A High-Living Hustler’s Last Payoff Is Delivered in Bullets

Jimmy Lee Casino’s world was shattering around him.

U.S. Internal Revenue Service agents were days away from padlocking his primary source of income--the Mustang, a Santa Ana topless bar--because of unpaid payroll taxes.

The Mustang’s lease was to expire in February, according to bankruptcy records, and Casino owed thousands of dollars to his landlord and other creditors.

Casino also owed $302,000 to a group of investors in his failed chain of hot dog stands, and a Los Angeles Superior Court judge was ready to ship him off to state prison for five years if he missed a Jan. 27 deadline for paying the debt. The thought of returning to prison terrified Casino, said Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Diane L. Vezzani.

The real terror came on New Year’s Day, however, when two intruders broke into Casino’s Buena Park luxury condominium and shot him in the back of the head at close range with a small-caliber weapon. Casino’s 22-year-old girlfriend was tied up as the killers stole credit cards, furs, jewelry and Casino’s Camaro and Mercedes-Benz.

The killers are at large. Buena Park police thought they had a lead when three men were arrested after Casino’s stolen credit cards were used at a San Fernando Valley department store. But the men eventually were released for lack of evidence.

Jimmy Lee Casino was a slick-talking swindler with a penchant for topless dancers and fancy cars. He lived a fast-paced life style, often only a step ahead of the law, and more than once he lost that one-step advantage. His story offers a glimpse into the seamier side of life under the bright lights.

An ex-convict who served federal prison time for tax evasion, mail fraud and counterfeiting, the 48-year-old Casino was an unforgettable character, his friends and associates agree. They knew him as an attractive man who led people to believe he was a high-powered gangster with ties to organized crime.

“He was good looking and fit, the image of an up-and-coming gangster,” said Arcadia private investigator Ray Alerich, a retired Los Angeles County deputy sheriff who met Casino in 1975. “He would supply dancers and models for the nude bars.”

He was fond of talking about his connections. After muscling his way into control of the Classic Cat, a topless bar on Sunset Strip in Hollywood in the early 1970s, said James W. Grodin, a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney, the blond and blue-eyed Casino “would come into the bar and give his gun to the bartender. He told club owners he had a fix with local law enforcement and could do anything he wanted.”

And he was a persuasive promoter who could talk people into emptying their wallets for him.

“The guy was unreal,” prosecutor Vezzani recalled. “He was a hell of a salesman.”

Yet Casino may have been less than he appeared. While he drew the attention of numerous police and government investigators, authorities said Casino’s talk of organized-crime connections were hollow boasts. Others who knew him described him as unable to handle his money, an assertion reinforced by records showing that Casino was always in debt and struggled to finance his extravagant life style.

Born James Lee Stockwell and raised in Pomona, he was a high school dropout who earned a diploma while behind bars. He married twice and was the father of six children. Joe A. Dickerson, one of his attorneys, said Casino was very close to his 10-year-old son Shane and, in fact, had spent the day with Shane just before he was killed. Police said Casino dropped off his son and another boy at the second youth’s house before returning home, where he was accosted by the killers.

In interviews last week, friends and enemies alike portrayed Casino as a flamboyant, extravagant man who owned a dark-blue Rolls-Royce, but fancied himself a cowboy and dressed in Western-style clothes. His passion for the West was evident in the names of his businesses--the Mustang, Cowboy Enterprises Inc. and Cowboy Hotdog Companies. An avid golfer, Casino spent much of his free time on the Los Coyotes Country Club course adjacent to his home.

Although court records show that the Mustang grossed more than $150,000 a month, Casino was deeply in debt. The bar had been scrutinized many times by police vice officers who suspected it to be a center for prostitution.

Several Dancers Arrested

Santa Ana police arrested several Mustang dancers on prostitution charges in May, 1984, at a hotel in Orange, but none of the arrests resulted in a conviction.

“This guy was not a crook or a criminal--he had unfortunate business relationships,” said Sylvan B. Aronson, Casino’s criminal defense attorney and close friend. “He considered himself a cowboy.”

Casino’s criminal record stretched back to the 1960s, when he was arrested on minor charges that included passing bad checks and driving with a suspended license, according to court records.

In April, 1970, a Los Angeles federal court jury convicted him of 20 counts of mail fraud stemming from the fraudulent use of credit cards; he charged thousands of dollars worth of gasoline, furniture, clothing and travel expenses and never paid the bills, according to federal court records.

In March, 1971, he was convicted in federal court on counterfeiting charges after he and a group of friends were caught with 2,000 fake $20 bills. Casino was one of 34 people arrested for possessing about $100,000 in counterfeit bills, according to court records.

In August, 1972, he was convicted of conspiracy and extortion by a Los Angeles Superior Court jury.

He was sentenced to 10 years in prison for the two federal crimes and 10 years on the state extortion charges. In all, he served three years in federal prisons in Washington state and at Terminal Island Federal Correctional Institution in San Pedro before being paroled to the San Gabriel Valley in November, 1975. His federal parole ended in May, 1979, according to court records. He was allowed to serve the state sentence concurrently while in federal prison.

