For decades illegal bookmaker Ron “Cigar” Sacco has been ahead of his time. The hard part for him was staying ahead of the law.
To see Sacco’s name surface on the latest list of sports gamblers scheduled to be honored in August at the Circa Resort & Casino’s Sports Gambling Hall of Fame ceremony is at once head-spinning and spot-on appropriate. If notorious inductee Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal deserved a spot on the hallowed wall of handicappers, linemakers, innovators and outlaws, then Sacco’s name should be up there twice.
At the height of his operation in the early 1990s, he employed the latest technology available to operate from the Dominican Republic to downtown Las Vegas. Tech changes have come so rapidly that his use of computers, masked phone lines and the early internet might appear positively antiquated today, but those who knew the real score in the multibillion-dollar shadow sports betting industry followed his lead. At a time when only Nevada offered legalized sports betting, Cigar was the clandestine king of bookmaking’s multibillion-dollar netherworld.
In the Bay Area, his office inside the 7 Mile House pub took in millions each year in bets. A few years later, his Los Angeles office alone handled hundreds of millions of dollars a year and had links to cities in the East before being infiltrated by undercover informants. He’d eventually move to Las Vegas, but failed to blend in.
As savvy and scorned federal informant Dan Hanks put it to a reporter after helping to expose Sacco’s LA headquarters, “It is the opinion of other bookmakers that Ron Sacco is the largest bookmaker probably in the world. … He decided to go high-tech with computerized systems, satellite systems, international 800 telephone systems … do what other corporations do, put everything on computer to keep track.”
Chat up local veterans of the legal and regulated Las Vegas bookmaking fraternity about Sacco’s place in the pantheon, and the vote is unanimous. They wouldn’t want to be caught posing for photographs with him, but they have deep respect for his ability to innovate despite certain obstacles.
Like that law-enforcement takedown in Los Angeles that forced the San Francisco native to move his office to Las Vegas. Back then, I regularly interviewed a colorful cadre of illegal bookmakers as part of my job as a newspaper columnist. Sacco was the talk of the town.
But Las Vegas was a small town, and it didn’t take long for detectives to follow Cigar’s smoke. He eventually served a year in prison. From behind bars in Jean, a very reliable source told me, Sacco had access to the warden’s phone and kept his action rolling.
After he was released, Sacco headed south to the Dominican Republic and is credited with starting a new generation of offshore sportsbooks in places they were legal or at least unregulated. The supposed loophole didn’t last, but offshore sportsbooks continue to confound law enforcement and regulators to this new day that finds legal bookmaking rapidly expanding in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2018 decision to overturn the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992.
Today, everyone’s getting in on the action even as California-based illegal bookmakers Wayne Nix, Matt Bowyer and many others make big headlines for operating multimillion-dollar client lists and spending big in Las Vegas casinos. Compared to Cigar, they are no better than his apprentices.
The year 1992 was not only a time when sports wagering was being hotly debated in Congress, but it was the same year that Sacco appeared in an entertaining and highly confident interview with “60 Minutes.” He was criticized and called arrogant by some of his peers, and more than one predicted his high profile would make him a target.
But the truth is, Sacco was always a target and had at least eight convictions for illegal gambling. Heat in the Dominican would move him to Costa Rica, still a favorite locale for the illegal operators.
Sacco pled guilty to illegal bookmaking charges in June 1994 and was hit with a 68-month federal sentence for running an offshore sportsbook that brought in an estimated $100 million a month. He was paroled after approximately three years.
“You’ve got a multibillion dollar — multibillions being wagered across the United States in the course of a year,” Sacco told “60 Minutes” reporter Steve Kroft. “I mean, it’s there. You can deny it all you want, but it’s not going to go away. It’s there. People are going to play.”
Cigar Sacco was right about that, too.
John L. Smith is an author and longtime columnist. He was born in Henderson and his family’s Nevada roots go back to 1881. His stories have appeared in Time, Readers Digest, The Daily Beast, Reuters, Ruralite and Desert Companion, among others. He also offers weekly commentary on Nevada Public Radio station KNPR.
