1958-1959

Two major impactful events occurred, one in 1958, the second 1.5 years later, involving the Senator Club, which offered the game 21 and slot machines. Near the Nevada capitol in Carson City, this casino-restaurant-bar was popular among state legislators and politicians.

At the time, Stella C. Vincent and William “Bill” E. Duffin had co-owned the business, 63 percent and 37 percent, respectively, for about two years. Duffin, though, ran the place.

Impetus For First Upset

Cheating at the Senator Club came to light in January 1958 when Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB) investigator William Walts witnessed Nicholas “Nick” V. Goodman dealing seconds, using the second versus top card in the deck, during 21 games. The NGCB called Goodman in for a chat. Agents told him they’d received unfavorable reports about his conduct and warned him he better deal cleanly.

Four months later, three Reno insurance salesmen filed a complaint with the tax commission, alleging a dealer named Nick had swindled them at the Senator. They’d seen Nick burn a card in the middle of a hand (take it from the top and put it face up on the bottom of the deck). This is usually only done after each shuffle. Nick also allegedly turned the deck or dealt from the bottom mid-game, so he could access cards used in earlier hands.

Also in April, Michael MacDougall, a gambling detective the Nevada Tax Commission hired to survey the industry in The Silver State, reported he witnessed cheating at the Senator Club (and at the New Star in Winnemucca).

Hammer Comes Down

To address the alleged cheating at the Senator, the NGCB held a hearing, per protocol, in June, for Vincent and Duffin to explain why they should be allowed to keep their gambling licenses.  

At the proceeding, NGCB agents questioned all of the witnesses, the co-owners and Goodman. Duffin and Vincent asserted they didn’t know cheating was taking place. Goodman denied he’d knowingly cheated, ever.

In late July, the Nevada Tax Commission, on the NGCB’s recommendation, revoked both gambling licenses associated with the Senator Club. All gambling activity ceased there. This was the first big blow to the gambling business during the Duffin-Vincent time.

Picking Up The Pieces

The co-owners made the best of it. They kept open the restaurant and bar and installed a dance floor in the casino space. Later, in early 1959, they leased the gambling concession to an outside operator.

Goodman, however, didn’t fare so well. He was fired from the Senator Club, for starters.

“The case washed up Goodman as a Nevada dealer, although he has steadfastly maintained he was not cheating,” wrote the Nevada State Journal (Dec. 27, 1959).

Shocking, Irreversible Loss

At the end of shift early Christmas morning in 1959, Duffin invited the Senator Club employees leaving work and some patrons still there to join him for breakfast at the nearby Silver Spur café-casino. Reportedly, Duffin often showed such kindnesses, including driving home employees so they wouldn’t have to walk or take a taxi in the dark wee hours.

Following the meal, the group dispersed. Duffin, on his way through the parking lot, stopped to wish several Silver Spur employees Merry Christmas.

Once at his car, after he opened the driver’s side door, a handful of bullets hit him in the back and drove him to the ground.

Duffin died then and there.  

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It Really Happened! will publish Part II next Wednesday, April 20, 2022.

Sources

1955-1956

In March 1955, Nevada gaming regulators accused Caliente mayor Donald E. Rowan of cheating while dealing a 21 game — which is illegal — in the Shamrock Club. He’d operated the Clover Street gambling enterprise with his partner and father-in-law Joe Colombo for seven years. Rowan had been the elected head of this southeastern Nevada railroad community for six.

The charge jeopardized his mayorship (the election was a month away, and he was unopposed) and his entrepreneurship (he may lose his gambling license), both sources of income.

A Civil Servant

By 1955, Rowan, 46, had lived in Caliente for about 30 years. The Silver State native, born in Goldfield,  had worked for the Nevada Highway Department and during World War II, served as a medic with the U.S. Navy in the South Pacific.

Along with serving as mayor, Rowan’s civic contributions included having organized the Caliente Fire Department and being its first chief. Also, he’d formed and headed three local groups: the Rotary Club, Veterans of Foreign Wars and Chamber of Commerce.

