Illinois Casino 'Black Book' Sat Incomplete for Years Before a Reporter Asked

When the Chicago Sun-Times found that 12 people permanently banned from Illinois casinos in 2023 were missing from the state gaming board's public exclusion list, the agency quietly added them. The list now shows 34 names. The 22 entries that existed before the 2023 round span 1993 to 2016, leaving a gap of nearly seven years in which Governor Pritzker's administration added no new involuntary exclusions beyond that single 2023 cohort. The names had been missing, and it took a newspaper inquiry to surface them.

There are occasions when we here at ReadyBetGo want to bring you interesting facts about the gambling industry  When something catches our eye, we will publish it for your enjoyment.

A Discretionary List the Board Is Not Required to Keep Current

The Illinois Gaming Board's involuntary exclusion list is not governed by any statutory or regulatory deadline. After the Sun-Times asked about the omitted names, an agency spokeswoman said the board "is not required by rule or law to display the names on the website." Administrator Marcus Fruchter declined to explain why the 12 names were absent for roughly two years.

The agency's formal explanation for how the list operates is broad. A statement from Fruchter's office said placement is evaluated "based on case-by-case circumstances" and that "many factors influence placement of individuals on the Exclusion List and other agency initiatives and actions including regulatory and law enforcement strategies and focus, efficacy and necessity of particular actions or tools, competing priorities and mandates, and staff time and resources."

The Sun-Times described the gap as fitting "a pattern of sometimes-lax oversight" under the current administration. Whatever the operational reasoning, the result was a public-facing record of banned gamblers that was materially incomplete, with no legal mechanism to compel correction.

Online Poker Observers Note a Structural Contrast

The Pokeriukas Team, the editorial staff at Pokeriukas who track developments in the Lithuanian-language online poker market, read the Illinois situation as a product of how land-based enforcement was designed. The Illinois list's defining weakness, they note, is structural: it is a discretionary, manually maintained instrument that a regulator can leave incomplete without legal consequence, administered case by case and subject to the same resource constraints and competing priorities the gaming board cited.

On the online side of the industry, the same protective function has been built into platform software rather than left to a regulator's periodic judgment. The pokeriukas.com site documents how digital rooms wire self-exclusion, deposit limits, and account bans directly into the player account, so the barrier the Illinois black book struggles to enforce by hand is enforced automatically online.

“Illinois relies on someone manually deciding to add a name to a list, and even then the name may not appear publicly. On digital platforms, the exclusion is written into the account itself — it does not depend on whether a regulator has time to post it.”

The Cases Behind the 2023 Omissions

The conduct that triggered the 2023 bans covers a wide range. Vincent DelGiudice, an Orland Park resident, pleaded guilty in 2021 to running a sprawling illegal sports betting operation and was sentenced to 18 months in prison. He and ten co-defendants were subsequently permanently banned from Illinois casinos, their names absent from the public list until the Sun-Times inquiry.

Among those co-defendants was Casey Urlacher, the mayor of Mettawa. Urlacher was charged in the bookmaking case but pardoned by President Donald Trump during his first term and never went to trial. The gaming board banned him anyway. Urlacher's reaction was direct: "My whole case was dropped... and I still got banned. That's how f–d up Illinois is... I didn't do anything wrong." He added, with some irony, that the ban "saved me a lot of money, actually."

Two other names from the 2023 round were also left off the public list. Ismail Ateyat is accused of stealing more than $14,000 in gaming chips at gunpoint from Rivers Casino in Des Plaines on October 31, 2023. Abdul Barr is accused of stealing at least $5,000 in chips from Bally's Casino Chicago while on supervised release on September 14, 2023.

A List That Cannot Reach Video Gambling or Sports Betting

The involuntary exclusion list's limitations extend beyond what it publishes. The Illinois Gaming Board, which regulates 17 casinos, has no authority to ban individuals from video gambling establishments or sports betting venues. Extending that reach would require new legislation or an administrative rule change, and a spokeswoman confirmed that "neither of which have been introduced."

Pennsylvania offers a direct comparison. Pennsylvania regulators have the authority to bar gamblers from categories of gambling that extend beyond traditional casinos, and 1,300 people are already barred from that state's 18 casinos. Illinois has produced 34 publicly listed names across the full history of its program.

The oversight picture grows more complicated when specific figures are examined. A garbage contractor with reputed mob ties appeared at the Bally's Chicago construction site in 2025, and gaming board officials said they were unaware of it until the Sun-Times reported the visit. Separately, in late 2022 the board reversed an earlier decision and licensed James Banks' video gambling company, despite having written in 2021 that his associations "would adversely affect public confidence and trust in video gaming." Fruchter declined to explain the reversal.

Two Documented Figures Absent Without Explanation

Neither Casey Szaflarski, once described as the mob's video poker kingpin, nor Jeffrey Bertucci, who admitted at trial to sharing illegal gambling profits with Szaflarski and paying out illegal winnings to gamblers, appears anywhere on the gaming board's exclusion list. Fruchter has not said why. The list's stated purpose is to keep individuals who pose a threat to the integrity of Illinois gambling out of licensed venues. With both Szaflarski and Bertucci absent and no explanation forthcoming, that purpose remains visibly incomplete.