David Groover first saw Joey Cusumano at a distance back in the early 1980s, and he saw him the way police officers are trained to see certain men: with suspicion, with patience, and from behind the glass of an unmarked car. It wasn’t personal. It was the job. As a detective in the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s Intelligence Bureau, assigned to the Chicago squad, Groover and his partner Gene Smith spent long hours keeping watch on Cusumano and an entire mug book of other figures connected to Anthony Spilotro’s criminal crew. Those were dangerous days in Las Vegas, when Spilotro’s name was in the newspapers more often than the mayor’s and when a person could vanish after a wrong word. The city was still wearing its bright, sequined costume, but underneath there was a pulse of violence, and the men who policed that world learned to read body language, shifts in routine, and the subtle choreography of loyalty and betrayal. Cusumano stood out even in that crowd. He wasn’t a local, and he wasn’t a stereotypical wiseguy. He was from New York, and yet he moved comfortably on the edges of a Chicago crew. Groover remembers it as a strange arrangement. “He was a New York guy who hung with the Chicago crew,” he says. “I guess if you were a politician, you’d say he caucused with the Chicago crew. Maybe he was an independent.” It was the sort of observation that could only come from a man whose job was watching patterns, and the pattern of Joseph Vincent Cusumano never quite fit. He was there, but not entirely of there. He orbited dangerous men, yet he seemed to have his own orbit. He survived years that killed others, and he never explained how. To Groover, he became an enigma, a face in the files who would reappear decades later.
Joseph Vincent Cusumano was a New York City native who became a Las Vegas enigma, a man whose public biography sounded like the pitch for a noir film. At one time, he owned Joey’s New Yorker, a restaurant on the Strip, a place that put him inside the glamour and gluttony of old Las Vegas. He bounced in and out of the casino business during the 1970s, when the industry was still trying to scrub away its underworld fingerprints, and he worked in Hollywood as a line producer on Francis Ford Coppola’s troubled production of The Cotton Club. That alone guaranteed him stories, access, and the kind of connections that could make a man useful. But Cusumano was not simply a colorful character with a good résumé. He survived a murder attempt, served time in federal prison for insurance fund fraud, and was eventually added to Nevada’s infamous “black book,” the official List of Excluded Persons that banned him from every casino in the state. That kind of résumé would have made many men bitter or reclusive. But those who knew him describe something else: a gentleman charmer, a man who played tennis almost daily, who dressed well, laughed easily, and somehow never betrayed a confidence. Even his enemies, if he had any left, seemed to respect that about him. He moved through worlds that thrived on rumor and betrayal, but he kept his mouth shut. Much of what he did over his long and turbulent life was probably illegal, and much of it was certainly shadowed by his reputation as a connected guy, but he never once used silence as a bargaining chip. In a city of noise, Joey Cusumano chose quiet. In a world of self-promoters, he kept his secrets. It was that stubborn, almost old-fashioned loyalty that would define him in the end, perhaps even more than the restaurant, the movie, the prison time, or the black book.
By 2015, Cusumano was an old man living a quiet life in Las Vegas, far removed from the violent energy of the Spilotro years. He had outlived almost everyone who shared that particular chapter of the city’s history. He had learned to keep his head down and his name out of the papers, which was no small feat for someone with his past. He did not seek attention, and attention mostly left him alone. But there was one ordinary thing he still wanted, one simple privilege that millions of Americans take for granted. He wanted to vote. The problem was that he was a convicted felon, and his conviction was federal, which made the legal path to voting more complicated than just walking into a polling place. After some searching, someone told him to see a local private investigator who might be able to help cut through the red tape. And so, more than thirty years after that first long surveillance, Joey Cusumano walked into David Groover’s downtown private investigation office. Groover, the retired detective who had once watched Cusumano from the shadows, now watched him enter his own office door. There was a moment of recognition, then a little laughter, then a handshake. “What are you doing?” Groover asked. “I wanna vote,” Cusumano said. “And I got this problem. And it’s a big problem. It’s a federal conviction. Somebody said you might be able to figure it out.” It was a strange, almost tender moment. The former detective and the former target suddenly found themselves on the same side of a problem. Groover could have easily referred him elsewhere or simply told him it was too complicated. Instead, he took the request seriously and began to work.
