Loan Shark Gets 10 Years in Prison, Fine of $200,000

Twice-convicted loan shark Vito Dominic Spillone was sentenced Monday to serve 10 years in federal prison and pay a $200,000 fine in connection with a scheme to make high-interest loans to local card club gamblers.

Spillone, 48, was convicted on similar charges in Chicago in 1971 and served five years of a 12-year sentence before being paroled to Los Angeles, according to government prosecutors.

“I have little doubt there was a conspiracy to extort loans at rates of high interest,” U.S. District Judge Matt Byrne Jr. said before sentencing Spillone and three others convicted by a federal jury last October.

Byrne said he had no doubt that “Spillone and perhaps others were at the upper echelon of the scheme” and “the threat of violence was certainly an integral part of this conspiracy.”

Threats on Tape

During the trial, witness testimony and tape-recordings from government-authorized wiretaps showed that borrowers who were late in repaying their loans were threatened with broken bones and other harm.

Spillone declined to comment before the sentence or after it was imposed, telling Byrne, “I think my lawyer said everything.”

Byrne ordered Frank Serrao, 56, of Huntington Beach, to serve one year in prison and five years’ probation for his role as a “collector” for Spillone.

John Clyde Abel, 41, of Chicago, who also served as a collector for Spillone, was sentenced to five years in prison. He is already serving a 25-year sentence for a 1981 armed robbery, according to his attorney.

Frank Citro, 39, of Las Vegas, was sentenced to two years in prison and five years’ probation.

A February, 1984, federal grand jury indictment described Spillone and the other defendants as “associates and members” of a crime family who tried to set up illegal loan-sharking operations in Southern California and Las Vegas in the late 1970s and early ‘80s.

Spillone was earning about $16,000 a month from his South El Monte wholesale grocery business when he started lending money at extortionate rates to gamblers at local card clubs, according to Blair Watson, a special attorney for the U.S. Justice Department’s Organized Crime Strike Force.

Watson said that although Spillone was earning substantial amounts of money from his business, he was “hassling people for $50 a week on their $500 loans.”

Byrne increased Spillone’s bail from $25,000 to $200,000 and ruled that he and Serrao could remain free pending appeal of their convictions.