McDonough

1934-1935

An argument between two underworld men devolved into violence during a dance endurance competition in Hollywood, California on April 14, 1934.

Explosion Of Rage

At 7 a.m., the 21th consecutive hour of the walk-a-thon,* competing dancers sluggishly moved about the Winter Garden Auditorium floor. Mobster James “Socks” McDonough, among the spectators, sat at a table in a far corner, playing craps with some buddies.

Suddenly, angry shouting erupted and soon after, gunshots rang out, seven of them.

McDonough slumped in his chair. Chaos ensued.

Emergency personnel rushed the critically injured man to Georgia Street Receiving Hospital where he received emergency treatment for through-and-through bullet wounds to the chest and thighs. After, he was transferred to General Hospital. Reportedly, he had 15 scars from previous gunshots.

The Criminal Life

He likely had gotten those during his years as an alleged member of the Dean O’Banion** (né Charles Dean O’Banion) and Bugs Moran’s (né George Clarence Moran) North Side Gang in Chicago, Illinois. At the time of the walk-a-thon, McDonough had been in Los Angeles for about three years and continuing his criminal ways. At one point he’d been the city’s Public Enemy No. 1.

As such, police had questioned him frequently in connection with various crimes. In 1932, McDonough had gone to trial for allegedly participating in the $50,000 ransom kidnapping of E.L . “Zeke” Caress, betting commissioner at Agua Caliente, but the case again the Chicagoan was dismissed.

Hints Of Mob Involvement

Three to four hours after the potentially fatal incident, a citizen and former U.S. deputy marshal, H.W. Ballard, reported to police a car driving erratically in his neighborhood, about three miles from the Winter Garden.

An officer dispatched to the area discovered the reported car, parked, with actor Thomas O’Rourke, 37, behind the wheel. Lee Moore, 35, bookmaker, former prizefighter and previous bodyguard for professional boxer Jack Dempsey, was passed out in the back seat. When searched, Moore was found to have a small automatic pistol on his person. The officer took both men to the police station.

Faulty Memory, Denial

By this time, detectives working the McDonough case deduced, after hearing witness accounts, that Moore probably was the perpetrator. (McDonough knew who’d shot him but wouldn’t name the man.) On questioning, Moore said he was drunk and didn’t remember anything. O’Rourke relayed he and Moore had gone to the Winter Garden after attending the Hollywood Legion Stadium prize fights, but he didn’t recall a fight or shooting.

Moore was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon with the intent to commit murder and O’Rourke, for drunk driving. While in jail, awaiting trial, Moore served a previously received 30-day sentence for illegal gambling.

Underhanded Tactic

A few days after Moore’s arrest, Ballard received an anonymous phone call in which a man told him, “You better lay off if you don’t want to get yours.” Later, while the local resident was driving, a car pulled up alongside him, and the men inside verbalized a similar threat.

Meanwhile, McDonough remained alive, though barely.

“The shock from the seven wounds, police surgeons stated, probably will prove fatal unless the victim has unusual recuperative powers,” reported the Los Angeles Times (April 16, 1934.)

Mum’s The Word

By the time of Moore’s trial, in July, McDonough defied the odds and pulled through.

In court, nine witnesses, on the stand, suddenly couldn’t remember any specifics of the shooting despite having provided detailed accounts to detectives before. The Times described this phenomenon as “gangland’s shadow” dogging the witnesses. One of them recanted his entire former statement. O’Rourke pleaded the fifth. McDonough testified he didn’t know who’d shot him and denied ever having seen Moore before court.

Who’d gotten to these witnesses? It seems Moore was connected to a criminal entity, but which one? The Los Angeles Mob?

Because of their silence, none of the witnesses placed Moore at the scene of the crime. However, ballistics experts, determined the gun found on the defendant was the weapon that had been used, after comparing it to slugs and the bullet retrieved from the Winter Garden.

The defense countered this fact by having Moore claim he’d purchased the gun at 7:30 a.m., roughly a half-hour after the shooting, “from a guy about 6 feet 8 inches tall in a Hollywood Boulevard beer hall” (Los Angeles Times, July 31, 1934).

Out Of Bogus Stories

Despite the setback for the prosecution, and no motive for the shooting made apparent, Moore was found guilty. The judge sentenced him to one to 14 years to be served in San Quentin State Prison.

The convicted man appealed the court’s decision and lost. He continued to fight, though, taking his case to the Supreme Court of California.

Best You Move On

In September, Los Angeles Captain of Detectives Bert Wallis called McDonough into his office. There, Wallis suggested the Mobster might want to leave the city or he’d likely get arrested for vagrancy. McDonough agreed to go. Wallis helped him procure a train ticket.

That night, he left on the Santa Fe, headed to Chicago. The press captured his departure.

