Calvin Kovens

1924-1995

A Miami, Florida businessman and convicted felon, involved with at least one Nevada casino in the 1960s, later got special consideration from President Richard M. Nixon.

Gambling History

Calvin Kovens bought The Sierra Tahoe hotel-casino in 1966, defying Nevada gambling authorities’ order that he not become involved with the resort. He acquired the property with a James “Jimmy” Riddle Hoffa-approved loan from the Central States, Southeast, Southwest Areas Pension Fund of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

Having debuted in 1964, The Sierra Tahoe comprised a set of buildings, one on Lake Tahoe’s shore, the other across the street, in Incline Village. After several iterations, the property became the Hyatt Regency Lake Tahoe Resort, Spa and Casino.

Kovens made an undesirable gambler, in the eyes of the Nevada Gaming Commissioners, as he was Mafia connected, was twice convicted of crimes and was due to serve prison time pending appeal. Though he couldn’t get a Silver State gambling license as a result, he remained the landlord of The Sierra Tahoe for three years. (During that time, he renamed the hotel Lake Tahoe Hotel, and lessor of the casino Arthur “Art” L. Wood renamed the gambling house Incline Village Casino.)

In 1968, the Nevada Gaming Control Board suspected Kovens had a hidden interest in the Carousel Casino in Las Vegas. He denied it, and the agents couldn’t prove it.

Criminal Background

Born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, Kovens served in the U.S. Army during World War II and moved to Miami in the early 1950s. Later in the decade, he launched two commercial real estate businesses: Ruedd Inc., a development company, and Cal Kovens Construction Corp., a building firm.

In 1962, he was fined $12,000 ($103,000) and placed on probation for loan fraud. He’d used Federal Housing Administration financing earmarked for a Miami shopping center for other purposes.

Subsequently, he became an expediter for the Teamsters pension fund. In 1964, he, as well as Hoffa and six others, was found guilty of mail fraud (five counts) and wire fraud (one count). The group had been providing false or inflated information to obtain loans as well as requiring and pocketing kickbacks. Kovens was sentenced to three years in federal prison and a $5,000 ($42,000 today) fine. (Hoffa got five years and a $10,000 fine).

Tit For Tat?

After remaining free for seven years, Kovens began his three-year stint at the minimum security Federal Prison Camp, Elgin in Florida. After his first parole request was denied in June 1971, he allegedly came down with a fever and “symptoms of heart difficulty,” for which he was hospitalized (Sunday Gazette-Mail, June 16, 1974).

Consequently, in December, the parole board, in a unanimous vote, granted Kovens the early release date of May 1, 1972 due to his supposed medical condition. By then, he would’ve served 15 months.

Three days later, Nixon ordered Hoffa be released from the U.S. Penitentiary, Lewisburg in Pennsylvania.

About a week later, former Senator George A. Smathers (D-Fla.) intimated to Charles “Chuck” W. Colson, White House office of public liaison director, in a phone conversation that Kovens should be freed., Smathers relayed to Colson the following dialogue he’d had with Charles “Bebe” G. Rebozzo, a close Nixon friend (The Breaking of a President, 1975):

Smathers: “Bebe, It looks to me that this would be a pretty good thing to do. [Kovens is] the most popular Jew in Dade County, South Florida. … This I know would at least give the president, and those who are going to help in this area, a very strong basis for going to the Jewish community and saying: For God’s sake, the one guy that went to bat for him was the president.”

Rebozzo: “I think [Nixon] ought to do it.”

Smathers: “I agree. There’s no negatives on this; it’s all pluses. … I’m sure the president can do it, and I’m sure, actually, [parole board] Chairman George Reed would probably approve of it.”

Colson sent to White House Counsel John Dean a transcript of this phone call with Smathers with the note: “The attached is much too hot for me to handle. … Obviously, [Smathers] makes a very good point, and I would assume if there is anything we can do properly, we should. On the other hand, in view of the personalities involved here, I would think this has to be handled with extreme care.”

