KENO broadcasting station license, 1941

1941

When Maxwell Kelch applied for call letters for his Las Vegas, Nevada radio station, he requested KLVN as a first choice and KENO as a second, certain the Federal Communications Commission wouldn’t approve a gambling-related name.

The FCC apologetically notified Kelch that KLVN already was in use elsewhere so he’d have to accept using the alternative, KENO — what he wanted all along.

1961-1966

Early in 1961, Michael Catrone, 60, an apartment complex owner, presented to the Nevada Club in Las Vegas a winning keno ticket for $25,000 ($198,000 today). Yet the casino’s general manager didn’t pay it because it was suspicious — the ink on the ticket was lighter than on other ones.

An internal inquiry revealed a discrepancy between the machine-generated original and duplicate. The copies typically were locked up and used to confirm a winning ticket.

Catrone complained to the Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB) the gambling house had stiffed him. The casino’s owner, Robert Van Santen, went to the police, claiming Catrone had tried to cheat the house and hired a private eye to look into the incident. Law enforcement, the NGCB and the district attorney’s (D.A.’s) office investigated.

Concluding that Catrone and two Nevada Club employees — Robert Pearson, 27, and Stanley Wagner, 28 — had colluded to take the casino, detectives theorized the perpetrators had run a blank ticket through the keno machine, then after the winning numbers had been posted, had opened the machine and had marked those digits on the ticket. The D.A. charged the three with attempting to obtain money under false pretenses (the doctored keno ticket) by defrauding the club.

NGCB agents looked into the matter and after receiving a confession from Wagner, told Van Santen he didn’t have to pay the $25,000.

In the preliminary hearing, the prosecution tried to introduce into evidence Wagner’s written and signed confession of his involvement, but the defense objected, noting the Nevada Club had offered Wagner $1,000 in exchange for the confession. (Was this true?) Later, claiming the casino had only given him $250 of the agreed upon $1,000, Wagner retracted his previous admission of guilt.

Prosecution’s House Of Cards

D.A. John Mendoza pursued a case against the three, all of whom pled innocent.

During the trial, which began in April 1962, the prosecution’s key witness, Frank Cirinna, a bartender at the Log Cabin, testified that Pearson had approached him about participating in an illegal keno ticket scheme. Cirinna, however, lied on the stand about his meetings with Van Santen, asserting he’d only met him once informally. (Had Van Santen asked or paid Cirinna to testify as he had about Pearson?)

Despite defense attorney Harry Claiborne grilling him about meeting with Van Santen more than once, Cirinna stuck to his story. When Mendoza questioned him, Cirinna admitted he’d lied but wouldn’t say why, so the judge had him jailed for contempt. After several hours, though, the judge freed him.

John Baptist Pollett (aka Johnny Dean) a former friend of Wagner and an ex-convict out on bail at the time for a disorderly charge in Reno, took the stand for the prosecution. During his testimony, it came out that someone, Dean refused to say who (perhaps Van Santen or his P.I.), offered him $3,500 to get a confession out of Wagner for the Nevada Club’s private investigator. Dean claimed he never got the $3,500. (Had Dean gotten the money or not? Was Dean supposed to give $1,000 of it to Wagner for his confession but only gave him $250?)

While Dean was on the stand, Mendoza filed a motion to dismiss the charges against all three defendants, as Claiborne had discredited his two key witnesses, Cirinna and Dean, and he didn’t believe he could win solely based on two document experts’ testimony. He noted that Cirinna and Dean, while testifying, had divulged information that Mendoza hadn’t known when he’d filed the complaint against the defendants. District Judge Compton agreed with the motion.

Back To The Money

Following the ruling, Van Santen reiterated his refusal to pay the disputed $25,000 because “the trial had nothing to do with the validity of the ticket” (Las Vegas Sun, May 2, 1962).

Claiborne tried to get the NGCB to force Van Santen to pay, to no avail. Mandating that a gambling win be paid or not wasn’t part of the NGCB’s role, Chairman Ed Olsen said.

