After Chicago area bookie Vincent DelGiudice pleaded guilty in 2021 to running a sprawling illegal sports betting operation, the Orland Park resident was sentenced the following year to 18 months in prison.
He and his initial co-defendants, including Mettawa Mayor Casey Urlacher, later faced another penalty: They were banned by the Illinois Gaming Board, an arm of state government reporting to Gov. JB Pritzker, from ever stepping foot in an Illinois casino.
But the public could be forgiven if they didn’t know.
Even though the gaming board went through the process in late 2023 of permanently barring DelGiudice, along with nine others who were part of his case and two men who weren’t part of it, the agency did so with little or no fanfare, then left their names off its publicly available online “involuntary exclusion” list that identifies others similarly banned from Illinois casinos.
The gaming board’s administrator, Marcus Fruchter, won’t explain the omissions, declining to say whether they were purposeful or accidental.
An agency spokeswoman said in June, when the Chicago Sun-Times learned of them, that we “are not required by rule or law to display the names on the website” but are nonetheless “in the process of making updates to the website.”
That happened this past week, after the Sun-Times asked about the status of updates since it’d been two months. There are now 34 names displayed on the public list.
Beyond the latest additions, the 22 other exclusions spanned from 1993 to 2016.
Some of them were accused of being part of illegal gambling schemes — at times involving the mob, which has long claimed dominion over illicit gambling in Chicago and beyond, and has tried to make inroads into legal gambling.
Others were accused of cheating, stealing or creating havoc at casinos in Illinois or out of state. Two were accused of helping underage patrons visit casinos.
Created in the early 1990s as the state’s first casinos opened, the list has long served as a hall of shame of sorts that, among other things, is intended to serve as a deterrent for bad actors and a means for casinos to know who to keep out.
Among those already on the online public list:
- Robert Cechini, a one-time Bloomingdale resident convicted in an illegal video gambling case brought by authorities before video gambling was legalized in Illinois. He was added to the exclusion list in 2000.
- James Dvorak, the former Cook County undersheriff convicted of corruption in the 1990s. He was added to the list in 2009 and says he’s aware of the banishment. “There’s nothing really you can do about it,” he said, adding it apparently had to do with “my alleged association with organized crime.” The restriction “didn’t really bother me.”
- Christopher Rosario, who was involved in a 2007 fight in an Aurora casino and allegedly has “gang affiliation.”
A certified letter sent by the gaming board to DelGiudice in December 2023 telling him he’s been forever banned from Illinois casinos says his “reputation and conduct” is such that his “presence within any Illinois casino gambling facility would jeopardize the safety, honesty, and integrity of the gambling operations.”
“This exclusion is PERMANENT.”
A similar letter went to Urlacher, brother of Chicago Bears great Brian Urlacher. Casey Urlacher was charged in the case but pardoned by President Donald Trump in his first term, so he never went to trial and wasn’t convicted.
“My whole case was dropped… and I still got banned,” Casey Urlacher said. “That’s how f–d up Illinois is… I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Even so, he joked that the ban “saved me a lot of money, actually.”
Besides DelGiudice and the others involved in his bookmaking case, two others excluded in 2023 but not on the public list include Ismail A. Ateyat and Abdul D. Barr. A letter from the gaming board to Ateyat explained his ban:
“You were recently arrested and charged with multiple felony offenses, including armed robbery and theft, for an incident on October 31, 2023 in which you stole at gunpoint more than $14,000 in gaming chips from… Rivers Casino in Des Plaines.”
A gaming board letter to Barr says: “On September 14, 2023, while on supervised release, you stole at least $5,000 worth of gambling chips from a gaming table on the floor of Bally’s Casino Chicago at Medinah Temple.”
In 2025, the Sun-Times documented the sometimes alarming levels of crime at local casinos, involving everything from robberies and fights to reported domestic violence incidents.
There’s been an explosion of burglaries at establishments with video gambling machines, but gaming board officials say they don’t have the ability to ban patrons from those businesses, or from sports betting, just casinos.
A spokeswoman for Fruchter, who was hired by the Pritzker administration shortly after the governor took office in 2019, says: “Expansion of the exclusion list to include sports wagering or video gaming would require legislation and/or an administrative rule, neither of which have been introduced.”
