The colorful career of San Francisco-born Joseph Zemansky (1877-1953) spanned three industries and two countries. After childhood in Sacramento, he spent several decades in California before settling in Nevada.

Here are 10 highlights of Zemansky’s professional life and experiences:

Gambling

1) Zemansky helped establish and operate the immensely popular Agua Caliente Casino and Hotel in Tijuana, Mexico, which opened in June 1928. Along with four others, he was part of the Mexican Development Co., the group behind the resort and initial owners of its gambling concession.

2) Zemansky and his Mexican Development Co. partners came under Internal Revenue Bureau (IRB) scrutiny in 1930 for not reporting for tax purposes their share of $550,000 ($8.9 million today) that the group’s head Wirt Bowman divvied between them. The likely skimmed money had come from Bowman’s records-less Agua Caliente “concession fund,” or bribe fund more accurately. When tax men questioned the quartet, three denied ever receiving any money, and the other two, Zemansky included, claimed they’d only borrowed money from the fund. Lacking proof, the IRB dropped the issue.

3) Zemansky had dealings with the Mafia. He and his brother-in-law Barney Morris opened a bingo club in 1934 in Kansas City, Missouri called Club Fortune. The two owned half, and the Kansas City Combine boss John Lazia owned the other half.

4) The Mob allegedly victimized Zemansky. When Lazia was murdered, his successor, Charles Carrollo, assumed Lazia’s 50 percent of Club Fortune. Then in 1938, Carrollo forced Zemansky and Morris to sell him their half for a ridiculous price, $1 according to one report, $10,000 according to another. (The club generated about $60,000 a month, about $1.1 million today!) The transaction took place, but Zemansky asserted Carrollo hadn’t coerced him and Morris into it and the deal had been profitable.

5) Zemansky debuted another Club Fortune in 1937, this one a nightclub in Reno, Nevada with a casino, cocktail lounge and entertainment, which became known for its large, tango offering. After a successful, 10-year run, Zemansky closed the business in 1947 when the property lease expired.

“At the time it was the outstanding night spot in Western Nevada, featuring an unusual decorative theme of potted palms,” wrote the Reno Evening Gazette (Jan. 12, 1953).

Other Business

6) Zemansky’s other businesses included: Diamond Palace, a pawn shop and jewelry store he and his brothers ran for years, and the House of Props, which rented furnishings, sets and objects to movie studios and theater companies, both in Los Angeles, as well as Heaney’s Jewelry & Loan Co. in Reno, co-owned with George Heaney.

7) Zemansky discovered and, for several years, managed boxer Jack Johnson who went on to become a world heavyweight champion.

Crime

8) Zemansky was robbed twice at his Los Angeles home, in 1933 and 1934. The second time, two masked gunmen bound Zemansky, his wife and nephew with neckties, made Zemansky open the vault and stole $5,000 ($100,000 today) in jewels and $200 ($4,000) in cash.

9) Zemansky was arrested in Reno in August 1945 for leaving open Club Fortune’s basement door, thereby violating a city ordinance. His punishment was a $10 ($150 today) fine.

10) Zemansky passed away from a heart attack at age 75 on January 12, 1953. He was in San Bernardino at the time with his wife, visiting her sister on their way to Palm Springs.

Do you have any additional information about Zemansky to share? 

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It’s undisputed that Mobsters ruled early gambling in Reno, Nevada’s 1920s and 1930s. Two club owners who offered games of chance in the city courageously wrote, in their memoirs roughly two decades later, about the powers that were.

Here are the authors and their depictions created with words: 

Harold Smith, Sr., I Want to Quit Winners (1961)

Smith encountered the Reno Mob in his casino Harolds Club in 1937, two years after it opened. The co-proprietor explained:

“Let us say they were a local mob with options on outside talent. They had a club — we’ll call it the Gibraltar — and it did a good business. Who owned it in fact, I cannot, or will not, say. However, a very prominent Nevada citizen whom we shall call Mr. Senior was sufficiently regarded at the Gibraltar for every employee to snap to attention at the sight of him.