“Our function is merely to determine whether the circumstances are such as to warrant the board in proceeding against a club’s license for unsuitable method of operation on the basis of a failure to pay a gambling win,” he added (Las Vegas Sun, Oct. 27, 1962).

Catrone and his attorney pursued a different tack for getting the money. They sued Van Santen and his corporation for $750,000 in damages for false imprisonment and malicious prosecution.

District Judge George Marshall, however, handed down a summary judgment in favor of the Nevada Club. On appeal, the Nevada Supreme Court, in 1966, unanimously affirmed the lower court’s ruling.

Sources

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.

————————

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

Sources

Dealer training school for African Americans in Las Vegas, 1971

1957, 1962, 1968, 1974

Over the years, entities around the world fashioned casinos for various educational and training purposes. Here are four that were based in the U.S.:

1) Instruction For Novice Players

In 1957, the Royal Nevada in Las Vegas set up and housed a cash-less casino in its Beverly Hills, California reservations office. The purpose was to teach potential hotel-casino guests how to play craps, cards and roulette, which were offered at its Southern Nevada property, and ultimately garner business for its real gambling house. Since opening two years earlier, the Royal Nevada resort in Vegas had struggled financially amid great competition.

The faux casino operation was short-lived, however, because Police Chief Clinton H. Anderson soon learned of it.

“He descended on the place in high dudgeon and issued this ultimatum: ‘Get that stuff out of here or else,’” reported the Madera Tribune (April 24, 1957).

2) Historical Exhibit

Starting in 1962, when gambling was banned in Wisconsin, the State Historical Society in Madison featured the exhibit, “You Can’t Win,” in its Room 118.

It was a makeshift casino, with a dozen-plus slot machines, a roulette wheel, chuck-a-luck cage, faro layout, parlay tickets, punchboards, crooked dice and marked cards. The slots, for instance, had come from raids on illegal gambling, in 1948, when Wisconsin ranked second among the states for having the most machines operating.

Accompanying information included the games’ odds, reasons why “you can’t win” and historical facts. One tidbit was that crooked dice had been found as early as 400 B.C. Another was that gambling in the U.S. at the time was a $500 billion a year industry, 9 percent of which, or $45 billion, went to casino owners.

3) Dealer Training School

With U.S. government dollars, Reverend Leo A. Johnson, the deputy director of the Concentrated Employment Program (CEP) in Las Vegas, created a mock casino on the West Side to teach young, unemployed African American men how to deal craps, blackjack and keno, jobs that had been denied black people in the city until 1965. The federally mandated CEP aimed to focus various manpower programs and related services in areas with the highest unemployment rates. Howard Hughes’ Landmark Hotel and Casino donated the gaming tables for this school that launched in 1968.

Students worked for nine weeks in the faux gambling room, posing as both dealers and customers, to develop the necessary job skills and poise. They were paid $47 a week (about $322 today), the amount they would’ve received in unemployment benefits.

Instructors — former pit bosses, casino managers and dealers — watched and advised the pupils as games unfolded, earning $7 ($48) an hour doing so.

Despite a rocky start, the school became successful and, over its years in existence, graduated numerous people. It operated for at least three years, perhaps more.

4) Law Enforcement Training Tool

In 1974, in one of its Virginia buildings, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) established a casino, complete with slot machines, a roulette wheel, blackjack table, craps table — “our version of Reno,” described Charlie J. Parsons, an agent who specialized in gambling and organized crime investigations (Reno Evening Gazette, Nov. 28, 1974).

All of the equipment, some of it rigged, had been confiscated from actual gaming operations and turned over to the federal law enforcement agency by the courts.

The faux casino’s purpose was to teach FBI agents all about gambling.

Sources

Photo from Ebony, December 1971

1968

During the grand opening of the Silver Spur casino at 221 N. Virginia Street, Reno, Nevada on July 1, 1968, the ribbon was cut with a silver spur that Audie Murphy used in the movie, Billy the Kid.

Resembling an early Western gambling hall, the club showcased a $25,000-limit keno game, five 21 tables, one roulette table, one craps table and 150 slot machines, including a rare Big Bertha (10 feet wide, 6 feet tall).