Pittsburgh Mobster and Illegal Casino Supremo Lenny Strollo Dies, Aged 90
Lenny Strollo, the former mobster formerly credited past the FBI with operating America’s biggest illegal casino, has died ripened 90.
Strollo came upwardly through and through the ranks of the Pittsburgh Mob, decorous the brag of the Youngstown, Ohio crew in the 1960s.
He controlled all vice in the surrounding Mahoning Valley, at a time when Youngstown was dubbed “Crimetown USA” past The Saturday Evening Post.
Strollo and his brother, Dante, ran bookmaking, poker game machines, and peddling machines in the Valley. With local officials inwards their rearward pockets, they also did a mulct line of products in narcotics trafficking, racketeering, and murder.
In Campbell, a rundown suburban area of Youngstown, Strollo ran the All-American Club. When the lodge was closed down pat(p) inward 1987, prosecutors said it was generating $20 1000000 a yr for the Pittsburgh Mob, more than any other resistance gambling casino inwards the country.
Turncoat Mobster
Strollo was arrested in 1997 as component of a crackdown on illegal play and public corruption. He became a turncoat mobster, lancinating a trade with federal prosecutors that allow him hold his money and pass just 12 years inward prison house for spilling the beans.
He pleaded shamefaced to leading the Mahoning Valley’s organised criminal offence operations and to ordering the off of rival mobster Ernie Biondillo.
He also confessed to ordering the botched assassination of Mahoning County Prosecutor Paul the Apostle Gains, who was targeted for refusing to cooperate with unionized crime. Gains was severely injured in the round on Christmas Eve 1996, but recovered, and remains inwards office.
Meanwhile, Strollo’s testimonies led to the stoppage and internment of II judges, a former sheriff, a former prosecutor, and former territory congressman Henry James Traficant.
The mobster told the courtyard how he controlled virtually the intact Mahoning County sound system through and through a mixture of bribes, payoffs, and drive donations.
Some of those he testified against received living imprisonment without parole.
Decline of the Pittsburgh Mob
Strollo was released from prison house inwards 2008 and directly disappeared into the federal informant tribute program. But he got to live come out his retirement inwards the Valley. He later returned to his home inward the fashionable expanse of Canfield, southwestern of Youngstown, as the threat of requital subsided.
By the 2010s, the Pittsburgh Mob, otherwise known as the De Rocca crime family, was a spent force, thanks to the dying of tonality members and a string up of convictions inward the 1990s and 2000s, some of which are attributable to Strollo’s testimony.
“His exit is an finish of an era,” said Gains to The Tribune-Chronicle, virtually the piece who tried to kill him and real nearly succeeded. “Thank Supreme Being that his system has been completely abandoned.”