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Roots of gambling run deep in Ralph Infante's Niles
By Ed Runyan
NILES
The Niles of Ralph Infante’s youth and many years after was a place where illegal gambling was easy to find.
In the 1960s, Niles ranked among the best high school sports programs in the state, drawing interest in betting. Area steel mills provided workers with enough money to stop in Niles on their way home to entertain themselves with a wager.
Perhaps it’s not surprising then that an indictment unsealed recently accusing the former Niles mayor of 56 criminal charges stated that Infante, now 61, was himself involved in gambling as early as 1987, when he was 32 — five years before he became mayor.
As early as 1987 and continuing into February of this year, Infante collected thousands of dollars on sports betting for profit, the indictment says.
The gambling allegations – failing to pay income taxes on gambling earnings from 2011 to 2015 while running a McKinley Heights bar, for example – seem quite tame among the shocking allegations in the indictment of bribery and theft as mayor.
After all, until about 2000, gambling in Niles was not viewed in a negative light by most people. And today, gambling is run or supervised by the government, with a legal casino just up the road in Austintown and legal daily lottery numbers shown on television.
News coverage from the 1970s, including FBI raids, would suggest that illegal gambling was also enjoyed in other communities, such as Youngstown, Austintown and Warren.
But the reputation Niles had was that it was “the gambling center of Northeast Ohio,” said Trumbull County Commissioner Frank Fuda, a Niles native who still lives here.
Steve Ruman, a Niles native and longtime area sportswriter in his 50s said as a kid, he knew there were a lot of gambling houses in the city even though he never cared about playing.
“I remember my uncle talking about the bars downtown. You could place a bet, the card playing, the workers playing cards after work,” he said. “It was common. Growing up, you knew of it. It was not a big deal.”
He said he knew of places on Mason Street, “even in the early 1990s,” and downtown where gambling thrived.
Ruman believes illegal gambling changed around 2000, when former Niles Police Chief Bruce Simeone wore a “wire” to record conversations with two gambling men, who offered the chief bribes to allow their operation to continue while asking him to shut down the others.
“Some of the things you heard about told you that there was gambling in Niles,” said Mark Hess, 56, another Niles native who didn’t participate in illegal gambling. “For instance, you heard they were playing, that they had back doors where they were gambling at, that there were places where people played blackjack and pool.”
Hess, like others, said the gambling was not viewed as anything scary.
“I think Niles was a good place to live and grow up in,” he said. Hess formerly worked for the city but now runs the county’s public transportation system, Trumbull Transit.
“If people wanted to [gamble], that was OK, and if they didn’t, that was OK, too,” he said.
He found it interesting how much money some people invested in “block pools” or “squares” in which a bettor pays to secure a block that corresponds with the points scored in an event, such as the Super Bowl. The amount of money required to enter some pools in Niles was so large that people would make payments on it all year, Hess said.
“It was pretty much all around,” Fuda said of illegal gambling in the 1960s. “That’s back when we were No. 1 in football and No. 1 in baseball,” Fuda said of Niles McKinley High School. This in part led to committed athletes and adults who gambled, often times on sports, as a form of recreation.
“It was a form of entertainment,” Fuda said. “They wanted to have a reason to watch the games,” he said. Fuda said he played high school baseball and worked, went to college and “worked too hard for my money” to gamble.
The watershed event affecting gambling in Niles may have been the felony charges filed in 2000 against Michael “Mugsy” Malvasi, then 69, and Albert Tuminello, then, 73, both of Niles. The two operated an enterprise involving sports betting sheets across Trumbull County, according to Simeone.
Ruman said it seemed that the Malvasi-Tuminello case did “squelch” gambling in Niles, or at least cause it to move “underground.”
An investigation began after Malvasi and Tuminello approached Simeone in 1999, offering Simeone bribes to allow them to conduct gambling at the Silver Nugget bar on Pratt Street in the city. The bar was operated by Malvasi.
When the bribe was offered, Simeone didn’t consult with his own people in the Niles Police Department and didn’t tell any other city officials. Instead he went to the Trumbull County Prosecutor’s Office. He worked with the FBI and Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation to carry out a sting.
The FBI had Simeone wear an electronic device so conversations among him, Malvasi and Tuminello could be recorded. Simeone accepted $2,650 from Malvasi and Tuminello over five months to build a criminal case against them.
