Wednesday, March 26, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
THE Nevada attorney general's office began investigating the highest levels of the State Gaming Control Board months before one of the board's chief electronics experts pleaded guilty to slot cheating and became a cooperating witness.
A former investigator with the attorney general's office who put together most of the criminal case against the ex-board employee, Ron Harris, said his superiors in Las Vegas described the inquiry as an "intelligence" probe.
The probe, according to the ex-investigator, Mike Anzalone, took shape shortly after Deputy Attorney General David Thompson was hired full time in December 1995 to help prosecute Harris.
Anzalone said the majority of the allegations Thompson was pursuing had been raised previously by witnesses who had vendettas against the board and had been dismissed as not being credible.
Thompson denied conducting an intelligence investigation, and refused further comment.
Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa today also denied that she had conducted an intelligence probe of the Control Board.
"The most important thing to keep in mind is that the Harris case is a complex and multifaceted case involving a Gaming Control Board employee who violated the law," she said.
Del Papa added that during the course of the criminal probe, allegations of wrongdoing were raised about current and former board employees.
But the 51-year-old Anzalone responded: "I was flat out told they were splitting the investigation in two. The criminal case I would handle and the intelligence investigation would be handled by another investigator."
Others back investigator
Two former Control Board enforcement chiefs, Ron Asher and Andy Vanyo, backed up Anzalone's story, confirming they were interviewed by the attorney general's office last spring about alleged high-level misconduct at the board.
Harris, who worked in the board's new games lab, didn't plead guilty to four counts of slot cheating and begin cooperating with the attorney general until August.
Anzalone said he believes he was taken off the intelligence case in January 1996 and forced to resign a month later because he wouldn't help Thompson pursue the investigation, which did not lead to the filing of criminal charges against any other Control Board employees.
Assistant Attorney General Brooke Nielsen this week would not comment on why Anzalone left the office, and she would not answer specific questions about Thompson's activities.
Anzalone said as many as four different investigators, including himself, were involved in the intelligence probe before Harris entered the picture.
Thompson voiced concerns to him early on about the possibility that other members of the board's lab were involved in the cheating scam with Harris, Anzalone said.
But Anzalone said he told Thompson he had already checked that out and concluded no one else at the board had participated.
Earlier this month, Del Papa acknowledged that her office investigated Harris' allegations of wrongdoing among gaming regulators after he pleaded guilty Aug. 9.
Del Papa did not indicate that misconduct allegations were looked into months earlier.
Secret tapes made
Harris, facing similar cheating charges in New Jersey, had outlined his accusations in six secret videotapes with Thompson in August. But Del Papa said the allegations could not be substantiated.
Excerpts from the tapes, however, appeared March 12 on ABC's "Prime Time Live," raising the ire of casino industry leaders and some state lawmakers critical of the way Del Papa had lost control of the tapes. Del Papa has denied her office was the leak to ABC.
According to those who have seen portions of the tapes, Thompson and his investigators appeared to steer Harris into talking about some of the same allegations they had been pursuing in the months before Harris pleaded guilty.
One line of questioning was said to have involved ludicrous claims of misconduct by Bible and well-known gaming lawyer Frank Schreck during the licensing process.
On the excerpts shown by "Prime Time Live," Thompson appeared to be leading on Harris.
Anzalone, who had worked at the Control Board before coming to the attorney general's office in August 1993, said that during his earlier dealings with Thompson the prosecutor appeared more concerned about dredging up the old allegations about the board than pursuing criminal charges against Harris.
"He just got totally sidetracked," Anzalone said. "I don't know where the authority was to do this."
Conspiracy theories
Anzalone added that Thompson constantly was throwing "conspiracy theories" at him.
Asher said his contact with Thompson led him to conclude the prosecutor "could see a snake under every rock."
Asher said he told Thompson that he was "all wet" when the prosecutor questioned him last spring about the unsubstantiated allegations.
Vanyo, who preceded Asher at the helm of the enforcement division, said Anzalone told him in the spring that the attorney general's office was trying to "hang" Control Board Chairman Bill Bible and that Anzalone wouldn't go along with it.
Vanyo, now chief of security at the Luxor, said an investigator with the attorney general's office later interviewed him, attempting to revive allegations that Bible knew ahead of time about a phony bookmaking raid staged by the chairman's intelligence chief in 1990 to protect the identity of an informant.