What Comes Next

The following year, 1935, in May, the California supreme court reversed the lower court’s decision, on grounds the evidence on which Moore had been convicted had been insufficient. He was freed.

It wasn’t long, though, until he was in trouble again. He was arrested a year later for involvement in the July 1935 robbery of the Monte Carlo gambling ship.

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* Jack Kearns, current and former manager of professional boxers Mickey Walker and Jack Dempsey, respectively, promoted the event.

** Dean O’Banion headed Chicago’s North Side gang during the 1920s until rival Mobsters murdered him in 1924. Bugs Moran took over for O’Banion. Throughout the decade, the North Side Gang violently fought the South Side Gang, helmed first by Johnny Torrio then Al Capone. In 1929, seven of Moran’s men were duped and gunned down by Mobsters dressed as policemen, suspected to be South Side Gang members, in what is known as the Valentine’s Day Massacre.

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“Clint Stone” — Who am I really? / Photo by Geno Munari

In the autobiographical book, Cheater, the author Clint Stone (most likely an alias), paints himself as a lifelong gambling cheat. His specialty is mucking, using sleight of hand, one hand in his case, to introduce a card into play while removing another. A self-proclaimed crossroader, he’d plied his craft around the world.

“I was a cheater. A predator. Casinos my prey. I was hunter and hunted,” Stone described.

The book covers a brief period in midlife for Stone, in the early 1990s, following his release from federal prison, where he served five years “because I wouldn’t drop a dime,” he wrote. Once out, he makes Las Vegas his home and plans the ultimate casino heist of his decades-long career. In the meantime, he and various associates pull off various cheats, of gambling houses and high rollers. All are fully detailed, from prep to conclusion.

The book is fascinating and a fun read, but is it true? It Really Happened! investigated, and here’s what we learned.

The Real Deal

Las Vegas businessman, Geno Munari, watched Stone demonstrate his card skills, when the two met to discuss Munari possibly publishing Cheater. Munari subsequently published the book on Amazon.

Stone’s performance impressed Munari, a former dealer and magician well-trained and -experienced in detecting card cheats.  

“His one hand muck for blackjack, making a total of 12 into a total of 20 or even a blackjack (ace and a 10 valued card) is undetectable,” Munari wrote in Cheaters‘ introduction.

Munari videotaped Stone in action. Watch it here and decide for yourselves. DB: Find the video.

Down To The Nitty-Gritty

Many of the specific places and dates in the book aren’t accurate. For instance, Stone mentions a significant life event involving the Humboldt Hotel in Winnemucca at a certain point in time, which can’t be true as it had burned down prior and hadn’t been rebuilt. He didn’t use people’s real names either.

Perhaps Stone changed these details to keep himself and his accomplices from being identified or worse. This is understandable, but if so, perhaps he should’ve informed readers this is the case.

***SPOILER ALERT*** More significantly, the book climaxes with Stone and crew taking a casino for a multimillion slot machine jackpot. Did that really happen?

It may have!

Similar Jackpot Win

In Cheater, Stone describes his target as a $25 million jackpot slot machine in an unnamed casino on the Las Vegas Strip.

“I wanted that jackpot,” he wrote. “My desire to take off a multimillion dollar slot machine score was a slice of my reality. That same desire was also part of my non-reality, which would remain an undeveloped, negative image until I beat the machine.”

Stone claims to have rigged the slot to pay off and prearranged for an African American surgical nurse from Los Angeles to come forward and collect the money. He alludes to carrying out the theft in 1993.

In that year, though, the amount of Nevada’s slot jackpots was nowhere near that large. They didn’t reach $25 million until 2003, when a player won a $39.7 million jackpot at the Excalibur Casino in Las Vegas.

In 1992, as reported in local newspapers, an African American surgical nurse from Sacramento, named Delores Adams, landed a $9.3 million progressive Megabucks slot jackpot, a huge and all-time record amount in The Silver State at the time. For the win, she reportedly lined up four symbols on a $1 slot machine in Harrah’s Reno Hotel and Casino in Northern Nevada.

The similarities between the newspapers and Stone’s accounts suggest this event involving Adams is the one he describes in Cheater. They don’t, however, confirm the win actually was a heist.

If this was the career-topping cheat Stone asserts it was, why did he embellish the dollar amount?

Sources

Wyatt Earp, age 21

Iconic American figure, Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp (1848-1929), is heralded for his courageous exploits as a lawman, but he was a gambler first and foremost, often relying on the then-respectable profession to earn income throughout his lifetime. He’s earned a spot in U.S. gambling history.

Earp’s Gambling Education And Practice

At age 20, the tall, slender native Illinoisan landed a job in Wyoming grading track for construction of the Union Pacific Railroad. During time spent at the railhead, Earp learned how to play and deal faro and run monte. Over the next several years, he honed the craft in various gambling houses, saloons and brothels of the frontier and became proficient. Eventually, he operated table games, too.