Pennsylvania regulators have the ability to ban gamblers from other types of gambling, beyond the 1,300 already barred from their 18 casinos.
Illinois law allows the gaming board, which regulates 17 casinos, to “eject or exclude or authorize the ejection or exclusion of, any person from gambling facilities where that person is in violation of state law, “rules and regulations thereunder, or final orders of the Board, or where such person’s conduct or reputation is such that his or her presence within the gambling facilities may, in the opinion of the Board, call into question the honesty and integrity of the gambling operations or interfere with the orderly conduct thereof.”
But exactly how people end up on the list is murky.
Fruchter’s office said: “The IGB evaluates whether an individual should be placed on the list based on case-by-case circumstances. The list includes people who engage in cheating and other gambling related offenses. When the IGB adds an individual to the list, the individual is notified in writing and they are prohibited from visiting Illinois casinos.”
“Many factors influence placement of individuals on the Exclusion List and other agency initiatives and actions including regulatory and law enforcement strategies and focus, efficacy and necessity of particular actions or tools, competing priorities and mandates, and staff time and resources.”
“From time to time, individuals have been removed from the list following death in response to a request from the deceased individual’s family.”
The agency also maintains a separate voluntary exclusion list where problem gamblers can put their own names on a banned list to help them stop visiting casinos and gambling.
Casinos are supposed to keep out the involuntary banned customers and if they’re caught at one, they could be subject to arrest and charges, though it’s unclear if that’s happened any time recently.
Also unclear is why there have been no additions to the involuntary exclusion list under Pritzker other than the dozen from 2023, though it fits into a pattern of sometimes-lax oversight.
A garbage contractor with past reputed mob ties somehow ended up at the construction site of the Bally’s Chicago casino in River West in 2025 — and gaming board officials said they had no idea until the Sun-Times brought it to their attention.
A Cicero diner was allowed to offer video gambling even though the operator, Jeffrey Bertucci, testified in 2010 at a racketeering trial that dealt with the mob, the Outlaws Motorcycle Club and illegal video gambling — something gaming board officials said they didn’t know until the Sun-Times brought it to their attention in 2023.
Once considered a transparent and tenacious regulator, known for resisting the prospect of a Rosemont casino out of concerns about organized crime influence, the agency is now often mired in secrecy.
Fruchter declined to explain his about-face in licensing a video gambling company overseen by Chicago attorney James J. Banks. The gaming board wrote in 2021 “the board finds that your business and social associations would adversely affect public confidence and trust in video gaming and would discredit or tend to discredit the Illinois gaming industry.”
Although the agency didn’t specify who it was referring to, Banks founded Belmont Bank & Trust on the Northwest Side, and the names of four current or former board members of that institution came up during the landmark 2007 Operation Family Secrets trial of Chicago Outfit bosses and others, though none of the four was charged.
In late 2022, the gaming board reversed course and licensed Banks’ video gambling company, saying privacy rules prohibit them from getting into detail, though one official said the reversal involved the presentation of “additional evidence.”
Pritzker aides confirmed the governor’s office was given updates around the time by the gaming board on “actions involving Mr. Banks and his company Gaming Productions, which were represented at various times before the IGB by at least two law firms, Taft and Croke Fairchild.”
An equity partner at Croke Fairchild Duarte & Beres LLC since 2021 is Lisa Duarte, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Before then, she was Pritzker’s first assistant deputy governor who played a role in hiring Fruchter, though then-Deputy Gov. Dan Hynes was ultimately “responsible for the hiring process and selection… including making the final recommendation to the Governor,” according to a Pritzker spokesman.
“Administrator Fruchter and the IGB made independent decisions about Mr. Banks and Gaming Productions solely based on the facts and law, free from interference of any kind.”
A longtime Lemont resident, Bertucci admitted at another trial that he’d gotten video gambling devices from Casey Szaflarski, once described as the mob’s video poker kingpin.
Bertucci admitted he’d paid winnings to gamblers playing those devices — which at the time was illegal to do in Illinois — and shared profits with Szaflarski.
Neither Szaflarski nor Bertucci are on the gaming board’s exclusion list, and Fruchter won’t say why.