The maximum security, federal prison opened in 1934 on Alcatraz Island, 1.25 miles from the coast of San Francisco, California. The facility housed 1,576 of the U.S.’ most dangerous felons, treatment of whom was, at times, brutal and inhumane there. Over time, the penitentiary infrastructure deteriorated to the point where it needed rehabbing. The U.S. government deemed it more prudent to build a new prison rather than overhaul Alcatraz and closed it in 1963.

Among the 1,576 criminals for whom The Rock was home for some duration are five Mobster-gamblers. They are:

Whitey Bulger

In 1956, at age 27, James Joseph Bulger, Jr. (1929-2018) Bulger found himself locked up in the U.S. Federal Penitentiary, Atlanta, facing 20 years for armed robbery of several banks and truck hijacking. When the warden learned the inmate had been plotting to escape, he had Bulger transferred to Alcatraz in 1959. Bulger remained imprisoned there until 1962, then served the rest of his time at two other federal prisons. He was paroled in 1965.

Subsequently, he was an enforcer for the Winter Hill Gang in Somerville (near Boston), Massachusetts. By 1979, he’d became the boss and controlled a large part of Boston’s bookmaking, drug dealing and loansharking operations. While in power, he sanctioned numerous murders and turned FBI informant in 1975.

Bulger went into hiding in the mid-1990s, thereby landing on the FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitives list. He eluded capture until 2011, after which he was tried and found guilty of 11 murders, federal racketeering, extortion and conspiracy.

After FBI agents found and arrested Bulger, he told CNN, “If I could choose my epitaph on my tombstone, it would be, ‘I’d rather be in Alcatraz,'” CBS in San Francisco reported (Aug. 12, 2013).

Frankie Carbo

Paul John Carbo (1904-1976) began his life of crime as a gunman for the New York-based Murder, Inc. enforcement-for-hire group. (He was arrested 17 times for murder and rumored to have assassinated Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel.)

Eventually, Carbo became a member of the New York City Mafia’s Lucchese crime family, a partner in a New Jersey bookmaking ring and a corrupt boxing promoter.

“Frankie Carbo had become the Mob’s unofficial commissioner for boxing and controlled many fighters,” Gary Jenkins wrote in Gangland Wire. In that role, he illegally generated revenue from stealing part of boxers’ purses, fixing bouts and gambling on those.

One of Carbo’s various boxing extortion schemes involved muscling in on the promotional rights to boxer Don Jordan after he won the world welterweight championship in 1958. Carbo was caught threatening promoter Jackie Leonard and convicted of conspiracy and extortion in a trial Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy prosecuted.

The feds sent Carbo to Alcatraz with a 25-year federal prison sentence. When the penitentiary closed in 1963, Carbo was relocated to the McNeil Island Corrections Center in Washington.

Charles Carrollo

For many years, Charles Vincent Carrollo (1902-1979) was the Kansas City Mafia’s lug man, collector of the tax it charged the gambling houses to operate. The Combine controlled a $20 million ($307 million today) a year gambling business in the city as well as other rackets. When the boss John Lazia was assassinated, Carrollo took over as the top dog.  

His reign was short-lived, though, because soon after, he was convicted separately of tax evasion, mail fraud (using the U.S. postal service to promote a gambling scheme) and perjury for lying on his naturalization form. While doing his eight years at the U.S. Federal Penitentiary, Leavenworth, he was caught trafficking narcotics and liquor into the facility. For that, he was sent to Alcatraz in 1943, where he stayed until he was granted parole in 1946.

Mickey Cohen

After 20-plus years of working for the National Crime Syndicate in Los Angeles, Meyer Harris Cohen (1913-1976) lost his battle with the Internal Revenue Service in 1961. At age 49, he was imprisoned at Alcatraz for a 15-year stint for evading and underpaying his federal income taxes.

He served three months there then bonded out, the only Alcatraz prisoner to do so. After six months of freedom, he had to go back. Twenty-eight days after his return, fellow inmates John and Clarence Anglin escaped the supposedly impenetrable island prison. Allegedly, Cohen had arranged for a boat to pick up the brothers and for help getting them to South America.

“All of these big named people — Mickey Cohen, Whitey Bulger — they all wanted somebody to try it and make it,” one of the Anglin’s nephews, David Widmer, told a news outlet in 2016. “If somebody made it, they would all get out.”

Cohen’s involvement in gambling went back to his years in Chicago during Prohibition. There, he worked for the Outfit, both running card games and other forms of illegal gambling and as an enforcer.

Eventually, Meyer Lansky and Louis “Lou” Rothkopf sent Cohen to the West Coast to help Siegel gain control of the territory. There, Siegel and Cohen established a horse racing wire service, launched operations in bookmaking, other gambling, prostitution and drugs, and controlled the labor unions.

