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

U.S. FBI seal

1970-1975

In a massive, coordinated effort, federal agents raided illegal bookmaking operations throughout the U.S. with ties to organized crime.

On December 12, 1970, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agents struck in 11 states and 26 cities, including Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, Miami Beach, six in Ohio and five in Georgia. The feds served 160 search warrants and made 27 arrests.

Mobsters Wanted

In Nevada, the Feds targeted Caesars Palace and the Rose Bowl Sports Book in Sin City. The following men were arrested, among others, for allegedly running an illegal sports book, in connection with the nation’s top bookmakers, between Palm Springs, California and Las Vegas. They were charged with violating interstate gambling laws.

• Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, Rose Bowl Sports Book manager and alleged Chicago Outfit member

• Jerome Zarowitz, former Caesars Palace casino manager and reputed mob associate in partnership with the New York Genovese and Boston Patriarca crime families

• Elliot Paul Price, Caesars Palace casino host and alleged Patriarca crime family associate

• Sanford Waterman, executive vice president of Caesars Palace

When FBI agents raided Caesars Palace, they seized about $1.6 million in $100 bills (about $9.9 million today), mostly from Zarowitz’s lockboxes kept at the casino, the rest from those of Price and Waterman.

Watertight Case … Or Not

With the defendants free on bond, a trial was set, and the defendants retained attorney Oscar Goodman to represent them.

“The case hinged on wiretap information, which solidly established the multi-state connections and the activity of the group. In short, they were dead,” Goodman said in Of Rats and Men, John L. Smith’s biography of the attorney who later became Las Vegas’ mayor.

In prepping for the case, Goodman noticed an irregularity on the wiretap authorization, that someone other than U.S. Attorney General (AG) John Mitchell had signed his name. The defense attorney later determined the assistant AG had signed for his boss, which is illegal.

On that basis, Goodman requested the court dismiss the case. It did, but an appeal followed.

Ultimately, in late 1975, District Court Judge Roger Foley ended the saga for good. He determined the federal government hadn’t exhausted all other investigative avenues before they’d resorted to bugging and that made the wiretap evidence inadmissible.  Without it, prosecutors didn’t have a case.

“Every defendant walked away without a scratch from the biggest federal assault on the national bookmaking syndicate since the Roaring ’20s,” Smith wrote in Of Rats and Men.

Sources