Former Mobster Who Was Pronounced Dead Really Fled To Vegas, Found After 32 Years!!

Faced with rising gambling debts, dangerous mob ties and a troubled home life, Chicago commodities trader Arthur Gerald Jones vanished in 1979, leaving behind his wife of 17 years and three young children. Hit the jump to read the rest of the story.
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The courts closed the book on Jones in 1986, declaring him dead. But by that time he was several chapters into his second life under a new identity of his own creation.

“My feeling is we’ve been together 22 years, and he’s been very loving and respectful to me and my family. And I love him. And everything’s fine,” Patricia Baal said of Jones, the longtime boyfriend she knew as Joseph Richard Sandelli.

Jones was arrested Tuesday and booked at the Clark County jail on several felonies, most related to identity fraud. Along with his Sandelli alias, the 72-year-old Jones used several other names in his decades-long quest to stay hidden, authorities said.

“It’s a little emotional over here,” Baal said Friday in a phone interview from her Las Vegas home.

Baal referred further questions to Jones’ attorney, wondering aloud why anyone would be interested.

“It’s not an interesting story, really, sir,” she said.

“It sounds like a very interesting story,” said Jones’ lawyer, Stephen Stein. “But I can’t comment until I know what the hell the story is about.”

According to a report by a Department of Motor Vehicles investigator, Jones began his double life on May 11, 1979, the day he abandoned his family.

Jones said he needed to run an errand and was nervous, his then-wife, Joanne Esplin, told investigators.

He tried to persuade a neighbor to join him. When the neighbor declined, Jones left by himself, she recalled.

She never saw or heard from him again.

Esplin told detectives her husband’s life had crumbled in the months before his disappearance.

Jones had been forced to sell his seat on the Chicago Board of Trade to pay off personal debts. He was a big gambler, she said, once betting $30,000 on a single basketball game.

Jones forged her name to obtain a second mortgage on their home, Esplin said, and she suspected he ran errands and delivered money for the Chicago mob. The FBI confirmed they had been investigating Jones’ organized crime connection when he disappeared.

Jones had a different tale. He told detectives he left Chicago because of his unemployment and failing marriage, as well as the desire to start a new life.

He said that before he left town, he paid a business friend $800 for a fake Illinois driver’s license, birth certificate and a stolen Social Security number, according to the report. He then adopted his first persona, Richard Lage, and headed for Florida.

Although Jones had no criminal record before he left Chicago, he did not fare as well with the law under his assumed names.

Between 1979 and 1980, “Lage” was arrested four times in Florida. The first arrest was a larceny charge, but the other charges were not specified in the report.

After Jones moved to California in 1980, his new persona “Richard Sanders” was arrested once in 1981 and twice in 1986 on unspecified charges.

Jones arrived in Nevada in the late ’80s and met Baal.

A few years later, in 1992, he was arrested in Henderson under the Sandelli name for the first time.

After that arrest, Jones’ life seemed to settle down. He received a casino work card in 2005 and bounced around a few race and sports books.

Most recently, he worked at the Rampart. He was not at work Friday, and a sports book employee declined comment. A Rampart spokesman also declined comment, citing employee confidentiality.

Teresa Zellhoefer, a deputy chief of the Nevada Gaming Control Board’s enforcement division, said Jones obtained a work card because he disclosed his arrests on his application and none of the charges concerned regulators.

His fraudulent Social Security number was linked to the criminal history he had compiled under aliases since 1979, when his fingerprints were first recorded, but there was no criminal record under his true name.

Zellhoefer said enough time had passed from the minor offenses for his work card to be approved.

“We rely on those fingerprints, and everything matched what he put on his application,” she said. “It’s only when it doesn’t (match) when we start digging.”

Although Jones had been arrested under several different names, this also didn’t raise any alarms.

“A lot of people use different names,” Zellhoefer said.

Jerry Markling, chief of the board’s enforcement division, agreed.

“You’d be amazed how many people have aliases or a.k.a.’s who work in the industry, whether they’re married names or nicknames, whatever,” he said. “We don’t object to somebody if they have an alias.”

Jones’ 30-year fabrication began to unravel in May 2008, when he entered the Henderson DMV office to renew his driver’s license under the name of his alter ego of Sandelli.

But the Social Security number Jones had used for years really belonged to a man named Clifton Goodenough, according tothe report.

“In 2008, we began electronically verifying Social Security numbers,” said Tom Jacobs, a DMV spokesman. “Every time you come in to renew it (a license), now we will verify the numbers to establish identity.”

That wasn’t the process in 1988, when Jones arrived in Las Vegas, Jacobs said.

At the time, Nevada accepted another state’s driver’s license as acceptable proof of identity.

Earlier this year, the Social Security Administration began an exhaustive investigation into Jones’ past. The DMV was contacted July 12.

Jacobs said it’s not unusual to find false identities that are decades old. Before Sept. 11, 2001, some states’ proof of identity requirements for a driver’s license were not as stringent, and electronic databases were not nearly as organized.

“It’s very unusual to find a suspect who is actually, legally dead, as he was,” he said. “He could not get away with it if he tried this in 2011.”

Of all the names linked to Jones — Richard Lage, Richard Sanders, Joseph Sandelli — the one that appeared most unbelievable was the name Clifton Goodenough, the true owner of the Social Security number he stole three decades ago.

But Goodenough is a real person, Jacobs said, and still alive.

Their paths were on a collision course as each man grew older.

And no matter how hard Jones tried to hide his true identity, in the end, he simply was not Goodenough.

BSS