while speaking to him.

“After a few moments, Weiss got back in his car, the blond man got in the back seat behind him and the third man got in the front,” Connelly wrote. “Then the Rolls and the Cadillac drove away.”

Digging into Weiss’s background, detectives became confident that the witness had seen Weiss’s killers, Connelly reported.

Investigators cast a wide net that extended from Los Angeles to Florida, but nothing solid ever turned up. Among those eyed in the killing were a jewel thief and, according to Connelly, Ronald Launius, a drug dealer linked to Weiss.

In 1981, Launius was beaten to death at a Laurel Canyon home in Los Angeles with three others in a high-profile case known as the Wonderland Murders, named for the street where the residence is located.

Though Launius was investigated in the Weiss incident, “there was never any evidence to connect him to the slaying,” Connelly reported.

Another person whose name surfaced during the Weiss investigation was Carroll Rosenbloom, who owned the Los Angeles Rams for much of the 1970s. Moldea wrote that Weiss spent Sundays at Rams home games either with Rosenbloom or in the team’s press box.

Leroy Orozco, a Los Angeles Police Department detective, told Moldea that authorities knew Rosenbloom was gambling. “We believe that Weiss played some role in that,” the detective said.

In an email to The Mob Museum, Moldea said law enforcement sources think Weiss was “likely a bagman and possibly even a beard for Carroll Rosenbloom.” The Rams owner died in a swimming accident about 10 weeks before Weiss was killed.

Moldea’s sources also said Weiss “might have been working with Spilotro and the Stardust crowd.” The Stardust was a Mob-connected hotel-casino on the Las Vegas Strip where Resorts World stands today.

According to Moldea, a Chicago bookmaker serving as a federal witness said Weiss was $200,000 in debt and that he was skimming. Moldea shared that information with Orozco, the LAPD detective, who said, “Weiss was skimming, was warned, and got hit.”

According to the detective, Weiss “was definitely a bagman for some of the Vegas people.”

“Weiss came up on some phone records at a place called the Gold Rush,” Orozco said, referring to a jewelry store in Las Vegas. “The Gold Rush was operated by Tony Spilotro.”

The Gold Rush has since been demolished but was located on Sahara Avenue just west of the Strip near the Golden Steer steakhouse.

Moldea reported that Los Angeles police questioned Weiss’s widow about her husband’s alleged association with Spilotro and Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal. A sports bookmaker from Chicago, Rosenthal ran the Stardust and three other Argent Corporation casinos in Las Vegas for Midwestern crime families.

“She replied that her husband had not discussed his business dealings with her and that she had never heard of those two men,” Moldea wrote.

In Las Vegas, Spilotro’s defenders assert that his reputation for violence is overblown. An editorial in the Las Vegas Review-Journal once labeled the tendency to accuse him of various killings as the “Blame Tony Syndrome.”

Oscar Goodman, an attorney and former Las Vegas mayor, told KLAS-TV years ago that the FBI claimed Spilotro killed 26 people. Spilotro was a client of Goodman’s.

“If he killed 26 people, they should have put him in jail for a day, and they didn’t even do that,” Goodman said.

‘Tark the Shark’

Moldea said he believes the Weiss cold case will be solved one day. Moldea is regarded as a leading authority on labor leader Jimmy Hoffa, who went missing in July 1975 and is presumed to have been killed in a Mob assassination. On his Substack site, Moldea, who wrote the 1978 book The Hoffa Wars, posts updates regarding the search for Hoffa’s body.

“Hey, I still believe that I can find Jimmy Hoffa,” the author said in an email. “So, as far as I’m concerned, the Weiss murder can still be solved.”

Since Weiss’s 1979 killing, the topic of his death crops up from time to time. In the early 2020s, it was featured in the HBO drama series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty.

Recently, Moldea appeared on the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast, discussing the circumstances surrounding Weiss’s death. Moldea also is part of a filmed report on the Weiss case by documentary producer Sean Carey. (Carey’s work on the Weiss murder will be the focus of a panel discussion at The Mob Museum this fall.)

After Weiss was killed, Tarkanian remained at UNLV as head basketball coach.

“Jerry Tarkanian and Vic Weiss were longtime close friends,” Moldea said.  “It is my understanding that after the Weiss murder, Tarkanian apparently lost his enthusiasm for the Lakers’ job, which was his if he wanted it.”

Known as “Tark the Shark,” Tarkanian went on to lead the Rebels to a national title in 1990. He later accepted coaching positions elsewhere, including a brief period as head coach of the San Antonio Spurs in the NBA. After several seasons at Fresno State, Tarkanian retired from coaching in 2002.

In 2013, he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. That same year, a bronze statue of Tarkanian, seen in his familiar towel-chomping, sideline seated position, was unveiled at the Thomas & Mack Center on the UNLV campus. On February 11, 2015, Tarkanian died at age 84.

In 2006, a Clark County middle school named for Tarkanian and his wife, Lois, a former Las Vegas City Council member who also served on local and state education boards, opened in the southwestern part of the Las Vegas Valley. The school’s athletic teams are nicknamed the Sharks.

Larry Henry is a veteran print and broadcast journalist. He served as press secretary for Nevada Governor Bob Miller and was political editor at the Las Vegas Sun and managing editor at KFSM-TV, the CBS affiliate in Northwest Arkansas.