Charge Of Bubble Peeking

As ordered, Rowan appeared on April 1 before the Nevada Tax Commission to state his case.

At the hearing, the commissioners alleged that one of their undercover agents and a commission investigator both witnessed Rowan and another Shamrock dealer, Bob Powell, bubble peeking. In this move, advantageous to the house, the dealer crimps the top card on the deck with their thumb, creating a bulge, or bubble, and then peeks at the card’s number.

Rowan declared innocence, saying, “I might hold my deck funny, but I wasn’t peeking.” He asked the commission to act swiftly because if they decided to revoke his gambling license, he would bow out of the run for mayor. He wanted to give Caliente residents (about 1,500 people lived there) some time to find a replacement, and the filing deadline for candidates was only eight days away.

Allowing Minors To Gamble

The tax commissioners also accused Rowan of allowing under-age youths to gamble and drink alcohol at the Shamrock, violations of Nevada law as well.

Rowan’s response was that he’d let his son, who’d just returned home from college, drink a little with his friends, but stopped it when the friends invited others to join them. The mayor added that the Shamrock Club hadn’t been in trouble with the Caliente police ever, and one member of the force was at the club often, playing in a band.

How The Votes Went

Despite Rowan claiming innocence and having a clean gaming record since entering the industry seven years earlier, the tax commissioners stripped him of his gambling license, which had covered 21, craps and slot machines. They based their decision on the alleged “unsuitable method of operation” of the Shamrock. Their unanimous vote for revocation put Rowan out of business.

On the mayoral front, though, developments were positive for Rowan. Caliente’s residents re-elected him in May 1955, and he’d go on to complete a second term.

No Reprieve In Sight

Rowan requested a reinstatement of his gambling permit, in June 1955. However, the licensing arbitrators disallowed it and told him he had to wait a year before reapplying.

When that time rolled around, Rowan tried again, to no avail. In fact, he never would be granted another gambling license.

Other men, however, would get licensed for gambling at the Shamrock Club, until 2005, at which time the proprietors stopped offering games of chance. Today, the enterprise is still in business but as the Shamrock Pub, at a different Clover Street address.

Did the tax commissioners treat Rowan fairly or not?

Sources

As Mark Estes, 28, played blackjack at a table in Nevada’s Las Vegas Hilton casino one day, he counted the cards. This involved remembering the cards dealt during each game and using a mathematical formula to calculate the odds of success of betting on any given hand.

Suddenly, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas grad student found himself in a back room on the property, being told he’d “wind up in the desert with a hole in his head” if he was caught counting cards again at the Hilton, Estes alleged. Because he refused to leave the casino after this threat, the staff had him arrested for trespassing.

Card counting was legal then, and Nevada gambling authorities didn’t regulate it. House rules of many of the state’s casinos disallowed the practice, and these enterprises could and did eject card counters and take other actions, like extra card shuffling, to impede their efforts.

Right To Play Cards

Estes, with help from the American Civil Liberties Union sued the Hilton, the Nevada Gaming Commission (NGC), the Nevada Gaming Control Board and the Las Vegas Police Department to try to stop Nevada casinos from refusing to play card games with card counters.

Estes’ complaint asserted the following:

• Card counters had to the right to play cards in a casino in any way they wanted.
• The state of Nevada was obligated to protect card counters.
• Nevada was encouraging unlawful conduct by allowing casinos to throw out card counters.
• Casinos can’t just let people most likely lose play cards in their establishments.

In his suit, Estes asked the court to declare illegal the existing gambling regulation that requires casinos to ban people whom the state deems to be “inimical to the interests of the State of Nevada, or of licensed gambling, or of both,” reported the Las Vegas Sun (Jan. 21, 1977).

“The case, expected to be a landmark for the NV gaming industry, will test the practice of card counting and whether casinos are in their rights when they eject a counter,” wrote the Reno Evening Gazette (Aug. 19, 1977).

Persisting In The Cause

After Hilton Casinos Inc. and the NGC asked the court to dismiss Estes’ case, Judge Joseph Pavlikowski did just that. Based on a previous ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, he determined that nobody has a constitutional right to play cards.