As a gambler, Earp reportedly was honest and garnered high repute wherever he went, and he traveled a lot.

“Earp rarely stayed in the same place for long, frequently becoming broke, bored, unwelcome or some combination of the three,” wrote John Caldbick in a History Link essay.

The nomad typically moved from boomtown to boomtown, and in every one he hustled as a faro banker. He did own some brick-and-mortar gambling establishments, too. Here are some of them:

It Was Westward Ho For Lawman

After a roughly decade-long stint as a law enforcement officer, most recently as a deputy U.S. marshal, Earp relocated to San Diego, California in the mid-1880s.

“There was another Wyatt Earp seldom remembered — an older, wiser gentleman who lived in San Diego and operated gambling halls; bought and sold urban property; refereed [bull and cock] fights and owned racehorses,” reported the San Diego Union (Oct. 17, 1978).

During his roughly decade of living off and on in America’s Finest City, Earp leased and operated four gambling saloons there, all four simultaneously at one point, reportedly. All of them were in the red light Stingaree district that teemed with con men, shifty gamblers and criminals.

They offered faro, monte, blackjack, poker, keno, pedro, monte and other games. Not much else is known about Earp’s gambling enterprises there except for their locations and that they were profitable, particularly during the city’s boom years, 1885 to 1888, during which the gambler could net as much as $1,000 a night.

His most famous and most popular gambling spot was the Oyster Bar, in the Louis Bank Building at 835 Fifth Avenue. The others were at:

• A corner of 6th and F streets (where he ran high stakes faro)
• The northeast corner of 6th and G streets
• 951 4th Street

On Sundays, Earp promoted and ran all types of gambling, including the big wheel, rouge et noir, faro, monte and even thimblerig in Tijuana, Mexico.

Businessman Strikes Gold With New Saloon

After the rush to Nome, Alaska Territory for gold began in 1899, Wyatt moved there. He and partner Charlie Hoxie built and operated the luxurious Dexter Saloon, the town’s hotspot for travelers, miners and locals to drink, gamble, discuss politics and do business. The establishment was hugely successful thanks, in large part, to Earp’s notoriety.

Dexter Saloon

Gamblers Disgruntled by Big Name Newcomer

While still a co-owner of The Dexter, in 1899, Earp debuted another gambling house: The Union Club. That one was in Seattle, Washington’s tenderloin and was a partnership with a local man, Thomas Urquhart.

The move was risky because The Emerald City prohibited gambling and the men running places offering games of chance regularly paid off the local officials to let them operate. Those gamblers were displeased with the famous lawman moving in on their territory and then, with the Union’s immediate success, having to compete with him.

Law enforcement erratically enforced Seattle’s anti-gambling ordinance and this created ongoing trouble for the Union’s co-proprietors. Consequently, within six months of opening, Earp pulled out of the joint venture.

Nomad Stakes Out Mining Camp

Earp sold his share of the Dexter to Hoxie and headed to Nevada, Tonopah specifically. There, in 1902, he opened the The Northern with partner Al Martin and ran a successful business. 

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Know anything more about Earp’s gambling career? Let us know about it, please.

Sources

Faro game in progress, 1800s

1832-1860

Elijah Skaggs, nè Eli Harrison Skaggs (1818-1890) stands out in U.S. gambling history. He was one of the country’s cleverest card tricksters and a hugely successful gambler. More significantly, he created a franchise system for the business of crooked faro.

“He probably had more to do with the spread of gambling in this country than any other one man,” wrote Herbert Asbury, author of Sucker’s Progress.

Soaking It All Up

After leaving the Skaggs family farm in Kentucky, the young man visited several of the country’s gambling centers in the mid-Atlantic states. During these stops, he learned all of the intricacies of dealing faro, cleanly and crookedly. When he witnessed a new trick, the student compelled the dealer to show him how it was done, paying significant sums for the information if necessary.

“He was greatly impressed by the popularity of faro, by the opportunities it offered for chicanery, by the fact that the deal remained always in the hands of the man who ran the game, and by the expedition with which the artists emptied the pockets of the local sports,” Asbury wrote.

The Business Model

Beginning in the early 1830s, Skaggs made New Orleans his business headquarters. There, he recruited young men in gambling halls to help him build a gambling empire. The mastermind trained them extensively, paid their expenses and supplied money for their bank.

Once they became proficient, the gambling visionary sent pairs of them to different towns to ply their craft together, supervised by one of his many cousins. Skaggs gave each of his proteges 25 percent of the profits from their individual operation.

“If luck ran against them and they somehow lost their bankroll, they returned to Skaggs for replenishment and reassignment,” wrote Roll the Bones author David G. Schwartz.

Eventually, other professional gamblers called Skaggs’ practicing pupils “patent-dealers.” They came to be considered fraudsters at the gambling table.

