The Nevada Gaming Control Board’s Excluded Person List, which has for decades gone by the much more exciting name of the Nevada Black Book, is a list of individuals who have committed crimes so prejudicial to the interests of Nevada gaming houses that they are banned from every single one of them. The book was opened in 1960 in an attempt to clean up the gambling industry’s image, which for decades had been tarnished by the strong influence of the Mafia who skimmed profits and threatened owners who didn’t comply. Eleven names were initially entered into the Black Book when it first opened, all of them related to organized crime, but the most famous of these entrants was probably Salvatore ‘Momo’ Giancana.

Casino Kingpin

Momo Giancana was, at his height of his powers in the late 1950s, the head of the criminal Chicago Outfit. He first joined the gang in the 1930s and for twenty years controlled, among other interests, most of the illegal gambling in Louisiana. Giancana ascended to the top spot in the Outfit in 1957, where he expanded operations to take in Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, and even Iran, with hundreds of casinos under his influence. Giancana was even recruited by undercover CIA agents to take part in a plot to kill Cuban president Fidel Castro, which was abandoned after several poisoning attempts. After the cancelled operation, and now presumably with in-depth knowledge of the Chicago Outfit’s operations, Giancana and ten others were entered into the inaugural Black Book, a sure sign that their influence was on the wane.

Prison and Murder

In 1966, following FBI wiretaps that caught him boasting about arranging ‘hits’ on rival gang members, Giancana was arrested and imprisoned. He moved to Mexico on his release but was deported back to the US in 1974 as part of an investigation into CIA and Mafia collusion. While awaiting a grand jury appearance, Giancana was murdered in his home in June 1975. The most widely accepted theory is that Chicago Outfit members, furious with his refusal to give them more of his gambling profits, took their revenge while he was back in the country.

Legacy

Giancana’s death resulted in his removal from the Black Book, the only way a name can be removed, and the following decades saw a huge decline in Mafia influence in Nevada casinos. The last of the original eleven names in the book was that of Louis Dragna, whose death in 2012 brought to an end a fascinating chapter in the history of gaming, and Nevada’s history as a whole.
Read about Archie Karas and ‘The Run’ in our Black Book Biog No.1