The couple’s harrowing experience started at their Las Vegas home.

Two men disguised with faux facial hair and odd outfits nabbed First National Bank of Nevada executive Reno N. Fruzza as he entered his garage at about 9 p.m. on Monday, May 23, 1977. They held him, 56, and his wife Polly, 50, captive there, overnight, at gunpoint.

Reno had worked for the financial institution for 36-plus years. Polly had had a career as a Western comedy star named Polly Possum in the 1950s and ’60s. The two were active in the community, avid fishermen and big art and antiques collectors.

The next morning, the kidnappers injected the Fruzzos with a poison requiring an antidote to stave off death, they told the couple. They instructed Reno to retrieve $1.22 million dollars from his bank’s vault and then follow directions he’d receive in notes left for him in various places. Otherwise, they’d withhold the antidote from Polly, and she’d die.

Elusive Money Swap

Reno obtained the cash and while doing so, told some bank employees what was happening. Per the typewritten note in his 1963 Cadillac’s glove compartment, he then went to the phone booth outside the Knight’s Inn. Meanwhile, his co-workers had notified the police who’d caught up to and started following Reno but allegedly lost him in traffic.

The next note told him to go into room 125 of the Sahara hotel-casino. There, in an ashtray was another instruction, to find and use the 1964 beige Cadillac sedan in the parking lot to follow spray paint marks on the road. Subsequently, various notes and Polaroid photos led Reno through numerous small rural towns, including Goodsprings, Sloan, Jean and Sandy Valley, and finally to the Calvada Inn in Pahrump, about 60 miles from Vegas. He arrived there at about 1 p.m., and was to stay in its Pony Express Bar until further notice.

While he was there, the perpetrators removed the money from the Cadillac’s trunk. They transferred it to a yellow Cessna 172 (which had false identifying numbers on it) and flew from Pahrump to the North Las Vegas Air Terminal, where they got in waiting cars and left. They phoned Reno at about 3 p.m., thanked him for his cooperation and said he was free to go. The freed captive immediately called police, who subsequently found Polly handcuffed to a bed post in Las Vegas’ Showboat hotel-casino.

Neither Polly nor Reno had been hurt, and the supposed poison they’d been injected with had been a hoax, requiring no lifesaving remedy.

Suspects Identified

FBI agents on the case determined the two culprits were Paul Michael Kodelja, a 30-year-old craps dealer at Circus Circus in Las Vegas and previously Harrah’s in Reno, and 50-year-old Craig Otte. Kodelja was a licensed pilot with no criminal background. Otte, however, had a record including burglary, larceny and other petty crimes. Most recently, though, he allegedly had robbed a Los Angeles bank of $40,000 in 1975, charges for which were pending against him in 1977.

For Otte and Kodelja’s criminal scheme, the federal government charged them with conspiracy, stealing bank money, assault with dangerous weapons and kidnapping.

Accountability On Horizon

The younger of the two turned himself in 10 days after the crimes and after his attorney Oscar Goodman negotiated his surrender. Kodelja posted $150,000 in bail and was released from the Clark County Jail. After pleading innocent to the charges, he turned to the Nevada Supreme Court for dismissal of the counts against him on the grounds that the grand jury indictment contained ambiguous language and other technical problems.

Kodelja, however, lost that appeal in November 1977. A trial date was set for January 4, 1978.

As for Otte, he’d disappeared. The stolen $1.22 million had, too.

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The story concludes in next week’s post, Casino Dealer, Accomplice Execute Elaborate Crime in Las Vegas, Part II.

Sources

Las Vegas Strip, 1970s

1971

Actress Jane Fonda and renowned activists led about 900 people down the Las Vegas Strip on March 6, 1971, a Saturday, in protest of welfare cutbacks.  

“Today we launched a spring offensive and a national campaign against repression,” said participating civil rights leader Rev. Ralph Abernathy (Reno Evening Gazette, March 8, 1971).

Starting at a parking lot behind Circus Circus around 1 p.m., the group, displaying signs with various messages, such as “Nevada Starves Children” and “Don’t Gamble with Human Lives,” slowly meandered the four miles to Caesars Palace.