Additional Ventures

As for other industry-related investments, Skaggs financed gambling houses in New Orleans and helped one of his brothers set up a gambling enterprise in California. He funded inventors who had a new idea for faro chicanery in exchange for being able to use their innovation exclusively for a year before they commercialized it. Consequently, Skaggs played a role in the development of some of the crooked faro dealing boxes that hit the market in the 1830s and 1840s.

His Business Attire

Skaggs himself was called “Brother Skaggs, the preaching faro dealer” because of his zeal for the card game and because of his regular attire, a uniform for gamblers of the period. He donned a white high standing-collared shirt and cravat, the color of which contrasted his black silk vest, trousers, frock coat, stovepipe hat and patent leather gaiters.

“These somber garments covered a long, gaunt and awkward frame and emphasized a sour and saturnine physiognomy,” described Asbury.

Prosperity For All

The ambitious entrepreneur kept the franchise alive for nearly two decades. At one time, Skaggs had about 100 of these gamblers scattered throughout the States. Business boomed.

“Skaggs’ patent-dealers prospered exceedingly, and the money rolled like an avalanche into the pockets of the Master in New Orleans,” Asbury wrote.

Through his massive gambling enterprise, other business interests and investments, the Kentuckian had become a millionaire.

Winding Down

He dissolved his gambling franchise and retired from the industry at age 40 in 1858. Afterward, he settled down on the Louisiana cotton plantation he’d purchased years earlier.

Little information is available about how he spent the remaining roughly 30 years of his life. He may have returned to working in the gambling industry at some point.

Reportedly, Skaggs lost about $3 million he’d invested in Confederate money and bonds, which became worthless after the Civil War.

The gambling maverick died at age 72 in Texas in 1890.

Sources

Street photo of 2nd Street Reno in 1950, with Club Cal-Neva

In a likely unprecedented event, with all of the necessary equipment on hand, demonstrations of how a local casino operated its race horse keno game were provided to the judge and jury in a Reno, Nevada courtroom in 1950.

These presentations were part of the defense strategy during the three-day February trial regarding the civil court case, Leon Pierce v. Club Cal Neva.

Hedging His Bets

In his suit and when testifying in court, Reno resident and sporting goods store worker Leon Pierce alleged that the Club Cal Neva casino owed and refused to pay him $5,000 (about $60,000 today) for a winning race horse keno ticket he played in January 1949. Pierce claimed that the 10 horse numbers he chose to be winners, on a $1 ten-spot ticket, actually were. Pierce was the only witness for his side.

(A similar case involving plain, not race horse, keno would happen a decade later at the Nevada Club in Las Vegas.)

Going for the Win

The Club Cal Neva and its defense team sought to prove that Pierce’s keno ticket had been filled out after the winning race was called. They alleged that Pierce’s ticket had been for race number 126, as shown by his receipt, but the winning race had been 127. For some reason, his marked ticket was in the pile of tickets for 127 not 126. Because Pierce’s ticket was for a non-winning race, the casino didn’t owe him any payout, its attorneys argued.

To help jury members understand, Club Cal Neva casino manager Samuel “Sam” A. Boyd* explained the bookkeeping and other operations of race horse keno, using the game implements brought into the courtroom for this very purpose. He showed how tickets were written and payoffs were made.

He said the ticket mixup could’ve been the dealer’s fault or an incidence of Pierce “capping the book.” If the latter, Pierce likely distracted the dealer and slipped a blank race 126 ticket on top of the blank tickets for race 127 then asked him to write a ticket for him. The dealer grabbed and filled out the top ticket.

The Double Whammy

The defense presented two additional witnesses. The first was Emmet Shea, a former, local race horse keno writer now living in Montana. Shea testified that when he’d worked at Harolds Club previously, Pierce had asked him two different times whether he’d be willing to collude with Pierce to produce a winning ticket.

“I told him he was nuts,” Shea testified (Nevada State Journal, Feb. 17, 1950).

Shea added that some time after that, when he’d managed keno for the defendant, he’d instructed his writers to ban Pierce from the game.

Next up on the stand was Rudy Stanch, a current Club Cal Neva employee. He said that in July 1949 Pierce had offered him $200 to testify in court that his employer had operated keno illegally. Stanch said he’d refused.

On cross-examination, Pierce denied all of the witnesses’ allegations. He didn’t know how his ticket wound up in the wrong pile, he said.

Out of Luck

The jury, comprised of seven women and five men, deliberated the case for about two hours.

The verdict was in favor of the Club Cal Neva. Ten jurors voted for the casino, one voted for Pierce and another voted for neither side (civil suits didn’t require a unanimous jury vote).

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What do you think about this case? Did Pierce have a legitimate claim or was he trying to scam the casino?

