Duffin

1959-1960

William “Bill” E. Duffin, co-owner of the Senator Club in Carson City, Nevada, was murdered on Christmas morning of 1959 (see Part I). He left behind his wife Gladys, his sister, his nephew, a business partner and many employees to whom he was like a father.

Duffin moved to Nevada in 1943. Before acquiring the Senator with Stella C. Vincent, the two had operated the Wild Horse Hunting Lodge in Elko for 14 years. Prior to that, the Salt Lake City native had operated pinball machines in San Francisco.

The Suspect

Carson City police quickly honed in on Nicholas “Nick” V. Goodman as the likely perpetrator. He was the former Senator Club dealer whom Duffin had fired for cheating customers during 21 games. As a result, Nick’s casino work card had been revoked.

Investigators learned that when Nick had lost that job in mid-1958, he’d threatened Duffin and then-pit boss, Thomas Scarlett. Since, the dealer had harbored a grudge against Duffin.

Throughout those 18 months, Nick had remained unemployed except for a fleeting stint in January 1959. That was when he’d worked for two hours at the Holiday Hotel in Reno and was let go, when this new employer learned about his alleged past cheating.

Senator Club workers told police Nick repeatedly had asked Duffin to “sign a statement clearing him of the cheating charge,” reported the Nevada State Journal (Dec. 29, 1959). Each time, Duffin had refused. This had happened most recently two weeks before the business owner was slain.

Vincent reported Nick had badgered her as well to get his work permit reinstated. She, too, though, had told him again and again she wouldn’t. Their most recent interaction had been on December 21, when Nick had showed up at her home, uninvited, and warned her, “Get my card back or else” (NSJ, May 28, 1960).

Goodman

The Evidence

When investigators questioned Nick, he had gunshot residue on his hands. He explained that by saying he’d fired a gun on Christmas Eve but as a test.

The suspect didn’t have a strong alibi for when the shooting of Duffin had occurred. Nick said he’d been away from home, but had been looking for his wife Genevieve Goodman, as they’d gotten separated when they’d been out earlier. (The time of the murder was 3:20 a.m.)

Some days later, the California Bureau of Criminal Investigation and Identification determined the bullets fired from Nick’s rifle matched those removed from Duffin’s body.

The Help

Police also arrested a Carson City handyman named Jack Armstrong for allegedly having hidden the murder weapon. They charged him with being an accessory after the fact.

Genevieve also wound up in jail, for allegedly having directed Armstrong to get rid of the gun and later, when she’d learned police were searching for it, having told him to move it.

All three suspects were going to be given lie detector tests.

The Admissions

They all came clean, one at a time, on December 28, three days after the crime.

Armstrong conceded he’d repaired the 0.22-caliber rifle Nick had used and had hidden it in a manure pile after the shooting.

Genevieve gave up Nick. Her hot-tempered husband, she added, had been growing increasingly angry at and preoccupied with Duffin for more than a year. that She also admitted her role.

Then Nick himself confessed he in fact had shot Duffin.

“I just went wild … berserk, I guess. I kept pulling the trigger,” Nick told police (NSJ, May 27, 1960).

The confessed murderer also revealed he’d tried to kill his ex-boss six months earlier one day when he’d spotted him inserting coins into a Carson City parking meter. When the gun had misfired, Nick had aborted the attempt.

Police let Armstrong and Genevieve go. The district attorney charged Nick with murder, for which he pleaded not guilty.

The Trial

When Nick’s trial got underway in mid-May 1960, he faced a potential death penalty if convicted.

District Attorney John Tom Ross and special prosecutor Emile Gezelin called a handful of witnesses to testify and played, for the jurors, the tape recording of Nick’s confession. Overall, the prosecutors laid out a strong case for Nick being guilty of the murder.

Nick’s defense attorneys, Samuel Francovich of Reno and Jack B. Tenney of Los Angeles, conceded the defendant had killed Duffin but argued he’d been insane when he’d done it. To save him from capital punishment, the team attempted to prove “Goodman went insane after 18 months of brooding and trying to prove his innocence in a cheating episode which cost the club its gaming license and himself his right to work at Nevada’s legal card tables,” the NSJ reported (June 1, 1960).

The bottom line for the jurors was whether or not Nick had been of sound mind when he’d shot and killed  Duffin. The prosecution asserted yes, he had been. They called for a first degree murder verdict and demanded the death penalty. The defense argued no, he hadn’t been sane. They demanded acquittal.

The Verdict

After nearly eight hours of deliberating, the jury of eight women and four men found Nick guilty of second degree murder. This conviction carried a prison term, not capital punishment, as a penalty.

“Defense attorneys Sam Francovich and Jack Tenney, together with Goodman’s wife, were jubilant over the second-degree finding. But Goodman was angry,” the NSJ reported (June 4, 1960). “‘For what?’ he snapped when newsmen congratulated him.”

Judge Frank B. Gregory sentenced Nick to a statutory 10 years to life term in Nevada State Prison.

After serving six years, Nick was granted early parole and released. 

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Sources

When police arrived at the alley behind the Carlton Bar in Reno just after midnight on May 16, 1946, they found an unconscious man lying on the ground, covered in blood. An American Legion ambulance rushed him to Washoe General Hospital, where a medical team worked to save his life. Their efforts unsuccessful, though, and the physician there pronounced Joseph Vaughn Spratt dead at 1:15 a.m.

Grave Injuries

Spratt, in his early 30s, a World War II veteran and pharmacy student in Denver, Colorado, was in the “Biggest Little City” with a handful of schoolmates to take the Nevada Board of Pharmacy exam. With the test behind them, the group went to the Carlton Bar that fateful night, for music, drinks and gambling before returning home. (The saloon offered 21, craps, roulette, poker and slots.)

All of the students but Spratt eventually left the bar. One of them, Roy Spencer, who exited out the back, was struck immediately after, in the dark alley.

One or more of the establishment’s personnel tossed Spratt out of the rear door into the same unlit area. Somehow, he wound up with a 5-inch-long skull fracture that caused a subdural hemorrhage. He also suffered bruising on the back and one side of his skull and three facial cuts, on his chin, above his eye and on his nose.

The events leading up to him dying on the pavement differed, depending on who relayed them.

