“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.” “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. 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. He said he knew of places on Mason Street, “even in the early 1990s,” and downtown where gambling thrived. You could place a bet, the card playing, the workers playing cards after work,” he said. “I remember my uncle talking about the bars downtown. 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. 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.īut 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. 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. 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.Īfter all, until about 2000, gambling in Niles was not viewed in a negative light by most people. 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.Īs early as 1987 and continuing into February of this year, Infante collected thousands of dollars on sports betting for profit, the indictment says.

Area steel mills provided workers with enough money to stop in Niles on their way home to entertain themselves with a wager.

In the 1960s, Niles ranked among the best high school sports programs in the state, drawing interest in betting. By Ed Niles of Ralph Infante’s youth and many years after was a place where illegal gambling was easy to find.

Niles slot machine records