Joseph "Joey" Cusumano, Spilotro Associate and Mob-Linked Film Producer, Dies at 90 in Las Vegas

Joseph "Joey" Cusumano, convicted of labor racketeering and barred from Nevada casinos, died Tuesday afternoon in Las Vegas at 90 after years of medical problems. Born in New York, he relocated to Las Vegas in 1968 and was tied to Caesars Palace through Genovese figures Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno and Vincent "Jimmy Blue Eyes" Alo, helping deliver skimmed proceeds east. He instead opened Joey's New Yorker, a Strip nightspot popular in the early 1970s, and partnered with Chicago Outfit enforcer Tony Spilotro in street rackets. After the 1986 murders of Tony and Michael Spilotro, he declined to take over Chicago's Las Vegas operations. Convicted in 1987 of skimming the Culinary Union's life insurance plan, he left federal prison in summer 1990; regulators then placed him in the Black Book following an eight-hour Nevada Gaming Commission hearing and unanimous vote. Months later a masked gunman fired five shots at him outside his townhouse, hitting him three times; he drove himself to Sunrise Hospital with two bullet fragments in his shoulder. Attorney Oscar Goodman, later Las Vegas mayor, called the hearing "a sham, a shame, and a fraud." Cusumano also worked as a line producer on Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club. Visitation is November 13 at Palm Mortuary-Cheyenne, with services November 14 at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Church and Bunker's Memory Gardens.