Castle Mona, home to the Manx, or Isle of Man, Casino, 1964

1961-1966

“When you bring in gamblers, you bring in trained law violators, and to expect them not to break the law is to expect the tides not to rise,” Wallace Turner wrote in Gambler’s Money.

The Manx Casino, also called the Isle of Man Casino, named for its locale, was a case in point.

A Dubious Proposition

The enterprise came about despite and after much opposition to the idea. The roughly 300 Methodist Manx “raised hell about a gambling joint on the island,” Turner wrote.

The Manx government itself wasn’t sold on it entirely, which led to heated debate. Even England hadn’t considered legalizing gambling yet and wouldn’t do so until 1962.

“Some politicians portrayed casino gambling as an act that could subvert the Isle of Man’s respectability, but also one that surrendered national sovereignty by making the Manx Treasury subservient to the taxation revenue procured from multinational gambling magnates,” Pete Hodson wrote in the 2018 article, “‘The Isle of Vice?'”

The Manx House of Keys legalized gambling with a 15-to-9 vote on the Pool Betting Act in 1961.

Two years later, in May 1963, the Manx Casino debuted, the first gambling house in the British Isles.

“Anxious politicians and members of the public were reassured that the casino would be subject to tight regulation, and that unruly behaviour would not be tolerated,” wrote Hodson.

Americans At The Helm 

Initially, the gambling enterprise was sited in a temporary spot, inside Castle Mona, a hotel in the Douglas Promenade. Plans called for it to be moved later to a permanent location.

Casino Ltd., a group of Americans, held and operated the gambling concession. They included three Maryland businesspeople: William A. Albury and John D. Hickey, who headed it, and silent partner Helen Saul who provided most of the required upfront capital. Frank O’Neill, 49, was the casino director; Las Vegan William Paris, 39, was the deputy director; Raymond Gavilan, 45, supervisor; and Arthur P. Anderson (Hickey’s nephew), 23, cashier. James D. Gilson was another employee.

The syndicate was to pay the Manx government €5,000 pounds a year plus 15 percent of its profits.

Because half of the island’s economy relied on tourist spending at the time, the casino catered to the middle and lower classes.

“The betting was to be on the ‘Woolworth principle,’ of small stakes and large turnover of bettors. No French phrases were used,” Turner wrote. “[Patrons] even were offered lessons in roulette, chemin de fer, blackjack and craps.”

Prediction Comes True

After employee Gilson tipped off the police, they raided the casino in December and investigated the finances. O’Neill, Paris, Gavilan and Anderson were arrested and charged with conspiring to steal money from the Manx Casino since it opened and receiving stolen money, “‘thereby defrauding both the casino company and the government,” Manx Attorney General David Lay said, as quoted by Turner. The quartet was jailed and stripped of their work permits and passports.

Six months later, in late June, the former casino employees’ trial began.

Lay, the prosecutor, argued the four employees had engaged in fiddles, or types of swindling, including fudging the amounts on cash-out slips, I.O.U.s and checks, to allocate money to be skimmed, which then had been. From the skim, the wages of the four men had been paid. In carrying out these irregularities, Lay said, the defendants had defrauded the casino company and the government.

Palace Hotel & Casino, Douglas, Isle of Man

Defense Barrister Rose Heilbron countered that the defendants simply had been following orders of their bosses Albury and Hickey in regards to the skimming and their pay. As such, the company had known all along the funds were being stolen.

Rather than the four employees, Heilbron purported, Casino Ltd.’s two executives, who since had fled the Isle of Man, should’ve been the ones on trial. One had to wonder why they weren’t, she noted.

She charged that Albury and Hickey “had drawn cheque after cheque for unknown purposes. The fiddle had been to give the two tax-free living. The casino had provided the perfect front for all Albury’s activities” (Liverpool Echo and Evening Express, July 1, 1964).

Ultimately, the jury found all four men guilty of conspiring to steal. The judge sentenced them to spend six months in prison, pay a fine — O’Neill and Paris, €300, Gavilan €150 and Anderson €75 — and possibly be deported.

(A swindle by a different set of Americans would take place in England in 1969.)

The Next Phase

In 1964, the Palace Coliseum, in the Douglas Promenade, was demolished, and in its place a new building was constructed for the Manx Casino and a hotel.

The gambling facility, which Scottish actor Sir Sean Connery ushered in, opened in May 1966 under a different name, Palace Hotel & Casino.

“I wish the people in London could see the Casino,” he said. “There is nothing like it there!”

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Sources

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.”

Sources

1945-1950

Although gambling was illegal in Miami, Florida, in the 1940s, one lavish casino operated there for five years with the blessing of the local sheriff.

Club 86, on Biscayne Boulevard, which belonged to local mobsters, the S&G Syndicate, was noteworthy for its lavishness and security features.

Here’s how a United Press reporter described it:

“. . .luxurious furnishings, secret rooms, armor-plated walls, bulletproof glass and concealed catwalks for machine gun-toting guards like something out of Hollywood. In the main gaming room, well-heeled customers and visiting mobsters walked on a huge carpet costing $15,000 [$148,000 today]. They stood beneath 11 handmade Cuban light fixtures and dropped $500 and $1,000 bills at any one of six roulette wheels, three crap tables, one chemin de fer* layout and a chuck-a-luck** setup.