* Sam Boyd went on to co-found Boyd Gaming and grow it into one of the world’s largest gambling empires. The stadium at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas is named in Boyd’s honor.

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Hands Up! by The Cowboy Artist, Joachim Lüdcke

1891-1935

“No matter in which position you face it, whether from front, above, below or at either side, the subject has you constantly under his eyes and his ‘gun.’ In fact, as you move, the figure appears to move with you.” This is how Reno Chief of Police John “Jack” M. Kirkley described the gunman in Hands Up!, the painting that adorned a wall of his office during his tenure, from 1919 to 1935.

Kirkley

The work of art was more than eye candy. An actual 19th century gambling-related crime in Nevada had inspired it.

In And Out

On Thursday, April 9, 1891 at about 11:30 p.m., “a tall man with a black silk handkerchief with eye-holes in over his face” armed with a six-shooter entered the faro room of Al White’s Palace Hotel and robbed the dealer, James Conroy, of about $800, a significant amount back then, reported the Daily Nevada State Journal (April 10, 1891).

Soon after, the police arrested a man who had $270 in gold coins and a 0.48-caliber revolver in his valise. He identified himself as Thomas Hale, a detective for the Chicago, Illinois-based Pinkerton National Detective Agency. His real name was Thomas H. Horn, Sr., but because he was working undercover in the area on a railroad wrecking case, he was reticent to tell it to them. Horn didn’t have the full $800 on him, so police theorized he’d had an accomplice, but they never identified or found one.

Horn went to trial for the crime, but the jury couldn’t decide one way or the other.

A Strong Defense

The state of Nevada retried Horn in September. During the proceedings, witnesses identified him as having been the robber. They described how he allegedly had come on the scene and yelled, “Hands up!” Then he’d held at bay numerous employees and gamblers, known to be gunfighters, and while doing so, had gathered the money and fled.

During cross-examination, Horn’s attorney highlighted these claims as ludicrous. He noted it was incredulous to think one person could control a dozen, gun-trained and -toting men for a period of time during which not one of them would resist or make a move.

Horn

Pinkerton

William A. Pinkerton, superintendent of the agency bearing his name, testified that Horn in fact was a detective employed by him and had been working a case in Northern Nevada at the time of his arrest. The jury acquitted the defendant.

Supposedly, the actual bandit remained on the loose and continued robbing people throughout the western states.

It Is Possible

Joachim Lüdcke, known in the American West as The Cowboy Artist, watched Horn’s trial in court. He boasted he could depict a man covering, with a pistol, numerous people simultaneously. Using an experienced Spokane scout and trapper nicknamed Death on the Trail as a model, Lüdcke created a watercolor version of Hands Up!.

H.G. “Doc” Brown, the owner of the The Owl Club in Spokane, Washington who knew Lüdcke, displayed this original in his gambling-saloon. Pinkerton spotted the artwork there. Given his connection to the story behind it, he asked Brown if he’d have Lüdcke paint a life-sized version for him in oil. The Cowboy Artist did, and Pinkerton hung the piece in his office.* The Pinkerton agency later used the image in its advertising.

A copy of this oil painting is what Kirkley displayed in his city hall office.

The Actual Perpetrator

Two years later, the Pinkerton agency tracked down and arrested the actual person behind the Reno faro bank robbery and many other similar crimes, newspapers reported. He was one Ed Wilson of Gifford, Iowa (according to The Jewelers’ Circular & Horological Review), aka Frank Shercliffe (or Shercliff), aka Kid McCoy, aka James Burke. Detectives caught up with him in Colorado.

The 20-something-year-old with several aliases was “one of the most daring, desperate, uncompromising of highwaymen and  general robbers,” described The Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette (Sept. 23, 1893). “The number of his crimes can only be guessed at, but their quality and the character of the man himself are so thoroughly well known that the police of the entire west say he is the hardest man they ever had to cope with.”

Wilson’s known offenses included robbing faro banks in Tacoma, Washington and San Bernardino, California in addition to the one in Reno and forcefully relieving two women of their diamonds in Salt Lake City.

Ultimately, the desperado was convicted of robbing a traveling jewelry salesman of $15,000 worth of uncut diamonds in November 1892 on a train going from Omaha, Nebraska to Sioux City, Iowa. A judge sentenced him to 17 years in the Iowa State Penitentiary.

Subsequently, Wilson was released on parole, which he then violated by leaving the state. His next run-in with law enforcement was in 1901 in Kansas City, Missouri, when police there arrested him on suspicion of stealing men’s traveling bags. During the takedown, Wilson tried to escape, and officers shot him in the foot. They returned him to Iowa.

The Final Twist

It may have been Horn after all who perpetrated the Reno faro bank heist, and he and the Pinkerton agency conspiratorially pinned it on Wilson, a known jewel thief.  

