1952

The life of wealthy, prominent businessman with several connections to the gambling industry, Thomas “Tom” A. Keen, 56, was abruptly ended at about 10:07 a.m. on Tuesday morning, February 5. 

After giving some duck eggs to a neighbor, this San Mateo, California resident walked back home. He grabbed his coat, kissed his wife good-bye and went to their detached garage to leave for work.

Once in his green Cadillac Fleetwood, he stepped on the starter. Dynamite hidden under the floorboards ignited and blew up. The fatal explosion propelled Keen’s body into the car’s back seat and sheared off his legs.

Car parts took flight. One side of the garage blasted apart. Windows of the Keen’s 16-room mansion shattered, covering the driveway and sidewalk with glass. Two windows of a home across the street also broke into pieces.

“The terrific explosion scattered flesh, metal and wood over a wide area,” reported The Humboldt Times (Feb. 6, 1952). “It was heard for blocks by residents.”

Connections To Gambling

Example of a more modern dog racing tote board

The San Mateo, California resident had worked for the past couple of decades years in the field of dog racing and horse racing. First, he’d built and operated the dog racing tracks in Belmont and Bayshore City in The Golden State. He’d co-invented the mechanical hare used in the sport. When California outlawed dog racing, he’d shifted his business focus to manufacturing and supplying totalizators,* also called totalizers and tote boards, for race tracks. Currently, he was president of the International Totalizer Company, based in Belmont.

Keen’s work took him around the U.S., to states where dog and horse racing were legal. Most recently, he’d been to Phoenix, Arizona to install one of his totalizators at a dog track. One month earlier, he’d installed five of his quinella** machines in the Miami Beach Kennel Club for purposes of demonstration.

Keen had ties with many dog and horse track operators, many of them connected. At the time, Mobsters controlled many such tracks in the country.

The Tucson-born track betting equipment mogul owned stakes in many tracks, including Sportsman’s Park in Cicero, Illinois; the Multnomah Kennel Club in Portland, Oregon; and the Mile High Kennel Club in Denver, Colorado.

“He had no one to fear,” said Keen’s friend and sports shop owner Joe Darcy. “He was never afraid. He did nothing but good for hundreds of people. Who could have done something so horrible?”

Keen

Theory No. 1

According to San Mateo Police Chief Martin McDonnell, Keen likely was killed because he took business into a territory out of which he’d been warned to stay. His department’s investigation led McDonnell to deduce Keen had been killed because he’d tried to place his quinella machines in a certain Florida hotel. The chief also surmised there most likely had been two killers, carrying out the assassination on behalf of a Mobster boss somewhere on the East Coast.

Theory No. 2

The second hypothesis was put forth by the California Crime Commission, which had held an unprecedented closed hearing in early May 1952 to investigate the Keen case. In its final report, the commission purported that Keen had been murdered because he’d owed the Olmo Group bookmaking enterprise about $20,000 (roughly $210,000 today).

Allegedly, Keen had been an Olmo customer and a heavy bettor and had refused to pay his debt even after the group’s enforcer Richard “Big Dick” C. Trabert had tried “persuading” him to do so. As a result, supposedly Mobster-gambler Emilio Giorgetti and John O’Neil, also part of the Olmo ring, had been forced to cover the loss. (Keen’s estate at the time he passed away was worth $204,000 (about $2 million today).

The San Mateo County District Attorney Louis B. Dematteis, who wasn’t corrupt, didn’t give the bad debt theory much credence, he said. The timing — Keen being murdered two years after the Olmo Group had disbanded — didn’t make sense. Dematteis thought it more probable the murder was tied to more recent events.  

The actual motive behind the murder of Thomas Keen remains a mystery; the crime still is unsolved.

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* A totalizer is the system for running parimutuel betting. It’s an electrically operated board that flashes the changing odds and total bets before dog and horse races and the payoff amounts after.
** A quinella, or quiniela, is a bet in which the first two places in a race must be predicted, but not always in the correct order. Quinella machines, which displayed these types of bets, were used in dog, but not horse, racing.

Part II and Part III.