If the law got curious, two panels swung out from the main room to allow the gambling equipment to be pushed into a storage room — all in a matter of seconds. When the ‘heat’ was on, the 30 x 60-foot main room was kept vacant but favored customers gained admission to a secret ‘sneak room’ for a session with chips marked up to $2,500.

The club, built during the 1945 period of wartime shortages, was designed to prevent a sudden invasion of stickup men looking for easy loot. Behind the walls of the gaming rooms were catwalks where armed guards watched the proceedings below them through slatted ventilators. They were locked in the galleries behind a door of steel that had a peephole of bulletproof glass.

At their elbows were switches that controlled six warning lights used for flashing code signals to croupiers, stickmen and laddermen in the room below. Everything was arranged to prevent a repetition of the famous 1932 holdup of the Embassy Club when bandits, customers and employees alike were shot down by trigger-happy guards standing on a trellised catwalk” (Nevada State Journal, Oct. 26, 1950).

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*Chemin de fer is a French card game.
**Chuck-a-luck is a carnival-type game played with three dice and a cage.

Sources

1947-1952

Despite New York mobsters trying to scare her off, an ambitious woman — Elaine Townsend (née Margaret Helgeson) — held her own as a gambling operator in the late 1940s. Bright, young and gorgeous, she parlayed her chutzpah, commerce degree and drive into making gobs of money in Cuba.

Big Screen Worthy

Her exploits in Havana among gangsters, politicians, movie stars and secret agents were so compelling that Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz planned to make a movie about them with Ball in the lead role but never did. However, a different film about Townsend — Razzle Dazzle: The Elaine Townsend Story — is slated for release on Aug. 1, 2018.

Entrepreneurial Endeavor

The Wyoming-born go-getter traveled to the Caribbean island early in 1947, at age 27.

“I’d heard Cuba was the spot for free enterprise — and I was as determined as ever to make a lot of money,” said Townsend, the daughter of a cattle rancher who’d grown up poor (The American Weekly, Sept. 5, 1948).

Once there, she heard the gambling concession at the Gran Casino Nacional, Cuba’s only legalized gaming spot at the time, was being sold for the upcoming season. Soon after, the tall blonde learned it only had been awarded to the New York Mafia in previous years. She consulted some attorneys who told her women didn’t run games in their country.

None of that deterred her, however, and she bid on the enterprise.

After negotiating for months with officials, Townsend bought the dice and chemin de fer (a variant of baccarat) operations for $30,000 ($329,000 today). She opened them in July, four months before the New York gamblers typically did.

The Confrontation

She soon found herself face to face with three of those very men from The Big Apple in the Gran Casino.

“We heard you grabbed off the dice and chemmy gimmicks here,” one of them said (The American Weekly, Sept. 5, 1948). “We came down, hoping to grab them off ourselves, and this Cuban guy says, ‘Miss Townsend got them. They’re all hers. They’re not for sale.’ We thought maybe it was a gag. It isn’t true, is it?”

When she confirmed that it was, another of the trio told her the players would “clean her out in a week.”

“What you want to do it for, honey?” the first man asked. “It’s not your racket. You got … well, you got class. You ought to be home or someplace.”

“I don’t want to go home. I want to make a lot of money,” Townsend said.

“Look, we’ll give you $10,000 more than you laid out if you’ll sell to us,” the third man said.

“No.”

“Twenty thousand?”

“I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I’ve gone through a lot of anxiety over this thing. I’ve got to be repaid for that. And so far it’s been fun. I like it. I’m going to stick with it.”

The La Cosa Nostra representatives left her alone after that.

Never having worked in gambling before, Townsend hired New Yorker Connie Immerman, not a mobster, to run the games under her watch, as he’d run them years earlier. Most recently, Immerman, with two of his brothers, had co-owned and run Connie’s Inn, a Harlem night club from 1923 to 1934, when the Depression caused them to close it.

In Havana, Townsend went on to own an interest in the Jockey Club casino and operate the games at the Montmartre after Fulgencio Batista, who usurped the Cuban presidency by coup in 1952, legalized gambling in hotels, clubs and cabarets in 1954.

Amassing Cash

Before entering the gambling industry, Townsend had toiled to earn, save and invest her money. After working her way through and graduating from the University of Denver in Colorado at age 19, she worked, often simultaneously, an assortment of jobs — teaching, selling real estate and modeling.

In 1940, at 20 years old, she visited friends in Honolulu and, after seeing the potential to make money there, she stayed. First, she ran a photo studio. Then, with the start of World War II, she opened a chain of hot dog stands, to which she eventually added a costume jewelry counter. She also bought the pool table concession in an arcade. With her income, she played the stock market … successfully.

Subsequently, she investigated business opportunities in Mexico but, instead, wound up in Cuba, just seven years after her first entrepreneurial effort.

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