Spratt

Someone Must Pay

The police arrested the Carlton Bar’s co-owner, Sam Delich, and its bartender, Guido “Gene” DiIullo. (The other two proprietors were Sam’s brother George Delich and Franz Gersich). Sam Delich and DiIullo were charged with voluntary manslaughter.

Their trials didn’t take place until November of that year. In the interim, the Carlton Bar owners sold their business for $20,000 (about $284,000 today) to Stan Hanson, in June.

Manslaughter V. Self-Defense

At the joint trial of DiIullo and Delich, the prosecution argued that the two were responsible for killing Spratt. They’d beaten him when evicting him from the bar, had tossed him out the back door and had left him for dead in the alley. One prosecution witness, Colonel William Steer, testified Spratt had been unconscious inside the Carlton bar after being struck several times by either DiIullo and/or Delich and, therefore, couldn’t have advanced toward DiIullo, a weapon in his hand, outside.

The defense contended that only DiIullo had hit Spratt, twice, and had done so in self-defense because Spratt had pulled a nail file or other sharp object on him when the duo had escorted him out of the bar. The defense also asserted that it’d been his head hitting the ground that had resulted in Spratt’s

demise. Nevada’s governor at the time Vail Pittman testified to the good reputation of Delich and DiIullo.

The jury acquitted Delich of manslaughter, but was hung, 10 to 1, regarding a verdict for DiIullo.

Dilullo As Defendant Again

In March of the next year, 1947, the district attorney’s office tried DiIullo a second time. He again took the stand and recalled his version of the events.

“The three-day trial was featured by conflicting testimony regarding how and when the fatal blow was struck,” reported the Reno Evening Gazette (March 21, 1947).

After deliberating 11 hours, the jurors returned a not guilty verdict.

No one but Spratt paid, after all.

Time and time again, in these fatal historical incidents, the perpetrators were acquitted on the grounds of self-defense, and one has to wonder why. What do you think? Should DiIullo and/or Delich have gotten off like they did or not? Why?

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Sources

When sheriff’s deputies responded to a 10:45 p.m. call from Dixie’s Log Cabin* on January 11, 1953, they found a man, injured and lying in the parking lot there.

He was Raymond “Bud” Dutcher, 38, married and with a two-year-old daughter. He’d worked previously as a taxi and bus driver, a semi-professional baseball player, an umpire and a manager of the local West Indies Club. First responders transported him to Washoe Medical Center, where he remained in critical condition, unconscious and largely paralyzed, from being shot in the head. After twelve days in this state, he passed away.

The admitted perpetrator, Oscar Lafayette Maury, a former nightclub owner, 46, was charged with murder. His 1952 Oldsmobile was impounded; it had blood on the two left doors, some of which had appeared to have been wiped.

The ensuing investigation into the crime revealed that it resulted from words exchanged during a 21 game, at the Reno, Nevada establishment that also offered craps and slot machines. At that time, Joyce Moseley owned Dixie’s and held the gambling license for it.

“Dixie’s Log Cabin was a bar and cabaret that catered to local rounders and late night partygoers,” wrote Dwayne Kling in The Rise of the Biggest Little City.

Case Against Maury

At Maury’s trial, which began March 23, 1953, Assistant District Attorney Emile J. Gezelin and Deputy District Attorney William “Bill” J. Raggio, showed that Maury killed Dutcher, with an unpermitted gun, because Dutcher had tried to stop Maury from cheating while they’d played cards for money.

The prosecution’s key witness was John C. Bickford. A U.S. Marine who recently had just returned from Korea, he’d been working at Dixie’s as a handyman and errand runner the night in question.

Bickford relayed that during a 21 game between Dutcher, an unemployed dealer named Chauncey “Chuck” Kunz and Maury, Maury had been playing three hands at once. Having appeared “pretty drunk,” he’d been “loud and boisterous,” Bickford described, according to the Nevada State Journal (March 25, 1953).

“You’re holding up the game,” Dutcher had said to Maury.

Kunz had told Dutcher not to pester Maury as he could be dangerous.

“You can be a little rough, too,” Dutcher had told Kunz.

Shortly thereafter, Kunz and Dutcher had gone outside, presumably to fight each other. Maury had followed. Other patrons had intervened, though, and had prevented any fracas. Within minutes, they all had gone back inside, seemingly on friendly terms again. Dutcher and Kunz even had a drink together at the bar.

Later, Maury and his wife had left Dixie’s. Shortly after, Dutcher, who hadn’t seemed angry or drunk according to Bickford, had done the same. For a moment Bickford had lost sight of Dutcher but then had spotted him approaching Maury’s car.

“Before Dutcher got to the (car) door,” Bickford testified, “I heard a shot, and I saw the flash of a gun. The flash definitely came from the inside of the car.”

In presenting its case, the state brought up that the previous year, Dutcher had pleaded guilty to a charge of lewdness with an eight-year old girl, for which he’d received five years’ probation.

The Maurys’ Account

The defense, presented by attorney Sidney W. Robinson, was that to fend off Dutcher, Maury had hit him on the head with a 0.38-caliber pistol and in doing so, accidentally had fired it.

Mrs. Maury took the stand. She claimed that as she and her husband had been leaving Dixie’s, Dutcher had said, “There’s the little SOB I’m after,” and almost had chased them to their car, reported the Nevada State Journal (March 26, 1953).

“He looked like a giant,” she said. “He loomed up like Frankenstein.”

When she and her husband had been about to drive away, she claimed, Dutcher had opened the Olds’ driver’s door and had begun pulling him out of it. Her husband had hit Dutcher with a gun, and it, on its own, had discharged. 

Two other witnesses, Kuntz and Jack Cochran, a Lake Tahoe card dealer and bartender, who’d been with the Maurys that night, corroborated what Mrs. Maury said had happened inside Dixie’s. Neither Kuntz nor Cochran had seen the actual shooting.

Buster Terry, who’d dealt 21 for the trio that night, said that he’d only heard Maury being criticized for slowing down the game play.

Finally, Maury took the stand. He recalled that during the 21 game, Dutcher had told him angrily to speed up his playing. Maury had responded that he’d play his cards and Dutcher could play his own, to which Dutcher had said, “Don’t get smart or I’ll jerk your hat over your eyes.”