Kovens got paroled eight days later, on Jan. 6, 1972. He’d served 11 months of his 36-month sentence. He was 47.

“The past and present chairmen of the parole board in Washington denied contact or behind-the-scenes pressure in the release of Kovens,” reported The Daily Review (April 9, 1974).

Shortly thereafter, Kovens delivered $30,000 ($187,000 today) in cash, reportedly a campaign contribution, to John Mitchell, Nixon’s campaign manager.

Referring to this secret donation and financier Robert L. Vesco’s $200,000 cash payment, columnist Andrew Tully wrote, “If you think these cash transactions have a Mafia flavor, you said it, I didn’t” (Albuquerque Journal, Oct. 9, 1973).

A new law required that Nixon disclose all campaign monies he’d received and from whom, however, he left Kovens’ $30,000 off of the list.

End Of Life

The ex-convict lived another 23 years as a free man, until February 1995, when he passed away, not from cardiovascular disease but from complications related to myelodysplastic syndrome, a type of bone marrow disease that may evolve into cancer. He was 70.

In his obituary he was lauded for his philanthropy, including having raised $20 million for Miami’s Mount Sinai Medical Center and $5 million for Florida International University. Among numerous other honors, the Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce named Kovens Man of the Year in 1990, and the Florida International University and Tel Aviv University awarded him honorary doctorates.

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Sources

First, I’d like to thank you all for your readership and support. It means a lot.

On another note, the gambling history book, A Bold Gamble at Lake Tahoe: Crime and Corruption in a Casino’s Evolution, is finally here! I offer you the first chapter below.

The nonfiction book now is available for purchase as a paperback ($14.95) and an e-book ($7.99) in both EPUB and Kindle formats. To buy, click here.

Here’s a glimpse again at the story:

Their new, nature-inspired hotel stood amid a Northern Nevada township of more trees than people. The raw beauty of that lakeside spot on the cusp of development portended enormous getaway potential. The owners, legitimate businessmen, strove to add a casino, but no one would finance it.

Then Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters pension fund wormed its way in. The locals objected to a gambling house in their neighborhood. Shady characters usurped the enterprise. Lives were threatened. State agents witnessed an employed stickman using misspot dice. Felonious crimes occurred on the property, allegedly. Lawsuits by and against one owner crept into the double digits. And those events were just a handful of a mounting pile of troubles.

This is the story of a gambling business’ journey from concept to stability during the 1960s and ’70s, a time when the industry was Mob infiltrated, often volatile, theft and cheating prone, and unpredictably policed.

That once fledgling inn now is the Hyatt Regency Lake Tahoe Resort, Spa and Casino.

I wish you all a fantastic winter holiday season and new year.

Take care,

Doresa

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CHAPTER 1: 

DIP INTO THE UNDERWORLD

1964

With Jimmy Hoffa and the fund’s co-trustees waiting inside their headquarters to meet him and seal the deal, California businessman Bill Swigert told the broker his company now was refusing the proffered loan.

“You are finished with the Teamsters, and you better get out of Chicago,” Norman Tyrone said while dragging a thumb across his own throat.[i]

“We got the hell out of there,” said Swigert, referring to himself and his attorney.[ii]

Desperation for financing is what had spurred William “Bill” G. Swigert, Jr. to the Windy City that autumn. He and his two partners — collectively Pacific Bridge Company & Associates (PBC&A) — recently had built and opened The Sierra Tahoe, the premier hotel in a new, sparsely inhabited, developing community on the north shore of Lake Tahoe[1] in Nevada, U.S.A. Four months later, they still needed money to cover the construction and other incurred expenses and to fund the project’s next phase, adding a casino and more guestrooms.

A few months before, Swigert had received a telephone call from Norman B. Tyrone, who’d introduced himself as a financier and had asserted he could arrange a Teamsters Pension Fund (TPF) loan for PBC&A for The Sierra Tahoe.

