It’s just a rumor the Las Vegas casino kingdom vigilante who calls himself “Robin Hood 702” is so unwelcome on the Strip these days that he’s considering changing the area code on his nickname.
The high-stakes gambler and information broker Robert Cipriani appears to be banned from every casino on the Boulevard. For a sizable player who is a teetotaler and doesn’t cheat, that’s saying something. With Las Vegas megaresorts struggling at the bottom line, you’d think they might want all the legitimate customers they can get.
Alas, Cipriani remains the skunk at the Strip’s green-felt garden party.
I’m guessing he’s not welcome at Hollywood’s Paramount Studios, either, after filing a $150 million lawsuit in a dispute with then-president Jeff Shell over a derailed TV series pitch. When Shell was bounced out of the president’s office last week, major media outlets gave at least partial credit for his departure to the heat Cipriani applied in his court filing and on social media.
Cipriani obviously takes it as a compliment, singing a little Elvis over the phone to his friend Gary Baum of The Hollywood Reporter, “If you’re looking for trouble, you came to the right place, if you’re looking for trouble, just look right in my face … My middle name is ‘Misery.’ Yes, I’m evil. So don’t you mess around with me.”
Misery, maybe. A certified, 100-percent pain in the ass to the corporate suits, absolutely. Cipriani’s filing makes an intriguing pitch for an SEC violation by the company, which denies it. I suppose some Paramount executive could have told Robin Hood 702 “You ain’t nothing but a hound dog, crying all the time. You ain’t never caught a rabbit, and you ain’t no friend of mine.”
Los Angeles powerhouse attorney Patty Glaser is another former friend of Cipriani, who appears to collect them. Press reports recount how she said she tried to quietly mediate a resolution to the dispute between Shell and Cipriani only to have it blow back on her. I’ve seen mammoths from the La Brea Tar Pits with less ooze on them.
In Las Vegas, Cipriani’s almost gleeful outing of illegal bookies, fraudsters, and mob-connected gamblers who enjoyed the run of the house at Resorts World Las Vegas made him persona-non-grata in some places. It also pancaked the career of longtime Las Vegas casino executive Scott Sibella. He was tripped up by a violation of the Bank Secrecy Act’s “Know Your Customer” during his tenure as president of the MGM Grand. Sibella, whose Vegas friendships reach all the way to the Governor’s office, pleaded guilty to knowingly catering to illegal bookie Wayne Nix.
Sibella’s not currently employable, but he’ll probably return to the Strip before Cipriani. The self-styled Robin Hood’s quiet comeback at Wynn Resorts was short-lived after he discovered what he describes as a back-channel slush fund used to spread the love inside Wynn’s ritzy clubs. The company in a statement said it has followed standard practices and has committed no regulatory or statutory violations.
It appears Cipriani’s standing on the Strip won’t be improving any time soon.
In a withering, 107-page amended lawsuit filed March 30 in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas, Cipriani, businessman James Russell and ex-casino security official Andrew Cheng Tao Do accuse gaming giant Genting Berhad and Resorts World Las Vegas, LLC along with 11 individuals of a civil racketeering enterprise. Among the bold-face names on the list of defendants: Genting Group Executive Chairman K.T. Lim, Sibella, and Las Vegas defense attorney and businessman David Chesnoff.
“As a professional gambler, he was deprived of his livelihood for over four years,” according to the lawsuit, which also alleges retaliation and witness intimidation along with false arrest and unreasonable seizure.
Chesnoff, whose career has included representing a panoply of colorful characters from drug addled celebrities to Hell’s Angels and made mobsters, became the object of Cipriani’s ire after some of his notorious clients turned up gambling at Resorts World. Chesnoff is also listed as a part owner of several companies doing business at Resorts World.
Cipriani has campaigned in the press in recent years about the lack of rigor of Nevada’s gaming regulatory apparatus. He managed to get arrested on suspiciously convenient – some would call specious – cheating at gambling and battery charges involving convicted fraudster Robert Alexander, now deceased. The charges were reduced to misdemeanors, but Cipriani remained undeterred. Alexander beat his rap entirely by expiring.
I suspect some folks wish Cipriani would take the Alexander offramp.
Cipriani banged a drum on social media about the ease of access big-league bookies Nix, Mathew Bowyer, and Damien Leforbes had inside Strip casinos. Bowyer is best known as the bookie who took millions in bets from the interpreter for Los Angeles Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani. Nix, Leforbes and Bowyer have been convicted of felonies in cases brought by the US Attorney’s Office the Central District of California based on investigations by conducted by IRS Criminal and US Homeland Security agents. In August 2025, Bowyer was sentenced to a year and a day in prison with two years of supervised release and his agreement to pay $1.6 million in restitution.
Cipriani might be short of friends in the front offices of the Strip’s biggest casinos, but he doesn’t lack for confidence these days. The RICO lawsuit shows it. Brought by former federal prosecutors Kathleen Bliss of Las Vegas and Michael Volkov of Washington, DC, it reads like a Robin Hood 702’s greatest hits with page after page highlighting his efforts to shine a light on some of the felons who were welcomed at casino establishments that should have known their customers.
Some will be tempted to write off the litigation as part of Cipriani’s seemingly endless self-promotion campaign. The trouble with that view is, federal and Nevada authorities have already verified many of the facts. Resorts World and MGM Grand, for instance, have paid millions in fines to settle cases that might have cost more than one corporate executive his career. In all, casino corporations have been hit with more than $30 million in fines related to money laundering in association with this string of embarrassing investigations.
Fellow litigant Russell claims he lost an estimated $10 million Resorts World allowed convicted fraudster Brandon Sattler to gamble at the casino despite knowing its source was fraudulent. Sattler is currently serving a 51-month sentence for defrauding what federal authorities describe as “loan lenders.”
Let’s not forget the other plaintiff, former casino security official Andrew Cheng Tao Do. His experiences come from inside the house.
Celebrity sizzle is fleeting, but when your exploits have been featured by The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, and The Hollywood Reporter in the same week, as Cipriani’s have, you’re officially a hot item. Such fame is often briefer than the Waiting for Godot cast credits, but his accusations beg a serious question:
What if Cipriani backs up his damning claims with admissible evidence?
That’s the problem with writing him off as a reckless provocateur. His enemies hate hearing this, but his information has often proven accurate.
That’s not good news in Hollywood, a place that eats scandal like movie popcorn, but it’s potentially much worse news in Las Vegas at the licensed and regulated casinos near you.
This article originally appeared in the author’s NevadaSmith Journal on Substack.
