In 1931, the year Nevada legalized gambling on a wide open basis, the state’s major metropolis Reno saw the introduction of the game of chance jokereno and the namesake place offering it commercially, the Jokereno Club. However, Lady Luck didn’t smile on either.

Giving It A Go

Two East Coast men opened the Jokereno Club on Dec. 19 to offer a game of the same name developed by one of them, William A. De Vellier of New York. Jokereno was a card game much like bingo but said “to contain many new and surprising devices and to give the player more action than any game resembling it,” reported the Nevada State Journal (Dec. 19, 1931).

De Vellier and his partner W.F. Bolte of New Jersey comprised the Nevada Holding & Trust Company, sponsors of National Jokereno Inc. William J. Hackett, allegedly from Massachusetts, was the club’s manager.

Holds Promise

An advertisement, published in the NSJ, announced the Jokereno Club’s debut that very night. It indicated its subsequent hours were to be from 1 p.m. until all patrons left, every day. Also daily, prizes were to be awarded for high score, low score and attendance.

The ad contained a brief letter that read:

To the Residents of Reno,

The Jokereno Club, just completed at 130 N. Center Street,* has been designed and constructed with the thought uppermost in the minds of the officers and directors of this corporation that, when finished, this club should be an everlasting source of civic pride to the citizens of the community.

We have endeavored to combine comfort with beauty and we shall let you be the judge of whether or not we have succeeded.

The management will appreciate and at all times co-operate with anyone offering suggestions as to how we may improve our club or game.

Nevada Holding and Trust Company

Indeed, the club was “one of the most attractive in the state,” the NSJ reported, with details having been paid to all appointments, from floor to ceiling. For one, the panels on the light fixtures bore the word “Jokereno.” The color scheme was based on the Moroccan upholstery fabric that covered the chairs, and the drapes, rugs and lights were in hues that blended nicely with it.

“Among the interesting features of the club is the original brass cashier’s grill from the Comstock Bank of Virginia City,” noted the NSJ.

The Jokereno Club owners stuck to their promise of heeding feedback. A week after opening, they closed for a day to install additional equipment in response to an open letter suggesting some game improvements.

On opening night, special guest Reno Mayor E.E. Roberts kicked off the first jokereno game.

Why Do It?

The Jokereno Club had been open for about two weeks when a strange incident occurred. Southern Pacific Company was tasked with delivering 98 swivel chairs and their iron bases to the man who’d ordered them from a Los Angeles store, a Mo Dorman, but mistakenly went to the gambling club’s address instead of Dorman’s. Someone at Jokereno, likely either De Vellier or Hackett, deceitfully claimed they’d bought the merchandise, so Southern Pacific left it there.

When Dorman didn’t get his property, he repeatedly asked that it be returned to him, but failed to get it back.

Thus, Southern Pacific sued both National Jokereno Inc. and Nevada Holding & Trust, seeking either return of the chairs or their value, $617 (about $12,300 today), along with $200 ($4,000) in damages and costs.

A few days later, the parties resolved the suit out of court. (Presumably, Jokereno gave up the merchandise.)

Last Breaths

By June, the Jokereno Club owed money to employees and equipment vendors. The creditors sued the owners, and the business was attached as a result. (Attachment is a preliminary property seizure done when it’s expected the plaintiff(s) will prevail in their claim the defendant owes them money.)

In another indicator of the club being in financial trouble, De Vellier was charged in July with passing a bad $25 ($500) check at the local Monarch Café & Lunch Counter.

On Aug. 24, some of the Jokereno Club’s seats, tables and equipment were moved to another gambling house. The remaining equipment was seized and used to pay the club’s debts.

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Have you played jokereno? If you have, what do you think of it?

* After the Jokereno Club, the location featured the Dog House gambling-nightclub.

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1964-1965

“Build it, and they will come” wasn’t a sure thing for gambling houses in Nevada, particularly ones offering an uncommon game. Case in point is the Barboot Coffee House and Casino in Reno.

