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.

———————————

* 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.

Sources

1950

In the morning, gambler Nelson Harris, 34, telephoned two Fort Worth, Texas criminal attorneys and said he was on his way over to discuss a life and death matter. He and his wife Juanita, 25 and pregnant, due in a week’s time, quickly loaded into the car to drive there, but didn’t get anywhere.

The car exploded after Harris pressed its starter, killing the three of them instantly.

Minutes after the blast, which shattered windows in nearby homes and apartments, the Harrises’ home phone rang, which a neighbor answered. According to him, a man on the other end said, “Tell the ______ ______’s friends they’ll get the same,” then hung up.

Harris had been a member of the Green Dragon narcotics syndicate, for which he’d served time, and after, had owned a gambling café, Nelson’s Place, on Jacksboro Highway, dubbed the “Highway to Hell” for all the houses of vice located on it.

Police investigated multiple possible motives for the assassination. Recently, Harris had been playing and wining a lot at floating craps games in Fort Worth and Houston, which had perturbed a gambler running them. A recent tip from Harris, an informant to the feds, had led to agents raiding a Dallas narcotics ring. Harris may have known too much, as a cache of business records found among his belongings after his demise detailed payoffs to police.

No one was convicted for the Harris murders.

——————–

Part I and Part II.

Sources

The Louvre and Oberon Saloons in Reno, Nevada

1900-1906

A snapshot of six early years of one popular gambling-saloon in Reno, Nevada spotlights some of the problems these establishments routinely faced: on-site crime, financial troubles, crooked games and changes in both owners and gambling operators.

Though the Louvre debuted in May 1897* at 22 E. Commercial Row in the then-called Marshall Building, it wasn’t until 1900 that any gambling associated with the enterprise was mentioned in the local newspapers. All earlier Louvre reports touted its unique beer offerings, fine cigars, music and lunches, but this new news brief was that “two new games are running there.” One was faro, the other one, unknown, perhaps craps.**

Thus, we begin our presentation of events then, just after the turn of the century, when the firm of Robinson & Matson owns the Louvre and remodels its interior.

1901

October: Burglars attempt to rob the Louvre’s safe, but it doesn’t go as planned. They successfully blow off the door with explosives but fail to penetrate the inner vault. They abort their plan.

1902

April: C.C. Cox, from Texas, acquires the Louvre for $6,500 (about $180,000 today).

December: Alex Aguayo assumes management of the Louvre’s gambling.

1903

Bookmaking becomes legal in Nevada.

January: Thomas Ward joins Aguayo in management.

February: For unknown reasons, Aguayo “retires” from the Louvre (Nevada State Journal, Feb. 23, 1903).

April: A.L. Mason & B.F. Bailey, of Red Bluff, California, purchases the Louvre for $7,000 ($196,000 today), gives it a front facelift and adds a second story for gambling, per Nevada law.***

June: While playing faro in the Louvre, a 59-year-old man, Frank Fusselman, dies from a heart attack.

September: Bailey retires, leaving Mason to run the Louvre on his own.

November: Bert and Grant Crumley take over running the gambling and upstairs bar.

December: Leading up to Christmas and then, New Year’s Day, the Louvre gives away a turkey to every patron who pays 10 cents to spin the Big Wheel.

1904

April: Charles Dreyer, proprietor of the adjoining Oberon gambling saloon, secures the top floor of the Louvre. (His plan is to combine it with the Oberon’s, creating one large space in which to offer gambling, but he never does).

1905

Slot machines now are legal in Nevada.

April: Dreyer purchases the Louvre’s building from Mrs. Marshall for $18,000 ($505,000 today). Mason remains the Louvre’s proprietor.

May: Charles Stout and Mart Johnson take over management of the Louvre. Stout has a stake in Reno’s Arlington Hotel. Johnson is the proprietor of The Ingleside roadhouse and former co-owner of the Palace Hotel, both in Reno.

June: The Louvre bank goes broke, and Stout and Johnson temporarily shut down the faro and craps. They restart them the next day, though, with a new, $20,000 bank roll.

September: Stout and Johnson again close the Louvre’s games, this time due to a dissolution of the duo’s partnership. Johnson bows out.

October: At the Louvre, a former Reno department store clerk, Joe Mitchell, cashes some checks, for which he has no money.

1906

March: C.J. Miller, who previously owned the International Hotel in Nevada’s Virginia City, joins Stout in managing the Louvre’s gambling.