Bumpy Johnson

Ellsworth Raymond Johnson’s (1905-1968) career in illegal gambling started with shooting dice for money as a youth. Later, as the head of organized crime in New York’s Harlem, he ran a $50 million ($750 million today) a year numbers, or policy, game, in an alliance with Charles “Lucky” Luciano.

To obtain that business, Johnson “ran roughshod over the numbers bosses of Harlem, giving them the option of working for him or losing their businesses altogether,” reported the New York Post (Sept. 23, 2019). “Most accepted the former and took $200-per-week ($3,000 a week today) salaries, forsaking the thousands they earned on their own.”

Johnson expanded his empire to narcotics, which led to his 1953 conviction and 15-year prison sentence for selling heroin. Ultimately, he served 10 years, at Alcatraz.

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Photo of Alcatraz Island: by D. Ramey Logan, from Wikimedia Commons 

Sources

Riviera dice, with crystallized corners

From size to spot design, the basic elements of dice have evolved over time. Much of the changes made to U.S. dice over the last roughly 150 years have been effected with the goals of making it harder for players to cheat and making it easier for gambling house personnel to spot altered dice. Today, casino dice are more varied than ever.

Here’s a look at sharps’ tricks, illegal in the country’s casinos, and how gambling operators used (and still use) dice design to foil cheating attempts:

A bone die from the early 1880s

Rolling The Bones

Around the world, original dice were crafted out of bone (hence, the dice nickname “bones”), ivory and other materials, including bronze, agate, rock crystal, onyx, jet, alabaster, marble, amber and porcelain.

Eventually, opaque plastic dice, through which light can’t pass, became the norm in the States. This type was ideal for cheaters, who could get away with rigging them for an advantage during game play.

Modifications inside a die increased the weight on a certain side, which boosted the user’s chances of the die turning up a desired number.

Cheaters employed various methods to create these weighted, loaded or gaffed dice. They included:

Icing: To ice a die, one inserted a weight or iron filling inside it on the side opposite the desired face. The weighted, or heavy, side was more likely to fall against the table, thereby making the wanted side show.

Variable loading: This more complicated approach allowed the user to throw any side he desired rather than a predetermined one. The process involved hollowing out the die through one of the pips, placing a small weight inside, filling the cavity with a soft wax with a melting point just above room temperature, filling the pip with glue or epoxy and then coloring it to match the other pips.

While in play, the player had to hold the die in his closed first for a moment with the desired face up. This warmed the dice, allowing the wax to melt and the weight to shift to the opposite side. Then he had to hold the die in an open palm so it would cool and the wax would harden and, thus, hold the weight in place.

Tapping: This version of the variable loading method entailed creating, inside the die, a central reservoir and running tubes from it to each of six additional reservoirs created behind each of the faces. Then the central reservoir would be filled with mercury.

During play, a tap of the die against the table or other hard surface would send the mercury into the reservoir behind the face opposite the desired side. The mercury weighted the side it was on and altered the outcome of a roll.

To counteract these cheating methods, gambling operators wanted to be able to see into the die. A solution came in the second half of the 1800s in the form of dice made out of cellulose nitrate, or nitrocellulose, a synthetic and translucent plastic. An added benefit was these dice could be colored by dying them. This composition, though, was problematic. It was highly flammable and, over time, crystallized due to plastic fatigue and ultraviolet light exposure.

Then, nearly a century later, came the advent of dice made out of cellulose acetate, a less flammable and natural plastic manufactured from purified natural cellulose. These are the dice used in U.S. casinos still today.

No Rounded Corners

Casino dice are exact cubes with sharp corners that ensure entirely random rolls. In contrast, dice found in commercial board games, for instance, have rounded corners, which exacerbate any bias in them and skew roll outcomes.

Cheaters sometimes make a die off square by shaving one side to be shorter, which leads to one face predominantly showing on rolls. These alterations are so slight, they can’t be seen by the naked eye. Detecting a shaved die required measuring all sides of it with a micrometer.

Dice sizes and different pip designs

Size Matters

Casino dice size has gradually increased since the mid-1900s. They began at 5/8-inch squares then were increased to 11/16. Today, most are 3/4-inch squares, and each of a die’s dimensions must be true to within 1/2000th of an inch. As the die size grew, so did its pips, or spots or dots.

One reason for the increased size was to make die more difficult to palm and switch out, George Martin hypothesized in Collecting Casino Dice. He added that larger dice were more desirable on the larger craps tables that had become bigger over time, were easier to find on typically colorful, patterned casino carpeting and contained more surface area for printing a name or logo. Any to all of these factors could’ve prompted the size boost.

Shades iI Play

The most common color of casino dice is … yes, red, of various shades with many older dice being deep red or maroon. Whereas red still dominates, other dice colors — blue, yellow, green and purple — are often seen now.

As for the printing on dice, it began with one color, usually a light pastel to contrast with the red dice color. A rarity at the time was Club Primadonna’s (1955-1978, Reno, Nevada) dice, which boasted four colors of print in all, three on one side and a fourth on a second.

