The Economic Engine of Organized Crime
Tommy DelGiorno said it best.
“Gambling is the wheel that makes everything else go around.”
This was back in 1985 when he was being questioned by the New Jersey State Commission of Investigation during one of several debriefing sessions. DelGiorno and Nicholas “Nicky Crow” Caramandi were the two major mob turncoats whose testimony helped federal authorities dismantle the Nicky Scarfo crime family in the late 1980s. Scarfo died in prison. Most of the leaders of the Philadelphia mob who came after him ended up behind bars.
Mob bosses come and go.
But gambling remains the economic engine of organized crime. It generates cash. It provides customers and/or victims. It’s a form of networking that leads to other legal and illegal business opportunities. It’s a catalyst for the mob’s highly lucrative loan-sharking operations.
Gambling is the pathway to racketeering.
A series of events at the end of 2025 underscored that point.
One was the highly entertaining and informative Netflix documentary series “Mob War: Philadelphia versus the Mafia.” I was fortunate to work as a consultant, along with my mob reporting colleague Dave Schratwieser, on the three-part series that focused on the war between John Stanfa and Joey Merlino. Electronic surveillance was a critical element in that federal investigation.
Listening devices planted in the office of Camden defense attorney Salvatore Avena provided a treasure trove of evidence after authorities were able to establish that Stanfa was using his lawyer’s office to conduct mob meetings and mob business.
But what wasn’t mentioned in the series was how that investigation began. It started, as so many mob cases do, as a gambling investigation. A student at LaSalle University had gotten himself in a jam betting on baseball games with a mob-connected bookmaker. When he couldn’t pay a $3,925 debt, the mob began to put pressure on him. He panicked, went to his father and his father took him to the FBI. (A quick aside, baseball is the worst sport to bet. Too many variables.) So, when a mob enforcer began to threaten the student during a meeting on the LaSalle campus, the young, troubled gambler was wired for sound.
“You went in and you bet thirty-nine hundred this week with no f—kin’ money,” the mob enforcer asked. “I mean, are you out of your f—kin’ mind or what?”
The LaSalle investigation led to a major bookmaker in South Jersey who in turn led the feds to Stanfa and the meetings in Avena’s office. With that, the case was off and running. But it all started as a gambling probe.
The Netflix series premiered in October.
A few weeks later, federal authorities detailed a major gambling case tied to the NBA that, to date, has implicated a coach, a player and an ex-player. Some sources are saying this is just the tip of the iceberg, a look into how organized crime has tainted the “legitimate” gambling industry.
The two-pronged federal investigation focused both on “proposition” bets which may have been manipulated and high stakes poker games in which the coach and other celebrities were used as so-called “face cards” to attract high rollers to rigged card games in which millions of dollars were lost.
Proposition bets are bad for business and the NBA and other professional sports leagues that have gotten in bed with the gambling industry ought to put pressure on the industry to do away with that piece of the action.
Those bets, which are primarily built around individual athlete performances, are ripe for manipulation. If gambling is now a legitimate part of the American sports world, those types of bets need to be prohibited. If not, every time a player has a game in which his performance is subpar, there will be the suspicion that something untoward was involved. And each time the integrity of the sport will be questioned.
The rigged poker games are another matter. This was the mob flat-out cheating. Using sophisticated devices like x-ray rigged tables and special eyeglasses used to read marked cards, the mob-linked player in the game was able to bet accordingly and walk away with tens of thousands of dollars in “winnings.”
This, of course, flies in the face of a major concept in the world of organized crime and gambling. In the long run, the only way to sustain the business is to offer an honest game.
No less an authority than Meyer Lansky established that principle when he was appointed the “gambling czar” of Cuba in the 1950s. Lansky’s plan to turn the island into an adult fantasy land built around casinos, lavish entertainment and beautiful hookers began with a simple premise. He said that the casinos in Havana, which had a reputation for ripping off and cheating customers, would have to be run legitimately.
Lansky knew that the house always came out ahead in a well-run casino. And to attract and, more importantly, keep serious gamblers coming the games had to be run honestly.
The NBA scandal is certainly a black eye for professional sports. But it also taints any and every mob-run gambling operation. Whether you’re betting ten dollars or ten-thousand dollars you want to believe that you have a fair shot at winning.
Why a high stakes poker player would seek out a mob-run game over a game at a casino is now a question that many high rollers will be asking.
Finally, on the gambling front, the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office brought two major gambling cases last year aimed at members of the Lucchese crime family.
The first case revolved around back-room poker games and sports betting and targeted three major leaders of the crime family, including “Big Joe” Perna and his cousin John Perna. The second, announced two months ago, focused on an alleged two-million-dollar sports betting ring allegedly financed by “Little Joe” Perna, the brother of John Perna.
The Pernas have been described as a crime family within a crime family. Defendants in the most recent case include Little Joey’s son, stepson and nephew along with a group of their twenty-something friends. Sports betting with college athletes allegedly playing a role in the business has added another troubling twist to the case.
The betting ring was based in North Jersey but included operators in Rhode Island and Florida. The young Pernas’ involvement, if proven, would mark the fourth generation of the Perna family involved in mob gambling operations.
An ironic disclaimer in all this.
Unlike the NBA-linked scandal, there is no indication from state authorities that either of the Perna cases involved rigged or fixed games or bets. Millions of dollars were generated the way Meyer Lansky envisioned it.
“Despite the proliferation of legal betting of all kinds, gambling remains a mainstay of members and associates of organized crime,” New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin said in announcing the indictments back in November.
A mainstay, or in other words, “the wheel that makes everything else go around.”
