With their involvement in Nevada casinos behind them, Silver State residents, Clifford “Cliff” A. Jones and Jacob “Jake” Kozloff, together accrued a string of gambling enterprises in and around South America.

Who They Were

Kozloff (1901-1976), was a Russia-born businessman who’d owned the Lebanon Valley Brewing Company in Pennsylvania for two decades. He’d sold it and moved to Las Vegas in the late 1940s. There, he’d invested in various hotel-casinos over the ensuing years, including the Thunderbird, Frontier, Golden Nugget, Royal Nevada and Hacienda.

Missouri-born Jones (1912-2001) was an attorney, had founded the Jones, Jones Close & Brown law firm and had been the lieutenant governor of Nevada between January 1947 and December 1954. He’d held interests in Las Vegas resorts, including the Last Frontier Hotel, Lucky Strike Club, Pioneer Club, Westerner Club and Silver Palace.

Kozloff

Jones

Driving Forces

Both men had a reason to focus on opportunities outside of the U.S. Regarding Jones, the Nevada Gaming Commission in 1958 made him (and other Nevada gambling licensees in a similar situation) choose between his Nevada and his international holdings. (Then, Nevada law disallowed simultaneous ownership of gambling enterprises inside and outside Nevada). Jones divested of his domestic holdings and kept the one he held in Cuba, the Havana Hilton casino, until Fidel Castro became Cuba’s prime minister. At that time, in January 1959, Castro closed all of the country’s casinos, kicking out all of the Americans, many of them Mobsters, who owned and ran them.

As for Kozloff, Nevada’s gaming regulators had denied him a state gambling license in 1956.

New Casino Ventures

In four years’ time, doing business as Caribbean American Investment Inc., a Liberian corporation, partners Jones and Kozloff added the gambling concessions at four international casinos, all in different countries, to their holdings. They were as follows.

1958: HAITI

The duo first had success in Haiti, when, in 1958, government officials asked them to run the Casino International in Port-au-Prince. Kozloff and Jones became the casino’s primary shareholders. According to their gambling agreement, the Nevadans got 60 percent of the gross casino revenues, the Haitian government got 20 percent and the rest went toward maintenance.

“Since putting new life in Haiti’s government-owned casino, [Kozloff and Jones] announced plans to enlarge their horizon to include a chain of gambling parlors strategically placed throughout the tourist-popular West Indies,” reported The Miami Herald (March 15, 1959).

Casino International

1959*: ARUBA

Caribbean American Investment next garnered the casino concession at the new, $5 million Aruba Caribbean hotel sited on the white sands of the island’s Palm Beach. New York architect, Morris Lapidus, who’d designed many Miami Beach buildings, designed the property for owner Condado Caribbean Hotels Inc. This Chicago-based company also owned the Executive Hotel in the Windy Cindy, eventually the headquarters of James “Jimmy” R. Hoffa’s International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

Aruba Caribbean

“[Aruba] is being called the new Cuba at the Caribbean, since many Americans who previously  wintered in Cuba are now visiting Aruba to take advantage of the island’s miles of white beaches, its new hotel accommodations and the ever-popular gambling casino at the Aruba Caribbean Hotel,” reported The Salt Lake Tribune (Jan. 29, 1961).

1960: ECUADOR

Early in the following year, Jones and Kozloff expanded into Ecuador. They landed the gambling concession at the just built, elegant 250-room Hotel Quito located in and named after the country’s capital. At the resort designed by U.S. architect Charles McKirahan in a modernist style, the casino offered an array of games, including craps, blackjack, chemin de fer, poker, roulette and slot machines.

“The most popular feature of the hotel to the guests was the casino, operated on a high level by operators from Las Vegas,” Garth C. Reeves wrote in The Miami Times (Dec. 8, 1962).

Hotel Quito

1962: SURINAME

In 1962, Caribbean American Investment added to their portfolio a fourth casino, located at another new hotel. That one was the 80-room Torarica Hotel-Casino on the river in Paramaribo, the capital of Suriname,** formerly Dutch Guiana. Chicago’s Condado Caribbean Hotels also built and owned this property.

As for all of the above gambling opportunities, the two Nevadan gambling entrepreneurs never pursued them, Kozloff told The Miami Herald. Rather, officials in the various countries sought out him and Jones and proposed that the duo take on their casinos.

