June 5, 2024 — Federal investigators in Las Vegas have focused in on former Chicago mobsters Paulie (The Indian) Schiro and Joey (The Blonde) Hansen, affiliates of the old Hole In The Wall Gang, as the “prime suspects” in two cold-case murders being actively probed in recent years, per sources in Nevada law enforcement. Hansen died of cancer in the 1990s. “Paulie the Indian,” a convicted murderer, is still living at age 88, three years removed from walking free from a quarter century in the can for racketeering, robbery and first-degree homicide.

The pair were both childhood friends of Chicago mob crew chief Tony (The Ant) Spilotro and relocated to the West Coast with him when he was promoted to overseer of the Outfit’s Las Vegas hotel and casino interests in the early 1970s. Spilotro placed Schiro in Phoenix and Hansen in Los Angeles and used them to fence jewelry stolen by Spilotro’s infamous Hole In The Wall Gang in Vegas, among other mob-related assignments. They also served as Spilotro’s main hit-man tandem, with “Tony the Ant” tapping them for murder contracts coast-to-coast, including some of the more than two dozen he ordered while ruling the Sin City underworld per FBI intelligence records and federal-court filings.

Earlier this week, The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that the slaying of L.A. mafia associate and federal witness John (Johnny D) Dubeck and his wife Frannie on March 19, 1974, in the courtyard of their Vegas apartment complex, remains an open investigation. Dubeck was on the verge of testifying against L.A. mob heavyweights Peter (Shakes) Milano and Luigi (Little Louie) Gelfuso in a racketeering and gambling case out of U.S. District Court in Southern California. Dubeck, 31, was gangland running buddies with L.A, mob soldier John (Johnny V) Vaccaro, and along with Vaccaro, ran Milano and Gelfuso’s network of back-door gambling parlors in West Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley and fixed poker games and slot machines in various Las Vegas hotels.

According to FBI informants, because “Johnny D” Dubeck lived in Vegas and worked at a casino, Spilotro agreed to handle the Dubeck murder contract for L.A.’s Dragna crime family in exchange for allowing him and the Chicago mob to operate rackets in Los Angeles and San Diego, particularly. Despite Dubeck’s absence at trial, Milano, Gelfuso, Vaccaro and others, were found guilty of the charges. Vaccaro eventually became the L.A. mafia’s point man in Las Vegas. Milano rose to boss of the Dragna mob in the 1980s, a position he allegedly held until he passed away of natural causes in 2012.

Last year, investigators announced to the media that they had suspects still alive in the mysterious ‘Body in the Barrell” case. GR told its readership back then that Paulie Schiro was one of their suspects in what is believed to be the homicide of Chicago mob associate and Las Vegas resort boss John (Johnny Pappas) Panagiotakos, who went missing in August 18,1976 when his superiors in the Windy City worried he was about to flip and might have resurfaced in the form of his skeletal remains (two bullet holes in the back of the skull) in a rusted metal barrel that washed up on the banks of Lake Mead in the spring of 2022.

Schiro and Hansen were present in Las Vegas visiting Spilotro in both March 1974 and August 1976 on the days Dubeck and his wife were killed and Johnny Pappas disappeared, according to sources with intimate knowledge of the investigations. Because of rapidly decreasing water levels, a half-dozen sets of human remains have been discovered off the shores of Lake Mead, some of which law enforcement are hoping to tie to the carnage-strewn Spilotro era (1971-1986). Spilotro was murdered himself gangland-style, beaten, strangled and stomped to death in June 1986 for repeated insubordination in the basement of an Outfit-connected private residence in Chicago. His bloody reign in the desert was chronicled in the film Casino (1995) starring Joe Pesci, Robert DeNiro and Sharon Stone.

Johnny Pappas, 54, went missing on his way to a meeting at Jo Jo’s Restaurant in Las Vegas to discuss selling his boat. Pappas managed the Teamster union-funded Echo Bay Resort Hotel, located on Lake Mead. The FBI in Vegas considered Pappas an associate and operative working for Spilotro and his crew. Pappas’s abandoned car was found at the Circus Circus casino and hotel three days after he went missing.

Pappas was sent to Las Vegas in the 1960s by Chicago mob shot caller Gus (Slim) Alex and went to work at a number of mobbed-up casino and hotels, according to an FBI intelligence memo. In April 1974, he was named CEO of the Echo Bay Resort. Pappas knew Paulie Schiro and Joey Hansen and Pappas could be seen out socializing with Spilotro and Paulie the Indian when Schiro came to town, per sources and FBI surveillance logs from that time period.

At the landmark Operation Family Secrets trial in Chicago in 2007 Schiro was found guilty of participating in the summer 1986 murder of Spilotro crew member, Emil (Little Mal) Vaci, who was part of Schiro’s satellite branch of the Spilotro crew in Arizona. Vaci, 73, was kidnapped and killed as he left his job as the host of a Phoenix-area Italian restaurant, after Outfit shot callers discovered he had testified in front of a federal grand jury investigating the Chicago mob’s role in silently owning and skimming Las Vegas casinos. Schiro drove the hit car in Vaci’s slaying.