“Baby Face Nelson, the Chicago gangster then on the lam, had made the Gibraltar his local headquarters and might be seen playing Pan there any day. Rumor had it the Cribs and their fifty-odd prostitutes down by the river were Gibraltar-owned. So was at least one Reno city councilman.”

“The Gibraltar” clearly was the Bank Club and “Mr. Senior,” George Wingfield, Sr. As for the Reno City Council member (third ward), that was William A. Justi. He also was the police committee chairman for several years, a position through which he “virtually controlled police affairs” according to the Reno Evening Gazette (March 16, 1936).

Smith commented on the Mob’s approach to outsiders:

“They never sent any word of warning to us. That wasn’t the protocol; they were more discreet than that.”

Belle Livingstone, Belle Out of Order (1959)

Belle Livingstone, socialite and New York speakeasy owner during Prohibition, had a run-in with the Reno Mob when she opened The Cowshed on Virginia Street without their permission. Then unaware of their existence in town, she hadn’t anticipated any problems. She was wrong. She wrote:

“After all the years I had lived on the Continent, I should have remembered that in any gambling town there is always an underworld that runs everything — a clique that calls the shots in every racket, decides who may and who may not operate and under what terms, even elects public officials. This was as true in the Reno of the Thirties as anywhere else, except that in Reno the underworld was at the same time the uppercrust.”

As for those elite gangsters, she described them this way:

“At the time I was [in Reno], it was reputed that a certain financier, owner of seventeen banks in Nevada, was the real ruler of the little city, although Mayor Roberts sat in the chair; that the said financier and three partners formed a four-headed Octopus which strangled every business that didn’t pay money into their till; that no one could possibly operate without their sanction; and that to them every form of vice — from the dirty, painted girls in the red-light district to the flourishing hophouses — made obeisance.”

Whereas she didn’t name them, obviously the banker was Wingfield. Two of the partners she recalled undoubtedly were James “Jim/Cinch” McKay and William “Bill/Curly” Graham. The third partner might’ve been Justi or someone else.

Like Smith, Livingstone noted that the Mob didn’t verbalize their desires to intruders like her but, rather, sent their henchmen to send their message through violence. She wrote:

“The Octopus, moreover, had its own way of dealing with outsiders who tried to become insiders. This was the silence treatment, which might result in anything from a few days in the hospital to a few appropriate remarks to the mourners.”

Historical Documentation

At the time Smith and Livingstone’s memoirs were published, Wingfield, McKay and Graham were still alive. (Justi had died in 1945.) Had either author named any of the Mobsters, they could’ve experienced  extreme repercussions as a result. Even describing them as they had was risky.

In taking the chance they did, Livingstone and Smith recorded for posterity the key dirty players in one of The Silver State’s significant eras, and Nevada history is better for it.

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Selig Zoo archway

1938

Gambler Tony Cornero Stralla offered to donate a day’s worth of revenue from his Southern California casino boat, the Rex, to Zoo Park at 3800 Mission Road in Los Angeles.

The attraction, then owned/operated by the California Zoological Society and formerly the Selig Zoo, was teetering on bankruptcy and its animals were facing starvation.

However, the group refused Cornero Stralla’s offer on the grounds it was “inadvisable to mix gambling with pennies contributed by school children” (Nevada State Journal, Oct. 14, 1938). Indeed, youths were donating what they could to save the zoo.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons/University of California—Los Angeles Library, Los Angeles Times photographic archive

Canada-born Jack Sullivan, né John D. Scarlett, had co-owned and run the Bank Club for two decades and prior to that, the Willows (it burned down in 1932) — both Reno, Nevada casino hotspots. He’d retired a mere six months before his death at age 72. He passed away on April 24, 1951 in a local hospital after a prolonged illness.

