The Friars Club in Beverly Hills had been a favorite haunt of Hollywood celebrities and the area’s wealthy since 1946, but something underhanded began happening there in the 1960s, unbeknownst to most of its 670 members.

Friendly Wagering

Card playing for money was a regular activity at the Southern California hangout. Games included poker, bridge, panguingue and klabberjass.* Gin rummy was the most popular and usually played for $0.02 or $0.03 cents a point, resulting in wins/losses of about $300 to $400 ($2,500 to $3,200 today).

The third floor of the $750,000 ($10 million today) club, at 9900 Santa Monica Blvd. was dedicated primarily to that activity. Stark with bright lights and hard surfaces, the expanse included a large card room for gin rummy and two smaller private spaces for poker.

“Inside it looks not unlike a Brinks counting house,” described the Los Angeles Times (Sept. 9, 1967).

To access the gambling amenities, visitors entered a plain, mirrored door, at which a guard stood to ensure only members and their guests went through.

In contrast, the second floor showcased high ceilings, muted lighting, warm-hued carpeting, oak paneling and inviting colors: burnt gold, maroon and mauve.  A small bar and a large dining room with a long elaborate buffet comprised the main areas. (The first floor contained a parking area.)

To be a Friars Club member, people had to donate a large sum of money, around $1,500 (about $13,000 today), to charity and subsequently pay $40 (about $350 today) a month in dues.

Gin rummy hand

Chicanery Comes To Light

In July 1967, five federal agents inspected the A listers’ hotspot for four hours. This led to a roughly six-month federal grand jury investigation, for which 75 people were subpoenaed to testify. Some flat out refused, some pleaded the Fifth.

The inquiry uncovered a surreptitious card cheating scheme. Players’ cards were spied on through holes cut in the ceiling, directly over the gambling tables, and covered with fake air vents. Based on everyone’s cards, the observer in the attic, relayed to his partner in the game what moves to make.

This was done through an electronic device, worn by the person at the table, which emitted silent taps. The sender and receiver used their own system of coded signals. For instance, when the player wanted to know whether or not to put down his cards, he placed his empty palm flat on the table. A single tap by his accomplice meant don’t knock, and no tap was a green light.

The perpetrators of the cheat had bilked Friars members this way for five years, between 1962 and 1967, the government alleged.

“Millionaires and celebrities, proud of their ability at gin rummy, [individually] lost up to $100,000 [$800,000 today] in games against opponents who knew what cards they were holding. Few even guessed they were being cheated,” reported the Los Angeles Times (Sept. 9, 1967).

Among the victims were Tony Martin, singer; Harry Karl, shoe magnate and Debbie Reynolds’ husband; Zeppo Marx, comedian and actor; Phil Silvers, comedic actor; and Theodore “Ted” Briskin, former Chicago camera manufacturer and, previously, Betty Hutton’s husband. The government claimed that in less than one year, Friars Club members and guests’ losses due to cheating totaled $400,000 ($3.3 million today).

Quartet To Be Tried

Ultimately, the federal government charged five men with various infractions related to conspiring to swindle people, including interstate transportation to aid racketeering, interstate transportation of funds obtained by fraud and under-reporting income, and totaling 49 counts among them. The alleged criminals were:

• Maurice “Maury” H. Friedman, 62, developer of the Frontier hotel-casino in Las Vegas
• Warner T. Richardson, 62, Frontier casino manager
• Johnny Rosselli, 62, Los Angeles-based Chicago Mobster
• Manuel “Ricky” Jacobs, 48, Beverly Hills professional gambler, promoter of legalized panguingue and owner of a Santa Monica card club
• Benjamin J. Teitelbaum, 53, wealthy art collector and co-owner of a studio equipment manufacturing company

All but Richardson were Friars Club members.

Genesis Of The Cheating

Friedman concocted the scheme with Richardson and hired William Douglas (unindicted ), an electronics expert, to modify the ceiling and install the tapper. At some point, Friedman hired George Emerson Seach (the key witness in the trial) to install and maintain better equipment because the initial system was problematic. When Seach went to prison for an unrelated offense, Friedman replaced him with Miami-based electronics engineer, Edwin Gebhard (refused to testify before the grand jury).

Friedman invited Al Mathes, famed restaurateur (granted immunity for his testimony), and Rosselli, to join the swindle. Mathes did the same with Teitelbaum.

“As more conspirators were brought into the scheme, the prosecutor said, there was ‘dissatisfaction over the division of the proceeds,'” reported the Los Angeles Times in its trial coverage (July 26, 1968).

Jacobs also cheated card players at the Friars Club but using a different method. During play, he and his accomplice conveyed to each other in conversation, using a version of alphabet code, what cards they needed.

After the five co-conspirators were indicted, Friedman gave Seach $25,000 ($186,000 today) and offered another $25,000 so he’d lie about Friedman’s involvement in the Friars Club scandal. Richardson offered Seach $5,000 to say Richardson hadn’t had anything to do with the scam. Teitelbaum threatened Seach, telling him, “He who digs a hole for others falls in himself.” These actions came out in the trial.

“The defendants have approached witnesses in an attempt to have them withhold evidence,” one of the prosecuting assistant U.S. attorneys said in his opening statement (Los Angeles Times, June 14, 1968).

