Frank Jay Gould

1929-1933

Le Casino Municipal in Nice, France refused to cash Frank Jay Gould’s check so he could keep gambling there. This irked him. Gould wasn’t just a member of the bourgeoisie. Rather, he was an uber-wealthy American who’d been living and investing millions of dollars in various business ventures in the French Riviera since 1913.

I’ll show them, he thought; I’ll build the most magnificent, classiest gambling house in all of Europe—”a palace the Caesars could not have built,” Gould said (Lima Sunday News, Jan. 15, 1933). I’ll put it close to that municipal casino and call it the Palais de la Méditerranée (the palace of the Mediterranean).

That’s what he did. He went all out and spared no expense. The grand cost came to $5 million (about $76 million today), an amount his wife (the third one) was said to have won in just a week at the gaming tables. The project took nearly two years to complete.  

Gould engaged architects Charles and Marcel Dalmas, who designed the building “like a modernized palace of ancient Rome,” reporter Alice Langelier wrote (The Bee, Nov. 29, 1929).

Showcasing a neoclassical style, the expansive casino was built out of 1,000 tons of marble and 90 tons of steel and boasted high-vaulted ceilings, frescoed walls, glass chandeliers, immense mirrors and “expensive tricks of illumination and decoration to add to its charm,” the Lima Sunday News reported. The foyer staircase was one of, if not the, largest, in history. The interior displayed works, many of them well-known, of more than 100 artists.

“Inside there is none of the usual white and gilt adornment associated with all casinos. It is artistic, harmonious, but at the same time almost ‘home-like,'” noted Langelier.

The luxurious Palais featured a series of gambling rooms “with the ‘class’ nicely graduated from low to high: in one room tourists can play for a few francs a throw, in the next the stakes are a little bit higher, in the next they are higher yet — and so on, until the expensive private parlors are reached where only American millionaires, Indian potentates and the like are admitted,” according to the Lima Sunday News. One room contained 42 baccarat tables accommodating up to 500 players and space for up to 1,000 spectators. 

The house of pleasures also contained an elaborate theater, fine dining restaurant and wine cellar stocked with roughly 4,000 bottles.

The magnificent structure “stands on the best part of the Promenade des Anglais, facing the sea, and at night is easily seen by its cornices of concealed light and the white glow which bathes it from barrel-shaped searchlights on its terrace,” Langelier described. “This super-casino covers two acres of territory and swings like Brooklyn Bridge on supports from its columns.”

“The gambling king of France’s” Palais de la Méditerranée debuted in 1929, during the Jazz Age, and exemplified the period’s glamour.

When tourism was high and business was good, the casino, located a half-mile from Nice’s Casino Municipal, yielded an annual profit of about $785,000 ($15 million today).

Work Of Another Disgruntled Man

Four years later, a fire ravaged the Palais. In the hour it took firefighters to put out the flames, the architectural masterpiece got ruined.

“The gorgeous interior was destroyed, its costly marble wall cracked and broken, its glass chandeliers worth thousands shattered,” The Hammond Times reported (Nov. 24, 1933).*

It was believed an arsonist had set the blaze, a male job applicant whom the Palais had refused employment.

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* Subsequently, the Palais was completely restored and remained a viable business until 1978, when it was shuttered. The original property was demolished in 1990 except for two facades that were preserved as historical monuments and a modern hotel-casino was built in its place, now the Hyatt Regency Nice Palais de la Méditerranée.

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1969-1975

A bomb exploded on the Casino d’Istanbul’s roof, injuring several people, on the night of Saturday, May 1, 1971. It happened during a banquet hosted by the Dayton, Ohio-based National Cash Register Company and attended by 1,400 Europeans and Americans.

Just the month before, 11 provinces in Turkey had been put under martial law due to a renewed wave of terror, marked by kidnappings for ransom and bank robberies.

Two months earlier, in March, the country’s army demanded a new government be put in place to hopefully end the labor strikes, street protests, bombings, robberies, kidnappings and political assassinations that had been occurring during the prior few years. Much of this continual extremist violence had targeted Americans and their property.