According to podcaster Simone Whitlow, “After this incident [in Reno] other Pinkertons began to view Horn as a ‘dirty cop,’ and would coerce him to move on to greener pastures – quite literally. His next role [was] officially a farm hand – unofficially an enforcer – for the Swan Land and Cattle Company, Wyoming.”

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* The original Hands Up! oil painting sold for $9,440 at auction in 2019.

Sources

The Rhythm Boys were all about patterns of sound and movement but in relation to slot machines, not music.

Danny Foster, Johnny Pugh and Robert E. Black made $1,000 (about $11,800 today) from playing the slots for a few hours at the Club Cal Neva in Reno, Nevada in late 1950. Casino management asked them to leave. They did.

Sometime after, they were making money off of the El Cortez Hotel’s slots. During that spree, two Reno policemen approached and ordered them to leave the city by the next night or there’d be “blood on the streets,” Foster later reported to the press (Reno Evening Gazette, Oct. 31, 1951). In their threat, the officers referenced the trio’s continued, local slot playing. The Rhythm Boys moved on, to Lewiston, Idaho.

Trail Of Winnings

Wherever the Rhythm Boys played slots, they won. They used a method for beating the machines that tipped the odds heavily in their favor, boosting slot payoffs by more than 10 percent, reportedly. Morrie Brodsky, manager at the Club Cal Neva, told news reporters he estimated that each of the Rhythm Boys had hit a jackpot once in every 15 plays in his casino.

More distressing to slot operators was that the rhythm method was legal. That fact made them “physically ill,” wrote The Lighter Touch columnist Frank Johnson (Nevada State Journal, May 4, 1958).

“Even today the mere mention of [Rhythm Boys] sends a chill through the gambling fraternity,” Johnson added. “It was that bad.”

Tricks Of The Trade

The Rhythm Boys were nicknamed after their technique. It involved first determining a slot machine’s timing cycle, by the sound the device’s air governor made. Next was repeatedly pulling the slot handle according to a certain rhythm, letting a specific amount of time pass between yanks. Doing so interfered with the timing, slowing it down or speeding it up, such that the reels then “literally floated,” Johnson wrote.

He explained that proficient rhythm players could land the first and third reels in the position they wanted them in and hold them there. Then they could wait for the middle reel to spin to the needed position for a winning row and once there, stop it.

“It’s in the way they pull the handle of the slot. You get it going with a rhythm to it, the right rhythm. And it’ll jackpot for you every time,” columnist Stan Delaplane wrote, quoting a blackjack dealer at Reno’s Circle RB Lodge (Reno Evening Gazette, Feb. 27, 1960).

Attention Mounts

Once in Lewiston, two of the Rhythm Boys, Pugh and Foster, enticed the local news reporters to watch them play by betting they could land several $2 jackpots and spend less than $50 in doing so.

Successful, the duo collected $210 ($2,300 today) in 45 minutes’ time, having fed the machine only $20.

That afternoon, Foster and Pugh entered the 600 Club in Lewiston, and the proprietor turned his slot machines so their front faced the wall.

In October 1951, despite many slot operators urging them to stop playing slots in Lewiston, the Rhythm Boys announced they planned to stay in Idaho for years and make a career out of cleaning up on the gambling machines.

Even Classes On It

The rhythm method had been around since before the Boys drew widespread attention to it. Reportedly, it originated in Las Vegas, Nevada, even was taught there, then expanded.  

Johnson explained in his May 4, 1958 column. “One of the first institutions of higher learning in Las Vegas was a special college for rhythm players conducted by the man who developed the system.  It was no cheap diploma mill. The cost was $500 plus expenses for two weeks of concentrated instruction. Probably there were no more than 30 or 40 graduates during the time the school was in existence, but they were enough to endanger the whole slot machine industry.”

An affiliated school was located in Idaho.

Rhythm Is Gonna Get You

The great publicity surrounding the three slots stars and their method, which the Rhythm Boys invited, was their undoing.

“The thing that really hurt was the fact the rhythm boys were so obvious,” Johnson wrote. “Other casino patrons seemed to catch on wherever they played. Pretty soon jackpots would begin falling all around the section where the rhythm expert was in.”

No longer able to play publicly, the trio sought to capitalize on their system by selling it, outlined in a booklet titled How We Beat The Slots, for $2 a pop. In the publication, they Rhythm Boys noted that “publicity barred us from playing in some clubs and made us unwelcome in others.”

To start, in early 1952, the rhythm method kings sent an estimated 30,000 letters to residents of Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho in which they offered their treatise for sale.

End Of The Road

Eventually, savvy slot machine mechanics learned through the rhythm method course or the grapevine about this shortcoming of slot machines and sought to eradicate it. (Bud Garaventa, the foreman of Harrah’s Club’s slot machine repair shop, was one who attended the class, according to Johnson.)

