Dominic ‘Dicky Boy’ Spinale is one of the many entrants in The Nevada Gaming Control Board’s Excluded Person List, or ‘Black Book’, that are there by virtue of mafia connections. Spinale, once labelled a “reputed mobster” by a local paper, saw a betting scam net him a place in the Black Book, but this is just the tip of his criminal iceberg. We look back at the career of Dominic Spinale and how he ended up being banned from every casino in Nevada.

Boston to Las Vegas

Spinale grew up in 1950s Boston as various New England mobs were vying for supremacy. Little is known about Spinale’s involvement, but it’s clear he was involved in some way. As the Boston mafia scene died out in the 1970s and 1980s, Spinale saw further opportunity in Las Vegas and moved there in 1984 at the age of 48. Here he ingratiated himself with Anthony Spilotro, an enforcer for the Chicago Outfit criminal syndicate, and quickly rose through the ranks. In 1986, Spinale and eight other members of the Outfit were indicted by a grand jury on illegal gambling charges after they were arrested when running an illegal bookmaking operation. Spinale was jailed, and was added to the Black Book shortly after his release in 1994.

Jailed Again

With the Chicago Outfit edged out in Las Vegas, Spinale joined the Milano crime family, becoming involved in a fraudulent diamond scheme in 1996 where they would arrange to sell a diamond through the jewelry shop they used as a front, but would then switch it for a fake before it was handed over during the sale. The creator of the scheme, Herbie Blitzstein, was murdered in 1997, and after initially escaping suspicion, Spinale was named in a 1998 federal racketeering charge which threw suspicion his way in regards to the murder. Spinale pleaded guilty to the fake diamond scheme as well as another charge of conspiring to falsify car insurance claims. He was sentenced to 21 months in prison and an $11,800 fine.

Spinale the Author

In 2004, Spinale, then aged 68 and presumably running out of funds, released a book entitled ‘G-Men And Gangsters: Partners In Crime’, a “chilling account” of the famous Boston FBI/Boston Irish Mafia love-in that tried to topple La Cosa Nostra in Boston, tapping his Boston criminal connections for information. A Publisher’s Weekly review states that the book “adds little to previous accounts” and “there’s not much here that a reader of the many newspaper stories will learn.” Overall it seems that banning Spinale in 1994 was the right decision in Nevada’s attempts to rid the state of Mafia influence, although it didn’t stop another bad book entering the world.