The rest of Maury’s testimony mostly matched that given by his wife except for the cause of the fatal shot. “I don’t know whether the gun went off of its own accord or I pulled the trigger,” he admitted.

Not An Aggressive Man

Gezelin called two rebuttal witnesses, Tyrus “Ty” Raymond Cobb, Nevada State Journal sports editor, and Gino Quilici, operator of a bar in Sparks, a neighboring city. Both testified that Dutcher generally had a solid reputation for “peace and quiet” (Reno Evening Gazette, March 26, 1953).

Consequences Ensue

On the fifth trial day, both sides rested their case and the jury was driven to Dixie’s to see the place of the crime. Afterward, at about 11:30 a.m., the seven women and five men commenced deliberation.

About 10.5 hours later, they reported their verdict. They found Maury guilty of second degree murder, meaning he’d acted with malice when he’d fatally shot Dutcher.

Maury “stared straight ahead, appearing in disbelief, for several minutes after the verdict was read,” reported the Nevada State Journal (March 28, 1953).

District Judge Harold O. Taber sentenced Maury to a prison term of 10 years to life, and within a few hours, the convicted man was processed into the Nevada State Prison.

As for Dixie’s proprietor Moseley, she applied in June 1953 to renew her gambling license for Dixie’s. However, the Nevada Tax Commission turned her down, the murder of Dutcher on her bar’s premises playing a role in that decision.

Granted Freedom

In less than three years into his prison term, in November 1955, the state board of pardons granted Maury release.

What do you think? Was that sufficient time served for having taken a life or not?

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* Dixie’s Log Cabin, also called Dixie’s Club and Log Cabin, was located at 596 Airport Road that today is Gentry Way.

Photo from freeimages.com: “Blackjack” by Tracy Scott-Murray

Sources

1980

Certain Intensive Care Unit (ICU) employees at a Las Vegas, Nevada hospital were putting money down on the date the critically ill people under their care would die, and some wagerers were ensuring they’d win, by interfering with the equipment helping keep the patients alive. This was the allegation a hospital worker made in March 1980 after overhearing a conversation at work about such activities.

An unknown number of hospital workers was immediately and temporarily suspended while the matter was probed. The Las Vegas police, the Clark County Coroner’s Office and the Clark County District Attorney’s (D.A.’s) investigators all got involved.

Gathering Of Evidence

Through their inquiries, the police learned that employees had been making death bets and tampering with lifesaving equipment had been happening. It came to light that the nurse supervisor of the 10-patient Intensive Care Respiratory Unit graveyard shift allegedly referred to herself as the “Angel of Death,” and her co-workers called her the same, as she allegedly had been involved in ending patient’s lives.

D.A. Bob Miller pursued a legal case against her and only her, for her alleged involvement in a specific patient’s death, despite there reportedly having been more than one such incident. That case was of a 51-year-old Florida man with multiple organ failure, who’d had his ventilator settings changed and who’d passed away soon after, on March 3.

Testimony Obtained

A grand jury proceeding ensued. During it the alleged victim’s wife testified that during his final days, he kept pointing to the machine. “Actually, tears were starting to come to his eyes, and he’d shake. He was nervous about something,” the Reno Evening Gazette reported her as saying (April 15, 1980). The wife also said that a nurse, on the day before her husband died, had asked her to sign a release allowing his body to be moved to the mortuary.

According a male nurse co-worker who testified, one night the nurse supervisor had asked him if the alleged victim had died yet. He’d responded that the man would be around for a while longer due to ventilator assistance. The nurse supervisor allegedly had remarked that she’d take care of that and then had decreased the patient’s ventilator’s oxygen flow drastically.

Within the hour, the 51 year old’s heartbeat began slowing. Another nurse had notified the nurse supervisor, who’d been playing cards at the time, about the patient’s heartbeat, and she’d responded that she was aware of it and not to worry, the co-worker testified. When the patient had been near death, as indicated by the heart monitor, the nurse supervisor had instructed another nurse to go into the patient’s room and pretend to try to resuscitate him. Soon after, the 51-year-old man died.

Another nurse testified that in a conversation on March 2 about a different patient, who’d been in a car accident, the nurse supervisor had said jokingly, “You just don’t know how to kill patients off,” as reported by the Reno Evening Gazette (April 18, 1980).

Miller confirmed death bets had been made among ICU workers at the hospital but, he said, had been small, 5 cents apiece. He added that there was no proof that any wagers had been placed in the case of the alleged victim. As such, Miller ignored them. The work suspension was lifted for all of the suspected employees except for the nurse supervisor.

To Be Held Accountable

The grand jurors returned an indictment, charging her with open murder* of a critically ill patient.

She was arrested, charged and jailed. About two hours later, she was free on $15,000 (about $47,300 today) bail. Subsequently, on April 4 she pleaded innocent, and the judge set a trial date, June 23.

On April 18, the accused responded to the allegations in an interview conducted by an out-of-state newspaper. She said that nothing unusual or untoward occurred on the night the alleged victim had died. Her only interaction with him had been to administer his medications and help him turn in bed. She emphasized that the patient’s doctor had deemed him terminal and that death happened often in their unit. She denied anyone ever having made death bets.

“I can’t believe this is happening to me,” she added. “The whole thing has gotten blown out of proportion. It’s like a horrible nightmare” (Reno Evening Gazette, April 18, 1980).

Legal Wrangling

Before the trial date arrived, the accused’s defense attorney filed a motion, asking that the case be dismissed.

Before the judge, he argued that like “lambs led to the slaughter,” the D.A.’s office misled grand jurors into issuing their indictment (Reno Evening Gazette, May 24, 1980) and had given “12 medically ignorant people the right to speculate, to say that tampering with this machine caused [the alleged victim’s] death. The grand jurors hadn’t addressed the question of what actually caused the 51-year-old’s demise, the attorney said.

The Deputy D.A. countered, noting that evidence existed that showed the accused had been connected to the alleged victim’s death.

The Final Word

Ultimately, District Judge Michael Wendell dismissed the indictment** because the charge had not been “substantiated to a reasonable degree of medical probability” (Reno Evening Gazette, May 30, 1980). Specifically, for the charge to stand, it required establishment that “the criminal agency of another caused the death,” and that hadn’t been achieved. 

Consequently, the nurse supervisor was reinstated to her job and she returned to work.

