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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1967

The North Lake Tahoe gambling house had been running smoothly for eight months since Arthur “Art” L. Wood, developer of the Incline Village master-planned community, had assumed ownership of it earlier in the year. He’d acquired it along with the lakefront restaurant and bar components of The Sierra Tahoe in Nevada from then owner Calvin Kovens and afterward, renamed the gaming entity Incline Village Casino.

Caught In The Act

On a day in mid-October, employee Clayton P. Gatterdam was working there as a craps stickman, responsible for calling the dice rolls and moving the dice around the table. While a game was in progress, he pulled misspot dice — ones without certain numbers — a few times from a hidden pocket in his apron and swapped them for those in play to increase the player’s chance of winning. One of his dice, for instance, contained two ones, two fours and two fives.

Two members of the Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB), the investigative gambling regulatory arm that reports to the Nevada Gaming Commission (NGC), witnessed Gatterdam cheating! At the time, the NGCB happened to have been conducting a random, clandestine, undercover check of the Incline Village Casino.

Gatterdam had arranged in advance with an acquaintance to collude in the swindling and split the winnings. The co-conspirator was to bet at Gatterdam’s craps table, and Gatterdam was to insert the misspot dice to facilitate one or more wins.

“[We was] going to try to put the dice in and take the place off, shoot the bankroll. We was going to try to beat the house,” Gatterdam said in his statement to Wood’s attorney. He also admitted to having been a “crossroader,”* or cheater, for the previous 20 years. (About 1.5 years later, Gatterdam again would be caught using misspot dice but in London, England.)

Protocol Followed

Consequently, the NGCB closed the Incline Village Casino — standard procedure — and filed a formal complaint against its operators, Wood, who owned 90 percent, and Benjamin “Benny” Lassoff, the bartender there who owned 10 percent. Neither of them had been on the premises when the trickery occurred.

The NGCB recommended the NGC revoke Wood and Lassoff’s gambling licenses. That’s just what it did; it pulled them for a year.

“These procedures were established for two purposes, to protect players against cheating and to protect the reputation of the state,” stated an editorial published in the Las Vegas Sun (Nov. 3, 1967). “Should it ever become established that the state allowed a cheating operation to continue one minute after irregularities are detected or even strongly suspicioned, the fat’s in the fire for sure and there’ll be a field day for the ever-ready critics of our major industry.”

Business Left Hanging

Wood pleaded with the NGC to let him keep his license, saying he’d do whatever it would take. No dice. 

“I think this thing was handled unfairly,” Wood said. “But [the NGC] is the boss” (Nevada State Journal, Dec. 5, 1967).

Unable to run the casino, Wood sought to lease or sell his majority interest in it and even unload the restaurant and bar components he owned as well, if necessary.

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*A crossroader is a casino cheater; the term, which originated in the Old West, denoted someone who practiced their trickery at saloons located at crossroads.

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