Joey Cusumano

Cusumano had battled a number of medical problems for several years. He died in Las Vegas on the afternoon of Tuesday, 20 October 2026, aged 90. His death was reported by the Mob Museum and the Las Vegas Review-Journal on 22 October. Visitation was set for 13 November 2026 at Palm Mortuary Cheyenne, with a funeral Mass at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Church and committal at Bunker's Memory Gardens on 14 November.

Joseph Vincent Cusumano was born in New York City on 8 November 1935. He grew up on the streets of New York, and as a young man he came to know senior members of the Genovese crime family, including Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno and Vincent "Jimmy Blue Eyes" Alo. In 1968 he moved to Las Vegas, where those connections led him to Caesars Palace at a time when organised crime held influence over the resort.

In Las Vegas Cusumano was said to have played a role in delivering skimmed Caesars Palace proceeds to New York, but he did not want a career in the casino business. In 1970 he opened Joey's New Yorker, a restaurant just south of the Sands Hotel that became a popular Strip night spot in the early 1970s. Over the following years he was reported to hold influence at the Golden Nugget, the Argent Corporation and the Culinary Union, and the FBI and the Metropolitan Police Department described him as the closest confidant of Anthony Spilotro, with whom he partnered in various street rackets.

He also built ties in the film world. Cusumano worked as a line producer on Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club, released in 1984, and Coppola later gave testimony in support of him. He became friends with Nicholas Pileggi, the author of the book Casino, although no character in Martin Scorsese's 1995 film was based specifically on him.

After the murders of Tony and Michael Spilotro in 1986, Cusumano was considered next in line to take over the Outfit's Las Vegas street operations, but he turned the role down. In 1987 he was convicted of labour racketeering for skimming from the Culinary Union's life insurance plan, a case in which he was represented by Oscar Goodman, and he served a federal prison sentence. Following his release in the summer of 1990, the Nevada Gaming Commission voted unanimously after an eight hour hearing to place him on the List of Excluded Persons, known as the Black Book, on 21 June 1990.

Cusumano was known for his charm and generosity and kept friends in business, entertainment, law and politics. He remained close to Oscar Goodman, who went on to become mayor of Las Vegas, and the two met monthly for lunch at the Las Vegas Country Club to talk about old times. A filet mignon at Oscar's Steakhouse in the Plaza was named after him, although as an excluded person he could not enter the casino to order it. In 1990, a few months after his Black Book listing, a masked gunman fired five shots at him as he opened his garage door; hit three times, he escaped in his Mercedes convertible and drove himself to Sunrise Hospital. The case was never solved. In later life he enjoyed tennis and entertaining family and friends, and he chose not to go back to court to seek removal from the Black Book.

Cusumano was widely described as one of the last surviving figures from the Spilotro era of Las Vegas, the period dramatised in Casino. Historians at the Mob Museum and journalists who chronicled the city's organised crime history saw his life as a rare example of a man who lived through the mob's heyday and its violent decline and went on to a long, quiet retirement. Oscar Goodman said he had devoted a chapter of his forthcoming memoir to their friendship.