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* An open murder charge is a general allegation of murder that encompasses the crimes of first- and second-degree murder and voluntary and involuntary manslaughter.

** Because the indictment was dismissed, identifying details of the accused, the alleged victim and the hospital were withheld from this post.

Clip art from clker.com: “Rod of Asclepius”

Sources

Frost, 1936

1906-1967

Frank “Frankie” Frost (1898-1967) spent about two decades working in Reno’s gambling scene and had close relationships with those in power locally, including gambler-Mobsters William “Bill/Curly” Graham and James “Jim/Cinch” McKay and banker and businessman, George Wingfield, Sr. Frost had a checkered past, which eventually got him blacklisted from Nevada’s gambling industry.

Here we present the “work” (criminal) highlights of Frost, tracking him geographically through Illinois, then California and, finally, Nevada.

Chicago, 1906-1930: Murder Charge By Age 30

Though Frost was born in California, he spent most of his youth in Chicago and eventually became part of its North Side Aiello–Moran gang (Giuseppe “Joe” Aiello and George “Bugs” Moran), which was involved heavily in bootlegging during the 1920s. Frost, who used the aliases Eddie Ryan, Frank Bruna and Frank Citro there, was arrested three or four times for disorderly conduct but wasn’t charged.

Also, Frost was the primary suspect in the November 16, 1928 machine gun murder of John G. Clay, head of the Laundry and Fyehouse Chauffeurs’ Union. Police theorized that Moran ordered the hit because Clay was thwarting Moran’s attempts to muscle in on the cleaning and dyeing racket in The Windy City’s West and South Sides, Alphonse “Scarface” Capone’s territory. Though Frost was arrested for the murder, he wasn’t charged.

In a supposed act of retaliation by Capone, some of his soldiers, disguised as police officers, lined up and machine gunned down six of Moran’s men on February 14, 1929, nearly wiping out his crew. Initially, Frost was thought to be among the victims of what was dubbed the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Afterward, Frost switched his allegiance to Capone.

When Chicago Tribune crime reporter, Alfred “Jake” Lingle was murdered June 9, 1930, police traced the gun, left at the scene, back to Frost but determined that a Leo V. Brothers was the shooter.

Frost

Los Angeles, 1930-1934: Not Staying Out Of Trouble

Frost was indicted by a grand jury for accessory to the Lingle crime because he presumably had guilty knowledge of the killer(s) and their motives, but he was in Los Angeles at the time, using the alias Frank Foreman. He was captured there on July 1, 1930, arrested, returned to Chicago and placed in the county jail. After five months, though, he had to be released by law, so he got out on a $20,000 ($309,000 today) bond.

In March of the next year, Frost testified at Brothers’ trial. Also called to the stand was a witness who said he saw Frost and Brothers flee the scene in different directions after Lingle was shot. One detail the witness recounted was seeing Frost help Brothers light a cigarette afterward so Brothers didn’t have to take one of his hands out of his pocket.

The trial of Frost, for his alleged involvement in Lingle’s murder, was scheduled for April 28, but it never took place because the witnesses disappeared. Frost was back in Los Angeles when he learned, in June, that charges against him were dropped.

In September, Frost was arrested on suspicion of extortion in connection with a scheme to extort money from the widow of soap magnate, Leo Bergin. Bergin racked up a gambling debt of at least $6,000 ($102,000 today) in a days-long dice game run by representatives of New York gambler-Mobster Arnold Rothstein. Bergin wrote some checks for what he owed but later stopped payment on some. Before Rothstein’s men could collect in full, Bergin died, so they went after Gladys Bergin for payment. Due to lack of evidence, Frost wasn’t charged.

The following year, 1932, in February, a patrol officer pulled over Frost, who was working at the time as a bail bondsman. A search of the new car he was driving yielded a fully loaded, 0.45-caliber automatic pistol. Frost also had with him a letter from a “Ben” in New York, possibly Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, which read in part, “Other people out there are trying to keep out of trouble, but are always in touch with New York. Glad you have gone into the bonding business, as that is good cover for the business you are in.” Frost was found guilty of carrying a concealed weapon, a misdemeanor. Because he then failed to appear at a hearing of arguments concerning a possible new trial, the judge issued a warrant for his arrest.

A month later, police in San Francisco raided an apartment in their investigation of a $100,000 ($1.8 million today) jewelry robbery and took the four men inside to the station. Frost was among them. It resulted in a vagrancy charge (that later would be removed) and him being returned to the City of Angels. He was sentenced to six months in the county jail for the concealed weapon offense. Frost, though, disappeared, and a nationwide hunt for him began. Before he could be found, the appellate court reversed his conviction.

Presumably, the man who repeatedly had gotten away with crimes laid low in Southern California for the next few years.

Reno, 1935-1967: Focus On Gambling, Business

Frost next turned up living with his wife in The Biggest Little City. Only five months later, in April 1936, he was arrested for allegedly stealing $125,000 ($2.3 million today) worth of jewelry from a New York City store that January. For the story, see next blog post, Reno Mobsters Aid Gangster From Chicago, Raising Suspicions.

In 1938, the owner of a New York clothing store, Cy Kronfield Inc., sued Frost for $630.85 ($11,500 today) for not paying for goods and services it provided to him between 1933 and 1939.

Using the name Frank Foster, Frost was arrested in Elko, a city about 300 miles northeast of Reno, in May 1940 for attempted burglary of the Reinhart general merchandise store. Two months later, he was arrested and served 30 days in jail in Reno for “prowling through parked automobiles” (Reno Evening Gazette, Dec. 10, 1940). In June 1941, he was arrested for petty larceny after getting caught trying to sell children’s clothes he’d stolen from somewhere.

Frost reportedly ran or helped run the race horse pool at Graham and McKay’s Bank Club for several years, after which he opened and operated his own book, the Reno Turf Club.

In 1947’s first half, Frost applied for another gambling license from the city, this one for a new entity, Washoe Sports News, which was to supply race results from the Trans-America News and Publishing Co. wire service to local outlets. On behalf of Capone, Siegel was tasked with forcing bookmakers on the West Coast to switch to Trans-America from Continental Press. While the city council was mulling over whether or not to eliminate the existing cap on the number of race pools allowed in Reno, because granting Frost the license would’ve exceeded it, Trans-America went bankrupt and folded after its primary owner-operator was murdered. Soon afterward, Siegel was killed, too, and Frost withdrew his gambling application.

