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

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.

Sources

The article, “Las Vegas Gamblers Arming in Control Battle,” ran on the front page of a Los Angeles newspaper in the third week of December, to the chagrin of Nevada gambling regulators, casino owners, officers of the law and other industry representatives.

The story reported that in the new iteration of Sin City:

• Casino owners (gamblers) were readying to fight for control of gambling there
• Many gamblers were carrying weapons and had armed bodyguards
• Men (presumably hired by the gamblers) were cruising competing casinos’ parking lots, trying to persuade guests to play at their clubs instead
• Ladies planted in cocktail lounges were directing visitors to specific casinos
• Although unreported, several physical beatings took place in gamblers’ inner circles
• One casino owner left the state because his life had been threatened*
• Fixers, dispatched by East Coast Mafia heads, were en route to negotiate a truce

Landscape At The Time

In the ’40s, downtown Las Vegas transformed when a handful of its gambling properties changed owners and names. The 1949, or post-war, Fremont Street was home to the:

Las Vegas Club (1930)
Boulder Club (1931)
Frontier Club (1935)
El Cortez Hotel (1941)
Western Club (1941)
Pioneer Club (1942)
Santa Anita Turf Bar (1943)
Monte Carlo (1945)
Golden Nugget (1946)
Club Savoy (1946)
El Dorado Club (1947)

Downtown Las Vegas in early 1950s

Also in that decade, the city saw the start of what would become the Las Vegas Strip, with the debut of this quartet of hotel-casinos:

El Rancho Vegas (1941)
Last Frontier (1942)
Flamingo (1946)
Thunderbird (1948)

Still fresh in the minds of those in the gambling world was the execution two years earlier, in 1947, of Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, violent mobster (Genovese crime family associate) and Meyer Lansky pal. Siegel had overseen (badly) the building of the Flamingo in Vegas, and had run the business until his murder.

In mid-December 1949, the Flamingo double-crossed Club Savoy, which was across the street, with a play that involved a cheating gambling stunt. The incident was extensively reported in the papers when Savoy’s owner refused to pay the Flamingo its winnings. It was negative publicity that gambling regulators and state officials disliked.

Also around the time, several casinos agreed to stop some of their blatant efforts to poach customers from other gambling properties. They’d used people on megaphones and “circus-type banners” to inform passersby that their slot machines had better payouts than their competitors’.

The L.A. newspaper article didn’t specify which gambling factions supposedly were fighting one another. Perhaps it was a Strip vs. downtown beef.

Similar, Widespread Reaction

The overarching response to the newspaper report from the big names in and associated with the Vegas gambling industry was denial: A turf war? What turf war? Calling the article’s contents hogwash, they deduced it merely was an attempt to hurt Nevada’s booming sector at a time it would feel it the most, the New Year’s Day weekend.

Here are some of the individuals who publicly weighed in and their comments. (All quotes are from the Nevada State Journal, Dec. 29, 1949.)

Gus Greenbaum, mobster, Meyer Lansky lieutenant and Flamingo hotel-casino president:

“The stories to that effect are fabricated entirely,” he said, specifically referring to an impending war for control. “No guns are being carried on any hotel or club property except by authorized personnel.”

Spokesman for the Nevada Tax Commission, the then gambling regulation agency:

Any impending warfare over gambling control “is news to us.”

Spokesman for the downtown casinos, who asked to remain anonymous:

“Relations between the gambling clubs and the casinos are more harmonious than ever. We think the story was carried mainly to counteract favorable publicity given our gaming recently by another Los Angeles newspaper. This whole business has been dreamed up by some eager newspaper correspondent.”

William J. Moore, Jr., Hotel Last Frontier executive vice president and tax commission member:

He wasn’t aware of any threats on the gambling scene, he said. In fact, the various gamblers have gotten along well in recent months and hold weekly meetings to hash out any issues. The story was “a deliberate attempt to keep California dollars from coming into the state, appearing as it did on the eve of the biggest weekend in the history of gambling in Las Vegas.” He added Vegas gamblers aren’t using “steerers,” or “persons corresponding roughly to ‘B’ girls in cocktail lounges who direct visitors to a certain casino,” which the state prohibits.

Archie Wells, City of Las Vegas acting police chief:

He didn’t know about any alleged beatings of certain gambling figures, he said. “We checked thoroughly and found no violence of any kind — reported or otherwise.” His department found no evidence the reports perhaps stemmed from possible attempts at revenge by Club Savoy.

Glen Jones, Clark County sheriff:

“We’ve received the utmost cooperation from all gambling operators.” He didn’t know of any gambler who was carrying a gun openly other than the special officers with deputy sheriff status in the clubs.

Informal Peace Summit

After the story appeared, the city’s casino and gambling club owners quickly convened to address its allegations.

They must’ve come to a mutually satisfactory resolution, if in fact a battle for gambling control had been underway or imminent, as no lives were taken . . . at least that we know of.

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* One gambler, Beldon “Jake” Katleman, co-owner of the El Rancho Vegas, had traveled to the Middle East recently but was back in town at the time the newspaper article was published, the Nevada State Journal noted.

Sources