The solution was a mechanism added to the inside of a slot machine. Described as windmill like, it spun when the slot handle was pulled and dictated how long each reel would spin. It prevented the floating of any and all reels but didn’t change the game’s odds.

“This [development] was at least six or seven years ago, and since then [the industry] has seen a rare slot machine not so equipped,” Johnson wrote in 1961 (Nevada State Journal, Dec. 27).

Sources

Faro stands out in U.S. gambling history. The imported card game dominated the industry here for a long time, about 100 years. “Tiger” was the country’s favorite gambling pastime during the 1800s, though played before and after. Men couldn’t get enough of it. It was ubiquitous.

Faro also is noteworthy for being the game in which the first rampant cheating at cards occurred in the States.

“No other card or dice game, not even poker or craps, has ever achieved the popularity in this country that faro once enjoyed, and it is extremely doubtful if any has equaled faro’s influence upon American gambling or bred such a host of unprincipled sharpers,” author Herbert Asbury wrote in Sucker’s Progress.

Shaving, Pricking, Sanding

The first cheating tricks in faro involved altering the playing cards. Sharpers could buy all types of prepared cards. However, the careful gamblers invested in shears, knives and trimming plates and modified the decks themselves.

One method was trimming certain cards in each suit in specific ways with shears. These cards are called strippers. The deck containing them was a stripped deck. The amount shaved off the cards was minute, about 1/16 or 1/32 of an inch in width.

Trimming shears

One type of strippers is wedges. Using shears, the sharper trimmed both long sides to make them narrower at one end, say the bottom, than at the other, the top. Ends are similar but instead of the sides being shaved, the ends, or short sides, were.

Then there are hollows and rounds, or bellies. With these, certain cards were cut using trimmer plates to be round, wider across the middle and tapered slightly toward the ends. The remaining cards were cut in the opposite manner, to be hollowed out, narrower in the middle and wider at the ends. Concave and convex are similar but their ends, instead of their sides, were modified.

Stripping plate

Cheaters also marked cards, known as readers. One way of doing this was making pinpricks in them, which the dealer could feel with a finger.

Sometimes cheaters roughened one side of certain cards. This made them better adhere to one another and, thus, easier to deal two at a time. This subtle texture was achieved with emery paper; spermaceti, a waxy substance sperm whales produce; a pumice stone; or a rosin-glass mixture.

Definite Advantages

With prepared cards, the cheater could stack the deck as desired and, thereby, know at all times which cards were where in it. Oftentimes in faro, he altered cards below seven and keep those separated at the top of the deck from the rest in the bottom. As needed, he took a card from the top and another from the bottom at one time. Sometimes, he hid one of two cards in his hand until he wanted to use it.

“Card sharping has been reduced to a science,” wrote John Maskelyne in Sharps and Flats. “It is no longer a haphazard affair, involving merely primitive manipulations, but it has developed into a profession in which there is as much to learn as in most of the everyday occupations of ordinary mortals.”

Advancement In Cheating

An American invention came along in the 1820s that allowed the sharper to better conceal his faro cheating tricks — the dealing box.

Faro dealing box

It led to a permanent change in how cards were dealt in the game. Beforehand, bankers dealt them from a face down deck in their left hand. Afterward, bankers dealt them from a face up deck in a dealing box.

“The motives for changing this game from the hand to the box were as base and nefarious as any that ever actuated the ingenious but wicked gambler; his object was nothing less than to be absolutely sure of stripping completely every man that should bet again him,” wrote self-described reformed gambler Jonathan H. Green in Gambling Exposed.

Evolution Of Dealing Boxes

A Virginian and notable card player named Major Robert Bailey designed the first dealing box in 1822. Made out of brass, it was a bit longer and wider than a deck of cards. The lid contained a small oblong hole in the middle for the dealer to insert his thumb or a finger and push a card out the slot on the side. This box didn’t catch on widely, though, because the top card couldn’t be identified.

Three years later, a Cincinnati, Ohio-based watchmaker, Joseph “Joe” Graves, debuted a variation in which the top card was fully visible. Casinos and faro dealers widely adopted this iteration, and over time, it became the standard.

Soon after Graves’ dealing box hit the market, a number of crooked ones appeared. The San Francisco, California-based company Will & Finck, for instance, manufactured 19 different kinds of boxes, only three of which weren’t rigged. Graves also made and sold crooked dealing boxes.

Variations Of The Device

Over time, these contraptions became more and more ingenious.

“Some were intricate contrivances of springs, levers, sliding plates, thumb screws and needle-like steel rods,” Asbury wrote.

The coffee mill, or crank box, for example, allowed the cheater to deal the second, rather than the first, card.

With the lever box, the cheater pushed an outside screw that activated a blade inside to thrust out the two top cards. Similarly, with a balance top, when the banker pressed down on one corner of it, the slot, or mouth, opened wider than usual, and he expelled two cards at once.