The Verdict Is In

During the trial, which commenced June 12, 1968, Friedman admitted that he’d rigged games and cheated at the Friars Club but claimed he hadn’t done it past 1962, the time when the five-year statute of limitations no longer applied. He said his motive hadn’t been money. Rather, it had been to get back at Briskin, an excellent gin rummy player who regularly beat Friedman at it. As for having tried to pay off Seach, Friedman claimed Seach had shaken him down for the money.

Finally, after 68 witnesses and 200-plus exhibits, the nearly six month-long trial neared its end in January 1969. The jury of seven women and five men deliberated for 22 hours. They found all five defendants guilty. Subsequently, though, Richardson was acquitted.

Judge William P. Gray meted out these sentences, listed from most to least severe:

Friedman: 6 year prison term and $100,000 fine (months later, he’d get three more years for bribery in the Friars Club case)
Rosselli: 5 year prison term and $55,000 fine
Jacobs: 4 year prison term and $5,000 fine
Teitelbaum: 4 year prison term and $75,000 fine

Before the court, Gray told Friedman his “cynical cheating of people was cold and calculated.” He added, “Even wealthy people are entitled to the protection of the laws” (Los Angeles Times, Feb. 4, 1969).

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* Klabberjass, pronounced “klobber-yoss” and thus often simply called klob, is a Hungarian, combination poker and gin rummy card game.

Photo from pond5.com: Gin Rummy Hand

Sources

1941

The brief union between Tony and Dorothy Stralla ended in a suspicious tragedy.

Antonio Cornero Stralla was a colorful, law defying, Southern California rumrunner turned gambler. He was involved, most often as the owner/operator, in a string of casino enterprises,  including the:

• Meadows (Las Vegas, Nevada)
• S.S. Rex (Las Vegas, Nevada)
• Stardust (Las Vegas, Nevada)
• Rex gambling ship (offshore, Santa Monica and Redondo Beach, California)
• Lux gambling ship (offshore, Long Beach, California)
• Montmartre Club (Havana, Cuba)

Dorothy Friend Thaxton was a nightclub singer known as Dorothy Carroll, and, prior to the marriage, Cornero Stralla’s publicist.

He, at about age 41 (records show various birth years), and she, at 25, tied the knot in Las Vegas, Nevada at 2 a.m. on Monday, May 5, 1941. He’d been married before, at least once. It’s unknown whether she had been.

Following their nuptials, she lived in his Beverly Hills home, and he resided in Havana, where he ran the Montmartre nightclub-casino.

The Bloom Is Off The Rose

About two months later, the couple separated following a heated argument at the Southern California house, to which the police were called and Friend Thaxton was taken to the local emergency room for care.

“She first said she had swallowed the contents of two bottles of iodine, and later said she had just stained her lips and hands with the brownish liquid,” reported the Los Angeles Times (July 10, 1941).

A week after that incident, Cornero Stralla filed for a marriage annulment, claiming Friend Thaxton hadn’t “fulfilled her marital obligations” and had pursued the union with him intending never to do so.

The Times noted, “‘Admiral’ Tony Cornero’s latest romance has faded — quick than a sucker’s bankroll aboard one of the floating gambling ships that formerly beckoned the unwary along the Southern California coast.”

“Cold, Harsh, Devoid Of Affection”

Friend Thaxton responded with a cross-complaint, citing cruelty and desertion and asking for separate maintenance. This is an order requiring a spouse to make support, or maintenance, payments to the other, via a separation agreement. In her filing, Friend Thaxton requested $150 (about $2,500 today) per month, 15 percent of Cornero Stralla’s monthly income of about $1,000 ($17,000 today). She denied her husband’s accusations.

On the couple’s subsequent court date in late July, Friend Thaxton showed but Cornero Stralla didn’t. He was away on business, his attorney said. Friend Thaxton told the judge that since she and Cornero Stralla had separated, her husband hadn’t supported her, thereby forcing her to pawn her jewelry and borrow money from friends.

In late July, a judge ordered the gambler to pay the monthly $150 in alimony but only temporarily. Even though the marriage was so short-lived, by California law he had to do so because he’d been the one to initiate the union’s dissolution. Were she to have filed for the annulment instead, he wouldn’t have had to support her.

Whiplash Of Extremes

A month later, the two dismissed their respective legal actions, supposedly having reunited.

Had Cornero Stralla coerced or manipulated Friend Thaxton into dropping her alimony request or had she done so willingly?

A week later, on September 4, the two were in a Las Vegas court, where Friend Thaxton was granted a marriage annulment.

Who Was Responsible?

Following the hearing, she was driving herself home to Hollywood, when she got into a serious car accident about 18 miles west of Baker, California. When she’d tried to pass another car along the shoulder, traveling at a high speed, she lost control. Her vehicle skidded about 140 feet, overturned three times and skidded another 150 feet. She was thrown about 70 feet from where the car came to a rest.

Cornero Stralla had been following her in his car, hoping to overtake her and get her to stop driving, as she’d been drinking and “in no condition to drive,” he told police (Los Angeles Times, Sept. 6, 1941). He claimed she’d exceeded 100 mph at times.

What really happened on that drive?

At 6:15 the next morning, Friend Thaxton died in a doctor’s office from her injuries, which included a skull fracture.

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