California Grand Casino Robbery

1. Early on April 25 a man carrying an assault rifle and wearing a Halloween mask robbed the California Grand Casino in Pacheco. Citing casino spokesman Jimmy Lee, the San Jose Mercury News reported that, “The man pulled up a seat at the table, pulled out the rifle and pointed it at staff and customers, Lee said.
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The sister of Clippers star Kawhi Leonard and another woman were arrested and charged with the robbery and beating death of an 84-year-old woman at a Southern California casino. Suspect in Strip casino cage robbery booked in Clark County jail. But police said a suspect was arrested at the nearby MGM Grand at 3:45 a.m. California, 2 other states issue travel.

Feeling disrespected and unappreciated, a rogue Chicago Outfit burglary crew robbed the suburban mansion of longtime crime boss Tony “Big Tuna” Accardo. It happened 40 years ago this month, in the early morning hours of January 6, 1978.

The fallout was swift and savage. A protégé of Prohibition-era boss Al Capone, Accardo ordered a combined 10 revenge slayings and cover-up murders tied to the daring predawn break-in.

The price for the misdeed would be paid in blood. Bodies began dropping within days.

Accardo was vacationing in California at the time of the robbery. He had recently instructed a burglary crew led by associate John Mendell to return a bundle of cash, gold and diamonds acquired in a jewelry store heist pulled off in the days before Christmas 1977. The store was owned by a friend of Accardo — a Jewish bookie paying the Big Tuna protection money. Mendell decided to show his extreme displeasure by brazenly robbing the ritzy, well-manicured estate built by the legendary Outfit kingpin more than a decade earlier.

It proved an ill-conceived endeavor, and it didn’t take long for Accardo to seek his proverbial pound of flesh.

An expert at deactivating complex alarm systems, known as the most skilled “bypass man” in the whole Outfit, Mendell was the first to go, disappearing on January 15. He was found, weeks later, in the trunk of his car, stabbed and strangled to death.

California Grand Casino Pacheco Robbery

Five days after Mendell went missing, his second-in-charge, Bernard “Buddy” Ryan, was discovered dead behind the wheel of his car with four bullet holes in the back of his head. Ryan’s right-hand man, Stevie Garcia, made it until February 2 when he popped up as “trunk music” at the Sheraton Hotel next to O’Hare International Airport.

The hit parade continued and got more brutal.

On February 4, Vince Moretti, the marked burglary crew’s fence for all of its stolen property, along with a small-time crook friend of his named Don Renno, were lured to a Cicero, Illinois, bar and beaten and stomped to death. Renno had nothing to do with the Accardo robbery; he simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The double homicide came to be referred to as the “Strangers in the Night Murders” because of the Johnny Mathis song playing on the jukebox as Moretti and Renno were slaughtered by an Outfit hit team. Moretti, a former police officer, had been seen wearing Accardo’s gold cufflinks around town in the days before he was killed.

There was a two-month reprieve from the bloodshed before the final two members of Mendell’s crew, Bobby Hertogs and Johnny McDonald, met their own gruesome fate. Hertogs was found in

the trunk of his car on April 6. He had been badly beaten and had his throat slit. McDonald was shot in the back of the head, his body dumped in an alley on April 14.

In order to cover his tracks and cut ties from the purge he set in motion, Accardo turned his wrath toward his own inner circle and the execution squad he had dispatched to do his bidding. In October, Accardo’s houseboy, native Sicilian Mike Volpe, vanished weeks after testifying in front of a grand jury investigating the slayings linked to the January break-in. Accardo was famously protective of his beloved River Forest mansion, having even bumped off the architect who designed it out of suspicion that he had shared the blueprints with the FBI.

Months later, Anthony “Little Tony” Borsellino and Gerald “Jerry the Dinger” Carusiello were slain with bullets to the back of the head. Borselino and Carusiello had participated in the epic bloodletting of the burglary crew that dared to boost the boss. Borselino was a member of the notorious westside “Wild Bunch,” a group of grizzled Cicero enforcers tasked with the Outfit’s most difficult jobs. Carusiello was a driver and bodyguard for Accardo’s street boss, Joseph “Joey Doves” Aiuppa.

