The Black Book and the Mob: The Untold Story of the Control of Nevada's Casinos

8. Renewed Zeal

8 Renewed Zeal When the regulation of Nevada gaming entered the mid-1980s, some of the questions that had been raised about the constitutionality of the Black Book had already been resolved in the 1983 state supreme court decision in the case of Spilotro v. State ex reI. Gaming Commission. The decision also paved the way for the 1985 gubernatorial mandate to revitalize the List of Excluded Persons. So when the regulators moved to add additional persons to the list, they acted with great fervor. Although they were to ban some who had tormented them for more than a decade-Carl Wesley Thomas in 1987 (entry stayed until he exhausted his appeals) and James Tamer and Frank Larry Rosenthal in 1988-they additionally entered a number of small-time "hoods" and "bookies" and a new category of threat to the changing marketplace, "slot cheats," who presented little challenge to their efforts. Persons in this last category were often nominated while they were in prison for gambling-related crimes and were processed routinely because they often failed to contest their entry or to be represented by counsel. They seem to have been easy targets. Never before had the regulators been so actively involved in gathering information and preparing cases for exclusion of individuals who were thought to pose a threat to the industry. The acceleration of the process, however, did not mean that the regulators had substantially changed their conceptions of what constituted a threat to gaming. Perhaps even more than before, they held dearly to beliefs about organized crime that by now had 141 Copyrighted Material THE REVITALIZATION PERIOD become institutionalized both within the national law enforcement community and in the society at large-the mafia myth. The beliefs about organized crime that were voiced in the Kefauver and McClellan investigations of the 1950s and 1960s became accepted as fact with the "findings" of the 1967 federal Task Force on Organized Crime. The task force concluded that there was a mafia of Italian origins operating in the United States and that this mafia was: structured in a highly bureaucratic manner; governed nationally by a commission; involved rigid rules enforced by violence; engaged in conspiracy to monopolize certain illegal activities; and was composed regionally of families, with members assigned to specific roles within those families.1 Already wedded to such beliefs, the law enforcement community was quick to institutionalize this "alien conspiracy theory" of organized crime. And the theory has persisted within law enforcement / although it has been regarded by many scholars as built largely on inconsistent and questionable findings.3 It also merged with popular beliefs as conveyed through the media, cinema, and literature,4 and has been accepted even by certain social scientists as well.s The acceptance of these beliefs by some socialscientists seems to have derived from their reliance on the same journalistic and governmental reports that shaped law enforcement practices in the area, presumably because of misconceptions that the secrecy and danger associated with organized crime precludes the collection of data by researchers themselves.6 * The U.S. Senate and federal task force conclusions, in combination with popular and certain social scientific conceptions that have evolved in part from them, have also continued to circumscribe the decisions of regulators regarding those selected for inclusion in the Black Book. Regulators seem to select aliens or those of foreign background, view these persons' relationships with others as conspiratorial, often associate them with a specific family of organized crime, and interpret their activity in light of the specific roles believed to exist within the family. *Reliance on government reports to study organized crime is not dissimilar to the now questionable use of official records to study crime more generally (Galliher and Cain 1974: 73). Neither practice adequately addresses the issues of selective enforcement and the intended uses of the information, the latter being the accusation and prosecution of certain individuals rather than the objective understanding of crime. 142 Copyrighted Material Renewed Zeal THE TRADITIONAL STEREOTYPICAL THREATS Chris George Petti The extent to which Nevada regulators continued to be constrained by the mafia myth is especially evident in Chris George Petti's 1987 entry into the Black Book. Court documents (including judgments of commitment, indictments, and probation orders ), California crime reports, and newspaper articles made up the large part of the state's case for the inclusion of Petti in the Black Book.? The documents, as entered in...