Illinois Gaming Board officials say they were unaware of key information when the agency approved a state license in 2019 for Jeffrey Bertucci’s Steak N Egger diner in Cicero to offer video gaming and that they now plan to move to revoke the license.
Officials with the state agency say they hadn’t realized when they approved the gaming license that Bertucci had testified in 2010 in a mob gambling case that he’d paid winnings from illegal video gaming machines installed in his diner — and split his take with the Chicago Outfit’s so-called video poker king, Casey Szaflarski.
But following a Chicago Sun-Times report in May quoting gambling regulators as saying about Bertucci, “The allegations you have raised are serious, and the Illinois Gaming Board is looking into them,” the gaming board now plans to revoke the license it gave Bertucci’s company, Firebird Enterprises, Inc.
Officials say Bertucci didn’t disclose the revelations from his 2010 testimony at the federal criminal trial of reputed mobsters including Szaflarski.
“Bertucci misrepresented the extent and duration of his involvement with and use of coin-operated amusement devices for illegal gambling purposes,” according to a complaint issued by the gaming board.
“Board Rule 310(a)(8) subjects a licensee to discipline for misrepresenting any information to the board.”
“By engaging in the conduct described above,” Bertucci’s company is “subject to discipline.”
Bertucci, a Lemont resident, couldn’t be reached for comment.
The gaming board’s complaint says that, in 2018, while investigating Bertucci’s suitability for a gambling license, officials knew he’d been arrested in 2000 for keeping a gambling place after a waitress at an establishment he owned in Stickney “paid out a customer for play on a coin-operated amusement device.” Such gambling was illegal in Illinois in 2000.
“Based in part on Bertucci’s apparent candor” to the gaming board at that time, the agency says, it granted him a license in 2019.
Gaming board officials say that they learned of his public testimony at the high-profile 2010 mob trial only in May, when Sun-Times reporters asked about Bertucci and the admissions he made in court under a grant of immunity from prosecution.
“After the Chicago Sun-Times inquired about Mr. Bertucci in May of 2023, the board conducted an investigation which resulted in a disciplinary complaint against Firebird Enterprises,” a spokeswoman for the state agency says.
Bertucci’s testimony was reported in news accounts in 2010.
His 2019 license approval occurred before Marcus Fruchter, the agency’s current administrator, was named to that post, though one of his aides was in charge at that time.
Since then, records show that six gambling devices at Bertucci’s Steak N Egger restaurant at 5647 W. Ogden Ave. in Cicero have hauled in more than $4.8 million in bets. Of that, about $361,000 is “net terminal income” — split between the restaurant and the gaming company from which it gets the machines.
Of the gambling money the Cicero diner has brought in during that time, the state of Illinois has gotten more than $100,000 in taxes, and the town of Cicero has gotten more than $18,000 as its share of taxes.