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* In 1959, before Aruba, it appeared as if the Puerto Rican government was going to grant the gambling concession at the new Barranquitas resort to Caribbean American Investment, but, ultimately, it decided against it.
** Until January 1978, the country’s name was spelled “Surinam.” Now, it’s spelled “Suriname.”

Sources

During Nevada’s 1957 legislature, State Senator Kenneth Johnson (R-Ormsby), voiced his concerns about some of the state’s gambling licensees* simultaneously co-owning Cuban casinos.

He feared that:

• Nevada licensees might form alliances with U.S. mobsters in Havana, who primarily ran gambling there

• Nevada licensees might use those relationships to hide mob interests in their Silver State gambling enterprises

• U.S. lawmakers might grow intolerable of the political ties between Nevada licensees/their agents and the Cuban government

• U.S. lawmakers might, therefore, pass a law that eradicates legal gambling in Nevada

“I don’t like to see them use the stamp of respectability given them by Nevada as a magic wand to go into similar business ventures in other part of the world,” Johnson said (Reno Evening Gazette, Jan. 26, 1957). “From now on I’m going to dedicate my efforts to protecting Nevada’s gambling monopoly.”

Johnson, therefore, was tasked with studying the effects on the state of its licensees being involved in Cuban gambling.

Potential Stain On Nevada

Before he could report his findings as planned, prior to the next (1959) legislative session, events took place that forced Nevada’s gaming regulators to take a stand immediately.

In December 1957, Albert Anastasia was murdered. He’d been a boss of the Giambino crime family and head of Murder, Inc., the Mafia’s enforcement branch that was founded by notorious, New York mobster Meyer Lansky, who also was an associate of Charles “Lucky” Luciano.

New York police were investigating the angle that mobsters involved in Cuba’s gambling industry, Lansky in particular, had Anastasia whacked because he’d tried to horn in on that territory.

Cuba Gambing Exposé

In March 1958, LIFE magazine published an article, “Mobsters Move in on Troubled Havana and Split Rich Gambling Profits with Batista.” The subtitle was, “Old Familiar Faces from Las Vegas Show Up in Plush New Casinos with Plenty of Fast ‘Action’ to take Tourist Dollars.”

Of the surreptitiously taken photos in the piece, one depicted Meyer Lansky and a woman leaving the Riviera casino. The description noted that he carried a “satchel reported to have contained $200,000 from cashier’s office” and went on to state, “Lansky was returning to U.S., where he was picked up for questioning in the Anastasia murder case.”

Meyer Lansky, known as the mob’s accountant, had gambling interests from coast to coast in the United States and had been a key player in the Mafia’s development of Las Vegas. Another image showed Meyer’s brother, Jake Lansky, in Cuba’s Nacional casino.

Spotlight On Silver State

The LIFE article stated Nevada’s casino industry was spotless: “Ever since the Nevada boom hit full stride in the ’40s, the gambling mob has been ‘legit,’ shunning the back streets and peepholes, running scrupulously honest tables, keeping books and paying income taxes.” (This was partially valid.)

The piece, though, also revealed that some Silver State licensees were entangled with major mobsters in Cuba, where the industry wasn’t so clean. (This was true.)

The Lanskys managed Cuba’s Nacional casino while owner Wilbur Clark, co-owner of the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, was the front man and three other Desert Inn shareholders were investors. Meyer also owned a piece of the action at the Havana Riviera casino with three Nevadans tied to the Sands and the Fremont hotel-casinos in Sin City.  

The other Nevada gaming licensee involved in Cuban gambling was Clifford Jones, the co-owner of the Thunderbird Hotel in Las Vegas, who owned a percent interest in the Havana Hilton casino.

“Nevada, which has already been and is under fire, cannot stand idly by when licensees participate in activities which in any way bring notoriety or discredit to the state,” the Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB) wrote in a report (Reno Evening Gazette, April 25, 1958).

The rumor in Cuba then was that the all-powerful in Las Vegas orchestrated the LIFE exposé and were supporting Fidel Castro to collapse Havana gambling. Many Nevada gamblers didn’t like the industry’s booming success in the island nation where the swanky hotels and casinos were larger than any in Las Vegas.

In Or Out?

The LIFE article spurred the Silver State’s gambling regulators to act. In April, they demanded that the eight licensees with financial interests in Cuban casinos choose Nevada or Cuba, as they no longer could operate in both places.

All of the gamblers selected Nevada and claimed they’d divest their Cuban holdings but noted it might take some time.