“The change is of interest to Reno and Nevada sporting circles on account of the prominent part taken by the new owners in square games,” reported the Nevada State Journal (March 30, 1906).

This quote suggests someone was operating crooked games at the Louvre. It may have been Johnson, given the local newspaper described him once as “the ‘smooth’ man of the Louvre” and given he stepped down seemingly over a disagreement with Stout (Reno Evening Gazette, Aug. 11, 1905).

—————————–

* The Louvre ended its run in 1939 when it became the Martin Hotel Bar.

** In 1900, Nevada allowed some forms of gambling, only these games: faro; monte; lansquenet/rouge et noir; keno; fantan; 21; Diana; stud poker; red, white and blue; and banking games (ones in which there is a fund against which all players may bet). Per state law at the time, any and all commercial gambling had to be conducted in an establishment’s back room(s) so that passersby out front wouldn’t see, through the windows, the action inside. State legislators amended this statute in 1903 (see ***).

*** The new version of law required that gambling establishments in more populous Nevada counties (in which at least 2,000 votes had been cast in the previous general election) confine games of chance to their location’s second floor.

Sources

The Harmony Kid made his living as a traveling gambling cheat in the U.S. and was known from coast to coast. While primarily a card and dice sharp, Lawrence Varner (1865-1933) also perpetrated swindles related to roulette and horse races. He he obtained his moniker because he was born and lived for decades in New Harmony, Indiana.

He was “one of the most notorious gamblers and sporting men in the country,” wrote The Democrat in 1892. That newspaper shared what a colleague of Varner said about him: “That fellow has won more money in the last two years than any three men in the country in his life, but it goes like the wind. He is never broke, though, and has lots of friends in every city in the Union.”

Cons and other crimes were part and parcel of Varner’s career despite his having a family of his own. Here we create a snapshot of his “professional” life through some highlights, presented chronologically.

1886: His Unfailing Bones

This year, craps was introduced in Cincinnati, Ohio. Using his trusty method of cheating, the Harmony Kid stunned the naivete right out of two of the game’s operators there, taking one for $900 ($25,000 today) and the other for $1,100 ($30,000).

During play, Varner “would sling his money around promiscuously and give the house dice a wicked twist with the result that one of them would jump off the table, and on to the floor,” described The Daily Times-Star (June 10, 1924). While retrieving the errant die, he switched out both for his own set of stolen tops and buttons, misspotted dice with which one can’t roll certain losing combos. Varner’s bones lacked ones and sixes, minimizing his chances of landing on the dreaded seven. 

“To add insult to injury, the ‘Harmony Kid’ wrote a scurrilous letter to each of the Cincinnatians in which he told [them] that what [they] didn’t know about that little old game would fill a cistern,” reported The Daily Times-Star (June 10, 1924).

For the rest of his life, the Harmony Kid steered clear of Cincinnati.

1889: Escalated Card Game Dispute

During an argument with an Indiana saloonkeeper, Dallas Tyler, in Washington, Indiana, about a card game, Varner shot him. The bullet hit Tayler on the inside of one of his legs. Varner escaped, and Tyler survived.

1890: Wedding Bells Ring

The Harmony Kid married Laura Warden in Kentucky and went on to have at least two children.

1893: Arrested for Murder

Varner was charged with murdering a George Franklin, who’d been found dead on the train tracks in New Harmony with a fractured skull and two head gashes. He’s last been seen at the fair. It’s unclear why the Harmony Kid was fingered for the crime. During his trial, the jury couldn’t agree, with 10 for acquittal, two for conviction. Eventually, the case was dismissed.

1898: Off To The Great White North

During The Klondike Gold Rush, Varner and some buddies traveled to this region in Canada’s Yukon Territory to make a fortune. Their hopes were dashed, though, when they discovered there really wasn’t any money there for the taking. After six months with nothing to show for their time spent there, the group returned to the Lower 48.

1900: A Needle In A Wheel

With fellow gambling cheat and Indianan Jim Pents, the Harmony Kid swindled Columbus, Ohio gambling room owner John Alexander, known as the Black Prince, out of $400 ($11,000 today) at the roulette wheel. Varner and Pents had broken into Alexander’s place of business the day before and inserted a needle into the wheel. Pressing on the needle stopped the wheel.

On the day of the swindle, the two showed up dressed as farmers. They played some faro and lost. The roulette wheel operator enticed them to try their luck with him, so the duo made a few bets and lost. Then a third man, a secret associate of Varner and Pents, entered the business. He acted as though he was just watching the action, but intentionally stood blocking the operator’s view of the Harmony Kid.

