Las Vegas Sun

March 18, 2024

Columnist Jeff German: Cecola getting foot back in door

It was a deal Metro Police and Clark County licensing investigators couldn't pass up.

On March 9, 1998, following his federal tax conviction, Sam Cecola -- a man investigators believed had ties to organized crime in Chicago -- voluntarily agreed to surrender his license to run Club Paradise rather than go through an extensive revocation hearing.

But investigators got much more than they bargained for in the five-page agreement.

Cecola agreed to turn over his financial interests in the topless club to his wife, Geralyn, and have nothing to do with running the club. He also agreed to never again seek a privileged license in Clark County and to never again set foot in Club Paradise.

He didn't even bother to contest the alleged mob ties that had inspired investigators to push hard for his banishment.

Today, however, Cecola is challenging those alleged ties, which he insists were fabricated by police, and the great deal investigators thought they had to keep Cecola out of the topless nightclub industry doesn't look so great.

The 58-year-old Cecola is in a good position to persuade a district judge to let him return to Club Paradise, and investigators may be unable to stop him.

Cecola isn't bold enough to ask for his license back. He knows investigators are on firm legal footing in denying him a license because of his tax conviction.

But he has found a way to come back and call the shots at Club Paradise without a license, which has to be giving investigators fits. He has filed suit to rescind the 1998 agreement so that he can return as a "consultant" to his wife.

Cecola and his longtime lawyer, Dominic Gentile, contend the 1998 agreement was signed under duress and violated Cecola's constitutional rights, including those that allow a husband and wife to engage in communications about their financial well-being as a couple.

The unfairness of the agreement is demonstrated further, Cecola and Gentile say, by the fact that Cecola can walk into any topless club in Clark County except the one run by his wife.

In a sworn affidavit, Cecola says it has become necessary for him to play a more prominent role in Club Paradise because the club recently lost its general manager, and his wife is unable to manage the club herself.

Cecola also explains why he signed the sweeping agreement under duress five years ago.

At the time, he says, he was a federal witness against several Chicago mobsters and would have had to disclose that at a public revocation hearing in Las Vegas to prove that he wasn't an associate of "The Outfit."

Had he made that revelation, he says, he would have endangered his life and subjected himself to federal prosecution in Chicago for violating the secrecy of grand jury proceedings. He didn't even tell Gentile.

So Cecola says he bit the bullet and signed the agreement to at least ensure that the lucrative Club Paradise stayed in his family.

But today he wants back in, and this time he can freely discuss the Chicago case because all of the defendants have been convicted.

And this time he has a lawyer who knows how to use that information to break a deal that probably never should have been made.

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