Pittsburgh Mafia Gambling Boss Bobby Ianelli Dies Age 95
According to The Gangster Report, Robert E. "Bobby I" Iannelli, who had been a mainstay of the gambling underworld in Western Pennsylvania for almost fifty years, passed away quietly on July 15 at the age of ninety-five.
Iannelli, who lived in McCandless Township and Jupiter, Florida, passed away quietly in the company of his loved ones, according to his obituary at Devlin Funeral Home.
Iannelli, arguably the last member of the LaRocca-Genovese mafia family, changed Steeltown's sports betting regulations.
His first encounter with the law occurred in the 1950s when he was penalized for operating football pools. He started out as a small-time bookmaker. He developed an underground empire over the years that allegedly managed businesses worth millions of dollars throughout the counties of Allegheny and Westmoreland.
According to a 1990 study by the Pennsylvania Crime Commission, Iannelli was a member of the infamous Pittsburgh Mafia, also known as the LaRocca-Genovese family.
Iannelli was never accused of violence, despite the fact that the LaRocca-Genovese family was formerly a vicious crime enterprise.
Legal Issues
Once a dominant force in the city's rackets, the syndicate—named for former rulers John LaRocca and Michael Genovese—was decimated in the 1990s by prosecutions and a change in power. Iannelli, who continued to operate "Chub's Place," a North Park cafe that served as his base of operations, was one of the few people to survive its decline.
Federal legal conflicts peppered his career. Iannelli was incarcerated in the 1970s and early 1990s after being found guilty of engaging in unlawful gambling. Authorities indicted the elderly gangster, his son Rodney, and eleven other people in February 2019 in connection with a vast numbers lottery and sports-betting conspiracy, which led to the most recent arrest.
Along with his son, he entered a guilty plea in September 2020 and consented to pay fines of almost $300,000. Both individuals were spared additional jail time when the judge deferred their 10-year sentence in favor of probation.
In 2020, Donald Liddick, a professor of criminal law at Penn State, told Casino.org that Iannelli had been "a numbers guy and bookie around Pittsburgh for decades." He was referred to as the jewel in the LaRocca-Genovese gambling machine in a Tribune-Review profile.
Old School Gangster
According to Devlin's obituary, he was surrounded by loved ones in his final moments and was a cherished husband, father to four children, and great-grandfather. In a message announcing his passing this week, mob journalist Scott Burnstein referred to him as "old-school" and one of the greatest gamblers of all time.
Burnstein and other mob-watchers view his passing as the symbolic demise of Pittsburgh's traditional organized crime elite. Liddick claims that the once-powerful LaRocca-Genovese family, which in its prime spanned from the Hill District to suburban eateries in the 1950s to 1980s, has "dissolved into informal groups" with no centralized leadership.