The Visionary

C. Mathias “Matt” Skender, moved from Michigan to The Biggest Little City to introduce his favorite gambling game — barbudi — there. Most recently, the Pennsylvania native had worked in various private barbudi clubs at night and as a projects engineer during the day. Prior to that he’d attended Wayne University in Detroit and before, the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh.

What It Is

Barbudi, name variations of which include barbouti, barbooth, barboot, barbouti and barbotte, is a dice game for up to 12 players, believed to have originated in Greece around 450 B.C. After proliferating in Eastern Europe, it made its way to the Near East then to Mexico and, eventually, Canada and the U.S. By the 1960s, barbudi was played by thousands of people in Idaho, Oregon, California and a few other states but wasn’t recognized legally in The Silver State, according to Skender. The game was most popular among certain groups of people, including Greeks, Turks, Basques and Jews.

Educating Regulators

After landing in Reno, Skender applied in February 1964 with the state’s gambling regulators for a license to offer barbudi in a club he planned to open at 208 N. Center Street (between E. Commercial Row and E. Second Street). 

Because the Nevada Gaming Commission (NGC) members were unfamiliar with barbudi, Skender explained and demonstrated it to them. He indicated he’d spent 20 years improving the game and, accordingly, had designed a table layout for it, which he showed them. It contained a row of 12 numbered positions on one side, on which dealers kept track of individual bets using red and green colored markers, each marked with a number between 1 and 12.

The following month, the NGC approved Skender for such a gambling license. For some reason, though, the location he’d chosen for his enterprise didn’t work out, and his license expired.

Seeking Approval, Take Two

To support himself, Skender began driving a cab. He told all of his customers about barbudi and how great it was and invited them to his barbudi establishment once it opened.

It took him nearly a year, but the barbudi afficionado finally scouted out another prospective location, this one on Fourth Street. He’d also, by this time, found some people interested in investing in the enterprise. One was the property’s landlord, Martin Schwamb, the founder of Martin Iron Works located next door. Another was William C. Franks.

In September 1965, Skender reapplied for a gambling license and for him, his wife Betty Skender, Schwamb and Franks to open a gambling club worth $12,500 ($108,000 today). In November, the NGC approved the group for one barbudi game, one poker game and four slot machines.

At Long Last

That same month, Skender debuted the Barboot Coffee House and Casino at 560 E. Fourth Street (between Evans Avenue and Sutro Street). Along with the gambling, he offered Turkish coffee and sandwiches, free for players, but no alcoholic beverages.

At the time, he told the Nevada State Journal (NSJ), “In the year or so that I’ve been here, I’ve met hundreds of people who know barboot and have long wanted a nice place to play the game. I also think it might catch on with a lot of people who would just like to try something new in the way of coffee house gambling” (Nov. 26, 1965).

Not So Fast

In only a few weeks, though, the new entrepreneur realized he’d been overly optimistic. In reality, his Barboot Coffee House just wasn’t getting the level of business he’d thought it would.

He shuttered it, for good.

Why do you suppose this gambling place did poorly?

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Photo: by Christin Gasner, from Pond5.com

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Jack Johnson, Jack Dempsey, Buddy Baer, Joe Louis

1913-1955

Some famous 20th-century boxers got involved in U.S. and Mexico enterprises offering gambling, some of which, but not all, were knockouts.

Jack Johnson

Jack Arthur Johnson (1878-1946) was the first of the group featured here to enter the gambling arena.

This world heavyweight champion between 1908 and 1915 opened and ran two nightclubs in Tijuana during his years of self-exile there, starting in roughly 1913. (He’d fled to Mexico from the U.S. to avoid doing time for his conviction for having violated the Mann Act.)

Johnson had two clubs. One, the Newport, just off of the city’s main tourist strip, catered to black people. Gambling, boxing and entertainment took place there.

His other club, the Main Event, was for whites. It likely offered gambling, too, but this isn’t certain.

Gambling had been legal in Baja, California since February 1908. The law permitted most types of dice and card games and racing but banned roulette and slot machines. However, many casinos and clubs ignored those restrictions.