Nobody was ever arrested for any of the murders. Volpe’s eyeglasses were recovered from a safe inside the residence during a raid years later, but his body has never been unearthed. The Big Tuna himself died peacefully in 1992, having served close to a half-century at the helm of the Outfit and never doing any significant time behind bars.

Scott M. Burnstein, a journalist and true-crime historian, is the author of five books on organized crime. He founded and runs The Gangster Report (www.gangsterreport.com) newsmagazine website. He writes daily for The Oakland Press in Metro Detroit and focuses on Mob activity in Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia and New England.

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When patrons of the casino get upset and make a scene, the casino will have them charged and arrested for disorderly conduct. If you get thrown out of a casino and try to return, you’ll be charged with trespass. If you’ve been banned permanently, you’ll get charged with felony criminal trespass. If you write a bad check, you will be charged with a crime. It is not uncommon for casino patrons to find that a bounced check they wrote has now resulted in an arrest warrant for them. If you fail to pay a casino marker, the casino can (and will) come after you with criminal charges. You decided you would not get caught passing counterfeit money there because it’s dark. First, everything gets filmed at a casino. Second, they check bills with those pens anyway. Third, it’s a federal offense. If you manage to get by number one and two, the casino will still find you.

They use face recognition software, amazing record keeping (think casino member cards), credit card and ATM records, and cameras in the parking lot (yeah jackass, they know the license plate of every car at the casino) and best of all, the State Police help them (Pennsylvania Troopers are at the casino 24 hours a day enforcing state gaming law). And in case you missed number three, the US Secret Service will also be hunting you down. At the end of the day, theft is the most common charged criminal charge made against casino patrons. While stealing chips or chip stacking scams are common charges (Ocassionally a robbery or pickpocketing crime happens, but these are actually very rare), the most common theft crime is when someone cashes out a slot machine that did not belong to them or picked up cash or a chip off the casino floor.

California Grand Casino Robbery

“Wait,' you say knowing you’ve done that exact thing. “It’s finders keepers, right?' Guess what? This is the biggest misconception in the law. Pennsylvania does not have a 'found money' doctrine. In Pennsylvania, lost property goes to the finder, but he must make reasonable efforts to find the true owner: “A person who comes into control of property of another that he knows to have been lost, mislaid, or delivered under a mistake as to the nature or amount of the property or the identity of the recipient is guilty of theft if, with intent to deprive the owner thereof, he fails to take reasonable measures to restore the property to a person entitled to have it.' 18 P.S.A. § 3924. Theft of property lost, mislaid, or delivered by mistake. Cross References. Section 3924 is referred to in section 5552 of Title 42 (Judiciary and Judicial Procedure). Outside of the casino, you could take it to the police, get a receipt, hope no one ever showed up to claim it, and eventually get it to keep as your own. Maybe, you place an ad in a newspaper and wait thirty days before you claim it as your own. Technically, if you take reasonable measures, you can keep it and under 18 P.S.A. § 3924, as long as you take reasonable measures, you have a legal defense. Problem is at a casino, the only reasonable measure is to give it to the casino. As stupid as it may seem to say “I found $1.38 on a slot machine' or “I found a $5 chip (or even a $1 chip) on the floor'; it is your only legal choice. Whether you are at Harrah’s Philadelphia or Parx or Sugarhouse or any other Pennsylvania casino, they have major “high security' technology. Every table, every slot machine, the outside of the bathroom, the ingress and egress into and out of the casino, and virtually every public area in the casino is being filmed. To put it succinctly, the casino is going to find the true owner. Law Office of Kevin Mark Wray 200 West Front Street Media, PA 19063 (610) 566-1006 (610) 566-1002 (fax)

This web posting is for general information and does not contain a full legal analysis of the matters presented. It should not be construed as legal advice or relied upon as legal opinion on any specific facts or circumstances. The invitation to contact Kevin Mark Wray, Esquire is not a solicitation to provide professional services and should not be construed as an availability to perform legal services in any jurisdiction in which Kevin Mark Wray is not licensed to practice.

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