By that time, the TPF had underwritten more than $20 million in loans ($163 million)[2] in Nevada, for hotel-casinos, including the Riverside in Reno, and the Dunes and the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, as well as other facilities.

The TPF — formally the Central States, Southeast, Southwest Areas Pension Fund of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters — collected and managed employer contributions for retirement, disability and death benefits for its unionized truck drivers and warehouse workers in about 20 states.

One of the fund’s eight trustees was James “Jimmy” R. Hoffa, who, as the Teamsters union president, allegedly had ordered bombings, arsons, beatings and murders and had aligned himself with Mobsters nationwide.

Tyrone had arranged for PBC&A to receive $2.6 million ($21.2 million) in financing from the TPF. The loan was PBC&A’s last resort, as Swigert had exhausted all other potential options over the prior 2.5 years. Swigert and his counsel, Frank E. Farella, had flown to Chicago to finalize the transaction.

On Friday, September 25, the two men convened with Tyrone in the new riverfront, 36-story, downtown Executive House hotel, about seven blocks from the TPF’s building. Tall but portly, the man wore expensive apparel.

“Tyrone just looked dishonest,” Swigert said. “He looked like a big, tall gangster, like Al Capone[3] on steroids.”

In Tyrone’s suite, piles of papers lay strewn across the furniture. The loan liaison darted around and made and answered several calls supposedly to and from Elliott Roosevelt, who was said to be waiting in the TPF’s boardroom to meet Tyrone and his loan applicants from the West Coast. Tyrone had indicated this son of Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt, former United States president and first lady, was his business partner.

“God, it was almost like a show,” Swigert said about Tyrone’s behavior.[iii]

Swigert and Farella reviewed the loan papers. As a condition of the financing, PBC&A previously had agreed to pay 1 point, or 1 percent of the loan amount, which equaled $26,000 ($212,000), to the TPF for appraisals, estimates and other costs. It also had agreed to pay 2 points, which was $52,000 ($424,000), to Tyrone as commission for brokering the deal.

However, among the documents, Swigert spotted a letter that committed PBC&A to giving an additional $208,000 ($1.7 million), or 8 points, as a subsidiary loan to the International Mortgage and Statistical Corporation, supposedly Tyrone and Roosevelt’s company in the Bahamas.

“What’s this? What’s it all about?” Farella asked.

“To Swigert and Farella … the Bahamas loan had an imme-diate and unmistakable stench,” reported the Oakland Tribune.

The additional $208,000 meant PBC&A would pay 11 versus 3 points on the loan. Tyrone defended it as “a hell of a good deal”[iv] and said all TPF financings were transacted at a 10 point-minimum.[4]

Frank Sheeran, who once had been Hoffa’s right-hand man, explained to author Charles Brandt how the TPF loans worked: “Jimmy’s cut was to get a finder’s fee off the books. He took points under the table for approving the loans. Mob bosses would bring customers. The bosses would charge the customers 10 percent of the loan and split that percentage with Jimmy.”[v]

If this were to have been the case with the loan to PBC&A, then $104,000 of that $208,000 would have gone to Hoffa, the rest to Tyrone. (Tyrone wasn’t a Mob boss, but like one, he connected loan candidates and the TPF.)

When Swigert asked him what his corporation did, Tyrone explained that it was somewhat of a startup, aiming to computerize global information about potential loan sources. Farella requested the business’ latest financial reports, but Tyrone said they weren’t and wouldn’t be available. He admitted that no paper trail documenting the $208,000 disbursement would exist.

“We said that if this was a legitimate loan [to Tyrone’s firm], then there was a legitimate business reason for doing it,” Swigert recalled. “Otherwise, this clearly would be immoral and illegal.”[vi]

About then, it was time for Swigert and Farella to rendezvous with the TPF’s trustees at their 29 E. Madison Street offices. Swigert told Tyrone he and Farella would catch up with him there with a final decision on the loan. First, Swigert had to discuss with his partners the surprise term just thrust upon PBC&A, by phone. He did so.