Johnson curtailed his south of the border entrepreneurial streak in 1920 by returning to the U.S. to serve his prison sentence.

Jack Dempsey

In 1928, Jack Dempsey (né William Harrison Dempsey, 1895-1983) became involved in a hotel-casino in Ensenada, Mexico. At the time, Prohibition was in effect and gambling mostly was illegal in the States. Dempsey no longer was the world heavyweight champion.

That year, construction on Hotel Playa of Ensenada began after Cía. Mexicana de Rosarito acquired the property using mostly capital from U.S. investors.

“The promoters had shrewdly aligned Jack Dempsey to the enterprise,” Maria Bonifaz de Novelo wrote in the article, “The Hotel Riviera Del Pacífico.” Dempsey “was married to a Hollywood star, Miss Estelle Taylor. Their names alone guaranteed a surefire promotion.” One list of the business’ executives showed Dempsey as president; another indicated he was second vice president.

Also, it’s unknown whether he contributed any money to the project or received shares in exchange for his role in it. Reports on both points are mixed. What is known is the company built a luxurious house for Dempsey adjacent to the hotel-casino.

The $2 million resort on the beach opened on Halloween night, 1930. Per Mexican law, the casino only offered gambling between 8 p.m. and 2 a.m. daily, and excluded all servicemembers, police and people under age 21 from playing.

Whereas the Hotel Playa of Ensenada remained in business for eight years, albeit somewhat of a struggle but attracting high-profile guests, such as Lana Turner, William Hearst, Marion Davies and Myrna Loy, Dempsey’s involvement with it was short-lived. Reportedly, he resigned shortly after the grand opening because he disagreed with how management was running the hotel. He never stayed in the home built for him.

Also during this period, Dempsey bought $100,000 worth (about $1.6 million today) of shares in the company that built and owned the Agua Caliente Casino and Hotel in Tijuana. Also, he agreed to help one of the principals, Wirt Bowman, “line up a new group to promote fights” at the resort, the El Paso Herald reported (Aug. 6, 1929).

Agua Caliente Casino

In 1931, Dempsey partnered with big time Reno, Nevada Mobster-gamblers in a different type of undertaking. He, William “Bill/Curly” Graham and James “Jim/Cinch” McKay set out to promote boxing locally.

In preparation for a planned upcoming bout in The Biggest Little City, the trio had about $100,000 worth of improvements (about $1.75 million today) made to Reno’s race track and fairgrounds on North Wells Avenue. The upgrades and enhancements included construction of an outdoor boxing arena and a clubhouse featuring a casino, dining room and boxes, installation of a loud speaker system along with grandstand remodeling and expansion.

The work began in late April, not even a month after the Nevada Legislature legalized gambling. The improvements were done in two months, in time for the start of a summer horse racing meet and the July 4, Dempsey-refereed fight between heavyweights Max Baer and Paulino Uzcudun (the latter won by decision in 20 rounds).

At the improved Reno facilities, patrons participated in parimutuel gambling at machines trackside and played games of chance in the clubhouse casino.

Reno fight arena under construction, clubhouse behind it on the left

Buddy Baer

Prizefighter Buddy Baer forayed into the gambling club business in Reno in 1950. In March, Baer (né Jacob H. Baer, 1915-1986) and restaurant-bar operator Fred Cullincini debuted Buddy Baer’s at 136 N. Center St. in Reno, the former site of the Bar of Music club. Buddy Baer’s offered drinks, dining, entertainment and slot machine gambling.

At the time, Baer no longer was boxing and instead was acting and performing in nightclubs. Also, he still owned, with Cullincini, a similar venture (likely without gambling) in Sacramento with the same name (later changed to Bar of Music), which opened in 1945.

About 10 months after debuting the club in Reno, Baer presumably bowed out as Cullincini changed its name to Freddie’s Lair. It went out of business in October 1951.

Joe Louis

In 1955, former world heavyweight champion Joseph Louis Barrow (1914-1981) and other investors built and opened the history-making Moulin Rouge, Nevada’s first desegregated hotel-casino. From the owners and employees to the patrons and entertainers, this Las Vegas hotspot was fully integrated.