From Arkansas To Istanbul

In fact, the Casino d’Istanbul was owned and operated primarily by Americans, specifically people who most recently had run illegal gambling in Hot Springs, Arkansas. When Governor Winthrop Rockefeller eradicated gaming there in 1967, this group sought to debut the first casino in Turkey. Investment Opportunities Incorporated outlaid 95 percent of the $315 million project cost (about $1.9 billion today). The Bank of Tourism in Turkey covered the remaining 5 percent and was to receive a percentage of the casino’s future profits.

The United States-based entity obtained the required Turkish gambling permit and acquired, from his heirs, the lavish, Istanbul summer palace of the late Said Halim Pasha, who’d served as the Prime Minister of Ottoman Sultan Mehmed Resat between 1913 and 1917. (He’d been assassinated in Rome in 1921.) Built in 1878 and boasting an exterior blend of French and Egyptian architecture in an empire style, the mansion sat on the Straits of Bosporus, the waterway between the Black and Aegean Seas, where Europe and the Middle East meet.

The Hot Springs group converted the mansion into Casino d’Istanbul, a place where foreign guests could dine, dance and play games of chance (Turkish citizens weren’t allowed to gamble, and patrons had to show their passport for entry). The casino, open from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. at least initially, offered roulette, blackjack, baccarat, chemin de fer, craps and slots. On opening night, September 20, 1969, most of the guests held Lebanese passports.

“For years, [Casino d’Istanbul] was operated using former spa city casino employees, flying both the profit and the last shift home to Hot Springs every 30 days,” wrote Robert Raines in Hot Springs: From Capone to Costello. The casino was shuttered in 1975 due to the looming “threat of Turkish government intervention.”

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1967 & 1970

Apparently, the beloved crooner had a temper, which he sometimes unleashed when casino operators denied him additional, excessive amounts of credit when gambling.

In one instance when Frank Sinatra lost control, he wound up losing two front teeth. That was in 1967, when he provoked a fight with Carl Cohen, the manager of the Sands in Las Vegas, Nevada, yelling obscenities at him and hurling a handful of chips into his face.

The 250-pound Cohen, who also got angry, punched the star in the mouth, knocking him to the floor. Sinatra tore up the hotel switchboard, drove a golf cart through a glass window and tried to call Howard Hughes, who’d just purchased the hotel.

It’s unclear what the kerfuffle was about. The media reported it was because Cohen closed the singer’s $200,000 (about $1.4 million in today’s dollars) line of credit. Others said it was related to Sinatra ending his 16-year professional relationship with the Sands and contracting with Caesars Palace instead. Maybe it was both. You’d think the dental consequences of that incident would’ve cured Sinatra of future behavioral eruptions, but they didn’t.

Tantrum Turned Assault

In 1970, Sinatra had just begun a three-week engagement at Caesars Palace when he got into an argument with Sanford Waterman, Caesars’ casino manager. Sinatra had been playing baccarat for $8,000 a hand at a table where the limit typically was $2,000. He asked Waterman to double the limit to $16,000 (about $98,000 in today’s dollars) and let him play on credit. Waterman refused.

Sinatra threw gambling chips, squeezed Waterman’s throat hard enough to leave marks and threatened, “The mob will take care of you.” In response, Waterman pulled a 0.38-caliber revolver from his waistband and pointed it at Sinatra, which ended the scuffle. But Sinatra cancelled the remainder of his scheduled performances at Caesars because, according to his spokesperson, Sinatra was suffering from exhaustion and a recent hand surgery. Sure.

Waterman was arrested but released, as law enforcement and the district attorney figured Sinatra had been the instigator. The local sheriff, Ralph Lamb, had enough of Ol’ Blue Eyes’ rudeness and antics.

“If Sinatra comes back to town Tuesday, he’s coming downtown to get a work card, and if he gives me any trouble, he’s going to jail,” Lamb said. “I’m tired of him intimidating waiters, waitresses, starting fires and throwing pies. He gets away with too much. He’s through picking on the little people in this town. Why the owners of the hotels put up with this I plan to find out.”

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Caricature: “Frank Sinatra” by Andy McDougall, ©2013 / License

Mexico’s Monte Carlo and Sunset Inn

1913-1929

With various state bans on gambling and, later, a nationwide prohibition against liquor, many Americans, particularly wealthy Southern Californians, traveled to casinos in Mexican border cities to play and imbibe.

