Gamble of a lifetime

For Nick Mitola, life is all about gambling. As a teenager growing up in New Jersey, he was a high school bookie, taking sports bets. As a young man, he sold cocaine, betting he wouldn’t get caught. When he was caught, he testified against 20 of his friends in the Lucchese organized crime family, betting they wouldn’t hunt him down after they were acquitted in the longest trial of organized crime in U.S. history.

And while he was working as an FBI informant, he took another gamble – selling heroin.

In perhaps the biggest bet of his life, Mitola gambled on starting over in 1987 when he was relocated to Spokane under the federal Witness Protection Program.

But like most of his earlier wagers, Nicholas Peter “Nick” Mitola Jr. lost that one, too. Four years after moving to Spokane, he committed a gangland-style killing over a drug deal gone bad and was caught.

He got out of prison with a plea bargain and opened an espresso stand in Spokane – an enterprise that authorities described as a front for the biggest bookmaking operation the city had ever seen.

And because of a chance meeting in Spokane with Al Anglisano, another federally protected witness, the 58-year-old Mitola sits in the Spokane County Jail today, awaiting an expected Tuesday sentencing on a gun possession charge.

Cold cuts and making book

Born in Orange, N.J., in 1947, Mitola played football, basketball and baseball before graduating from high school in 1965. He attended a junior college in Boston, then transferred to Emporia College in Kansas. But even in the middle of Kansas he got into trouble.

“I was arrested for grand larceny and I was in jail until the end of the semester, and I never went back to college,” Mitola recently told a federal jury in his firearms trial in Spokane.

After serving his sentence, Mitola returned to New Jersey to operate a deli. He learned how to cut meat and cater parties while secretly perfecting the illegal bookmaking skills he learned in high school.

“I began gambling in sport betting operations, horse racing, poker … which were illegal in New Jersey,” he testified in U.S. District Court.

In an interview a few years ago, Mitola bragged about betting $100,000 on the Super Bowl and keeping $420,000 in emergency gambling money in his sock drawer.

When the cold cuts and bookmaking lost their allure, Mitola moved from New Jersey to Las Vegas. Between 1974 and 1978, he worked as a poker and blackjack dealer, and later as a legal “sports book,” laying down point-spreads on sporting events.

But his felony conviction in Kansas kept him from getting a supervisory position, so he went back to New Jersey where in 1980 he married and had a daughter.

The following year, Mitola and his bride moved to Colorado, where he trained for a management job with Arby’s. Despite his deli experience, work with the fast-food company fizzled when his felony record prevented him from getting a required bond to handle cash and deposits.

Returning to his comfort zone, Mitola crisscrossed the country and went back to New Jersey and life in a catering deli until he was arrested in 1984 for possession with intent to distribute cocaine.

An offer he couldn’t refuse

Mitola was sentenced to 10 years in prison, but it wasn’t long before FBI agents offered a deal: tell the FBI what he knew about the operations of the Lucchese family in New Jersey and he’d go free.

Mitola took another gamble and jumped at the deal.

He worked for the FBI for a couple of years in the mid-1980s, secretly wearing a transmitter as he hung out with Lucchese family associates in a New Jersey luncheonette called the Hole in the Wall, where mobster pictures decorated the walls.

Ultimately, Mitola’s work helped the FBI develop loan-sharking, gambling, drug-dealing and credit card fraud charges against 20 members of the family, according to various published accounts. But while working for the FBI, Mitola was also selling heroin.

Over a four-month period in late 1987, Mitola stayed at a “safe house” in New York City while serving as a prosecution witness against former associates in a federal racketeering trial in New Jersey.

Author Robert Rudolph, who wrote “The Boys from New Jersey,” once described Mitola as the “government’s secret weapon” against the family.

But a defense attorney in the same case mockingly said Mitola was nothing more than a drug dealer-bookmaker, “and certainly no heavyweight.”

Mitola apparently wasn’t too convincing; all the defendants in the case were acquitted. The Justice Department called the case its only significant loss against a major organized crime family.

After the trial, Mitola was rushed into hiding for a few days in St. Paul, Minn., where he was transformed into Mike Milano, complete with a new Social Security number.

A body and a plea bargain

Mitola, aka Milano, arrived in Spokane on Dec. 13, 1987, a foggy day with below-freezing temperatures. He was greeted at the airport by a deputy U.S. marshal who worked exclusively with federally protected witnesses from a numberless office in the U.S. Courthouse downtown.

The Marshals Service won’t talk about its witness relocation program. But those familiar with it speculate that as many as 200 federal witnesses, maybe more, have been relocated to the Spokane area.

Mitola’s wife and young daughter also moved to Spokane, “but found it very difficult to have any kind of life,” he testified during his trial, so they moved to Pueblo, Colo., to live with relatives. They divorced in 1989.

Federally protected witness No. 4986 got a few hundred dollars a month from the government, but needed a job. Mitola found one in 1988 at the Wilkes & Wilkes card room on North Division where he was a “prop poker player” – playing for the house.