Once there, they went inside and while waving banners and signs, chanted and sang “We Will Overcome.” They marched through the casino, held a brief rally near the back of the building, during which the resort’s management closed the gaming tables, about 15 to 30 minutes.

The group then returned to the front steps for a sit-in that blocked the front entrance. Guests were re-routed to a separate doorway.

(Fonda left sometime during the march to fly to San Francisco.)

The Precipitating Factor

Earlier that year, Nevada welfare director George Miller removed about 1,128, or 20 percent, of people from the state’s list of welfare recipients because they allegedly had lied about their income when they’d applied for public assistance. Miller’s action affected about 3,000 individuals.

Fonda accused Nevada of forcing women “off welfare rolls to become prostitutes” (Desert Sun, March 6, 1971).

The National Welfare Rights Organization claimed the state had stopped the aid checks without affording the recipients the due process the law guarantees. The group demanded the firing of Miller and reversal of what he’d done. However, Nevada Gov. Mike O’Callahan refused to order either.

Subsequently, NWRO’s executive director George Wiley vowed to protest by disrupting the gambling industry in the city that it dominated, Las Vegas, until Nevada reinstated all dropped welfare recipients. Another aim was to warn other states not to do what The Silver State had done.

A Second Go

On the Saturday following the initial protest, the NWRO and about 250 people again marched, for the same purpose, along the Strip, this time from the Las Vegas Convention Center to the Sands. Moving slowly, the group blocked traffic on South Las Vegas Boulevard and refused to disperse on orders from law enforcement officers.

Consequently, about 85 protesters were arrested. While that was happening, members of the throng shouted, “Arrest George Miller” and other commands and declarations.

When the demonstrators arrived at the hotel-casino, they tried to enter it to disrupt the gambling taking place, but security guards blocked the doors with furniture and their bodies.

“Aren’t we allowed in this hotel like anyone else?” Wiley asked.

Others yelled, “Does the hotel take no responsibility for those children who are starving, for mothers who have to turn to prostitution or to crime? Someone may be burning this hotel down.”

“Then shouts of ‘let’s burn it’ arose from the crowd, which was crushing up against the doors,” noted the Nevada State Journal (March 14, 1971).

Check is in the Mail

Later that month, Federal Judge Roger Foley ruled the State of Nevada, in cutting people off from receiving welfare, had violated their rights. As such, he ordered their names be replaced in the register immediately.

In fact, they were. Soon after, the affected people all got a check in the mail.

Sources

Elliot Paul Price

1970-1973

When federal agents arrested Elliot Paul Price, 51, during a massive multi-city raid in 1970 and charged him with illegally transmitting race wire information across state lines via telephone, two dominos fell:

• He lost his job as a casino host at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

• The Clark County Sheriff’s Office pulled his work card, which is required for casino employment.

In April 1971, however, the sheriff’s department issued him a temporary permit to work in a similar position at Circus Circus. Within the week, though, the Nevada Gaming Commission (NGC) voted to pull it due to his being under federal indictment and allegedly having an unsavory background. On the NGC’s orders, the sheriff’s office revoked his card, leaving Price again unemployed.

Price Won’t Take No

Unable to obtain a casino job, he filed a lawsuit, but it went nowhere because, according to the judge, he hadn’t pursued all possible avenues for re-obtaining his employment permit.

Price asked the NGC and the Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB) to reinstate it, but they didn’t. This was because, in a hearing on the issue, he refused to answer questions about his suspected association with underworld individuals. Price hailed from Boston and gambling regulators believed he was entrenched in the Mafia there.

Lawsuit, Take Two

At the start of 1972, with Oscar Goodman as his attorney, Price sued Nevada Governor Mike O’Callaghan and the NGC, claiming the latter had rescinded his work card arbitrarily. The suit purported the agency’s decision hadn’t been based on established guidelines but, rather, on unrelated “charts of the Mafia, ancient newspaper articles, dime store novels, and secret and confidential information” (Nevada State Journal, June 13, 1972). It also asserted the NGCB hearings had violated his freedom of association right and forced him to be a witness against himself.

Goodman requested the withdrawal of Price’s work card be deemed unconstitutional and a temporary restraining order (TRO) be placed against the gambling regulating agencies, preventing them from interfering with his obtaining a new one.