“It didn’t take us long to decide we wanted no part of any deal like that,” Swigert said.[vii]

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[1] Often called the “Jewel of the Sierra” or “Big Blue,” Lake Tahoe straddles the California-Nevada border. With a surface area of 191 square miles, it’s North America’s largest alpine lake.

[2] With most of the dated dollar figures throughout this book, a corresponding current value is provided in parentheses immediately after. These amounts are based on 2019 United States government consumer price index data and adjusted for inflation.

[3] Alphonse “Scarface” Capone was the American Mobster who allegedly murdered his way to becoming Chicago’s organized crime boss during the U.S.’ Prohibition Era.

[4] That was true, but it was a high rate, as traditional lenders typically charged borrowers 1 to 4 origination points.

CHAPTER 1: DIP INTO THE UNDERWORLD

[i] Nevada State Journal, “Teamster Fund Trial Starts on Tahoe Loan,” Jan. 26, 1971.

[ii] Interview of William G. Swigert, Jr., June 24, 2010.

[iii] Oakland Tribune, “$200,000 Fee on Loan for Teamsters,” June 5, 1970.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Brandt, Charles. I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa, Hanover, N.H.: Steerforth Press, 2005. Ebook.

[vi] Interview of William G. Swigert, Jr., June 24, 2010.

[vii] Oakland Tribune, “$200,000 Fee on Loan for Teamsters,” June 5, 1970.

1970-1975

More than nine centuries after her purposeful and likely shocking stunt* in Coventry, England, Lady Godiva provoked controversy at a hotel-casino on Lake Tahoe’s North Shore.

When Kings Castle debuted in Incline Village in 1970, a nude Lady Godiva astride a horse and flanked by two medieval, sword-wielding sentinels (all replicas, of course) welcomed guests at the resort entrance. Situated in the archway of a tall, stone wall, the long-haired beauty appeared to be about to pass through a gate and cross a drawbridge.

In Poor Taste

A contingent of Northern Nevadans considered the Lady Godiva statue offensive, presumably because the subject was naked. That sentiment extended to other elements of Kings Castle, too, including the nude revue FLESH featuring topless showgirls performed there and the “Thy Kingdom Come” sign outside the hotel.

The Nevada resort, inside and out, bore the look and feel of England’s royal architecture during its Tudor period, about 1485 to 1603, however, the real Lada Godiva had predated that by hundreds of years, having made her splash in 1040. As such, she wasn’t emblematic of the Tudor era, so why she was at Kings Castle in the first place isn’t clear. Perhaps the fact that both she and the Tudor dynasty were English was enough for then proprietor Nathan “Nate” S. Jacobson to connect the two.

Minimizing Her Effect

When Kings Castle came under new ownership, that of Jud D. McIntosh, in 1973, he sought to change the resort’s image to a family-friendly one and, thus, had Lady Godiva clothed.

Even clad in apparel, the English noblewoman only remained there two more years.

Doesn’t Fit In

After The Hyatt Corp. acquired Kings Castle in 1975 and renamed it Hyatt Lake Tahoe, it eradicated all signs of the royalty motif, transforming the facilities back to one that blended with the natural surroundings; their first iteration The Sierra Tahoe (1964 to 1966) had been designed with that very intent.

Only 1.5 months after assuming control of the hotel-casino, Hyatt auctioned off all of the medieval décor, including Lady Godiva, and donated the proceeds to the North Lake Tahoe Historical Society. As a result, Lady Godiva’s new home became Bill Anderson’s Ponderosa Ranch, a nearby theme park based on the television show Bonanza (it closed in 2004).

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* In 1040, Lady Godiva implored her husband Leofric, the Lord of Coventry, to reduce or eliminate the taxes he’d levied recently, as she found them oppressive. Knowing she was modest, he agreed to lift them if she rode her horse naked through the town’s streets. To his surprise, she did just that, after getting the local citizens to agree to not watch her carry out the challenge.

Sources