Plea Deal May Be Coming For 'Dead' Chicago Area Man Turned Vegas Bookie
LAS VEGAS (CBS) -- A former Highland Park man found in Las Vegas decades after he was declared dead may not have to go on trial.
As WBBM Newsradio's Nancy Harty reports, Arthur Gerald Jones, 72, who has more recently gone by the name Joseph Richard Sandelli, was arrested in Las Vegas last month, 32 years after vanishing from his Highland Park home.
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He is due in court Tuesday on charges of felony theft and fraud.
His attorney Stephen Stein tells The Associated Press that he has had "serious discussions" with the Nevada Attorney General's office about resolving the case at the hearing Tuesday.
Jones was arrested July 19, after he was identified as a former Chicago financier who'd had a seat on the Board of Trade, who disappeared from in 1979 with gambling debts and a troubled marriage.
He had been living in Highland Park with his wife and three children.
Jones' disappearance was immediately labeled suspicious, and police believed he might have run into trouble with gambling debts and possible mob affiliations, the Chicago Tribune reported last month.
Jones was declared legally dead in 1986, and his family collected his Social Security benefits.
But investigators say it turned out that Jones was very much alive all along, and actually has been living under the alias of Joseph Richard Sandelli since about the time of his disappearance.
"Mr. Jones apparently had a valid Social Security number that was issued to another person, and that's how he was discovered, was someone filed a complaint," Kevin Malone of the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles said last month.
Malone said Jones first went to Florida under the Sandelli alias, and then to Las Vegas in the late 1980s.
For the past ten years, he's been working there in a sports betting operation.
