Thursday, March 6, 2008 | 2 a.m.
He’s back.
Former Crazy Horse Too owner Rick Rizzolo checked into a federal halfway house Tuesday night in Las Vegas to serve the remaining month of a 366-day sentence for tax evasion.
The 49-year-old Rizzolo was furloughed from the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles, where he has spent the past 10 months. He has received some time off for good behavior.
The halfway house, the Las Vegas Community Corrections Center at 2901 Industrial Road, is about six blocks from the now-closed topless club that landed Rizzolo in trouble with the law.
One of the first things Rizzolo did under the supervision of the halfway house was report to Metro Police and register as an ex-felon, something state law required him to do within 48 hours, said John Casale, the facility’s director.
At the 120-bed center, the only private halfway house in Las Vegas that contracts with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Rizzolo will be evaluated to determine whether he is suitable to work outside the facility and receive community passes that allow him to spend additional time away.
He’s also eligible to leave the center for medical and legal appointments.
Residents at the halfway house, which is monitored by cameras, live in dormitory-style rooms — four beds to a room — and share communal bathrooms.
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There was bad news in federal court this week for two well-known personal injury lawyers reported to be facing FBI scrutiny.
At the fraud and money laundering trial of personal injury attorney Noel Gage, the wife of a key government witness placed lawyers Robert Eglet and Robert Vannah in the “inner circle” of medical consultant Howard Awand, the central figure in an FBI probe into a massive scheme that allowed a few attorneys and physicians to line their pockets at the expense of the victims in malpractice cases.
Joanne Venger, the wife of Dr. Benjamin Venger, who had testified a day earlier for the government, said Awand, Eglet and Vannah liked to call themselves the “Medical Mafia.”
Awand is scheduled to stand trial this year for his dealings with Gage, who was not identified by Venger’s wife as being part of that inner circle.
•••
Anthony Eppolito, the son of Louis Eppolito, a former New York police detective the media dubbed the “Mafia cop,” is standing trial in U.S. District Court this week on charges of selling an ounce of methamphetamine to an undercover FBI informant.
The informant, Steve Corso, is the same man who set up the elder Eppolito on drug trafficking charges and testified against him in New York in 2006 in a separate and widely publicized mob murder case. The drug charges are still pending, but Louis Eppolito’s conviction in the murder case was thrown out by the federal trial judge.
Attorneys for Anthony Eppolito and his co-defendant, Guido Bravatti, contended in court this week that Corso entrapped their clients in the local drug case. The lawyers mounted a furious assault on the credibility of Corso, who again was on the witness stand.
The elder Eppolito pleaded guilty in federal court here last month to one count of filing a false tax return and is in federal custody awaiting trial on the New York drug charges.
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