Two years ago, government regulators moved to yank a coveted video gaming license away from a 24-hour Cicero diner following questions about the operator’s testimony in a 2010 mob gambling trial. Today, video gaming machines remain at the establishment, and the cash keeps rolling in.
A lot of cash — with more than $2.7 million in bets placed with the video machines at Firebird Enterprises, Inc.’s Steak N Egger franchise, run by Jeffrey Bertucci, since the Illinois Gaming Board filed paperwork in July 2023 to try to revoke its license, agency records show.
Also during that period, the establishment at 5647 W. Ogden Ave. reported more than $200,000 in “net terminal income,” the amount shared by the establishment and the company providing the video machines.
And state and local governments got more than $70,000 in tax revenues from those devices.
Gaming board officials say Bertucci is allowed to keep them in use at his west suburban diner because he’s still appealing the revocation.
“The Firebird Enterprises, Inc./Steak N Egger-Racine appeal/response is confidential and not available” under Illinois’ open records law, a gaming board spokeswoman says.
“Under the Illinois Administrative Procedures Act” and the gaming board’s “Administrative Rules for Disciplinary Action Against Licensees, an operator’s license remains active pending the conclusion of the administrative hearing process including potential appeals.”
“The outcome of the pending proceedings will determine the status of the Firebird/Steak N Egger license.”
When that might be is unclear.
Bertucci couldn’t be reached for comment.
The Chicago Sun-Times reported in May 2023 that Bertucci admitted in federal court in 2010 that he had obtained video gaming devices for his diner from an amusement company linked to one of the most feared figures in the Chicago mob, James Marcello.
Bertucci also testified that he had gotten other gambling machines from a different operator, Casey Szaflarski, who has been portrayed by federal authorities as the mob’s video poker king.
And Bertucci admitted he had paid winnings to gamblers playing those devices — which at the time was illegal to do in Illinois — and shared profits with Szaflarski in a 70/30 split.
Granted immunity in exchange for his testimony against Szaflarski — in a case that also resulted in the convictions of the mob’s reputed Cicero street boss, and a pawnshop owner who had been a high-ranking member of the notorious Outlaws Motorcycle Club — Bertucci was asked by a prosecutor: “Why is it that you only paid out people that you knew?”
Bertucci responded, “Because it was illegal, and I didn’t want to get caught.”
The gaming board, which reports to Gov. JB Pritzker, licensed Firebird to legally operate video gambling machines at the diner in 2019 — with state officials saying they hadn’t known about Bertucci’s sordid disclosures at trial.
After the Sun-Times began asking questions about Firebird in 2023, the agency moved to pull its license, arguing Bertucci hadn’t revealed all of his past troubles on his gaming board paperwork, or later in a routine interview with gaming agents.
He told the agents in 2018 he’d been arrested in 2000 at a business he owned in Stickney for paying “out a customer for play on a coin-operated amusement device” when such gambling was still illegal, records show.
“Bertucci further represented that his use of and involvement with these illegal gambling machines in his business occurred for five or six years during the 2000s before the passage of the Video Gaming Act in 2009” that legalized such gambling, records show.
With the gaming board appreciating Bertucci’s “apparent candor,” the agency granted him the license in 2019, records show.
But “unbeknownst” to the gaming board at the time, Bertucci “had failed to truthfully disclose the full extent and duration of his past involvement with illegal gambling,” including his testimony that “he facilitated and enabled illegal gambling using coin-operated amusement devices in businesses he owned in Chicago and Cicero.”
In recent years, the gaming board has been confronted with a number of questions about whether it’s doing enough to keep possible organized crime figures out of legal gambling in Illinois. The Sun-Times disclosed in the spring that the Bally’s Chicago Casino construction site was using a waste hauler that was long ago linked to the mob by the FBI.