Pents made the bets, and when he signaled, Varner pressed the needle. Every time they did this, they won, an average of $53 a turn. Alexander paid them in certificates of deposit but later, when he discovered they’d rigged his wheel, he stopped payment on them.  

“Not long ago [Varner and Pents] cleaned up $1,400 in Lexington by the same game,” reported the Greencastle Star-Press (July 28, 1900). “They have skinned a [gambling] bank in almost every big city in America. Both men have been principals in similar skinning affairs for years back.”

1903: Clever Horse Race Scam

The Harmony Kid employed a system for betting on the horse races at the pool rooms in New York, New York that generated between $2,000 and $3,000 (about $55,000 to $82,000 today) a day. After months of doing this six days a week at such enterprises in The Big Apple, the proprietors caught on, and they all banned him from their business.

Varner’s scheme was this: In the morning  at every pool room, he left a note with his bet, which was on a horse to come in as good as third. He purposefully always bet on a favorite because there wasn’t any third place money for the horses in this class in any race. He also indicated he wanted the form sheet in a certain newspaper to dictate his payout should he win. Those amounts tended to be prohibitive.

So every time Varner’s horse lost, the bookies had to give Varner back the money he bet, and any time his horse won, they had to pay him a large amount.

“In other words, the poolroom men were being constantly drained out of their money without a chance of winning a cent,” reported The Ottawa Journal (Nov. 7, 1903).

1904: More Creative Cheating

With an accomplice, also from Indiana, the Harmony Kid pulled a different, less complicated roulette cheat. In a gambling room in Pekin, Illinois, the two slowly made their way over to the roulette wheel. After playing and losing for a bit, Varner asked the wheel operator for some cigars. He went to retrieve some, and while away, the Harmony Kid somehow plugged the wheel. After that, the two cheats won on nearly every turn. They only played for a half-hour, but in that time racked up $465 ($13,000 today).

Also this year, Varner fleeced various bookmakers in Hot Springs, Arkansas out of about $9,000 ($247,000 today) in all. At several betting parlors, he and eight other swindlers wagered on various horse races. When the results came over the wires, everyone in his group won and collected their winnings. The announced winners, however, weren’t the actual winners.; the broadcast was fake, previously arranged by Varner.

For this fraud, Varner ultimately was arrested in St. Louis, extradited back to Arkansas and held over for a grand jury investigation. The charge was obtaining money under false pretenses. What happened in the case is unknown as the story disappeared from the headlines.

1910: Four-Minute Fraud

The Harmony Kid blew into Reno, Nevada on a train. It was the last chance to gamble there, as a new law mandated a permanent statewide shutdown by midnight that day. After ambling through the three still open casinos, he sat down to play craps in the Casino. By this time, he’d modified his dice switching modus operandi, pulling them from a sleeve as he pushed it up. Using his infamous misspotted dice, he took the house for $500 ($14,000 today) in only four minutes.

“He made every kind of a complicated bet, shooting continuously, and keeping the dealer so busy paying him that he could not notice the alarming number of sixes and eights,” reported the Reno Evening Gazette (Oct. 1, 1910). “Time up, the Kid left $30 or $40 in bets on the table, substituted the square dice and crapped out immediately.”

He stealthily merged with the crowd and moved to and out the door. Next, he went to the Palace, but quickly left when the craps dealer saw him, as the two knew one another. To make his escape, Varner drove to the neighboring town of Sparks and caught the train out there.

1920: Taking It Overseas

By year-end 1910, all legal gambling in the U.S. had gone away and with it, opportunities for the Harmony Kid to earn money in the way at which he excelled. It appears as though he spent some years serving the country during World War I.

Afterward, in 1920, he went to Europe for the purpose of “commercial business,” as a “salesman,” according to his passport application. Most likely, the only selling he did there was of the lie he was an honest gambler.

There was no mention of him in American newspapers until his passing, in 1933, at which time he was back in the States, Chicago specifically.

Do you know anything about the Harmony Kid you could share?

——————————-

Photos: all from freeimages.com

Sources

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!”

———————–

Sources

Here’s one of Roger Price’s Droodles, funny drawings of everyday objects, called “Sick With the Measles.“

Droodle, The Desert Sun, May 18, 1957

The accompanying anecdote read:

“When my landlady Mrs. Goonsgarten saw this Droodle, she made me sign a statement saying that I never again would mention the subject of dice or gambling in her boarding house. I don’t blame her for feeling that way after what happened last month.

