Joey Cusumano, a Las Vegas figure long tied to Tony Spilotro and the city's old organized-crime networks, died at his Las Vegas home on October 20 at age 90. He survived a labor-racketeering conviction, a spot in Nevada's notorious Black Book, and a 1990 assassination attempt that left bullet fragments lodged in his shoulder.
Cusumano was born in New York City on November 8, 1935, according to his obituary from Dignity Memorial. He moved to Las Vegas from New York in 1968, as reported by The Mob Museum. In the years that followed, he became known as the trusted confidant of Anthony Spilotro, described by the Las Vegas Review-Journal as the Chicago Outfit's man in Las Vegas.
From Street Rackets to Caesars Palace Ties
Cusumano connected with Spilotro in the early 1970s, becoming his friend and partner in various street rackets, per the same Mob Museum account. He was also connected with Caesars Palace through Genovese crime family figures Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno and Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo, the outlet reported. Around that same period, Cusumano opened his own restaurant, Joey's New Yorker, in 1970, which grew into a popular Strip night spot.
Spilotro and his brother, Michael, were murdered by the mob in 1986 and buried in an Indiana cornfield, according to seed reporting from NBC 5 Chicago. Following those killings, Cusumano was considered next in line to take over Chicago's Las Vegas street rackets, but he turned the role down, the station reported, citing investigators' belief that Outfit leaders had asked him to replace Spilotro as boss.
Conviction, the Black Book, and a Shooting
The year after the Spilotro murders, Cusumano was convicted of labor racketeering for skimming from the Culinary Union's life insurance plan, per the Mob Museum's account, and he later served a prison term tied to the union racketeering case. In 1990, Nevada regulators formally added him to the state's List of Excluded Persons, commonly known as the Black Book, barring him from casino premises statewide.
That same year, Cusumano survived an assassination attempt at his Las Vegas home that left two bullet fragments in his shoulder, according to the Mob Museum. NBC 5 Chicago's reporting adds that a gangland hit squad opened fire on him outside his townhouse and that the assassin's bullets could not be removed from his body. He stepped aside from conducting Outfit-related business a few years before his death, per people who knew him, the station reported.
A Detour Into Hollywood
Amid his legal troubles, Cusumano also found work in the film industry. He served as a line producer on Francis Ford Coppola's 1984 film The Cotton Club, the Review-Journal noted, an unusual credit for a man whose name was simultaneously circulating in federal racketeering files. The Mob Museum's biography treats that Hollywood chapter and his Las Vegas restaurant venture as parallel threads in a long, improbable career.
His death closes out a chapter of the city's organized-crime history that had already been fading for decades. Nevada's legislature passed the Corporate Gaming Act in 1967, and as PBS's American Experience documents, Strip resorts built during the 1950s and 1960s boom gradually switched ownership from the Syndicate to Wall Street. By the mid-1970s, the Nevada Gaming Control Board was penalizing known mobsters and refusing their license applications, and by the early 1980s, PBS reports, mobsters had mostly disappeared from the city's radar. The Mirage's 1989 opening helped usher in the corporate era that defined Las Vegas through the 1990s.
Services Planned for Mid-November
Funeral services for Cusumano are planned for mid-November, according to NBC 5 Chicago, with the Mob Museum reporting that visitation is scheduled for November 13 and funeral services for November 14 at Palm Mortuary-Cheyenne. NBC 5 Chicago's reporting frames his death as the Outfit losing its most lucrative Las Vegas outpost, though not through the kind of gang war that claimed Spilotro decades earlier.