Estes appealed, and two years later, the Nevada Supreme Court heard arguments in the case. Estes’ attorney asserted that blackjack/21 is a game of chance, and players who have a chance of beating the house can’t be banned. Card counters are simply using their intelligence, he said, and casinos can’t kick out better players.

Hilton Casinos’ attorney countered that casinos’ right to ban certain players is a private business decision, one that Nevada gaming regulators recognize.

Ultimately, the high court jurists ruled in the Hilton and, thus, all Nevada casinos’ favor.

Battle Buddies

Before Estes took up the sword, another card counter, Kenneth “Ken” S. Uston, had launched the battle in 1976, when he’d sued Las Vegas’ Flamingo, MGM Grand and Marina Hotel and Casino for $14 million for what he’d claimed was “illegally” prohibiting him from playing cards at their establishments. This suit differed from Estes’ in that it didn’t allege state wrongdoing.

In federal court in 1978, U.S. District Judge Roger Foley decided Uston’s case. Foley ruled that Nevada casinos may disallow card counters from playing cards in their gambling house.

Over the years, Uston filed several lawsuits related to Nevada casinos’ treatment of card counters, but he lost them all.

For Ben Affleck and all other card counters, present and future, these two Davids, Estes and Uston, fought the Goliath of Nevada casinos, but unlike in the Biblical story, they didn’t prevail.

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Do any of you count cards? If so, how much of an advantage would you say it gives you?

Illustration from Pond5.com

Sources

Castle Mona, home to the Manx, or Isle of Man, Casino, 1964

1961-1966

“When you bring in gamblers, you bring in trained law violators, and to expect them not to break the law is to expect the tides not to rise,” Wallace Turner wrote in Gambler’s Money.

The Manx Casino, also called the Isle of Man Casino, named for its locale, was a case in point.

A Dubious Proposition

The enterprise came about despite and after much opposition to the idea. The roughly 300 Methodist Manx “raised hell about a gambling joint on the island,” Turner wrote.

The Manx government itself wasn’t sold on it entirely, which led to heated debate. Even England hadn’t considered legalizing gambling yet and wouldn’t do so until 1962.

“Some politicians portrayed casino gambling as an act that could subvert the Isle of Man’s respectability, but also one that surrendered national sovereignty by making the Manx Treasury subservient to the taxation revenue procured from multinational gambling magnates,” Pete Hodson wrote in the 2018 article, “‘The Isle of Vice?'”

The Manx House of Keys legalized gambling with a 15-to-9 vote on the Pool Betting Act in 1961.

Two years later, in May 1963, the Manx Casino debuted, the first gambling house in the British Isles.

“Anxious politicians and members of the public were reassured that the casino would be subject to tight regulation, and that unruly behaviour would not be tolerated,” wrote Hodson.

Americans At The Helm 

Initially, the gambling enterprise was sited in a temporary spot, inside Castle Mona, a hotel in the Douglas Promenade. Plans called for it to be moved later to a permanent location.

Casino Ltd., a group of Americans, held and operated the gambling concession. They included three Maryland businesspeople: William A. Albury and John D. Hickey, who headed it, and silent partner Helen Saul who provided most of the required upfront capital. Frank O’Neill, 49, was the casino director; Las Vegan William Paris, 39, was the deputy director; Raymond Gavilan, 45, supervisor; and Arthur P. Anderson (Hickey’s nephew), 23, cashier. James D. Gilson was another employee.

The syndicate was to pay the Manx government €5,000 pounds a year plus 15 percent of its profits.

Because half of the island’s economy relied on tourist spending at the time, the casino catered to the middle and lower classes.

“The betting was to be on the ‘Woolworth principle,’ of small stakes and large turnover of bettors. No French phrases were used,” Turner wrote. “[Patrons] even were offered lessons in roulette, chemin de fer, blackjack and craps.”