The printing on modern dice is usually done in two or three colors, often metallic ones like silver or gold.

Flamingo dice, 3/4 inch square, blue, with solid spot pips, a logo, lot number and internal identifying letter

Logos Prompt No-gos

When gambling establishments first started printing identifying info on their dice, it generally was their name, like “Boulder Club.” That evolved into printing the hotel name, like “Hotel Sahara” and then the casino name, such as “Fitzgerald’s Casino.” Some casinos opted for only a printed object, like a heart, horse, fish or gun, a geometric shape or symbol.

A later trend was dice bearing the possessive form of the casino owner’s surname, like “Harrah’s” and “Binion’s.” Sometimes it had their full name, such as “Milton Prell” and “Del Webb” and at other times, their initials. Eventually, printing identifiers included the casino’s geographic location, such as “Sparks Nevada,” the year, slogans like “Viva Las Vegas,” special event names and more.

These logos help casinos differentiate their dice from others’ and afford them a way to brand and market themselves.

Casinos change their printed logos several times a year and only use dice bearing the latest variation, again to prevent cheating. Cheaters generally won’t get away with swapping into a game old dice with a different logo.

The side containing the single pip is the most common for printing, with the two dot face the runner up, as they offer the most available space.

Not Gladys Knight’s Pips

Misspot dice, used to cheat and today called tops and bottoms, are made with certain numbers duplicated on or omitted from them. For example, one of these might have a one, three and five on it, twice each, but no two, four or six or vice versa.

As such, pips on today’s dice aren’t painted on. They’re drilled into the die then filled with a special paint. The paint’s density is the same as the die’s to ensure all sides weigh the same.

In terms of pips’ appearance, they most commonly are solid spots. Other pip designs of various names — bird’s eye, ring eye, double ring eye, bull’s eye, donut and others — include two concentric circles, one inside the other; a dot inside in a circle; a dot inside two concentric circles; an octagon inside a circle or any combination.

The arrangement of the numbers on U.S. dice is such that those on opposite faces always total seven. This means two mirror image arrangements are possible, in which 1, 2 and 3 are arranged in a clockwise or counterclockwise order about a corner.

This die’s key identifier is “F”

An Ounce Of Prevention

Casinos have added a couple of features. One is a letter or number printed underneath the paint of one pip. It can be seen only when looking into the cube in a certain way, usually through the four spot side toward the three spot side.

This identifier is yet another dice component cheaters have to contend with, and it’s a difficult one to replicate. To up the ante even more, casinos usually change this code with each new dice issue.

Each fresh dice lot also gets a new number, which is printed on every die in the batch, usually between the two rows on the six face.

When casinos take dice out of action permanently, they mark them, most commonly with a 1/4 inch in diameter circle stamped into the plastic on the four spot side. Sometimes they use an “X,” numbers or letters instead, even “void.” This allows anyone to easily spot the unacceptable use of retired dice in a game.

An Ongoing Battle

While the design of today’s casino dice goes a long way in counteracting cheating, it doesn’t eradicate it. For instance, some skilled players like Dominic “Dice Dominator” LoRiggio, can control how they throw dice so they land on certain numbers. Some cheaters use magnets to control their roll, one inside the dice and another under the table.

What ingenious method will someone concoct next?

Sources

Tank plant at Ford Motor Company’s Highland Park facility in Michigan, early 1940s

1943

A site protection officer disciplined nine workers for shooting dice in a restroom and instructed them to report to the labor relations officer. This happened during the night shift at the Ford Motor Company tank assembly facility at Highland Park in Michigan, on a Friday night in April, during World War II.

Four of the men, instead, fomented a sympathy strike, causing a 2:45 a.m. shutdown. During the morning of the day shift, another 4,200 employees refused to work.

Union officials pleaded with them to return to the job, which they did, by noon.

1934

When police raided an illegal gambling den in Kingston, Washington, one of the players present, Raymond Johnson, swallowed the dice. In court after his arrest, the judge gave him 30 days to “digest” and produce the dotted cubes.

Unfortunately, it’s unknown how everything turned out in this case.

Photo from freeimages.com: by Katinka Kober

1967

When the owners of the Ponderosa — Reno, Nevada’s newest major hotel (at 515 S. Virginia Street, now the Wild Orchid) — were about to debut gambling, with a celebratory first throwing of the dice, they ran into a snag.

It seems the casino bankroll was locked in the hotel safe … along with the safe key.

Two of the proprietors hotfooted it to the bank downtown to borrow replacement cash until they could get the safe opened. Though delayed, the festivities ensued without further trouble.

Today

Chinese dice differ from traditional dice in two ways:

• The spots for numbers 1 and 4 are painted red.
• The number 1 spot is larger and more deeply etched than all others.

Anyone know why?

Photo from Pond5: “Chopsticks and Dice on White Background” by olinchuk