The state, on the other hand, argued that were the court to afford the TRO until the issue got resolved legally, it would be substituting its judgment for that of Nevada in a state administrative matter. Also, were Price to prevail, it “could well emasculate the total regulatory concept of gaming” (Reno Evening Gazette, June 13, 1972).

District Court Judge Howard Babcock granted Price the TRO.

Nevada Fights Back

The NGCB responded with a suit of its own to overturn Babcock’s action on the grounds that the local court lacked jurisdiction in the matter. The NGC and NGCB conceded Price could work in a non-casino job at Las Vegas’ Riviera hotel.

District Court Judge Carl Christensen denied the State of Nevada’s motion to dissolve the TRO. This meant Price could return to his casino host post at Circus Circus until the high court weighed in.

Off To Higher Court Land

Next, Goodman took the case to the Nevada Supreme Court, asking it to allow Price to regain his work card, thereby protecting his constitutional right to due process.

Deputy Attorney General David Polley, for the state, argued that upholding Babcock’s ruling would “set a dangerous precedent which would be detrimental to the inhabitants of Nevada and their major industry” (Nevada State Journal, June 13, 1972).

Resolution Three Years Later

In 1973 the Nevada Supreme Court delivered the opinion that, yes, the lower, or district, court had jurisdiction to rule upon the validity of Price’s right to work in gaming.

In other words, Goodman and Price* won the legal fight. Their doing so established that Nevada couldn’t deprive someone of their work card without due process. Subsequently, Clark County instituted processes for suspending or revoking a work identification card and for an appeal by the card holder.

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* In 1979, Price would be indicted for multistate race fixing along with other members of Boston’s Winter Hill Gang, James “Whitey” Bulger’s associates, for which he would serve two months. Subsequently, he would disappear, never to be heard from again.

Sources

1972

In the mail on Monday, April 24, each of 21 Las Vegas hotel-casinos received an identical, typewritten letter that demanded they pay a total of $2 million (about $12 million today) or get blown up, one by one, until the extortionist got the full amount. It was up to the Nevada resorts if, and how, they divvied up payment. The correspondence didn’t indicate a day, time or place for the drop.

The letters had been sent via Special Delivery, which was expedited service, from Austin, Texas. Fifteen of them were turned over to the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The same 21 gaming properties received a second letter, on May 4, which contained payoff instructions. It noted the bombing would start in two weeks, on Saturday, May 13, with Circus Circus being getting hit first and the Thunderbird second.

A similar extortion case had occurred in 1970 in Northern Nevada, in which the perpetrators had instructed three casinos — the Sparks Nugget Motor Lodge in Sparks and Harolds Club and Harrah’s in Reno — to pay a total of $1 million (about $6 million today) or face multiple bombs exploding in their casinos.

Plot Foiled

In the Las Vegas case, about two weeks later, on Thursday, May 11, FBI agents arrested a suspect in a Santa Monica, California motel, on a federal warrant. He was Los Angeleno Nathan N. Marks, 28, a self-employed radio and sales promoter. On him at the time was an airline ticket to Paris, France.

The next day, Marks waived extradition to Nevada to face the charges. Instead, that would take place in San Bernardino County, California. Bail was set at $500,000 ($3 million today).

Spilled The Beans

Marks had recruited a partner, a Texas resident, to help him carry out the scheme, and that person had informed the FBI about it all. That led to federal agents listening in on a phone call between the two alleged conspirers.

During that conversation, Marks told the second man to “buy enough explosive to blow a ’50 by 50 by 50′-foot hole in the casino,” he said, referring to Circus Circus, because he wanted “‘to let the Thunderbird Hotel, which was next on the list, to know that he meant business’” (The Bakersfield Californian, May 12, 1972). Marks indicated the bombs would be dropped from the air, out of a private plane Marks would charter in Los Angeles.

Day Of Reckoning

In May 1973, a year after the criminal endeavor was set in motion, Marks appeared in court. Rather than plead guilty to the 21 counts of mailing a threatening letter against him, he was permitted to admit to just one, which he did.

The judge sentenced him to 10 years in prison, half of the maximum sentence.

Sources