“The great hegira* is in, and already these towns are filled to the limit with throngs of the thirsty, willing to pay big sums for the pleasures banned by law on American soil,” reported the Reno Evening Gazette (March 30, 1920).

Here are some casinos that lured U.S. citizens across the border to do what they legally couldn’t at home:

In Calexico

• Owl (Tecolote) Café and Theatre: Large but unadorned, “an immense barn-like structure,” the Owl boasted nearly 40 tables for keno, faro and poker along with many roulette wheels (The Bakersfield Californian, Feb. 10, 1920). Advertisements for the gaming resort touted: “Both night and day, across the way, you will never find closed, the Owl Café.” Three Bakersfield, California, saloon and brothel owners — Marvin Allen, Frank Beyer and Carl Withington — or ABC Corp., opened the Owl around 1913. Seven years later, a fire that raged for three hours burned it down.

“The destruction of the Owl leaves one large gambling house in Mexicali, a Chinese establishment where many of the games are beyond the ken** of the average American,” reported The Bakersfield Californian (Feb. 10, 1920).

In Mexicali

• Casino de Mexicali: Following the conflagration of the Owl, Governor Esteban Cantu of Baja, California, built and oversaw in his capital city the upscale Casino de Mexicali, which also was open 24/7. Luxuriously appointed, the entire top floor was divided into suites equipped with games for wagering. Cantu charged customers an initial $250 membership tax (about $2,950 today) and a $20 monthly fee. In the first month alone, 2,000 people had joined. In its early days, the Casino de Mexicali drew about 25,000 to 30,000 Americans per day.

“The project stood Cantu an even million dollars before a wheel turned,” noted the Reno Evening Gazette (March 30, 1920).

In Tijuana

• Feria Típica: This traditional fair, the brainchild of Antonio Elosúa, offered gambling in the forms of cockfighting, bullfighting, bull baiting and horse racing along with folk dancing and Mexican food and drink. It debuted in 1915 with the slogan: “Where Everything Goes and Where Everyone Goes.”
• Monte Carlo: Elosúa opened this casino the following year. Adjacent to the Feria Típica’s open-air arena, it offered cards and dice table games, slot machines and roulette wheels. By 1917, ABC Corp. had bought out all of Elosúa’s holdings.
• Sunset Inn: ABC Corp. and Jim Coffroth built in 1920 this new $1 million casino with a balcony that overlooked the racetrack. The proprietors added to the casino’s events schedule many of the feria’s most popular exhibitions, like bullfighting.

“To lure and keep gamblers on the property, the new Monte Carlo served decent enough 75-cent meals and the dance hall stayed open all night,” wrote Lawrence D. Taylor (San Diego Historical Society Quarterly, Summer 2002).

• Agua Caliente Casino and Hotel: Another trio of Americans — Wirt G. Bowman, Baron Long and James N. Crofton — built this ornate, $10 million, Spanish-style resort that boasted a casino offering faro, roulette and baccarat, horse and greyhound racing among other recreational amenities. Four-person bungalows allowed for gambling in private. Located six miles south of the border near the hot spring, the property opened in two phases, in 1928 and 1929. During its heyday, Agua Caliente attracted a slew of tourists, among them famous Hollywood stars.

“American cupidity has enriched the gamblers of Augua [sic] Caliente more than $4 million in the past 10 months. The Old West in its heyday never saw such gambling as is being done at Augua Caliente these days,” reported The Kokomo Tribune (June 7, 1929).

The end of Prohibition curtailed the throngs of U.S. citizens visiting Mexico for pleasures.

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*A flight or journey to a more desirable or congenial place
**Understanding or knowledge

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1907-1918

In 1918, the United States Army requisitioned Le Casino Municipal de Beausoleil, in France on its border with Monaco, for a YMCA center for World War I infantrymen on leave. In the main former gambling room, food was served to doughboys, including American-style bacon and eggs in mornings and, on Sunday afternoons, housemade donuts.