After Wilkes & Wilkes closed in the summer of 1989, Mitola worked a few months as a card room manager and pull-tab operator at the Stockyards before it, too, shut down. He didn’t immediately find another job. “I was just gambling and running around town,” he testified.

It was over a poker table in the early 1990s that Mitola, living as Mike Milano, met Iranian immigrant Iraj “George” Vedadi, who had moved to Spokane to start a new life after fleeing his homeland. In Spokane, Vedadi had a fondness for gambling and was known to carry large amounts of cash.

Vedadi disappeared with $68,000 in February 1991, shortly after the naked, bloody body of one of his associates was found in East Spokane, apparently deliberately dragged by a car.

About the same time, Mitola also disappeared. And this time, neither the Marshals Service nor his second wife knew where he was. His wife told investigators that the last time she saw her husband he was cleaning up blood in the bathroom of their East Gordon home.

Eleven months later, Vedadi’s decomposed body was found stuffed in the trunk of a 1977 Chrysler New Yorker on a 660-acre ranch near Newport in Pend Oreille County. His head and ankles were bound with duct tape. The man who owned the ranch told authorities he’d been offered $3,000 by a man named Mike Milano to bury the car and its “hazardous waste” contents.

During the Vedadi homicide investigation, Spokane sheriff’s detectives discovered that their prime suspect was a federally protected witness whose real name was Nicholas Mitola. Besides illegal gambling, investigators learned he was heavily involved in drug trafficking.

Mitola was terminated from the witness protection program and charged with first-degree murder in Spokane County. He struck a plea bargain that allowed him to spend only 28 months in state prison for manslaughter.

The case of Vedadi’s associate, who was found dead in East Spokane, remains unsolved.

Mitola’s attorney, Public Defender Dick Cease, told the court Mitola acted in self-defense and stabbed Vedadi to death in a “drug scam that went bad.” In a jailhouse interview a few days later, Mitola told The Spokesman-Review he wanted to return to Spokane, open a nursery and build a house in the woods.

Vedadi’s family was outraged over Mitola’s sentence and sued the federal government for $10 million for relocating criminals to unsuspecting communities like Spokane. The lawsuit ultimately was dismissed based on the legal principle of sovereign immunity – making it difficult to sue the federal government.

Mitola’s federal probation was revoked over the killing, and he spent a few more months in federal prison.

“I love Spokane,” Mitola said in a 1992 interview before going off to prison. “It’s a real family town. There’s friendly people and nine golf courses – nine!”

After serving his time, he was no longer thinking about a nursery and a house in the woods. Mitola went to Antigua for five months to learn the Internet sports-betting business.

He moved back to Spokane in early 1999, rented a house on the South Hill and opened “Cascade Espresso LX,” listing a business address on East Third. But there was no coffee, only a “cheese box” – a telephone-switching device Mitola used as part of an elaborate bookmaking operation.

The espresso business was merely a front for a bank of phones and computers.

State gaming investigators and the FBI quickly caught on to the bookmaking ring, which involved at least 360 active bettors who placed bets with 15 bookies, including Mitola’s girlfriend.

The bookies processed more than $100,000 a week in illegal sports bets, usually placed at a downtown sports bar. Investigators said Mitola collected 10 percent on each bet.

His phone records showed he placed calls to New Jersey and other states, indicating he was “laying off bets” with other bookies, probably some with ties to organized crime.

Investigators determined Mitola was involved in more than illegal gambling in Spokane. One witness told investigators Mitola was sending controlled substances to the East Coast by hiding them inside large fish. In return, Mitola was receiving “large amounts of cash” in FedEx envelopes.

Chance meeting

Mitola was arrested by FBI agents in early April 2000, and remained in custody. He pleaded poverty and was provided a public defender. Two months later, he pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Spokane to a charge of operating an illegal gambling business.

He got the maximum sentence – 24 months in federal prison. Given time for good behavior, he served 21 months and returned to work-release custody at a Spokane halfway house.

On federal probation, he was released to work at the same sports bar where his bookies had taken bets. It was also the same bar where Mitola met Spokane businessman Mike Chastek. The two struck up a friendship.

Chastek said he knew about Mitola’s federal gambling conviction, but not about his involvement in the 1991 killing of Vedadi. It wasn’t long before Mitola was working for Chastek, who owns Paul Davis Restoration, a local franchise that does water and fire damage restoration and remodeling.

“I felt sorry for him,” Chastek said last week. “At first he was a good worker, always dependable. But then he had these personal problems.”

While working on an estimate for a remodeling job at a South Hill home in April 2003, Mitola opened a phone book looking for a real estate appraiser. He left several random call-back messages, including one to a firm owned by a friend of Perry Adrienne.

Adrienne recognized Mitola’s name from news accounts about the bookmaking ring and manslaughter case and decided to call him back.

Until the two men met outside the South Hill remodel, Mitola had no way of knowing that Adrienne was really Al “The Penguin” Anglisano, another federally protected witness trying to make an honest living in Spokane. Their friendship would be another gamble for Mitola.