He left behind an estate valued at $844,952.00 (about $8 million today) and comprised of these assets:

TYPE	AMOUNT	BREAKDOWN
Cash:	$431,165.85
		$202,951.49 in a commercial account at Security National Bank
		$191,148.00 in a safety deposit box at First National Bank of Nevada
		$20,624.40 at the Bank Club
		$12,381.96 in a business account at a different FNB branch
		$4,060.00 in interest and dividends on investments
Bonds:	$245,893.45
Stocks:	$104,662.70
Loan Balance:	$25,000.00	(Amount due on loan he'd made to the Cal-Neva Lodge in 1948)
Miscellaneous:	$21,380.00
		$10,000.00 Diamond ring, 7 carat
		$4,500.00 Cadillac
		$6,880.00 Other
Real Estate:	$16,850.00
TOTAL:	$844,952.00

Post Mortem Withdrawals

The executor of Sullivan/Scarlett’s estate, First National Bank of Nevada, paid the federal taxes due, which amounted to $121,442.82. This reduced the estate value by 14 percent, to $723,509.18.

Then they paid the legal fees for the settling the estate, which totaled $65,307.16:

$42,619.40 went to Woodburn, Forman and Woodburn, the executor’s counsel
$17,187.76 went to FNB as a statutory commission
$3,500.00 went to Joseph P. Haller, the widow’s attorney
$2,000.00 went to McCarran, Rice, Wedge and Blakey, the heirs’ law firm

These expenses further reduced the estate’s value, by 9 percent.

What remained of Sullivan/Scarlett’s estate was $658,202.02 (about $6.3 million today).

Distribution Of Wealth

Sullivan/Scarlett left a will, which had been created in 1948, three years before his passing. He’d bequeathed the following:

To his widow: Half of all community property and the remainder of the estate after the other commitments were paid; the latter came to about $130,000.

To his daughter: $200,000. Held in a trust, the money was to be invested in U.S. government bonds and she was to be paid $400 a month from the investment returns until age 50. At that time, the trust was to be liquidated and the principal paid to her. 

In the event of her passing, the money was to be distributed equally to Sullivan/Scarlett’s three grandchildren once the eldest reached aged 21.

To his four sisters: $10,000 each.

Scarlett had left nothing to his brother, noting in the will that he’d provided for him when Sullivan/Scarlett was alive.

By year’s end, the gambler’s estate had been disbursed.

Sources

Photo from the University of Nevada, Reno Special Collections

1906-1909

An underage young man, Master Wadell, gambled at various games from poker to faro and lost big over the winter of 1906-1907.

His preferred playhouse was the Sixty-Six casino in the mining town of Rhyolite, Nevada. Subsequently, he sued the club’s three owners for what he claimed were his total losses — $10,000 (about $240,000 today).

During the trial in 1909, testimony revealed the proprietors allegedly had cheated repeatedly at various games, thereby swindling him out of large sums. None of that mattered, though, as the question before the court was whether or not a minor had the right to recoup money lost from gambling.

Wadell’s attorney argued that the defendants must repay Wadell as Nevada law prohibits casino proprietors from allowing minors into their establishments, never mind letting them gamble. He said that rule stood regardless of whether the individual said he was of age or looked it.

In the case of Wadell v. the Sixty-Six, the club owners’ counsel argued the law stated if an individual claimed to be 21, he couldn’t, after losing in a gambling house, take advantage of his own fraud and sue to recover his losses. Further, no statute existed that allowed for the recovery of money lost from gambling, he said.

Nevada law at the time — when some kinds of gambling were legal — stated that it was a misdemeanor for any gambling operator to knowingly allow anyone under age 21 to enter or play in their licensed club. (Previously, as of 1869, the legal gambling age had been 17.) To further protect minors, lawmakers in 1897 had allowed for parents of a minor to collect, in a civil action, between $50 and $1,000 from proprietors who’d allowed that child to spend time or play games in their gambling rooms.

In what was the first case of its kind in The Silver State, the jury found in Wadell’s favor in the amount of $2,762.40 (about $66,000 today).

“The decision makes a landmark in Nevada litigation and was one of the most hotly contested and longest cases ever tried in the state,” The Tonopah Sun reported (Reno Evening Gazette, June 8, 1909).

Sources

1888

When select games of chance were legal in Nevada, so many youths under age 21 regularly were frequenting the gambling clubs (which was illegal) that the police threatened to make an example of some of them.