Bible, who has repeatedly denied any such knowledge, forced the intelligence chief, Ron Hollis, to resign after the phony raid. The informant, Matis Marcus, ultimately was indicted for running an illegal sports betting operation that Hollis had secretly sanctioned.
"They maybe thought I had something, but I sure as hell didn't," said Vanyo, who retired as chief of enforcement in March 1990. "I didn't give them anything derogatory about Bill Bible."
Long-standing rift
Bible -- now being considered for a presidential appointment to a federal commission that will study gambling over the next two years -- has long been at odds with Del Papa.
During the 1995 Legislature, Bible made it known to Del Papa and some lawmakers that he was unhappy about the quality of legal representation he was getting from her office.
Bible declined further comment.
Asher, meanwhile, confirmed that he had a conversation with Anzalone last spring in which Anzalone expressed concern that the Harris case was veering off course.
Asher, an ex-FBI agent now running a gaming consulting business, said his records show that Thompson later met with him on May 21, about a month before he retired as chief of enforcement.
Asher said Thompson arranged the meeting under the guise of talking about the Harris prosecution. Harris was facing criminal charges by that time.
The conversation, however, turned to other allegations of wrongdoing at the board, Asher said.
Asher could not recall specifically what Thompson asked him.
But he said: "It seemed like a major effort to find something at the board. My general impression was that he was looking for something that wasn't there."
Tainted witnesses
Aside from Hollis, one of those Thompson apparently relied on was Frank Romano, a former American Coin Co. co-owner banished from the industry in 1990 over a slot-rigging scam.
Romano and Hollis, both of whom alleged that unlawful conspiracies had taken place at the Control Board, were suing the state at the time the attorney general was reviving their conspiracy allegations.
Romano, who did not return a phone call, was interviewed extensively on the "Prime Time Live" report.
Anzalone said investigators also were asked to check out information in "The Black Book and the Mob," a book written by two UNLV criminal justice professors critical of Nevada's gaming regulatory process. The book was published in November 1995.
More evidence that Thompson was pursing a case against the board before Harris officially began cooperating appeared in an internal memo that was shown on the March 12 "Prime Time Live" segment.
In the Feb. 26, 1996, memo, Thompson summarizes telephone conversations he had a couple of days earlier with Gordon Hickman, a former lab technician for the Control Board.
Thompson indicated that Hickman had told him he believed some licensees were getting preferential treatment at the board. Thompson wrote that Hickman also had questioned the integrity of current and past board members.
Anzalone, who worked for Vanyo and Asher, said he never had any trouble at the attorney general's office until he crossed Thompson.
In an Oct. 2, 1995, letter to Del Papa, Bible praised Anzalone's work on the criminal case against Harris.
"We appreciate the efforts of your investigator, Mr. Anzalone," Bible wrote in urging the attorney general to press ahead with the case.
Bible called the Harris case "possibly the most serious cheating effort in the history of gambling."
He went on to suggest that Harris should be "prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law in the most expeditious manner possible."
Harris was arrested two months later.
Relations deteriorate
Anzalone, a veteran of the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Police Department and the Maryland State Police, said that as Thompson tried to dig further into the Control Board's activities, relations between the two men soured.
At one point, he added, Thompson even questioned his integrity, and another investigator Thompson had brought into the case accused him of withholding information.
Anzalone said things got so bad that he complained to Nielsen in a telephone call.
Nielsen appeared sympathetic, he said, but she called him back the next day and told him to do whatever Thompson instructed him to do.
Nielsen denied ever having any such conversations with Anzalone.
Eventually, Anzalone said, he was taken off the intelligence case and life was made miserable for him at the office.
He said he resigned on Feb. 26, 1996, and has been working as a private investigator ever since.
Earlier this week, shortly after Nielsen was asked to comment on Thompson's activities, Del Papa telephoned Anzalone.
"I felt intimidated when she started out the conversation by asking if I had an attorney," Anzalone said. "She told me that my name would be dragged through the mud."
Anzalone said Del Papa, with Nielsen on the line, attempted to get him to back off using the word "intelligence" to describe the investigation of the Control Board.
But he said he stood firm, insisting that was how Del Papa's own investigators, his former colleagues, had called it.
Del Papa, however, said today that Anzalone recanted his statements regarding the intelligence probe, and she insisted that she did not attempt to intimidate him.
The attorney general's office, meanwhile, after disavowing Harris' allegations and being told months ago that he is the one of the biggest threats ever to the casino industry, has yet to press for his sentencing. His guilty plea was entered seven months ago.
archive