In 1951, Frost sold the Reno Turf Club. Afterward, he returned to working at the Bank Club, supposedly wrapping money. However, members of the Nevada Tax Commission, the entity which in 1947 gained the task of issuing state gambling licenses, saw him overseeing a game of faro there once. Because of his criminal background, the commissioners didn’t want Frost involved with running the gambling in any Silver State casino.

However, they spotted him again doing just that, counting money and giving orders at Reno’s Palace Club. After a related brouhaha, the casino banned him from working there in 1953, and after that, according to Frost, he no longer could get a job in the state’s gaming industry.

Dorothy Frost

In 1955, Frost’s wife Dorothy, a Manitoba, Canada native, took her life by overdosing on sleeping pills.

His Final Years

The widower remained in Reno and was involved subsequently in some shady business dealings, which came to light through various lawsuits. Frost held and breached the lease on the Mt. Rose Sawmill. In an incident that led to a lawsuit, Frost physically prevented a competing lumber firm (Frost owned the Nevada Pine Mill and Lumber Co.) from taking from the sawmill wood it purchased. Also, he was sued for failing to pay for lumber he bought from a Lake Tahoe man.

In another arrangement, Frost was a co-partner with McKay and Marion T. Weller in F.M.W. Drilling Co. In 1957, an employee sued F.M.W. for not paying him $1,650 ($15,000 today), the remainder of wages due him for building an oil derrick.

In 1961, a Frank Frost appeared to be working at the local Buick dealership as the assistant general sales manager. It may or may not have been him.

The Mobster Frost, who’d left a trail of crime in his wake, passed away on April 1, 1967 at age 68 in Nevada.

Sources

Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel and his famed Las Vegas hotel-casino

1947

“The Flamingo Hotel, one of the nation’s most elaborate establishments, was [Benjamin] Siegel’s baby and was set to be the operating headquarters for his syndicate which embarked on a program to control gambling in Nevada as well as Los Angeles, San Francisco and other spots in the west,” read a Nevada State Journal op-ed piece (June 22, 1947).

Among other various criminal enterprises, Siegel was involved in trying to establish the Mob-run Transamerica race wire service on the West Coast.

The well-publicized murder of Siegel, Mobster, hitman and gambler, on June 20, 1947 led to restrictions on who received a Nevada gambling license. The Silver State tightened control to filter out the undesirables and, thus, clean up the industry.

“It is up to the authorities to protect the state against the invasion of gangsters. Gambling attracts them but vigilance and honest enforcement of the gambling law and particularly the license provisions of it will keep them out, wrote an NSJ opinion writer (June 22, 1947).

Licensing At The Start

When the Nevada Legislature approved gambling in 1931, responsibility for granting licenses fell to the counties or cities; the state wasn’t involved. The only requirement for obtaining a license was that the applicant be a U.S. citizen. Licensees paid two monthly fees: $25 per table game and $10 per slot machine.

Fourteen years later, in 1945, state legislators shifted gambling licensing to the then two-person Nevada Tax Commission and, simultaneously, instituted a state gambling license fee equal to 1% of gross revenue for enterprises doing more than $3,000 worth of business quarterly. Cities and counties still could issue gambling licenses, too but only after an applicant obtained one from the state.

Changes In 1947

The tax commission established licensing-related guidelines based on the opinion of the Nevada Attorney General Alan Bible, which he delivered in October 1947.

According to Bible, the commission had the power to:

• Investigate a gambling license applicant’s background, including their character, habits, associates and the like

• Require license applicants to provide proof of citizenship

• Deny an applicant a gambling license when they are deemed to have an “unsavory character,” when granting a license wouldn’t serve the public’s interest or when another just reason warrants it

• Revoke a gambling license if the holder is determined to have an “unsavory  character,” if the licensee is acting against the public’s interest or if some other sound reason exists

“All applicants must now present complete evidence of past records, current business associates, dormant or active, and must submit themselves to an investigation if such is required by the tax commission,” reported the Nevada State Journal (Jan. 24, 1948). “If evidence is presented that any operator is knowingly permitting cheating in his establishment, his license is subject to immediate revocation.”

Immediate Repercussions

When the tax commission held its subsequent meeting, in January 1948, it granted 1,000 gambling licenses but denied five, for reasons not made public.

Two of the denials went to existing bookmaking enterprises, the Turf Club in Las Vegas and the Reno Turf Club in Reno.

Turf Club in Las Vegas

Sources

Chartrand’s bombed Cadillac

1968

On Aug. 27, 1968, a dynamite bomb rigged under his Cadillac’s floorboard caused the violent death of Richard “Dick” Louis Chartrand, 42, a co-owner of the Barney’s Club and South Tahoe Nugget casinos in Stateline, Nevada. Also, “a large amount of money” was stolen from his home safe (The Fresno Bee, April 10, 1970). (These events happened exactly 12 years before the bombing of nearby Harvey’s Resort Hotel.)

The Chartrand case went cold. Then in 1981, Douglas County Sheriff Jerry Maple reopened it, hoping for further information, but nothing came of it.

What We Know Today

The initial investigators were confident they knew who committed the vicious murder-robbery of Chartrand and why, according to The Sacramento Bee, the newspaper that in 1981 conducted a full inquiry of its own into the killing and published its findings (Part I, Part II, Part III, Aug. 27). What hindered the case moving forward 52 years ago was a lack of physical evidence, which the district attorney insisted on having to ensure a conviction.

The Douglas County sheriff’s office believed two men, Roy Fred Pursselley and Louis Glenn Ballard, carried out the crimes. Pursselley, 50, and Ballard, 54, at the time, were crime partners who both had served prison time in the 1950s for conspiracy to smuggle (in their case, parrots, across the Mexico border into Southern California). They were thieves with expertise in robbing safes and, thus, adept at using explosives.

The two ex-cons allegedly killed and robbed Chartrand for Irwin “Bud” Spencer Soper, Jr. in exchange for essentially $1,000 (Soper reduced Pursselley’s debt to him to $400 from $1,400.) At the time, Soper, Jr. co-owned the Montgomery Pass Lodge & Casino in Mineral County and was about to open, in the next six months, the Monte Carlo Resort in Laughlin, both in Nevada.