Photo from freeimages.com: “21st Balloon” by Craig Matchett

Einstoss

1939-1941

Bernard “Bernie” Einstoss was a well-known gambler in Northern Nevada for nearly two decades, between 1947 and 1965.* Prior to that, he masterminded and executed a scheme to fix horse races** in California by bribing and threatening jockeys to “pull” the horses they commandeered, or keep them from winning.

Einstoss went by the name Barney Mooney and introduced himself to people as Mooney.** He earned the nickname “Big Mooney,” wrote John Christgau, “because he liked to sweep into fancy nightclubs and set up the house with drinks — especially champagne, if he was flush from a big winning bet” (The Gambler and The Bug Boy). Einstoss began placing bets in grade school on marbles and chocolates and by high school, which he dropped out of, had progressed to wagering on prize fights, horse racing, baseball and more.

How It Worked

Einstoss, 27, with the help of some accomplices, launched his race fixing scheme with the season’s start in 1939 in Southern California, where he ran a suite of bookmaking rooms in Los Angeles with fellow gamblers, Benjamin Chapman and I.W. “Doc Kebo” Kivel.

The three spread tips around Hollywood movie lots that specific horses were sure to win in certain races, and they’d take the bets on them. Specific targets were high rollers like George Raft and Don Ameche. Then Einstoss would have the jockeys riding those horses deliberately lose the races. The trio profited from the betters’ (or suckers’) losses, assuredly and amply.

Manipulation Of Jockeys

Einstoss had intermediaries recruit and pay jockeys who could be bribed, typically those who were young, under age 20 for instance, vulnerable and desperate for money. Based on handicapping percentages, Einstoss determined which horses he wanted to lose and got word to the corresponding jockeys to “pull” them, sometimes multiple horses for one jockey in a day. Einstoss paid the riders $200 (about $3,500 today) per favorite and $100 ($1,700 today) per longshot horse they pulled and paid the go-betweens $200 per jockey they turned.

Einstoss had thrashed a jockey who hadn’t done what he’d asked, and most expressed a fear of him and belief that he’d kill them if provoked. In at least one instance, when a jockey failed to lose a race because he couldn’t physically restrain the horse, Einstoss told him, “You cost me $30,000! Thirty-thousand dollars! I’ve thrown boys in the ocean for less” (The Gambler and The Bug Boy). (This is equivalent to about $532,000 today.)

“These boys, I feel sorry for personally because I believe that they are just young kids, that is all, and they are not mature. They have not the state of mind to think things out … and they are tempted with easy money … far more than they ever saw before in their lives,” Jerry Giesler, chairman of the California Horse Racing Board, said at a hearing where numerous jockeys were compelled to tell what they knew about the race fixing.

Perpetrators Caught, Plot Halted

In November 1940, following an investigation, Einstoss was arrested and, eventually, so were his partners in crime. They were his brother, gopher and bet taker, Jack Einstoss; gamblers Chapman and Kivel; and two middlemen, Saul “Sonny” Greenberg, a horse trainer, and James Joseph Murphy, real name Irving Sangbusch, a race track follower.

Because fixing races wasn’t illegal (yet) in California, the group was charged with conspiracy and contributing to the delinquency of minors (the jockeys).

The Prosecution’s Case

At the trial, which began on February 28, 1941, the State of California argued that the defendants ran bookmaking establishments and through control of jockeys, altered the outcomes of races on which they’d accepted wagers and themselves had bet at the tracks. Prosecutors alleged that the group had fixed more than 100 races at various tracks — Hollywood Park, Del Mar, Bay Meadows and Tanforan — yielding an estimated $1 million (about $17.7 million today).

Sangbusch/Murphy testified for the state in exchange for removal of the charges against him. He explained that Reno, Nevada mobster and illegal gambler William “Bill/Curly” Graham had suggested to him that he contact Einstoss and had furnished the phone number. Sangbusch followed through, and the next day met with Einstoss, Kivel, Chapman and others at the bookies’ Hollywood headquarters, where they discussed the race fixing strategy. Subsequently, Sangbusch began working as an intermediary for the group. He admitted to having distributed about $20,000 ($355,000 today) in bribes from Einstoss to certain jockeys.

