Jimmy Casino.

Once upon a time, there was a man named James Stockwell who lived in Orange County.

Mr. Stockwell led a colorful life. He ran strip clubs on the Sunset Strip in the 1970s. He was also involved in credit card fraud and counterfeiting. Mr. Stockwell went away for a while.

When he came out of prison, he started a chain of hotdog stands called “Cowboy Hotdogs”. He raised a million dollars for his hotdog stands. But “Cowboy Hotdogs” folded; worse yet, Mr. Stockwell admitted that he stole $412,000 from his investors.

Mr. Stockwell, also known as “Jimmy Casino”, also ran the Mustang Topless Theater in Orange County. (Strippers, always with the strippers.) By 1987, he was in a bind: the IRS was going to shut down the Mustang because of “millions of dollars in unpaid taxes”, he didn’t have the money to make restitution payments to the “Cowboy Hotdogs” investors, and he owed other folks money. Serious other folks.

After years of staying a step ahead of the law and the people whom he owed money, Casino, 48, was ambushed at his Buena Park condo Jan. 2, 1987.”We’re getting paid to do this,” one of the two gunmen allegedly said.
They raped Casino’s 22-year-old girlfriend. Then they pumped three bullets into the back of his head with a silencer-equipped handgun before making off with credit cards, fur coats, jewelry and two of his cars.

25 years later, a man named Richard Morris Jr. is standing trial for the murder of Jimmy Casino. The investigators in the case matched DNA from Morris to DNA recovered from Casino’s girlfriend, and arrested him in 2008.

Casino’s death in 1987 was the opening salvo in a battle for control of the Mustang strip club in Santa Ana, which grossed $150,000 a month and had ties to organized crime.
Over the next 15 months, a financial backer of the Mustang was shot and blinded by a Los Angeles mob underboss who was convicted of attempted murder. Mustang bouncer “Big” George Yudzevich — a 6-foot-7 slab of intimidation who also happened to be an FBI informant — was shot to death in an Irvine industrial park; no one was ever charged.

I’m looking forward to the book about this case.

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