Prediction Comes True

After employee Gilson tipped off the police, they raided the casino in December and investigated the finances. O’Neill, Paris, Gavilan and Anderson were arrested and charged with conspiring to steal money from the Manx Casino since it opened and receiving stolen money, “‘thereby defrauding both the casino company and the government,” Manx Attorney General David Lay said, as quoted by Turner. The quartet was jailed and stripped of their work permits and passports.

Six months later, in late June, the former casino employees’ trial began.

Lay, the prosecutor, argued the four employees had engaged in fiddles, or types of swindling, including fudging the amounts on cash-out slips, I.O.U.s and checks, to allocate money to be skimmed, which then had been. From the skim, the wages of the four men had been paid. In carrying out these irregularities, Lay said, the defendants had defrauded the casino company and the government.

Palace Hotel & Casino, Douglas, Isle of Man

Defense Barrister Rose Heilbron countered that the defendants simply had been following orders of their bosses Albury and Hickey in regards to the skimming and their pay. As such, the company had known all along the funds were being stolen.

Rather than the four employees, Heilbron purported, Casino Ltd.’s two executives, who since had fled the Isle of Man, should’ve been the ones on trial. One had to wonder why they weren’t, she noted.

She charged that Albury and Hickey “had drawn cheque after cheque for unknown purposes. The fiddle had been to give the two tax-free living. The casino had provided the perfect front for all Albury’s activities” (Liverpool Echo and Evening Express, July 1, 1964).

Ultimately, the jury found all four men guilty of conspiring to steal. The judge sentenced them to spend six months in prison, pay a fine — O’Neill and Paris, €300, Gavilan €150 and Anderson €75 — and possibly be deported.

(A swindle by a different set of Americans would take place in England in 1969.)

The Next Phase

In 1964, the Palace Coliseum, in the Douglas Promenade, was demolished, and in its place a new building was constructed for the Manx Casino and a hotel.

The gambling facility, which Scottish actor Sir Sean Connery ushered in, opened in May 1966 under a different name, Palace Hotel & Casino.

“I wish the people in London could see the Casino,” he said. “There is nothing like it there!”

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Sources

When sheriff’s deputies responded to a 10:45 p.m. call from Dixie’s Log Cabin* on January 11, 1953, they found a man, injured and lying in the parking lot there.

He was Raymond “Bud” Dutcher, 38, married and with a two-year-old daughter. He’d worked previously as a taxi and bus driver, a semi-professional baseball player, an umpire and a manager of the local West Indies Club. First responders transported him to Washoe Medical Center, where he remained in critical condition, unconscious and largely paralyzed, from being shot in the head. After twelve days in this state, he passed away.

The admitted perpetrator, Oscar Lafayette Maury, a former nightclub owner, 46, was charged with murder. His 1952 Oldsmobile was impounded; it had blood on the two left doors, some of which had appeared to have been wiped.

The ensuing investigation into the crime revealed that it resulted from words exchanged during a 21 game, at the Reno, Nevada establishment that also offered craps and slot machines. At that time, Joyce Moseley owned Dixie’s and held the gambling license for it.

“Dixie’s Log Cabin was a bar and cabaret that catered to local rounders and late night partygoers,” wrote Dwayne Kling in The Rise of the Biggest Little City.

Case Against Maury

At Maury’s trial, which began March 23, 1953, Assistant District Attorney Emile J. Gezelin and Deputy District Attorney William “Bill” J. Raggio, showed that Maury killed Dutcher, with an unpermitted gun, because Dutcher had tried to stop Maury from cheating while they’d played cards for money.

The prosecution’s key witness was John C. Bickford. A U.S. Marine who recently had just returned from Korea, he’d been working at Dixie’s as a handyman and errand runner the night in question.

Bickford relayed that during a 21 game between Dutcher, an unemployed dealer named Chauncey “Chuck” Kunz and Maury, Maury had been playing three hands at once. Having appeared “pretty drunk,” he’d been “loud and boisterous,” Bickford described, according to the Nevada State Journal (March 25, 1953).

“You’re holding up the game,” Dutcher had said to Maury.

Kunz had told Dutcher not to pester Maury as he could be dangerous.