Defense: Gambler With Scruples

When Einstoss, free on $3,000 bail, took the stand, he claimed he made money by gambling on odds as opposed to race fixing through bribing jockeys. His attorney, Paul McCormick, argued that Einstoss was “always an honest gambler” (Los Angeles Times, May 3, 1941) yet admitted that Einstoss had given money to the jockeys and had known the jockeys, of their own accord, likely were going to pull their horses.

“But the facts are that the jockeys approached Einstoss,” not the other way around, McCormick added. “They were touting him to bet on certain horses and he paid them money for their tips. It is very probable that they might have pulled those horses to make their tips good and therefore collect more money.”

During final arguments, Einstoss “burst into tears,” got up, left the courtroom, went into an adjoining room, sat and sobbed (Nevada State Journal, May 16, 1941).

The End Result

After two months of testimony, at May’s end, the jury found Einstoss guilty on four misdemeanor counts of contributing to the delinquency of minors but not on the conspiracy charge. The judge ordered he serve a year in county jail and pay a $1,000 ($17,000 today) fine. The convicted man did both.

Subsequently, Einstoss moved to Reno, Nevada. Over the ensuing decades, he co-owned and had some involvement in the casino operations at the Mapes and Riverside hotels and the Horseshoe Club in Reno, along with the Bal Tabarin at Lake Tahoe in Crystal Bay. He had a smaller, nonoperational ownership in Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

Most of the jockeys who participated in the plot were suspended indefinitely from horse racing in California.

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* Bernard Einstoss died in 1966 at age 53 in Southern California.
** Horse racing under the parimutuel wagering system has been legal in The Golden State since 1933.
*** The name “Mooney” comes from the Gaelic word “maoin,” which translates into “wealthy” or “descendant of the wealthy one.”

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1963-1964

Caifano/Marshall

Mobsters Marshall Caifano (aka Johnny Marshall) and Charles Delmonico were arrested in Las Vegas on a federal warrant in July 1963 for conspiracy to commit extortion and engaging in interstate transportation in the aid of racketeering.

The latter charge was because the two supposedly schemed in California to commit the crime and then tried to finish carrying it out in Nevada. The two pleaded innocent and were released on $20,000 bond apiece (about $165,000 today).

Caifano/Marshall (born Marcello Giuseppe Caifano), age 54, had been listed in Nevada’s Black Book of personae non gratae in the state’s casinos since 1960. He was a prime suspect in several murders in Chicago, Illinois, his stomping grounds before Las Vegas.

Delmonico

Delmonico, age 36, was actually Charles “Chuck” James Tourine. He was the son of Genovese capo Charlie “The Blade” Tourine, a former gambler in Las Vegas and Cuba.

The mobsters’ target was Raymond “Ray” J. Ryan, wealthy head of the Ryan Oil Co. in Evansville, Indiana, owner of the El Mirador Hotel in Palm Springs, California and a high-rolling gambler.

The Alleged Crime

The story, pieced together from various newspaper accounts, Caifano/Marshall and Delmonico picked up Ryan at the El Mirador on April 30 and drove off. Ryan, unfamiliar with the men, had vetted them through his friend John S. Drew, then the co-owner of the Chicago Outfit-owned Stardust in Vegas, but also had two of his hotel employees trail the mobsters and Ryan in another car.

Ryan

In the back seat with Ryan, Caifano/Marshall demanded he pay him $15,000 and $60,000 in short order and then $60,000 each subsequent year. The first amount was to settle a supposed debt to high roller Nicholas “Nick the Greek” A. Dandolos resulting from a poker game Dandolos and Ryan had played 15 years before, in 1949. The annual $60,000 was protection money, as the Outfit had averted Ryan getting kidnapped in the past, for free, it claimed, but not anymore.

Delmonico hit Ryan in the chest to emphasize the mobsters’ message. Yet Ryan said he wouldn’t give them any money, and they argued. Eventually, though, they let him go because he had a flight scheduled later that day to Las Vegas.