Yet another dealing box contained a spring mechanism that made a grinding noise only when it came into contact with a rounded card.

Other box variations included the tongue tell, sand tell, top sight tell, end squeeze, screw box, needle squeeze, lever movement and horse.

“Occasionally one of the gadgets got out of order and caused considerable embarrassment to the unlucky sharper who owned it, but as a result they worked perfectly in the hands of competent operators,” noted Asbury.

A Pretty Penny

Honest dealing boxes were about $20 a pop, but the rigged boxes cost as much as $200 for one. Louis David of Natchez, Mississippi, also a watchmaker, got wealthy in the 1840s selling his tongue-tell boxes made out of German silver for $125 to $175 apiece.

Wicked Combination

The use of altered cards in conjunction with gaffed dealing boxes took cheating at faro to a new level. With both, the sharper could deal two cards at a time, deal a card to lose when play on it to win was heavy and arrange the last turn such that it maximally benefitted the bank, among other tactics.

“The advantages thus given the dealer were so widely used that cheating soon became as much a part of faro in America as a pack of cards,” Asbury wrote.

Sources

1928-1972

Samuel “Sam” F. Termini (1903-1972) was known as a small-time racketeer who worked at and operated gambling enterprises mostly for others.

Here are 10 interesting tidbits about him and his life:

Gambling History

1) Termini was associated with Kansas City Mobster Charles Binaggio. Born and raised in Missouri, Termini had worked for Binaggio before moving to California in 1939 and was one of his godsons.

2) Termini became involved in gambling in Kansas City, Missouri, where, reportedly, he owned and operated some type of business at 404 Independence Avenue where he offered illegal gambling

In Northern California, Termini managed the illegal gambling at the Willow Tree in Colma (San Mateo County), co-owned by Mobsters Emilio Giorgetti and Elmer “Bones” F. Remmer. He held this job from 1942 until the sheriff closed the club in 1947. Also, Termini owned a 10 percent interest in the operation.

Subsequently, in the same county, Termini, using the alias Sam Murray, rented some space in the Silver Saddle tavern-café, in which he debuted and ran the Skyline Club in Redwood City. The illegal gambling there included craps and blackjack.

Termini leased and managed the gambling concession at the Tahoe-Biltmore in Crystal Bay, Nevada during the warm weather season of 1949.

Starting around the mid- to late 1950s (see No. 9), Termini worked as a pit boss at the Horseshoe Club in Las Vegas, Nevada. At the time, his former associate Giorgetti owned it.

3) When Termini ran legal gambling at the Tahoe-Biltmore, Binaggio visited the financially troubled property and decided to bankroll his godson in what was to be “the biggest gambling joint west of the Rockies,” reported the California crime commission in its 1953 report. However, the assassination of Binaggio on April 6, 1950 ended the plan.

4) Police busted Termini for illegal gambling in 1928 at his Kansas City establishment and fined $25 (about $410 today).

Custom Home

5) Termini had a custom home built for him and his family in Hillsborough, California. Constructing a home at the time, in 1946, required veteran’s priority, which Termini didn’t have. So he transferred title of his property and obtained building permits for it in the name of a nephew, a World War II veteran living in Missouri, Jesse LaBoi. This was illegal.

6) Once completed, Termini’s home was an impenetrable fortress. A heavy electronic fence surrounded the property and was controlled from an underground room. This barrier was equipped with a ring of electric eyes linked to an alarm and motion activated floodlights. Gates allowed for entry but only through controls on the Terminis’ cars or by telephoning an unlisted number. The door to the wine cellar was armor plated. An house-wide intercom allowed Termini to hear any and all conversations taking place anywhere inside the home.

Suits Against Him

7) In 1951, the general contractor and the architectural firm that built and designed Termini’s house, respectively, sued him. The former asked for $103,000 ($1.1 million. The latter asked for $16,000 ($107,000 today). Both amounts were the unpaid balances owed them for their services. The case went to trial, and jurors ruled only in favor of Marshall. They awarded him $126,523 ($1.4 million), including interest and court costs.

8) The federal government tried Termini in 1952 for under-reporting his and his wife’s income and underpaying the amount of federal income taxes they owed. The years for which he was charged were between 1945 and 1949 for his taxes and 1945 and 1947 for hers. Termini was found guilty of tax evasion in the amount of about $92,000 ($976,000 today). The judge sentenced him to three years in federal prison and a fine of $20,000 ($212,000 today).

Last 20 Years

9) For the tax evasion, Termini spent three years in the McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary. After getting released, he reportedly lived and worked in Las Vegas. Eventually, he moved to Reno, Nevada.

10) Termini passed away on June 12, 1972 at age 69 in Reno. His body was interred at Mountain View Cemetery.

Sources