She rented her basement apartment to two men, Dr. Slick and Dr. Slade, who claimed to be bone specialists but later turned out to be operators of a floating crap game.

At first Mrs. G. didn’t suspect anything, but when 30 or 40 ‘patients’ would arrive at midnight and stay for ‘treatments’ until 5:00 in the morning, she smelled a rat. But when she heard Doctors Slick and Slade diagnosing their ailments, she called the cops.

Even Mrs. Goonsgarten knows there aren’t any diseases like box cars, snake eyes and eighter from Decatur.”

After Florida legalized slot machines in 1935, casino operator Myrton “Mert” Wertheimer, 53, devised a way to also get craps and roulette, unlawful at the time, allowed under the new rule. (Previously, only dog and horse race betting were legal, as of 1931.)

Capitalizing On Wording

Wertheimer, who ran the gambling at the Royal Palm Club in Miami,* had coin devices attached to his roulette wheels and to his craps tables, at considerable expense it was reported. The only difference in playing those games versus traditional roulette and craps was that guests first had to insert a 50-cent piece to be issued a ball or dice. A single coin got a player one roulette wheel spin or a full craps turn, until they hit or missed.

“There is no connection whatsoever between the mechanics of the wheel and of the slot,” or of the craps table and of the slot, The Courier-Journal reported (Jan. 13, 1937).

Before Wertheimer pursued his idea, he sought the advice of counsel, who advised him that games with such an add-on should be covered under the new slot machine law. That was due to the wording of the law’s slot machines definition, specifically the included phrase, “and similar devices of this type.”

Slot machines constituted “coin-operated skill machines (commonly referred to as pin-games, marble tables, and similar devices of this type which have a skill feature) which may or may not pay a reward for skillful operation or upon which operation, premiums may or may not be given for a high score or making certain combinations,” according to Chapter 17257 of the 1935 Florida Laws, 1085.

Subsequently, Wertheimer procured the requisite licenses for five of these adapted games, at $500 apiece ($8,900 today), for a total of $2,500 ($44,500 today). They were pricier than licenses for regular slot machines, which cost $120 ($2,100 today) apiece.

Controversial Rollout

Wertheimer then debuted his coin slot device-rigged craps and roulette in the Royal Palm Club at the start of the 1937 winter tourist season in place of his usual slot machines. His doing so caused public officials, from the local police chief to the state attorney, to question the games’ legality.

“The casual observer found little difference in what the management claimed was legal gambling and the old fashioned variety that generally brought the sheriff’s men with their axes,” noted The Daily Democrat (Jan. 13, 1937).

Florida Attorney General Cary D. Landis opined that since Wertheimer’s machines had been licensed, they were considered lawful. Conversely, State Attorney G.A. Worley and State Comptroller J.M. Lee deemed them illegal, and the latter sought to get them banned officially through the court system. While that process went on, other South Florida establishments copied Wertheimer and started offering coin-operated roulette and craps games. Lee’s efforts failed.

Subsequent Actions

All of the hoopla came to an abrupt end, though, when the state legislature, in 1937, repealed its 1935 slot machine law and banned those devices and all variations thereof.

“The vote for repeal in the legislature was overwhelming,” David G. Shields wrote in a Florida Bar Journal article (September/October 2013). “The repeal statute … was authored and vigorously championed by a young representative and future Florida governor named LeRoy Collins, who called the two-year experience with slot machines ‘a dose of moral poison.'”

Another 69 years would pass before slot machines again became legal in Florida, in 2004, this time by citizen vote. That referendum, however, only allowed slots in Broward and Miami-Dade counties, at certain parimutuel facilities there and with conditions.

Subsequently, in 2009, the state legislature would adopt an amendment that “ostensibly expands the possibility of slot machines to all pari-mutuels in South Florida and the rest of the state,” added Shields.

—————————————————

* The Royal Palm Club, located in the Royal Palm Hotel, was owned by Miami City Councilman Arthur Childers.

From from freeimages.com: by Richard Styles

Sources

Their behavior at several Las Vegas casinos got them noticed. Then the dominoes fell.

Two men showed wads of C notes at the craps tables, tried to exchange some of them for casino bills and broke others into smaller denominations. Word got to the local police, who picked up and took to the station Raymond Philip Wilson, 33, and Frank James Ellsworth, 36, on Friday, July 8, 1955.

Officers in Southern Nevada found more than $85,000 in their pockets and at their high-end hotel room, stuffed in drawers and suitcases. Both refused to divulge where they’d gotten the money but said they’d done so legally.