A new Nevada regulation followed that bars all state gambling licensees from engaging in casino operations in any other state or nation.

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* Gambling licensees and/or casino owners or operators are referred to as gamblers

Sources

Photo from the University of Miami Libraries’ Digital Collections

When Fulgencio Batista returned to power as president in Cuba in 1952, he aimed to foster a gambling empire from which he could generate revenue for his coffers. To facilitate casino development, he and his administration:

• Restricted gambling licenses to hotels or nightclubs worth $1 million or more

• Waived taxes, which were as high as 70%, on all building materials imported for new hotels

• Deemed all casino pit bosses, stickmen and dealers to be skilled technicians, so they’d qualify for entry into Cuba under two-year visas versus the typical six-month ones afforded to incoming workmen

• Subsidized construction costs of new hotels

Government-backed banks provided $6 million of the $14 million to construct the Havana Riviera, for instance. The pension fund of the Catering Workers Union of Cuba provided most of the $24 million for the Havana Hilton. Casino operators typically leased space for their operations from the hotel owners; a rate of $1 million per year was typical.

Consequently, lavish hotel and casino construction boomed, as did the gambling business. Cuba became what Mexico had been during Prohibition — a playground for wealthy Americans.

“Havana’s casinos are elegant salons with expensive chandeliers, brocade draperies and a mink-stole clientele … At the roulette tables the smallest chips are a quarter. At the craps tables they are a dollar — but nobody who really amounts to anybody thinks of betting less than a $5 chip,” described LIFE magazine (March 10, 1958).

Government taxes on the new casinos “were set ridiculously low: $25,000 for a license plus 20 percent of the profits,” LIFE reported. While this was the official cost, the true under-the-table fee was $250,000. “And no one has even tried to guess how big a cut the politicians demand at the end of the month.”

Further, Batista’s brother-in-law, Roberto Fernandez y Miranda, had a monopoly on the country’s slot machines from which he collected half the profits.

Las Vegas Gamblers Want In

Despite the corruption in Cuba (or perhaps because of it), eight Nevada licensees perceived an opportunity to make money by capitalizing on Havana’s gambling trend and dropped at least $400,000 into casinos there.

• Owner Wilbur Clark and associates, Thomas McGinty, Moe Dalitz and Morris Kleinmann, of the Desert Inn in Las Vegas leased space adjoining the Hotel Nacional de Cuba in which they opened and operated a $1 million casino called Wilbur Clark’s Casino International.

• Hy Abrams, owner, and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, investor, in the Sands in Las Vegas, and Jack Davis, investor in the Fremont hotel-casino in Las Vegas held a share of the Havana Riviera casino.

• Clifford Jones, co-owner of the Thunderbird hotel in Las Vegas, owned an interest in the Havana Hilton’s casino.

For these men, their investments were ultra-high risk and tenuous, as government depravity was rampant and political strife was high in Cuba.

“For the gamblers, the one completely unknown factor is the position of Batista himself,” LIFE noted. “If he fell from power, the gambling mob would have to make a whole new set of deals with a different bunch of politicians. The gambling trade might slow down.”

Sources

1955-1956

At 9:15 a.m. on Friday, November 11, 1955, eight U.S. IRS agents entered the Club Cal-Neva in Reno, Nevada, demanding payment of $65,000 (about $600,000 today) in overdue withholding and excise taxes. When the money couldn’t be proffered, the feds wired shut the casino doors and emptied all of the tables, cashier cages and slot machines of their money. They collected about $50,000 ($463,000 today), which they applied toward the debt.

The week before, the Internal Revenue Service had seized about $23,000 ($213,000) from Club Cal-Neva Inc.’s bank accounts to satisfy a total tax burden of $88,500 ($818,000). Subsequently, the corporation filed for bankruptcy.

The entity consisted of front man Sanford Adler,* Louis Mayberg, Morris Brodsky and Charles Resnick, who’d purchased the former Club Fortune (Fordonia Building) in 1947 from James “Jim” McKay and Jack Sullivan for $250,000 ($2.8 million) and then had spent $500,000 ($5.5 million) on renovating it. They’d opened it on Nov. 20, 1948 as the Club Cal-Neva, where they’d offered 21, craps, roulette, keno and slot machines.