“You can be a little rough, too,” Dutcher had told Kunz.

Shortly thereafter, Kunz and Dutcher had gone outside, presumably to fight each other. Maury had followed. Other patrons had intervened, though, and had prevented any fracas. Within minutes, they all had gone back inside, seemingly on friendly terms again. Dutcher and Kunz even had a drink together at the bar.

Later, Maury and his wife had left Dixie’s. Shortly after, Dutcher, who hadn’t seemed angry or drunk according to Bickford, had done the same. For a moment Bickford had lost sight of Dutcher but then had spotted him approaching Maury’s car.

“Before Dutcher got to the (car) door,” Bickford testified, “I heard a shot, and I saw the flash of a gun. The flash definitely came from the inside of the car.”

In presenting its case, the state brought up that the previous year, Dutcher had pleaded guilty to a charge of lewdness with an eight-year old girl, for which he’d received five years’ probation.

The Maurys’ Account

The defense, presented by attorney Sidney W. Robinson, was that to fend off Dutcher, Maury had hit him on the head with a 0.38-caliber pistol and in doing so, accidentally had fired it.

Mrs. Maury took the stand. She claimed that as she and her husband had been leaving Dixie’s, Dutcher had said, “There’s the little SOB I’m after,” and almost had chased them to their car, reported the Nevada State Journal (March 26, 1953).

“He looked like a giant,” she said. “He loomed up like Frankenstein.”

When she and her husband had been about to drive away, she claimed, Dutcher had opened the Olds’ driver’s door and had begun pulling him out of it. Her husband had hit Dutcher with a gun, and it, on its own, had discharged. 

Two other witnesses, Kuntz and Jack Cochran, a Lake Tahoe card dealer and bartender, who’d been with the Maurys that night, corroborated what Mrs. Maury said had happened inside Dixie’s. Neither Kuntz nor Cochran had seen the actual shooting.

Buster Terry, who’d dealt 21 for the trio that night, said that he’d only heard Maury being criticized for slowing down the game play.

Finally, Maury took the stand. He recalled that during the 21 game, Dutcher had told him angrily to speed up his playing. Maury had responded that he’d play his cards and Dutcher could play his own, to which Dutcher had said, “Don’t get smart or I’ll jerk your hat over your eyes.”

The rest of Maury’s testimony mostly matched that given by his wife except for the cause of the fatal shot. “I don’t know whether the gun went off of its own accord or I pulled the trigger,” he admitted.

Not An Aggressive Man

Gezelin called two rebuttal witnesses, Tyrus “Ty” Raymond Cobb, Nevada State Journal sports editor, and Gino Quilici, operator of a bar in Sparks, a neighboring city. Both testified that Dutcher generally had a solid reputation for “peace and quiet” (Reno Evening Gazette, March 26, 1953).

Consequences Ensue

On the fifth trial day, both sides rested their case and the jury was driven to Dixie’s to see the place of the crime. Afterward, at about 11:30 a.m., the seven women and five men commenced deliberation.

About 10.5 hours later, they reported their verdict. They found Maury guilty of second degree murder, meaning he’d acted with malice when he’d fatally shot Dutcher.

Maury “stared straight ahead, appearing in disbelief, for several minutes after the verdict was read,” reported the Nevada State Journal (March 28, 1953).

District Judge Harold O. Taber sentenced Maury to a prison term of 10 years to life, and within a few hours, the convicted man was processed into the Nevada State Prison.

As for Dixie’s proprietor Moseley, she applied in June 1953 to renew her gambling license for Dixie’s. However, the Nevada Tax Commission turned her down, the murder of Dutcher on her bar’s premises playing a role in that decision.

Granted Freedom

In less than three years into his prison term, in November 1955, the state board of pardons granted Maury release.

What do you think? Was that sufficient time served for having taken a life or not?

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* Dixie’s Log Cabin, also called Dixie’s Club and Log Cabin, was located at 596 Airport Road that today is Gentry Way.

Photo from freeimages.com: “Blackjack” by Tracy Scott-Murray

Sources