(FORTUNE Magazine) – As underboss and comptroller of the Kansas City mob, Carl DeLuna felt immense concern for his fiduciary responsibilities. ''Toughy,'' as he is known, called his meticulous record keeping ''doin' the right thing.'' It proved much too right. In January his handwritten documentation of how cash was skimmed from the Tropicana and Stardust casinos in Las Vegas sent nine gangsters to jail, including DeLuna. The ledgers revealed that between 1976 and 1979, the mob extracted $2.3 million from the two casinos' counting rooms before taxable revenues had been declared. In an October 1977 entry, DeLuna recorded the sitdown in Chicago at which top mob executives determined how the skimming operation would work. The notes proved DeLuna as reliable a recording secretary as he was a bookkeeper. Until the documents were uncovered, federal authorities never suspected that a mobster would keep a record of so important a conclave. The crime bosses who convened in Chicago agreed that couriers -- one DeLuna code-named ''Deerhunter'' and another, a Chicago policeman he called ''Stompy'' -- would deliver the loot each month to the families in Kansas City, Milwaukee, Chicago, and Cleveland. Distribution of the cash was done the same way corporations declare dividends. The mob bosses and underbosses in the four cities held shares, or ''points,'' in the Stardust and Tropicana; they received a certain amount for each share. Sometimes the shareholders received extra dividends: DeLuna's ledger shows that skimming produced a $130,000 bonus in January 1979 that he called a ''surprise number.'' The next regular dividend, however, failed to materialize. DeLuna recorded the reason: A key skimmer got sick. FBI agent William N. Ouseley, who found the books hidden in the basement, attic, and ventilating ducts of DeLuna's house, had no trouble cracking the code that camouflaged the various entries. No. 22, for example, stood for Chicago boss Joe Aiuppa. No. 21 was Aiuppa's enforcer, Jackie Cerone. The nicknames ''Fancypants'' or ''Beerman'' applied to Frank Balistrieri, the Milwaukee boss. ''ON'' (for onorevole, meaning honorable in Italian) was Nick Civella, the Kansas City Mafia chief and DeLuna's boss. DeLuna was a cautious accountant. If he did not actually see the money change hands, he said so to distance himself from any defalcations. He embarked on an important mission in 1978. His assignment: to force Allen R. Glick (''Genius''), the licensed owner of the Stardust and another casino- hotel, the Fremont, to sell out or risk the murder of his two children. The mob, which had begun to distrust Glick, thought it could skim more under another owner. In Las Vegas, DeLuna met first with three members of the Mafia's skimming team: Carl Thomas (''CT'' in the ledger page below), a gambling boss at the Tropicana; Joe Agosto (''Ceaser''), casino manager at the Tropicana; and Frank ''Lefty'' Rosenthal (''Craze''), the mob's man at the Stardust. Next he met Glick, who two days later announced his casinos were for sale. Four days after DeLuna left for Las Vegas, his wife, Sandy (''San''), followed for the weekend. True to form, DeLuna's accounts show that he paid ''personally for San's fare out and in and also for any personal purchases.'' As one of DeLuna's cronies confided to the FBI, ''He kept track of who got what, just so if anybody asked, he could show everything was right, that he hadn't grabbed a dime of that money for himself.'' The carefully kept records were only partially responsible for the jailing of Chicago's then Mafia leaders, Aiuppa and Cerone. The testimony provided by Glick, who told about the threats the mob used to force him to unload his casinos, also helped. So did the mob's avarice. The Chicagoans might never have turned up in DeLuna's ledgers if they had not tried to make the most of their role as conciliators. They tried to mediate between the bosses in Kansas City, Milwaukee, and Cleveland who got to squabbling over the casino spoils in 1975. For their efforts the Chicago mob demanded a 25% fee.

DeLuna's books depict Mafia benevolence toward both the greedy and the needy. In 1979, $1,500 went to then Kansas City Teamster chief Roy Williams, code-named ''Rancher,'' who used his influence to help arrange Teamster loans to the mob-controlled casino-hotels. The skimming money also supported a welfare program. DeLuna once noted that after he, Civella, and the others divided some $30,000, smaller amounts ranging from $1,000 to $3,000 were handed out to elderly Mafiosi and to the families of imprisoned mobsters.