Two men from Northeast Ohio spent several years living it up with high-end cars, country club memberships, stacks of precious metals and cash, gambling trips, and prodigious real estate holding, while scrambling to thwart IRS efforts to investigate their illegal gambling enterprise in the city of Canton, Ohio.
But on June 10, the Nother District of Ohio’s US Attorney’s Office announced that 65 year-old Clinton resident Ronald DiPietro, and 59 year-old Canton resident Christos Karasarides, Jr. have been ordered to pay millions of dollars in restitution and have also been sentenced to several years in prison.
The pair had been found guilty earlier this year of gambling, money laundering, tax evasion, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice committed between 2009 and July 2018. They were among a group of ten who were indicted in July 2023 for a slew of crimes related to illegal gambling.
They were involved with the others in illegal businesses, such as Redemption and Skilled Shamrock—off-the-books gambling parlors where customers could play slot machines. According to court documents, Skilled Shamrock alone generated thirty-four million dollars between 2012 and 2017, seven million of which were profits. Nobody payed taxes on those proceeds. The IRS noticed.
DiPietro was a Certified Public Accountant and helped his partner generate plausible, but false, tax returns. Karasarides, for his part, asked a number of people to lie to him once the IRS grew suspicious and opened in an investigation.
Karasarides now faces a restitution of $5,541,520 due to the Federal government for unpaid taxes, on top of forfeiture of his house and a $400,000 cash horde, and will also have to serve a little over 21 years in prison. DiPietro is facing only nine years in prison, and his restitution bill has been set at $4,763,520, also to the Federal government in settlement of his tax bill. After their release from prison, both men will undergo post-release supervision for a period of three years.