Getting Cusumano registered to vote was not as simple as filling out a form. Groover researched the issue, called the Clark County registrar of voters, and gathered the necessary legal paperwork to address the federal conviction and the voting rights that had been stripped along with it. When everything was ready, he escorted Cusumano to the registrar’s office. The moment they walked in, something shifted. An audible buzz went through the building. People peeked around corners to get a look at the man whose face they recognized from old headlines, black book notices, and crime lore. They knew his history. They knew the stories. But they also watched him register to vote, which meant something important: even a man with a past that dark could reclaim a small piece of citizenship. “We go in, and everybody’s peeking around the corner to see the guy because they know the history,” Groover recalls. “And he got registered to vote.” It was a legal victory, but for Cusumano it was more than legal. It was personal. When Groover asked what motivated him after all those years of fame, infamy, prison, and quiet obscurity, Cusumano put it in simple, almost gentle terms. He said, “It’s one of the last things in life that I want to do. I want to vote. And I would like to be able to go into the Plaza downtown to Oscar’s restaurant.” That simple sentence revealed so much. He wasn’t asking for a pardon. He wasn’t asking for old secrets to be forgiven. He wanted to cast a ballot, and he wanted to sit down for a meal in a restaurant named for his friend and former attorney, Oscar Goodman. The fact that he could not legally do that second thing was a reminder that even in his old age, the black book still had hold of him.
The black book issue remained a wound, especially to Oscar Goodman, the famous lawyer and former Las Vegas mayor who represented Cusumano and grew deeply fond of him over more than three decades. Goodman was still angry about it all these years later, not just about the legal consequences but about the principle of it. He told me recently that he would have gladly come out of retirement to take on the state Gaming Control Board one more time, to fight to get Cusumano removed from the List of Excluded Persons, a list that had followed him longer than most marriages last. But by that point, Cusumano no longer wanted the fight. The next big legal battle wasn’t worth the publicity it would bring. He had spent a lifetime avoiding the spotlight, and he wasn’t about to step into it now for the right to eat at a restaurant, no matter how much the injustice may have stung. So instead of meeting at Oscar’s place on the Plaza, the attorney and his client, now bound by friendship rather than just representation, got together once a month at the country club for what could only be described as memory lane lunches. They told stories about the old days, about other men who were gone, about cases and close calls and the strange world of old Las Vegas that no longer existed. Goodman plans to devote a chapter to Cusumano in his upcoming memoir. “We just talked about the old days,” Goodman says. There was no agenda, no legal strategy, no damage control. There was just friendship, shared history, and the rare comfort of sitting across from someone who knew exactly who you were and accepted it without judgment.
Groover saw Cusumano for the last time about two weeks before he died. The retired detective, now an old man himself, couldn’t resist one final question. He asked Cusumano if he had anything he wanted to share before moving on, any old murder mysteries to clear up, any unsolved cases he could finally put to rest. Maybe he should have known better. Maybe he expected the usual stonewall, or a wink, or a vague nonanswer. What he got was pure Joey Cusumano. “You know, Dave, I’m 90 years old,” Cusumano said. “I made it this long without being a snitch, and I don’t want to start now.” And that was it. No confession, no deathbed revelation, no final settling of scores. Just a simple, wry loyalty to the code he had lived by his entire life. Well, you can’t blame a guy for trying, Groover says with a shrug. Cusumano died on October 20 of natural causes at age 90, and he took his secrets with him. In a town that loves to reinvent itself, he remained stubbornly himself. He was a man who survived murder attempts, prison, and official exile, but he never lost the one thing he apparently valued most: the ability to keep a confidence. He wanted to vote, and he did. He wanted to sit in Oscar’s restaurant, and he never could. But he had friends who loved him, a lawyer who still fought for him, and an old detective who once watched him from a distance and ended up walking beside him to the registrar’s office. That was the strange, human arc of Joseph Vincent Cusumano. The surveillance finally ended, and he was gone, leaving behind only the stories and the silence, which, for a man like Joey, was probably exactly what he intended.