Mob Accused in Plot to Control Rincon Gaming

Reputed San Diego mobster Chris Petti and nine other men, including a top local defense lawyer and the alleged bosses of the Chicago mob, were named Friday in a federal indictment charging that organized crime tried to infiltrate gambling operations at the Rincon Indian Reservation in North County.

The 15-count indictment charges that Petti, San Diego lawyer Nicholas De Pento, alleged Chicago mobsters Samuel Carlisi and John (No Nose) DiFronzo, and the six other men tried to help organized crime leaders obtain a contract to operate the Rincon tribe’s gambling activities with an eye toward using the games to skim profits and launder illegal money.

The 10 defendants were arrested Friday in San Diego, Los Angeles, Palm Springs, Chicago and Florida on charges of racketeering, extortion, and mail and wire fraud. The maximum penalties for the charges range from five to 20 years’ imprisonment for each count, with fines of up to $250,000.

According to the indictment, handed down Thursday by a federal grand jury here and unsealed Friday, Chicago mob leaders became interested in the Rincon gambling operations in the mid-1980s, viewing it both as a source of added revenue and a means of laundering money from other illegal activities.

Petti and De Pento, aided by a Rincon tribe member, subsequently developed a plan to gain control of the Rincon bingo and card games on the behalf of unnamed investors, concealing the fact that the La Cosa Nostra crime family actually was behind the proposal, federal prosecutors said Friday.

Toward that end, the tribe member, Glenn Martin Calac, allegedly provided the group with inside information about other bids for the gaming contract, giving the defendants a “competitive edge,” the 49-page indictment states.

However, after several months of negotiations, the Chicago mobsters, uneasy over the fact that a similar non-Indian gambling operation in Baltimore was losing money, changed their minds and withdrew their financial support for the Rincon plan.

Instead, they directed Petti to find another means of financing the Rincon operation, but to send the profits to Chicago--plans that eventually brought Petti in contact with an undercover FBI agent posing as a money launderer for Colombian cocaine dealers, according to the indictment.

While those plans were proceeding, Petti and other members of the ring also allegedly extorted money from several people believed to owe money to the late Las Vegas mobster Tony (The Ant) Spilotro, who was murdered in 1986. Spilotro’s brother, John Spilotro of Las Vegas, was among those named in Friday’s indictment.

The others named in the indictment include Donald John Angelini and Michael Clement Caracci of Chicago; Carmen Salvatore DiNunzio and Anthony Louis DiNunzio, both of Los Angeles, and Calac, of Palm Springs.

Friday’s indictments, sprinkled with tantalizing details that sound as if they were lifted from the script of “The Godfather,” stem from a lengthy investigation by the FBI, San Diego police and sheriff’s officials into possible mob involvement in Indian gaming activities.

FBI wiretaps, for example, picked up conversations among ring members in which they proposed “skimming a little off the top . . . for ourselves.” At another point, they discuss plans to threaten an individual allegedly indebted to the mob by telling him that he should “get a one-way ticket . . . if he goes back to Chicago without the money.”

The five-year investigation produced an unexpected prosecutorial dividend 2 1/2 years ago when former San Diego financier Richard Silberman unwittingly stumbled into the investigation while seeking Petti’s assistance with a money-laundering scheme aimed at salvaging his foundering gold-mining company.

Silberman, who was later convicted of one count, a technical currency violation charge, and pleaded guilty to a second felony conspiracy count, is serving a 46-month federal prison sentence. Silberman is married to San Diego County Supervisor Susan Golding, but Golding has filed for divorce.

De Pento posted a $25,000 bond and was released shortly after being arraigned Friday, but Petti, at the request of federal prosecutors, is being held without bail here as a flight risk until a hearing set for Wednesday. Petti, long linked by federal authorities to organized crime in both Chicago and Las Vegas, once was considered the heir-apparent to Frank (The Bomp) Bompensiero, a notorious San Diego underworld figure who was gunned down in 1977 in an alley in Pacific Beach.

The indictments are notable both for the scope of the defendants--ranging from top bosses of the Chicago mob to Calac, a burly member of the Rincon tribe who, according to FBI wiretaps, allegedly was counted on to provide “muscle” on the reservation--and for the charges against attorney De Pento, who allegedly assisted the mob.

According to the wiretap reports, Petti occasionally used De Pento’s office and telephone to hold meetings and make calls, confident that he could escape government surveillance. But San Diego FBI agents, who already had tapped Petti’s home phone and more than a dozen pay phones he used, eventually planted a bug in the lawyer’s office as well, a highly unusual and sensitive procedure.

During one meeting, after an undercover agent infiltrated the operation posing as a New Jersey man attempting to launder drug proceeds, De Pento allegedly suggested a way to disguise the source of funding for the gambling.

The group had decided that Calac’s name would be used on the application, but worried about how to explain where and how the Indian had obtained enough money to open a gambling hall.

“De Pento said that Calac could say he got the money from ‘Cousin Red Cloud,’ who died,” according to the FBI reports. The group earlier used as their “front” a Los Angeles businessman, a feather supplier named Sam Kaplan, who has since died.

The period covered by the indictment, the late 1980s, was a turbulent time for the Chicago Mafia. Spilotro, the family’s chief operative in the West, had just been murdered, and the mob chiefs were reportedly anxious to keep up his business of collecting a “street tax” from bookmakers and loan sharks throughout Nevada and Southern California.

In addition, Petti had suggested that they could make a fortune by taking over a failed gambling hall and skimming the profits at Rincon, where they would operate bingo, a poker parlor and off-track betting. “You’ll handle two or three hundred thousand a (expletive) day,” Petti told Caracci.

Eventually, however, the Chicago mob lost interest in Rincon, frustrated by changing demands and internal fights within the tribe, and disappointed with profits from a bingo hall outside Baltimore, in which they had a hidden interest. A group of mob figures from Chicago, New York and Florida later were indicted for the operation of that hall and a plot to burn down a competitor’s facility.

The mob figures allegedly got most of their information about Rincon from Calac, a tribe member who prosecutors said had a “long criminal record” and whose father and cousin were on the tribal council. But another faction opposed the gambling proposal, suspicious of Calac and his partners.

“We didn’t know they were Mafia,” 70-year-old Max Mazzetti, the tribal chairman at the time, said in an interview Friday. “But we had a lot of hot battles. They were hollering about, ‘We’re going to make you a better deal.’ ”

After Petti’s group withdrew its application, the tribal council picked another group to run the bingo hall, but it quickly failed, in the spring of 1989.

Last year, the tribe began seeking new management firms to reopen the abandoned gambling hall, and it recently signed a contract with a Las Vegas partnership.

“For myself, I think we should be through with bingo,” Mazzetti said Friday.

Times staff writer Julie Tamaki contributed to this report.