Louis was the spokesman for the resort, which featured a hotel high-rise containing 110 rooms and a casino equipped for 21, craps and with slots. Other amenities included a bar, showroom, swimming pool, restaurant and dress shop.

Despite the big names it drew, both black and white, the business closed six months later, and the casino filed for bankruptcy.

Are there other associations between boxers and gambling-related businesses we didn’t include? If so, we’d love to hear about them.

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Photo of outdoor boxing arena: by Paffrath Studio, from the University of Nevada, Reno’s Special Collections and University Archives

Sources

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.”

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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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Frank Jay Gould

1929-1933

Le Casino Municipal in Nice, France refused to cash Frank Jay Gould’s check so he could keep gambling there. This irked him. Gould wasn’t just a member of the bourgeoisie. Rather, he was an uber-wealthy American who’d been living and investing millions of dollars in various business ventures in the French Riviera since 1913.

I’ll show them, he thought; I’ll build the most magnificent, classiest gambling house in all of Europe—”a palace the Caesars could not have built,” Gould said (Lima Sunday News, Jan. 15, 1933). I’ll put it close to that municipal casino and call it the Palais de la Méditerranée (the palace of the Mediterranean).

That’s what he did. He went all out and spared no expense. The grand cost came to $5 million (about $76 million today), an amount his wife (the third one) was said to have won in just a week at the gaming tables. The project took nearly two years to complete.  

Gould engaged architects Charles and Marcel Dalmas, who designed the building “like a modernized palace of ancient Rome,” reporter Alice Langelier wrote (The Bee, Nov. 29, 1929).

Showcasing a neoclassical style, the expansive casino was built out of 1,000 tons of marble and 90 tons of steel and boasted high-vaulted ceilings, frescoed walls, glass chandeliers, immense mirrors and “expensive tricks of illumination and decoration to add to its charm,” the Lima Sunday News reported. The foyer staircase was one of, if not the, largest, in history. The interior displayed works, many of them well-known, of more than 100 artists.

“Inside there is none of the usual white and gilt adornment associated with all casinos. It is artistic, harmonious, but at the same time almost ‘home-like,'” noted Langelier.

The luxurious Palais featured a series of gambling rooms “with the ‘class’ nicely graduated from low to high: in one room tourists can play for a few francs a throw, in the next the stakes are a little bit higher, in the next they are higher yet — and so on, until the expensive private parlors are reached where only American millionaires, Indian potentates and the like are admitted,” according to the Lima Sunday News. One room contained 42 baccarat tables accommodating up to 500 players and space for up to 1,000 spectators. 

The house of pleasures also contained an elaborate theater, fine dining restaurant and wine cellar stocked with roughly 4,000 bottles.

The magnificent structure “stands on the best part of the Promenade des Anglais, facing the sea, and at night is easily seen by its cornices of concealed light and the white glow which bathes it from barrel-shaped searchlights on its terrace,” Langelier described. “This super-casino covers two acres of territory and swings like Brooklyn Bridge on supports from its columns.”

“The gambling king of France’s” Palais de la Méditerranée debuted in 1929, during the Jazz Age, and exemplified the period’s glamour.

When tourism was high and business was good, the casino, located a half-mile from Nice’s Casino Municipal, yielded an annual profit of about $785,000 ($15 million today).

Work Of Another Disgruntled Man

Four years later, a fire ravaged the Palais. In the hour it took firefighters to put out the flames, the architectural masterpiece got ruined.

“The gorgeous interior was destroyed, its costly marble wall cracked and broken, its glass chandeliers worth thousands shattered,” The Hammond Times reported (Nov. 24, 1933).*

It was believed an arsonist had set the blaze, a male job applicant whom the Palais had refused employment.

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* Subsequently, the Palais was completely restored and remained a viable business until 1978, when it was shuttered. The original property was demolished in 1990 except for two facades that were preserved as historical monuments and a modern hotel-casino was built in its place, now the Hyatt Regency Nice Palais de la Méditerranée.

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