Because the serial numbers on their Benjamins were in sequence, Vegas police suspected they’d been involved in the April 6 holdup of the Chase Manhattan Bank in Queens, New York for $300,000, the perpetrators of which still hadn’t been identified. Police arrested Ellsworth and Wilson and booked them on suspicion of robbery.

Both suspects were ex-convicts from the Midwest and wanted on theft charges in different cities. They’d arrived in Sin City three days before, supposedly having traveled from Tampa, Fla.

Couldn’t Hold Them

Law enforcement officers concluded that the men hadn’t been involved in the Chase bank heist. Ellsworth was freed on $1,000 bond and fled the state with the duo’s $85,177 in crisp bills and $2,100 in gambling chips. (That $87,277 total is worth about $8.4 million today.)

The pair’s defense attorneys, Harry Claiborne and Calvin Magleby, retrieved the currency for their clients after filing a writ of mandamus charging that the police had obtained the cash and chips through an unlawful search and seizure, hadn’t informed the men of the charges against them and had detained them illegally.

“It’s my money. I didn’t rob anybody to get it, but let the police sweat it out,” Ellsworth told a newspaper reporter before disappearing (Reno Evening Gazette, July 11, 1955). He said he’d earned the money by selling magazine subscriptions and had saved it, over many years.

Wilson was released a few days later on $3,000 bail.

Way Beyond Robbery

The freedom of the duo was short-lived, however, as they were rearrested, Wilson in Las Vegas, Ellsworth in Omaha, Neb., on Tuesday, July 12 after the sequencing of the bills in their possession were matched to those owned by a 73-year-old widow in Philadelphia, Pa., Lulubel Rossman. Both suspects were extradited to The City of Brotherly Love.

Three days before Ellsworth and Wilson appeared in Las Vegas, Rossman had been bound, gagged, strangled and robbed of about $90,000, in $100 bills, that she’d kept in a safety deposit box in her home, a Hotel Adelphia suite.

Self-Gained Reprieve

Wilson went to trial first. A jury convicted him of first degree murder in May 1956, for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

With 19 years of time served, at the Huntingdon State Correctional Institution in Pa., he escaped from a farm work detail on June 12, 1975.

Subsequently, he created a life for himself in nearby Pottstown, Pa., where he remarried and quietly resided less than a block’s distance from the local police station.

After a decade of hiding in plain sight, though, officers found Wilson. They arrested him in his yard and returned him to Huntingdon.

Blood On His Hands

Ellsworth, on the other hand, had three trials, in each of which jurors convicted him of first degree murder and chose his punishment as life in prison over the death penalty. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned the first two decisions, however, and granted him new trials.

During the first, it came out, through the testimony of a jailhouse snitch, that Ellsworth, not Wilson, murdered Rossman, though Wilson was present when it happened. When being held in the Las Vegas jail for extradition to Philadelphia, Wilson told a man in his cell that the two robbers hadn’t had to kill Rossman but that Ellsworth had gotten “rambunctious.” The snitch testified at the trials of both defendants.

The verdict that stood finally came in November 1966, 11 years after the crime.

Photo from freeimages.com: “Free Gamble” by Lisa Kong

Sources

1967

The North Lake Tahoe gambling house had been running smoothly for eight months since Arthur “Art” L. Wood, developer of the Incline Village master-planned community, had assumed ownership of it earlier in the year. He’d acquired it along with the lakefront restaurant and bar components of The Sierra Tahoe in Nevada from then owner Calvin Kovens and afterward, renamed the gaming entity Incline Village Casino.

Caught In The Act

On a day in mid-October, employee Clayton P. Gatterdam was working there as a craps stickman, responsible for calling the dice rolls and moving the dice around the table. While a game was in progress, he pulled misspot dice — ones without certain numbers — a few times from a hidden pocket in his apron and swapped them for those in play to increase the player’s chance of winning. One of his dice, for instance, contained two ones, two fours and two fives.

Two members of the Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB), the investigative gambling regulatory arm that reports to the Nevada Gaming Commission (NGC), witnessed Gatterdam cheating! At the time, the NGCB happened to have been conducting a random, clandestine, undercover check of the Incline Village Casino.

Gatterdam had arranged in advance with an acquaintance to collude in the swindling and split the winnings. The co-conspirator was to bet at Gatterdam’s craps table, and Gatterdam was to insert the misspot dice to facilitate one or more wins.