Following the Chapter 11 filing, James “Jim” Contratto and five other men acquired the building, physical assets and lease from Club Cal-Neva Inc. Contratto previously had owned a gambling license for the Colony and Palace Clubs in Reno. His new partners were Robert I. Franks and Al Rogell of Beverly Hills, California; Sam Levy of Douglas, Arizona; John Callas of Huntington, Park, California; and Caspar Van Citter of Reno, Nevada. The group reopened the gambling house, keeping the name Club Cal-Neva, on December 2, 1955. The casino boasted four 21 games, one craps game, one roulette wheel and one keno game along with 150 slot machines.

Replay Down South

Just over a year later, on Friday, November 30, 1956, at 8:30 a.m., 10 federal revenue agents entered the Silver Palace in Las Vegas. One announced over the loudspeaker that the 20 or so customers should leave as the casino’s assets were about to be seized. The crew padlocked the doors and confiscated all of the cash from the premises, as the gambling club owners were roughly $77,000 ($638,000) in arrears on payroll taxes.

The Spinning Wheel Corporation had invested $1.5 million ($13.7 million today) into the Silver Palace and had opened it only six months earlier, with 160 slot machines, two 21 games, two craps games and a roulette wheel. Earl Snyder, a Monterey Park, California contractor, held the majority interest. Marion B. Hicks, Joe Wells and Clifford Jones each had a gambling license for the casino.

In January 1957, IRS agents auctioned off the Silver Palace’s assets, proceeds of which reduced the casino’s tax debt to $38,500 ($340,000). The $87,700 worth of furnishings only brought in $8,745. The Westerner bought the liquor for $6,100. The Saddle Club purchased the office equipment for $1,925.

Subsequently, the Spinning Wheel Corp. put up the building for lease.

*In addition to the Club Cal-Neva, Sanford Adler owned/co-owned several casinos at various times, including the Flamingo in Las Vegas and the Tahoe Biltmore in Crystal Bay at Lake Tahoe.

Sources

Casino International in Haiti

1959

In February, The New York Times outed Clifford A. Jones. It brought to light that he held gambling interests in and out of Nevada, which The Silver State’s gaming law then prohibited.

It was no secret that Jones owned shares in the Thunderbird, Palace Club, Golden Nugget and Lucky Strike casinos in Las Vegas.

What The Silver State’s gambling regulators didn’t know and learned from the newspaper story was that Jones co-owned the Casino International in Haiti and planned to open three more gambling houses, the first in Aruba, then Puerto Rico and Jamaica.

The year before, the state mandated that all licensees with casino interests both in and out of Nevada choose one or the other locale or risk losing their Nevada gambling license. At that time, Jones indicated he’d stay domestic and divest his only international holding — the Havana Hilton in Cuba.

Law, Politics, Gambling

Jones was an attorney with the law firm Jones & Wiener and had represented several major Las Vegas casinos. He also had been the state lieutenant governor from 1947 through 1954.

“In a town [Las Vegas] built on ‘juice,’ or connections, Jones’s nickname was ‘the Big Juice.’ He was at the center of an ecosystem in which mob money guys, state officials and earnest gamblers moved with ease,” wrote David Schwartz in Grandissimo: The First Emperor of Las Vegas, a book about Jay J. Sarno, the mastermind behind Caesars Palace and Circus Circus.

The State Reacts

Upon learning the content of the Times piece, Nevada Governor Grant Sawyer asked gaming investigators to determine whether or not it was factual. It was.

Also true was that Jones still owned his gambling interest in Cuba! Getting out of it perhaps wasn’t easy or even possible, as it might not have been up to him. Jones was believed to be the front man of that casino for powerful, big-time mobsters, Meyer Lansky and Abner “Longie” Zwillman, the real principals.

In March, gambling regulators ordered Jones to show cause why he shouldn’t lose his Nevada gambling license.

Jones Chooses Again

At the hearing he confirmed he remained financially involved in at least two casinos outside of Nevada. Jones agreed to disengage from the Havana Hilton by March 21 but asserted he’d continue as a proprietor of the International Casino in Haiti.

Given Jones’ stance, presumably the state informed the gambler he’d have to forfeit his ownership in the Las Vegas casinos.

By July, the Nevada gambler had done just that. He’d:

• Sold his 2.3 percent holding in the Lucky Strike to Monte Bernstein
• Sold his 16 percent ownership of the Thunderbird to Joe Wells
• Sold his interest in the company that operated the Silver Palace also to Joe Wells
• Transferred his 12,500 shares of Golden Nugget stock to G.C. “Buck” Blaine

Jones finally had made good on his promise, albeit a revised one.

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