Sources

The Red Carpet in Biloxi was cheating its craps players by using a “juice joint,” a two-ton electromagnet that controlled metal-containing dice on a game table, in 1965. At the time, Mississippi prohibited all forms of clean, never mind dirty, gambling.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) launched an investigation. Agents learned that Harry Bennett, 63, had turned his three-bedroom home into The Red Carpet, which he ran. One room contained two roulette wheels, two blackjack tables and one Beat My Shake table. Another room housed two craps tables. The third room featured slot machines and a bar. The Red Carpet owner of record, however, was Dewey D’Angelo, 39, because Bennett had been under federal indictment in Iowa when he’d started the club.

A Widespread Network

Inquiries about the juice joint led federal investigators to Tulsa, Oklahoma businessman, Jack E. Kress, whose company had manufactured and had sold the contraption to Bennett for $15,000 ($125,000 today). Kress also helped install it in The Red Carpet’s concrete floor. The 1951 Transportation of Gambling Devices Act prohibited the crossing of state lines with any and all gambling equipment via any method (mailing, shipping, vehicle transport, etc).

Kress

Ultimately, as part of its query, which carried over into 1966, the FBI raided multiple illegal Mississippi casinos, in Biloxi, Mississippi City and Jackson, finding various cheating implements — magnets, weighted dice, marked cards and more. Agents also searched Kress’ factory, Kress Manufacturing Co. (see Part I).

Ultimately, the federal law enforcement agency arrested 15 people, including Bennett, D’Angelo and Kress, from Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma and Nevada.

Agents also collared Wilbur K. Sullivan (aka Pat Sullivan), 56. He owned and operated Christy and Jones Inc., a dice manufacturing firm in Las Vegas, Nevada and competitor of Kress Manufacturing. In 1965, FBI agents confiscated from Christy and Jones misspot dice, weighted dice and company records. Among them, they found evidence that Sullivan had manufactured and had shipped an order of crooked dice in June 1965 to illegal gambling operator, James L. Porter, in Gulfport, Mississippi.

In early April 1966, Sullivan renamed his enterprise to Las Vegas Card Co. and moved it to a different Sin City location. Two months later, he was arrested and sold the business to a former gambling equipment manufacturer.

Conspiracy, Aiding And Abetting

A federal grand jury indicted all 15 suspects on four counts related to illegal gambling. The first count was conspiracy to promote gambling (racketeering) through, one, transportation of a juice joint from Tulsa to Biloxi in a U-Haul trailer and, two, use of the U.S. mail. The second count charged aiding and abetting relative to the conspiracy. The final two counts alleged the use of two checking accounts to house funds collected for gambling debts.

About a month before the trial was to begin in January 1968, Bennett was found murdered outside his Biloxi apartment, having been shot eight times.

The Dice Reveal

The U.S. government reduced the number of defendants in the trial to seven, Kress and D’Angelo included. Sullivan testified on behalf of the government. A total of 56 witnesses took the stand during the eight-day proceeding.

The jury deliberated for four hours and returned an across-the-board guilty verdict. Twenty months later, the appeals court would uphold all of these convictions in its September 1969 ruling.

In the meantime, a federal judge punished Kress with two consecutive sentences: for count one, five years in prison and a $5,000 ($36,000 today) fine, and on count two, a $10,000 ($71,000) fine and five years of probation.

Sullivan, sentenced for the same charges as Kress, received one year in prison followed by five years’ probation.

D’Angelo got three years of prison on count one; two years on count two, the sentences to be served consecutively; and a $3,000 ($21,000) fine on count three.

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Was this FBI investigation a productive or nonproductive use of time, money and effort? What do you think and why?

Sources

In its July 1966 raid of Kress Manufacturing Co. in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents seized a treasure trove of crooked gambling equipment that seemed headed to various Nevada casinos.

The haul included “hundreds of decks of marked cards and hundreds of pounds of crooked dice” (Nevada State Journal, July 27, 1966). The latter contained stamped logos of various major casinos in Las Vegas, Reno, Lake Tahoe and Elko along with smaller clubs throughout The Silver State. They included the:

Dunes — Las Vegas
Louisiana Club — Las Vegas
New Frontier — Las Vegas
Stardust — Las Vegas
Golden Bank — Reno
Riverside Hotel — Reno
Commercial Hotel — Elko
Crumley Hotel — Elko
El Bo Room — Wells
Cal-Neva Lodge – Crystal Bay (Lake Tahoe)

Agents also confiscated various other implements used to cheat at gambling. Among them were metal filings and discs used to weight dice; arm mirror manipulators and glasses used to read marked cards; holdout devices to secret away a desirable card for later use; magnets and magnetic coils used to control dice when rolled; and switches and relays used in rigging equipment like roulette wheels.