Soper’s motive behind having Chartrand executed and robbed, according to then Douglas County Undersheriff George J. Brautovich, was that Chartrand stopped paying Soper a portion of the skim from Barney’s Club. (Later, it was determined Chartrand in fact was taking money off the top from that casino.) Soper believed Chartrand was securing his own share in his home safe.

The involvement of the three men — Soper, Pursselley and Ballard — came to Brautovich’s attention through Paul N. McConkey, a man who employed Pursselley at his plumbing enterprise in Los Angeles. McConkey claimed to have seen Pursselley obtain dynamite and build, at McConkey’s business, what appeared to be a bomb. He relayed that a few days before Chartrand’s murder, Pursselley told him he was going to Reno to do a job, and Pursselley used the company truck and two company credit cards for the trip, on which Ballard accompanied him. The two returned to Los Angeles the day after Chartrand’s murder.

Soper, Pursselley and Ballard

“When all the information on the Chartrand murder was sifted, investigating authorities in Nevada and California were convinced that Soper, Pursselley and Ballard were their men,” the Bee reported.

In 1981, the newspaper team interviewed whom they could related to the case. Ballard was deceased (1975) by then. McConkey claimed he couldn’t recall anything about the 1968 events. As for Soper and Pursselley, “their basic position was that Chartrand was a friend,” according to the Bee. Pursselley knew both Soper and Chartrand from having played in their illegal gambling games. “Moreover, in Soper’s case, Chartrand was a valuable business associate and neither had any reason to want him dead.”

When the Bee reporters asked Soper if Chartrand phased him out of the Barney’s skim, he replied: “I have five points. I could bounce Chartrand off a wall and get my stock. I’m the last son-of-a-bitch that wanted Chartrand dead. Alive, he’s worth a quarter-million or better to me. Dead, he ain’t worth a quarter.” The quarter million was the amount Soper placed on the 5 percent hidden interest he allegedly held in Barney’s Club.

Today, Soper and Pursselley are dead. Pursselley went first, in 1987, at age 69, in Los Angeles. Soper followed in 1995 at age 71, in Laughlin.

Richard L. Chartrand

Chartrand And His Short Life

Born on April Fools’ Day in 1926 in Fresno, California, Dick Chartrand grew up in the same town. At age 18, he was drafted into the U.S. Army Air Forces during the final days of World War II.

“He was never the same after that,” his mother, Elizabeth Chartrand, said.

It was during his time in the military that he learned to shoot craps. After being discharged, Chartrand returned to Fresno and worked with his father, Louis Chartrand, in the real estate business until 1950 when he was reactivated as an Air Force reservist for the Korean War.

Subsequently, he provided a charter air service, flying people from Fresno to Nevada to gamble. At some point, he also sold used cars. An FBI memo indicated that in 1962, he was running illegal card and craps games in a small building in the rear of the Fresno Auto Auction sales yard.

The Fresnan began investing in and helping run Nevada casinos in 1961, first Barney’s Club and then the South Tahoe Nugget. At the time of his murder in 1968, he was living in Nevada’s swanky Skyland subdivision on Lake Tahoe’s East Shore. He had a girlfriend but no children.

The Murder-Robbery Instigator

Bud Soper was three years older than Chartrand, being born on July 5, 1923 in Corona, California. He was a “tough-talking, beefy, gray-haired man, who [could] be engagingly garrulous,” according to Sacramento Bee reporters.

In 1953, when Soper was 29 and reportedly working as a locksmith, he was arrested with others involved in an illegal dice game in Southern California. It isn’t clear if he was running or playing the game.

“I come out of the gutter in L.A., crawlin’ on my hands and knees, runnin’ sneak crap games,” he later told the Bee, in 1981.

Supposedly, Soper worked as a handyman for a wealthy person who unexpectedly left him all of his assets upon his death. With those, Soper funded one or more Nevada casinos and, thus, reinvented himself as a legitimate gambler.

The first of his gaming businesses was the Montgomery Pass Lodge & Casino, which he and a partner debuted in 1963.

Six months after Chartrand’s murder, in 1969, Soper and another investor opened the Monte Carlo Resort. Nearly a decade afterward, a group of physicians acquired the property and reopened it in 1978 under a new name, Crystal Palace.

Soper opened his third gambling house, the Regency Casino, in Laughlin in 1980. The following year, he launched the Silver Strike Casino in Tonopah.

“I’m just a plain old dirty-assed gambler,” he said of himself in 1991.

On February 19, 1995, Soper died at 71 years old in Laughlin.

———————————

Photos from The Sacramento Bee, Aug. 27, 1981

Sources

The tri-level Rose Isle, originally the S.S. Rose City passenger ship

1932

“There are no dull moments on the Rose Isle,” the invitation to prospective customers for dinner and dancing on the Southern California gambling ship read. Apparently, the excitement also included murder.

The Crime And The Ship

Alerted to trouble by the ship’s bulldogs Toots and Boots at around 2 a.m. on a Tuesday, a deck hand discovered craps dealer Charles M. Bozeman, 32, dead on a cabin floor, having been shot twice, below the heart and in the arm. Also in the cabin of steward A.C. “Duke” Pohl were café bus boy, Virgil Roach, 32, and casino floorman, James Lee O’Keefe, alive and drunk. An automatic revolver lay near the body (later it was discovered it’d been stolen the previous December in a robbery), and two bullets were lodged in the wall. Bozeman, Roach, O’Keefe and Pohl all were racketeers from East St. Louis, Illinois.

The Rose Isle was one of numerous boats that offered gambling offshore the West Coast during the 1930s. To skirt the state law that prohibited most forms of gambling, these vessels had to be anchored in federal waters, which were at least three miles out from the shoreline. This particular ship sat on “gambler’s row” off of Long Beach, between the Johanna Smith and the Monte Carlo.

Rose Isle’s owners* were believed to be East St. Louis gangsters — Erastus “Raz” E. Pendleton, D.P. Bozeman (the victim’s brother), Frankie Waller and William “Billy” F. Gleason — along with Chicago Mobster Johnny Rosselli, Los Angeles Mobster Jack Dragna and Los Angeles Spring Street Gang affiliates, Tommy Jacobs and Luther “Tutor” B. Scherer.