Plush Spa in Fullerton

After he was released from prison, Casino worked at health spas in Las Vegas, Pomona and Victorville before opening his own, a private club called Top of the Ninth in a Fullerton office building. He boasted to associates that he had received a “federal rehabilitation grant” to open the plush spa, but court records reveal that he borrowed money from several people who later sued him because they were not repaid.

Then he went into hot dogs.

In 1979 and 1980, court records show, Casino collected $928,000 from about two dozen investors to open a chain of hot dog stands, but spent only $173,000 on the business, Cowboy Hotdog Companies. As a result of that business effort, he was charged with stealing $412,000 from 10 people, including a Los Angeles County deputy sheriff, several schoolteachers and a service station owner who lost his business, said Vezzani, who prosecuted Casino.

On Jan. 28, 1986, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit grand theft.

“He wasn’t doing squat, but he was living high on the hog,” Vezzani said. She recalled that he had a big map behind his desk studded with colored pins marking future Cowboy Hotdog locations.

In 1979 and 1980, Casino had a suite of plush offices on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. He lived nearby in a $1,200-a-month apartment with his business partner, Mark Hendrix, Vezzani said.

Vezzani said Casino had paid $110,000 of the $412,000 he owed in restitution to the investors in the Cowboy Hotdog venture before his death. She said she thought that he would have been going to prison at the end of the month because he had not paid the rest, but Aronson said he believed that Casino would have avoided that fate because “he was making a good-faith effort to pay.”

Casino, who drank Coca-Cola while his guests drank alcohol, entertained frequently at Pips, a private club and discotheque in Beverly Hills. In May, 1980, he spent $3,205 at Pips, according to checks included in court records.

Home Foreclosed

Vezzani said Casino left Los Angeles and moved to Orange County during the district attorney’s investigation into the hot dog operation. He bought a $1.3-million house on East Crescent Drive in Anaheim Hills, and the home became a haven for dancers from the Mustang, according to local law-enforcement sources. Casino lost the house in a foreclosure, according to county property records.

Casino set up Fortune Investment Inc., the corporation that owned the Mustang, on Harbor Boulevard in Santa Ana, and the company obtained a liquor license in 1980. At least one creditor in bankruptcy proceedings alleged that Casino used the proceeds from sales of non-existent hot dog franchises to help establish the Mustang.

In 1982 and 1983, Casino, through Fortune Investment, borrowed $140,000 from Yvonne Hines, girlfriend of C.W. (Bill) Carroll, an Orange County loan broker, according to court records. Hines later sued Casino to get the money back, alleging that he was skimming cash profits from the Mustang.

“I have learned that the bulk of cash receipts from the operation of the Mustang Club are removed by Mr. Casino without maintenance of any records as to the amounts or their disposition,” Carroll said in a declaration written May 15, 1985, and filed in Orange County Superior Court.

Michael O. Walsh, who is listed in corporate papers as the sole stockholder of Fortune Investment, said in 1986 bankruptcy proceedings that the company paid $20,000 a month to Casino under a “consulting and management agreement.”

In June, 1985, Fortune Investment filed for bankruptcy protection, but the case was dismissed on Oct. 11, 1985.

The corporation filed a second bankruptcy petition on Feb. 7, 1986. That case was dismissed on Aug. 13, 1986. A third petition was filed Jan. 7, listing $500,000 in assets and $607,192 in liabilities.

Bankruptcies Called Ruses

Creditors complained that the numerous bankruptcy filings have been ruses to prevent them from collecting debts from Casino while he continued to draw huge amounts of cash from the operation.

A bankruptcy analyst of the U.S. Trustee’s office found in June, 1986, that, despite the ongoing bankruptcy, “Walsh and James Casino are not only continuing to draw compensation without the approval of the U.S. Trustee,” but that Casino was paid $43,500 during one three-month period.

Law-enforcement officials say Casino hid his ownership in the Mustang because, as an ex-convict, he could not obtain a liquor license. But not everyone is willing to agree that Casino had an ownership interest in the Mustang.

“A lot of people thought Jim owned the club, but all the shares are in my name,” Walsh, Casino’s friend and bodyguard, said in an interview Friday.

No matter who owned it, the Mustang owed nearly $500,000 in back taxes to the IRS, according to bankruptcy court records. The IRS had placed a lien on the bar’s liquor license, according to Buena Park police.

“The bar was only a few days away from being closed down (by the IRS),” said Buena Park Police spokesman Terry Branum.

On the afternoon of his death, Casino played golf with Walsh.

“He never told me about any threats. He was in a pretty good mood that day,” said Walsh, who was a friend and business associate of Casino’s for 12 years. “He was a great person. He loaned out a lot of money. He was always borrowing from Peter to pay Paul.

“He didn’t really know how to manage money.”

In the view of Santa Ana attorney Meir J. Westreich, who has represented clients to whom Casino owed money, the surprising thing about his death was that the killers could penetrate the blanket of security he maintained around himself.

“It’s amazing they were able to get to him that easily,” Westreich said. “He has bodyguards around him all the time.”

Times staff writer Bill Farr contributed to this story.