The search also turned up Kress invoices that showed the Tulsa gaming equipment manufacturer shipped its products to establishments throughout the U.S. Recipients included the Stardust and Riviera hotel-casinos in Las Vegas and the Citizens Club in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

Casinos Deny Wrongdoing

As soon as the news of the search and seizure went public, proponents of Nevada gambling reacted.

Officials from the Riviera, Stardust, Louisiana Club, Riverside, Dunes and the Commercial Hotel all publicly denied using any kind of cheating device. They never ordered gambling equipment from Kress Manufacturing, they said. In fact, they never heard of it.

“I never knew [Kress] existed until right now. This comes to me out of the clear blue sky,” said James Lloyd, president of Riverside Hotel Inc. However, he continued, “This happens lots of times. Some of these companies make crooked equipment to sell to crossroaders who try to cheat the house.”

State Agency Weighs In

Edward “Ed” Olsen, chairman of the Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB), the state’s gambling investigative arm, publicly made four points.

1) This happened before (which was true) and, thus, there is no cause for alarm. 

2) History shows that such cheating paraphernalia is not for Nevada casinos to swindle their customers with but, instead, it’s for individual career cheaters, or crossroaders, to use to cheat the gambling houses

3) To err on the side of caution, though, the NGCB will look into whether or not any of the state’s casinos ordered rigged equipment, but sending gaming agents to Tulsa isn’t necessary.

4) The Golden Bank Club, the El Bo Room and Crumley Hotel, the logos of which were on some of the found dice, no longer offer gambling or are out of business (this was true). The El Bo has been closed for 10 years.

Newspapers Take Side

When the Las Vegas Sun reported the news of the found cache of illegal gambling devices, it used the biased headline, “Foil Plot to Cheat Casinos.” It explained what that meant with a slanted lead, or opening line: “A national plot to cheat top casinos throughout Nevada was uncovered yesterday by the FBI in Tulsa, Okla.” (July 27, 1966).

Reno’s Nevada State Journal published an op-ed piece that refuted any possible merit to the notion some Nevada casinos cheated their customers. It read: “The gamblers and the state gaming officials know that the Tulsa dice were intended for use against the Nevada casinos. So, from a standpoint of the casinos being innocent of buying cheating gambling devices, there is no question. They just simply don’t do it” (July 18, 1966).

“Anyone who knows anything about gambling, however, knows immediately that the implication that the bigger Nevada gambling houses may be buying crooked dice or cards to cheat their patrons is just plain ridiculous,” the writer went on. “That the casinos, and particularly the big casinos, would risk, their licenses, representing millions of dollars in investment, by using crooked playing equipment is beyond comprehension.”

Also, the writer called out the FBI for intentionally misleading the public to think, by not saying otherwise in its report of the Kress raid, that the crooked equipment was intended for casinos not crossroaders.

An Opposing View

Op-ed writer Paul Harvey for The Ada Evening News in Oklahoma purported that Nevada’s gambling industry wasn’t as squeaky clean as it wanted the country to believe. In a published piece titled “No Gamble,” he wrote:

“Las Vegas is not going to incriminate itself. We are going to learn nothing new from this recent self-investigation. A hearing where the bosses are not subpoenaed and the witnesses are not under oath and the sessions are secret could hardly be anything but a whitewash. Accusers say the games are rigged and the cream is skimmed by the underworld before the casinos compute their taxable income, but you can hardly expect the State Gaming Commission to indict itself.

“We’d all heard the naive say, “Mathematical odds on cards, craps and roulette favor the house: they don’t have to cheat!’ Now the FBI has shown us that they do anyway. But the swindle goes on and the suckers stand in line and the casinos continue their business as usual” (Sept. 13, 1966).

Next week in Part II, read about the gambling investigation that led to the Kress raid, the indictment of 15 people including a Las Vegas-based dice maker and the legal outcomes for the key players.

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Louisiana Club chip photo: from the Museum of Gaming History’s Chip Guide

Sources