“[We was] going to try to put the dice in and take the place off, shoot the bankroll. We was going to try to beat the house,” Gatterdam said in his statement to Wood’s attorney. He also admitted to having been a “crossroader,”* or cheater, for the previous 20 years. (About 1.5 years later, Gatterdam again would be caught using misspot dice but in London, England.)

Protocol Followed

Consequently, the NGCB closed the Incline Village Casino — standard procedure — and filed a formal complaint against its operators, Wood, who owned 90 percent, and Benjamin “Benny” Lassoff, the bartender there who owned 10 percent. Neither of them had been on the premises when the trickery occurred.

The NGCB recommended the NGC revoke Wood and Lassoff’s gambling licenses. That’s just what it did; it pulled them for a year.

“These procedures were established for two purposes, to protect players against cheating and to protect the reputation of the state,” stated an editorial published in the Las Vegas Sun (Nov. 3, 1967). “Should it ever become established that the state allowed a cheating operation to continue one minute after irregularities are detected or even strongly suspicioned, the fat’s in the fire for sure and there’ll be a field day for the ever-ready critics of our major industry.”

Business Left Hanging

Wood pleaded with the NGC to let him keep his license, saying he’d do whatever it would take. No dice. 

“I think this thing was handled unfairly,” Wood said. “But [the NGC] is the boss” (Nevada State Journal, Dec. 5, 1967).

Unable to run the casino, Wood sought to lease or sell his majority interest in it and even unload the restaurant and bar components he owned as well, if necessary.

—————-

*A crossroader is a casino cheater; the term, which originated in the Old West, denoted someone who practiced their trickery at saloons located at crossroads.

Sources

1969

For a week in May, the leader of a group of U.S.-based gamblers rented the Villa Casino, which overlooked Hyde Park in West London, along with two craps tables, the latter for $2,500 (about $17,000 today) and 10 percent of the profits.

They offered a gambling trip to England for $960 ($6,500 today) for roundtrip air fare, a week’s hotel accommodations and $960 worth of chips. Such packages, or junkets, to that country had been popular. Travelers paid one amount for airfare, meals and lodging but individually covered all wagers beyond the allotted amount.

The gambling syndicate’s guests, 40 American high rollers, mostly from the Boston, Massachusetts area, flew into town by charter on Monday, May 12.

Suspicious Activity

During the many games of craps the vacationers played, the croupiers, at crucial points, swapped the dice for misspot ones, in this case dice with two sides bearing the same number of spots. One of these dice men was Clayton P. Gatterdam, a 48-year-old ski school proprietor from Fort Worth, Texas. Gatterdam* was a reputed crossroader, a hustler who traveled around, cheating others at gambling for money.

By using crooked dice at the Villa Casino, the operators fleeced the players out of about $26,400 ($181,000 today) over three days! 

Caught Bang To Rights

On Thursday at around 1 a.m., police burst into the pink, cottage-style building and arrested seven of the hosts. They were charged with involvement in the management and organization of unlawful gaming and conspiring to cheat and defraud. Gatterdam was charged also with possession of seven pairs of misspot dice. (Gambling was legal in England at the time, but cheating by those who ran it wasn’t.)

Undercover police agent and gambling expert, Detective Constable Brian Gillard, 26, had infiltrated the Villa Casino crowd and had watched the games for days before requesting the raid. It’s unknown how initially he’d become aware of the shady goings on.

Intended To Swindle

In a preliminary hearing the following Wednesday, the seven arrestees pleaded innocent. The magistrate agreed to bail of 15,000 pounds, or $36,000 ($247,000), apiece provided they give their passports to police and check in with them daily.

“The bail is the highest set in London for some time,” reported the Orlando Sentinel (May 16, 1969).

At their trial in mid-July at Old Bailey, officially called the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales, all of the defendants pleaded guilty. They admitted to having conspired between April 1 and May 15 to obtain property belonging to others dishonestly through deception with dice in craps games. They also admitted to being involved in conducting games in such a way that the odds weren’t favorable to all players equally.

Gatterdam was sentenced to three months in prison. The six others were fined $4,800, $6,000 or $7,200 ($33,000, $41,000 or $49,000), for a total of $33,600 ($230,000). All were discharged on the condition they don’t cheat at gambling again in England in the subsequent two years.

—————————

* About 1.5 years earlier, in October 1967, Nevada Gaming Control Board agents caught Gatterdam using misspot dice in craps games while working as a stickman at the Incline Village Casino at Lake Tahoe.

Sources

Photo from Wikimedia Commons