Nevada black book removes dead Colombo mobster's name from list of excluded persons
The Nevada Gaming Commission has determined that a mobster named in Nevada’s Black Book can no longer hurt the casino industry.
The reason: He’s been dead for more than two years.
Charles Joseph “Charlie Moose” Panarella,
who had a reputation as a brutally sadistic hit man for the Colombo
crime family in New York, was removed from “The List of Excluded Persons,” commonly known as the Black Book, in a unanimous vote Thursday.
“Because Mr. Panarella is deceased, he no
longer poses a threat to the Nevada gaming industry, so therefore the
(state Gaming Control) Board respectfully requests his removal,” Deputy
Attorney General Tiffany Breinig said in remarks to the commission.
Panarella would have been 92 when he died.
Former Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, who was a criminal defense lawyer
for a number of mob associates before taking office in 1999, recalled
his friendship with Panarella in his memoir “Being Oscar: From Mob
Lawyer to Mayor of Las Vegas.”
“I had represented him in a number of cases,
and you couldn’t find a more thankful client,” Goodman said in the
book. “The feds, of course, had a different view of him. His reputation
in the underworld was steeped in violence.”
Goodman said Panarella and a mob associate,
Natale “Big Chris” Richichi, gave him a plaque that he hanged in his
office as a reminder of their gratitude for representing them against
federal charges.
“With me, he was always aces, always 100
percent, a very, very nice fellow,” Goodman said of Panarella in an
interview Friday. “I know what they said about him, I know about the
allegations where he apparently killed somebody and stuffed their
private parts in their mouth, that kind of thing. But you could never
tell that by the way that he treated my staff. He was always very
decent. He treated the ladies in my office with respect and always was a
very fine person and he had a wonderful family that accomplished a
lot.”
Goodman also said he has never been a fan of “The List of Excluded Persons.”
“I’ve always said that the Black Book, ‘The
List of Excluded Persons,’ is probably the most unconstitutional
document in our nation’s history and the process attendant to it was
silly,” Goodman said. “It was a way of law enforcement trying to cover
up its inability to go after the real criminals by putting these fellows
who were colorful and the subject of dime-store novel magazines into
the Black Book without any nexus whatsoever with a violation of a gaming
regulation or gaming law.
“Nothing in Charlie Panarella’s life would
suggest that he ever was a cheat or took advantage of the casinos. It
was just because he had a reputation.”
Panarella was placed on the ‘Excluded
Persons’ list in September 1997. According to the listing, his last
known address was in Las Vegas. He was known by seven aliases, and the
listing said he was born in January 1925.
The attorney general’s office submitted a death certificate as evidence that he had died.
Gaming Commission Chairman Tony Alamo said the certificate was signed July 18, 2017.
“You can see that this really isn’t a high-priority matter,” Alamo said of the removal.
There have been 34 names removed from the
Black Book since it was established in 1960, mostly because the people
listed had died, according to Alamo. He said three people have been
removed while alive, including a pair of people who were excluded in
1965 and removed from the list a month later. He said his research did
not uncover a reason for the reversal.
With Panarella’s removal, there are now 35 people on the list, including one woman.
Two have been on the list the longest: Alvin
George Kaohu and Wilford Kalaauala Pulawa, since Jan. 23, 1975. Their
last known addresses are in Hawaii.
https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/casinos-gaming/name-of-dead-mob-associate-removed-from-nevadas-black-book-1811935/
my mother's cousin Charlie was a cool guy, always cracking jokes when he'd come to visit his Godmother who was also my Grandmother Lucia.I remember him mostly around the late 60's up until I joined the Marines in 1978. I didn't know of some of the events in the Colombo Crime Family and the Profaci's prior because he had to have been made before the books closed and that would have been under Profaci. My mom who was about 6 years younger was always defensive of him because his father I guess was an abusive alcoholic who beat his wife, my Grandmother's sister and also the kids, especially him bc he was the oldest boy. She said later in life when we talked about him that if he was mean it was because his father made him that way. I told her that I had read that he cut someone's balls off and made the guy eat them, then killed him and she was Oh stop that's newspaper people gossip. But a lot of what I've read says that. I heard Carmine Persico was even afraid of him and at one point he thought that Sonny Franzese who Charlie was buddy's with and him would try to take over the family when Carmine was in prison. I've read he took over his Mentor and Capo's crew John " Johnny Bath Beach" Oddo's crew after Oddo was murdered. Then I heard he killed Mimi Sciallo as a personal favor to Carlo Gambino after Mimi had gotten drunk and insulted Carlo at Gargiulo's in Coney Island while the restaurant was crowded. He did have some of the Colombo's top killer's and enforcers in his crew and they were so afraid of him that they complained to someone high up IDK if it was Persico or not that he was abusive towards some of his crew and made them run the streets with him and make them bring all the money from scores they did to him and he'D cut it up. I know he lived out in Vegas for about 25 years before he moved closer to home by buying a nice property in the Poconos. He still was making money well into the 2000s when he was in his late 70s and 80s kinda like Sonny Franzese, real gangsters to the end. So he definitely had an interesting career in that life. I liked him.
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