FBI agents investing the murder learned that earlier that day, July 19, 1932, Bozeman and O’Keefe had gone fishing together and after returning, had done some drinking with Roach in the cabin.

Roach fingered O’Keefe as the shooter and said the murder resulted from a quarrel over a married woman. However, both of these claims would come into question at O’Keefe’s trial in December 1932.  O’Keefe was booked into the Long Beach Jail and charged with Bozeman’s murder. Roach was held in the Los Angeles County Jail as a material witness.

Subsequent Mysterious Crimes

Later that Tuesday, in the evening, another East St. Louisan, John Miley, 36, also was shot to death while fleeing from a robbery he and his underlings had committed at the Lexington Pharmacy in Long Beach. For the theft of about $125 (about $2,300 today), police arrested and charged four suspects: Ed Allen aka Al Reed, 25; John Teeter, 33; Verner Hansen, 20; and Joe Aycoy, 26.

Allen revealed that he, Miley the leader and the others had held up 40 or more drugstores and gas stations over the preceding several months. He said Bozeman fenced the stolen goods for Miley’s group and that Bozeman had $15,000 worth of diamonds (about $281,000 today) in his possession on the day he was murdered. Allen also asserted that Miley was killed by one of his own, “a red-haired East St. Louis gangster” after they’d argued all that day over division of the loot they’d plundered and that the same person murdered Bozeman. The motive, according to Allen, was to gain control over the group of thieves.

About 2.5 days later, the Johanna Smith was set on fire around 6 p.m., and after three hours ablaze, only a charred hull remained. The floating casino was owned by men associated with the Los Angeles Spring Street Gang — Clarence Blazier, his brother Ed Blazier, Herbert C. Sousa, Marvin “Doc” Schouweiler, Ed V. Turner — along with front Albert Howard. Prosecutors at O’Keefe’s trial named the owners as Dan McGIynn of East St. Louis, Kirk Harrington of St. Louis and A.M. Gleason of Long Beach.

“A ‘gambling war’ broke out in the ranks of those controlling and employed on the vessels, where merrymakers from the mainland nightly court the favors of Lady Luck at craps, roulette, blackjack, chuck-a-luck and other games of chance,” the Los Angeles Times quoted Assistant U.S. Attorney Milo Rowell as saying (July 24, 1932).

James L. O’Keefe

Justice Is Done … Or Is It?

O’Keefe’s trial kicked off on Dec. 5. The woman over whom O’Keefe and Bozeman allegedly had argued testified. Edna Frances Smith Wilson said she frequented Rose Isle and knew both men but didn’t believe they’d fought over her.

Another witness testified that shortly after the shooting, Roach had thrown a small lockbox inside the cabin overboard.

When Roach was on the stand, he said O’Keefe and Bozeman had begun arguing in the dining room and then all three had gone to the cabin and had begun drinking from the 5-gallon jug of gin in the room. The dispute, which centered on O’Keefe allegedly having made a female friend of Bozeman leave the ship, had continued. Eventually, O’Keefe had pulled out the gun and had shot Bozeman. Roach said he’d yelled that O’Keefe had shot Bozeman, after which O’Keefe had tried to choke Roach.

Defense attorney John S. Cooper created reasonable doubt by suggesting that Roach could’ve been the killer. Numerous witnesses testified that he’d been drunk and obnoxious from Monday afternoon to the discovery of Bozeman’s body. Roach himself admitted to having consumed at least four drinks.

“Didn’t you shoot and kill Charles Bozeman?” Cooper asked Roach.

“I did not,” Roach answered. “It was James O’Keefe, not I, who shot him.”

Next, O’Keefe testified. He admitted to having been drinking but denied having had words with Bozeman. He claimed that he’d been asleep when Bozeman had been shot, had awoken to the sounds of the shots and had grabbed ahold of Roach who’d shoved him off. He said he hadn’t seen a weapon in Roach’s hand and didn’t know who killed Bozeman. He emphatically denied shooting Bozeman, who he said was his friend.

The ship’s chef testified that after the shooting, Roach had told him O’Keefe had fired the gun and also had expressed concern that his own fingerprints might be on it from his struggle with O’Keefe after Bozeman’s murder.

The jurors found O’Keefe guilty of manslaughter. After, Judge Frank H. Norcross sentenced him to five years’ probation because “the court is not convinced as the court would like to be that the defendant is the one who fired the shot,” he said (Reno Evening Gazette, Dec. 17, 1932). O’Keefe left the courtroom a free man.

Sources

Their behavior at several Las Vegas casinos got them noticed. Then the dominoes fell.

Two men showed wads of C notes at the craps tables, tried to exchange some of them for casino bills and broke others into smaller denominations. Word got to the local police, who picked up and took to the station Raymond Philip Wilson, 33, and Frank James Ellsworth, 36, on Friday, July 8, 1955.

Officers in Southern Nevada found more than $85,000 in their pockets and at their high-end hotel room, stuffed in drawers and suitcases. Both refused to divulge where they’d gotten the money but said they’d done so legally.

Because the serial numbers on their Benjamins were in sequence, Vegas police suspected they’d been involved in the April 6 holdup of the Chase Manhattan Bank in Queens, New York for $300,000, the perpetrators of which still hadn’t been identified. Police arrested Ellsworth and Wilson and booked them on suspicion of robbery.

Both suspects were ex-convicts from the Midwest and wanted on theft charges in different cities. They’d arrived in Sin City three days before, supposedly having traveled from Tampa, Fla.

Couldn’t Hold Them

Law enforcement officers concluded that the men hadn’t been involved in the Chase bank heist. Ellsworth was freed on $1,000 bond and fled the state with the duo’s $85,177 in crisp bills and $2,100 in gambling chips. (That $87,277 total is worth about $8.4 million today.)

The pair’s defense attorneys, Harry Claiborne and Calvin Magleby, retrieved the currency for their clients after filing a writ of mandamus charging that the police had obtained the cash and chips through an unlawful search and seizure, hadn’t informed the men of the charges against them and had detained them illegally.

“It’s my money. I didn’t rob anybody to get it, but let the police sweat it out,” Ellsworth told a newspaper reporter before disappearing (Reno Evening Gazette, July 11, 1955). He said he’d earned the money by selling magazine subscriptions and had saved it, over many years.