Between 1914 and 1918 the French had used the Beausoleil casino as a hospital. When the gaming house had opened originally in 1907, it’d offered baccarat and petits-chevaux.

1931

The Big Baccarat Table in Nice (France) was sketched by cartoonist, Pierre de Régnier, aka Tigre (1898-1943), and ran in newspapers with this description:

“From left to right: Mme. Ephrussi, the French multimillionaire widow who lives at the gaming tables; Andre Citroen, the rich automobile manufacturer, whose fortune represents motor cars; Yves Mirande, the famous playwright whose wealth comes from the plays he writes, such as The Man in Evening Clothes, Ta Bouche, One Kiss. Next to Mirande is the Aga Khan, ‘spiritual leader’ of the Indian Mohammedans, whose fortune is represented by elephants and jewels; then a prosperous Paris man-dressmaker, with his different gowns.

Behind are Erskine Gwynne, Henri Letellier, with his Paris Journal, and Jefferson Davis Cohn, with some of his Pullman cars. On the middle of the table a banco is ready. There is a champagne bottle, a Citroen car, the Chasseur de Chez Maxime, an elephant belonging to Aga Khan and the manikins.”

1929

Le Casino Municipal in Cannes, France broke its record in January for the highest amount of money (in chips) in play at a baccarat table — $1 million ($14.3 million today). “Though individual bets seldom ran over 200,000 francs or $8,000, almost every five minutes saw $50,000 change hands,” reported The New York Times (Jan. 29, 1929).

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

The Casino Municipal de Viña del Mar when the landscaping was still immature, 1930s

1928-Today

Members of English royalty unwittingly helped launch a new South American casino toward success in the 1930s.

After Chilean President Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, in 1928, authorized creation of a gambling house, Viña del Mar (translated as “vineyard of the sea”), a city on the country’s Pacific Coast, spent $6.5 million ($95.6 million today) on having such a place built.

Construction began in March 1930, and nine months later, the Casino Municipal de Viña del Mar debuted at 199 Avenida San Martin.

The facility, which featured three sizable roulette and baccarat rooms, a cabaret, theater, library, ballroom, restaurant, bar and encircling garden, was described as “an institution that rivals Monte Carlo, Nice and the other great gambling resorts of the Riviera in a beautiful seaside setting, architectural splendor and the sumptuousness of the Casino appointments,” by Iowa’s Daily Fairfield Ledger (March 26, 1931).

“The tourist tide is said to be moving toward South America and this progressive country has decided what will be most attractive to American dollars and is now all set for the harvest,” added the newspaper.

Quirky Casino Controls

The target customers primarily were foreigners. Tourists easily gained entry upon showing their passport, and Chileans residing in other provinces had to show their identification cards.

It was harder for the locals to get in. To do so, residents had to petition for admission formally and have their request officially recorded. Then their financial status was investigated and based on the findings, they were allowed or denied entry.

Among those in the community, certain groups also had to obtain written permission from a third party — for women, it was from their husband, and for business clerks, and bank employees and officers, it was from a company superior.

Edward VIII, Prince of Wales

Prince George, Duke of Kent

The Regal Touch

High-profile outsiders visited the Viña del Mar resort to play games of chance, dine and dance. For example, Prince George, Duke of Kent and his brother, Edward VIII, the Prince of Wales (later king in 1936) spent time there while on a tour of South America from January to April 1931.

Prince Edward won $3,800 ($61,000 today), or 27,420 pesos, while playing baccarat.

Prince George didn’t fare as well with that game, gaining $60 ($970 today), or 800 pesos, but had a good run with roulette, leaving with several thousand pesos (he didn’t count his winnings).

“The playing of the royal highnesses gave the casino just the tone it had to have to be a success, and without a formal order being issued by the management, evening dress and tuxedo became the mode,” noted Wisconsin’s Steven Point Daily Journal (March 31, 1931).

In Recent Times

In 2000, the Casino Municipal de Viña del Mar was designated as a historical and architectural place of interest. Later in the decade, the structures were refurbished, with care taken to preserve the classic look, and overnight accommodations were added to the property in the form of the Hotel del Mar.

Today, no longer city owned and, instead, held by the company Enjoy, the casino is called simply Viña del Mar.

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