Continuing our mob theme for the week, R-J columnist and Huntington Press author John L. Smith provides another profile in answer to the question, "Are there any real-life mobsters still living in Vegas?"
In post-Spilotro Las Vegas, few mob figures relocated to town seeking less fanfare than Lucchese crime family figure John Joseph Conti.
His trouble in Las Vegas was, Conti was already on law enforcement radar screens due to his criminal connections in New York and the suspicion of the FBI that he’d played a role in the murder of Lucchese associate and Southern California resident Tony Dilapi. When the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Organized Crime met in 1988, Conti was listed as a soldier with the New York mob family started by Thomas Lucchese.
But what the government believes and what it can prove are two different things, and Conti was never charged with the hit.
It was Conti’s activities in the back of local casino sports books that attracted the attention of at least one reporter. He was letting it known he was the new muscle in town, and few of the people who encountered him thought he was joking.
When I first saw Conti inside Bally’s sports book a long time ago, he was considered an associate of an intriguing Luchese soldier named Angelo Urgitano. They called Urgitano "the Jet," presumably because he moved money from coast to coast.
But in the pre-Sept. 11 era, doing business in the sports books is a fast way to gain the attention of the Gaming Control Board and Metro’s Intelligence detail.
Conti later took a felony tumble (’93 for wire fraud) and was noticed – and nicely photographed – in the company of Bonanno soldier Vincent Faraci and Chicago Outfit loanshark Richard Arnold. This is the kind of company that keeps you on law enforcement radar.
He was placed in Nevada’s casino Black Book in September 1997.
More recently, the 75-year-old Conti was a regular companion of Joey Roach, the former Las Vegas boxer turned telemarketer. Conti seemed to rely on Roach financially, according to reliable one eyewitness. Roach died last year of a heart attack.
Is there room for one more fall for John Conti?
If you enjoyed the last two day's answers, you can find more of John L. Smith's columns collected in On the Boulevard. For anyone interested in Las Vegas' Mafia history, we have a whole section dedicated to The Mob at ShopLVA.com, including Surviving the Mob, the latest title from the author of best-sellers Battle for Las Vegas and Cullotta, plus Of Rats and Men, John L. Smith's biography of Mayor Oscar Goodman.