Wilson was released a few days later on $3,000 bail.

Way Beyond Robbery

The freedom of the duo was short-lived, however, as they were rearrested, Wilson in Las Vegas, Ellsworth in Omaha, Neb., on Tuesday, July 12 after the sequencing of the bills in their possession were matched to those owned by a 73-year-old widow in Philadelphia, Pa., Lulubel Rossman. Both suspects were extradited to The City of Brotherly Love.

Three days before Ellsworth and Wilson appeared in Las Vegas, Rossman had been bound, gagged, strangled and robbed of about $90,000, in $100 bills, that she’d kept in a safety deposit box in her home, a Hotel Adelphia suite.

Self-Gained Reprieve

Wilson went to trial first. A jury convicted him of first degree murder in May 1956, for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

With 19 years of time served, at the Huntingdon State Correctional Institution in Pa., he escaped from a farm work detail on June 12, 1975.

Subsequently, he created a life for himself in nearby Pottstown, Pa., where he remarried and quietly resided less than a block’s distance from the local police station.

After a decade of hiding in plain sight, though, officers found Wilson. They arrested him in his yard and returned him to Huntingdon.

Blood On His Hands

Ellsworth, on the other hand, had three trials, in each of which jurors convicted him of first degree murder and chose his punishment as life in prison over the death penalty. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned the first two decisions, however, and granted him new trials.

During the first, it came out, through the testimony of a jailhouse snitch, that Ellsworth, not Wilson, murdered Rossman, though Wilson was present when it happened. When being held in the Las Vegas jail for extradition to Philadelphia, Wilson told a man in his cell that the two robbers hadn’t had to kill Rossman but that Ellsworth had gotten “rambunctious.” The snitch testified at the trials of both defendants.

The verdict that stood finally came in November 1966, 11 years after the crime.

Photo from freeimages.com: “Free Gamble” by Lisa Kong

Sources

An innocent man was placed in law enforcement’s crosshairs in late 1930s Los Angeles for a heinous crime … the frame-up stuck.

George “Les” Bruneman

Caught Unawares

While strolling on Southern California’s Redondo Beach Strand, or boardwalk, with a female employee on a July Monday night after dinner with friends, George “Les” Bruneman, 40, was shot in the back. The bullet, which entered his left shoulder, pierced a lung and entered his abdomen. He survived but spent months in the hospital.

“I’m living on borrowed time,” Bruneman told a detective lieutenant. “I’ve got about six weeks more. They’ll get me the next time. They won’t send the same pair, though. They’ll send experts after me the next time” (Oakland Tribune, Oct. 25, 1937).

Bruneman owned/operated the Surf Club gambling house in Redondo Beach and had many horse racing bookmaking establishments throughout that Los Angeles County beach area.

In Cold Blood

Six weeks after his release from the hospital, on October 25, while drinking with friends in Los Angeles’ Roost Café in the wee hours, Bruneman was executed, sustaining four shots from a distance followed by six more at close range. An innocent bystander, Frank A. Greuzard, ran after the killers, but they fatally gunned him down, too.

Police theorized that Bruneman’s murder was related to a gambling feud of some sort, perhaps even rivals wanting his territory for themselves.

Pete Pianezzi, 1981

Seeking A Suspect

While various persons of interest were questioned and released, an informant led police to Peter “Pete” Attillio Pianezzi, an ex-convict from San Francisco, California with bank robbery charges pending against him. He was arrested for the murders of Bruneman and Greuzard.

Pianezzi went on trial for the killings in February 1940, when he was 38. In court, one of the owners and the bartender of the Roost Café identified him as being the shooter. The prosecutor went for the death penalty, but the jury couldn’t agree on a verdict.

In Pianezzi’s second trial, which ended two months later, the panel of his peers convicted him of first degree murder, and the judge sentenced him to life imprisonment at Folsom State Prison.

Around the same time, he was found guilty on three counts of first degree robbery netting $17,000 in bank holdings. For those, he was given three life sentences. All four periods were to be served concurrently.

Long Overdue Exoneration

Pianezzi served 13 years, getting released in May 1953. For the next several decades, he worked to clear his name with respect to the murders and always maintained his innocence regarding them. He especially wanted his wife Frances to see him cleared, but it didn’t happen by the time she passed away.

“I’ve been pretty upset and depressed,” Pianezzi said. “I wanted her to see it. But even if she’s not around, I’m going to hang in there. I didn’t commit the murders, and that’s it” (Folsom Telegraph, June 26, 1981).

In 1966, California Governor Edmond “Pat” G. Brown, offered Pianezzi a pardon on the grounds that he’d been rehabilitated. He turned it down though because he wanted exoneration based on his innocence.

Fifteen years later, in 1981, Brown’s son, California Governor Gerald “Jerry” Brown pardoned Pianezzi, then age 79 and retired from a job distributing newspapers in Mill Valley.

Moceri on left, Bompensiero

Later Revealed

Roughly four decades after Bruneman and Greuzard’s murders, the identity of the actual killers and the motive for the crime supposedly came to light. Two hitmen, members of the Los Angeles Mafia — Leonard “Leo/Lips” C. Moceri and Frank Bompensiero — committed the murders, according to Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno, one of their cohorts who became an FBI informant. Jack Dragna, head of that crime family, ordered the hit, he said. (Moceri and Bompensiero had died, by murder, before Pianezzi’s pardon, the former in 1976, the latter in 1977.)

What allegedly led up to the hit on Bruneman was a dispute between him and Johnny Rosselli, whom the Chicago Outfit had dispatched to Los Angeles to protect Nationwide, the only horse racing wire service provided in California at the time. Bruneman had been bootlegging the service. A rumor swirled that Bruneman wanted to take out Rosselli, then a respected member of the Dragna crime family. When Dragna heard it, he acted pre-emptively.

According to Fratianno, Moceri had described to him years earlier how the assassination had gone down and the fallout, concluding with: “Want to hear the payoff? The cops arrested some dago, Pete Pianezzi, and believe it or not, the son of a bitch was convicted and he’s still serving time on that murder rap. It’s a bum beef.”

Sources

Photo of Bruneman: from the Oakland Tribune, Oct. 25, 1937, by the Associated Press
Photo of Pianezzi: from the Arizona Republic, June 25, 1981, by the Associated Press