Malvasi pleaded guilty in 2001 in common pleas court to conspiracy to engage in corrupt activity and five counts of bribery. He was sentenced to three months in an alternative sentencing program and three months’ house arrest.
Tuminello, 73, pleaded guilty to complicity to commit bribery and was placed on two years’ probation.
Shortly after Malvasi and Tuminello were indicted, Simeone told The Vindicator there was a “strong gambling presence” in the Niles area.
“It affects a lot of people. It goes all the way through. It’s a very political thing, too,” Simeone said. “It affects personal lives, the political process, business, law enforcement. Everyone’s susceptible. Once it starts, it continues.”
The Vindicator also asked Infante at that time about gambling in the Niles area. But Infante and his safety director at the time, Donald K. Allen, said they didn’t agree with Simeone’s assessment that gambling in Niles was a big problem.
Infante said he was somewhat surprised by the gambling and bribery charges.
“It’s just hard to believe,” Infante said. “It’s a way of life, I guess, for those kinds of people. ...My big thing is [cracking down on] drugs because they’re in schools. I’d like to see us get on the drugs more than anything. I never worried about gambling because to me, it’s not as important as the drugs.”
Allen said gambling was “everywhere.”
“I suppose it goes on in every community in the country,” Allen said at the time. “Sports betting has gone on since the beginning of time ... I’m not saying it’s a right thing to do. I’m not saying that at all. If it’s illegal, it should be stopped.”
A month before charges were filed against Malvasi and Tuminello in 2000, Niles police conducted a gambling raid on the home of Joseph Merlo of Niles, a Niles barber. Seventeen people were charged, including then county Commissioner Joseph Angelo Jr., who later pleaded no contest to attempted gambling.
Merlo later was convicted of four misdemeanor counts of gambling and four counts of operating a gambling house and was ordered to pay an $800 fine.
Women were players, too.
In 1994, three women — two from Warren and one from Campbell — were convicted of misdemeanor gambling after Niles police raided Joann’s Antique Shop, 2249 Harmon St. in McKinley Heights in November 1993, according to Vindicator files.
Niles police confiscated six electronic draw-poker machines in a back room that was behind a door marked “private.”
And the Ohio Auditor’s Office has said the event that first alerted investigators to the alleged criminal activity by Ralph Infante, his wife, Judy, and others was an investigation that uncovered Phyllis J. Wilson stole $142,772 between 2009 and 2012 as Niles assistant treasurer to pay for a gambling habit.
“To say I’m remorseful doesn’t begin to cover what I feel,” she said at her sentencing in 2014. “I vow to never allow gambling to take over my life again.”
Wilson took “early retirement” in 2012 “so that she would not be tempted to take additional funds,” according to court documents.
In 1987, the first point at which investigators say they uncovered evidence that Ralph Infante was taking sports bets, he had already served on Niles City Council twice, the first time serving four years starting in 1976, when he was 21, as Third Ward councilman. He also was elected to council in the spring of 1985. He also ran for mayor the first time in 1987, coming in second.
Infante did not return a phone call from The Vindicator asking him about the state’s gambling allegations against him.
He worked for the city in three jobs before being elected mayor the first time in 1992. In 1980, he started working in the engineering department; in 1982, he became Niles Municipal Court bailiff; and he became a sewer department laborer in 1984, according to Vindicator files.
After the failed 1987 mayoral bid, he was elected Niles councilman at large in 1988. He was elected mayor in November 1991.
Gambling allegations contained in the Infante indictments say Ralph Infante and Judy Infante used the club they run, ITAM No. 39, or Infante’s Lounge, to facilitate their gambling activities. The club is on North State Street in McKinley Heights.
For example, it says Ralph Infante had a Youngstown company deliver slot machines or other games of chance to ITAM 39, and that he allowed people to use the machines for gambling. Ralph Infante is also charged with five felonies related to money-laundering of gambling proceeds from 2011 through February 2016.
The Infantes and city employee Scott Shaffer of Niles will be arraigned on all of the charges contained in the indictments at 1 p.m. Dec. 5 by a visiting judge in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court.
Infante lost his most recent mayoral re-election campaign in the spring of 2015. He served as Niles mayor 24 years.
He has been secretary for the Trumbull County Democratic Party since June 2014. Before that, he held the party’s second-highest position, vice chairman.