Record
Court opinion
2001-02-28
CourtListener (Free Law Project), text of the opinion
United States v. Panaro, 241 F.3d 1104 (9th Cir. 2001)
Ninth Circuit opinion of February 28, 2001 affirming convictions tied to the extortion and killing of Herbert Blitzstein in Las Vegas in January 1997, with the court's summary of trial testimony about him.
- Date
- 2001-02-28
- Kind
- court-opinion
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-12
- Docket
- 241 F.3d 1104 (9th Cir. 2001)
- Rights
- Opinion of a United States court. Works of the federal judiciary are in the public domain in the United States. The text was read on CourtListener.
United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, February 28, 2001, an appeal by Robert Panaro and Stephen Cino from convictions under the Hobbs Act arising from an extortion scheme that ended in the killing of Herbert Blitzstein in Las Vegas. The court affirmed. The opinion is about the defendants’ convictions and the trial.
In summarizing the trial testimony, the court describes Blitzstein as “a ‘gangster’ with ties to the Chicago La Cosa Nostra (‘LCN’)” who gave a witness $25,000 to set up Any Auto Repair in Las Vegas and financed a loansharking business. It records that his body was found on January 7 and that “the coroner determined that Blitzstein had been killed the evening of January 6,” in 1997 by the opinion’s chronology.
The words “ties to” are the court’s summary of what witnesses said at trial. They are not a finding that Blitzstein belonged to any organization. The same court called him “an associate of Anthony Spilotro” in 1986, in its recounting of the FBI’s 1977 and 1978 investigation, on the page for United States v. Spilotro, 800 F.2d 959.