On May 1, in Ryan’s Desert Inn hotel room, Caifano/Marshall told Ryan they were going for a ride in the desert because Ryan hadn’t forked over any cash. The mobster forced Ryan into the hallway, where he spotted Delmonico and Dandolos. The oil tycoon made a run for it, shielded himself behind a full luggage rack, got to the lobby and had a security guard contact the authorities.

Facing The Heat

Caifano/Marshall and Delmonico’s trial began in Los Angeles in January 1964, with Thomas Sheridan, assistant U.S. attorney in charge of the criminal division for Southern California, prosecuting the case.

Dandolos, 81, testified that he and Ryan had known one another for 32 years and often had played cards together, for as long as five consecutive weeks at a time, with some games lasting five or more hours.

The supposed debt, Dandolos said, had stemmed from an August 1949, lowball poker game by the pool at the Flamingo or the Thunderbird in Las Vegas (reports differed on this point), during which Ryan allegedly had cheated him out of $550,000 ($5.8 million today). He claimed Ryan had used a shortwave radio to learn what cards Dandolos had either from someone who could see them somehow via a set of mirrors or from someone on the roof with a telescope (again, reports varied). (The money Dandolos had played with in that game supposedly had been put up by Chicago high rollers, thus, Ryan’s allegedly swindling the bundle from Dandolos enraged the Outfit.)

Dandolos said Ryan had paid back only $26,000 ($275,000). The big-time gambler said he had four men looking for Ryan to collect on the alleged gambling debt of $524,000 ($4.3 million), which was the $550,000 minus the $26,000.

Was Dandolos willingly in cahoots with the mobsters for some reason, perhaps because he needed money? Or were the mobsters using Dandolos to scam Ryan out of thousands of dollars?

Strange Twist

On the tenth day of the trial, Dandolos files a lawsuit against Ryan for $1,572,000 ($12.8 million) in damages and in which he charged Ryan had welched on the $524,000 he owed him from that 1949 rigged lowball poker game. Why hadn’t Dandolos filed the suit sometime during the past 15 years? Had the mobsters forced him to do so during their trial?

Back To Testimonies

Ryan took the stand and recounted that he’d won $15,000, not $550,000, during that very same 1949 poker game at the Flamingo. He said that later, Dandolos had asked him for $15,000, which he’d given him in cash, and he subsequently had loaned Dandolos $1,000 twice.

One witness, Lonnie Joe Chadwick, who Ryan claimed knew of the extortion attempt, was called by both the prosecution and defense. In a secret meeting in the judge’s chambers, Chadwick pleaded the Fifth Amendment.

The defense’s position was that Ryan had cheated Dandolos out of $555,000 during that 1949 poker game, as Dandolos has testified, and that neither Caifano/Marshall nor Delmonico had extorted or threatened Ryan to squeeze money out of him. Rather, they were simply trying to collect on a bad debt. In fact, the defendants, on the stand, denied trying to shake down Ryan and said they just were trying to get him to pay back Dandolos.

The defense also asserted that Ryan had contrived the extortion events to avoid making good on what he owed.

Jury And Judge

In February, the jury of nine men and three women found Caifano and Delmonico guilty.

(At the time, Caifano/Marshall was awaiting trial in Chicago on charges of conspiring to defraud an insurance firm of $48,000 [$395,000]. Delmonico had federal charges pending against him for a $22,000 [$181,000] bank robbery in Evansville committed on October 8, 1962.)

At March’s end, U.S. District Judge Jesse Curtis sentenced Caifano/Marshall to 10 years and Delmonico to two concurrent five-year stints. The men were taken into custody immediately.

The Fatal Postscript

Thirteen years after the trial, Ryan was murdered. On Tuesday, October 18, 1977, he left his neighborhood exercise club in Evansville after a workout and in the parking lot, got into his Lincoln Continental Mark IV, which then exploded into pieces.

The case went and remains cold, but the theory was advanced the Chicago Outfit had ordered the hit on Ryan in retaliation for him cheating Dandolos in that 1949 card game and for him snitching on Caifano/Marshall and Delmonico in 1963.

Featured photo from freeimages.com: Cards and Chips 3 by Chris Wrightson

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