1939

With the recent discoveries of dead bodies there, Lake Mead in Southern Nevada has been in the news.

The 1.5 million acres encompassing this water body and its environs have been a designated national recreation area since 1964, but a portion of them almost had become a Nevada state park three decades earlier.

The federal government quashed the effort to establish such an entity due to gambling, in part.

Piece Of The Pie

Nevada Senator Key D. Pittman introduced a bill to the U.S. Congress in early 1939 that would carve out about 10,000 acres (or 12 square miles out of 2,600) of publicly owned lands on the Boulder Dam National Recreation Area and authorize The Silver State to use them for a park.*

The recreation area, about 18 miles from Las Vegas, included the lake that Hoover Dam (previously called Boulder Dam) created, Lake Mead, named after Elwood Mead, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation commissioner at the time.

The National Park Service had gained responsibility for Lake Mead and the surrounding land in October 1936. About 10 years later, the name was changed to the Lake Mead National Recreation Area. The attraction drew about 500,000 or more visitors each year.

All About Gambling

U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes attacked Pittman’s state park idea, purporting that gambling and liquor interests were behind it. He argued that the 160 acres, allocated in the bill for the state park or “other public purposes,” likely would be used for saloons and gambling houses.

To support these claims, he alleged that, according to circulating rumors, gamblers being driven out of Los Angeles in a citywide cleanup intended to open shop in the Lake Mead area to capitalize on the numerous tourists visiting the lake and dam.

“I believe that the people of the United States want the integrity of their national park areas preserved,” Ickes said (Reno Evening Gazette, March 7, 1939).

Guy McAfee

Ickes didn’t name anyone but was referring to Guy McAfee, according to Charles “C.D.” Baker, president of the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce. McAfee was a former Los Angeles Police Department officer and gambler who’d moved from the City of Angels to Las Vegas due to heat from law enforcement in the former in 1938. The next year he’d acquired and renamed the Pair O’ Dice Club, on Highway 91 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, the 91 Club. Also, he’d debuted the Frontier Club in downtown Sin City. Baker refuted Ickes’ claims about gamblers, emphasizing McAfee had nothing to do with the proposed state park.

“That is a cooked-up charge to cloud the issues,” Baker said, referring specifically to Ickes’ assertion that Nevada wanted the state park so gambling establishments could be operated and liquor sold at it (Reno Evening Gazette, March 8, 1939).

Baker conceded, however, that Las Vegas wanted the state park so that Nevada, instead of the federal government, could control and benefit economically from the non-gambling/non-alcohol concessions there.

Ickes contended, too, that were Pittman’s bill to become law, it would set an unwise precedent and encourage other states to demand parcels of national parks.

Attempts To Appease

In response to Ickes’ opposition, Pittman expressed his belief that “western lands are rapidly becoming a barony, of the dictator at the head of the Department of the Interior,” but the senator also took steps to resolve the concerns.

He amended his bill. The new verbiage indicated Nevada would forfeit the federal grant for a state park if it “fails to put into effect and practice in said area laws, rules and regulations put into effect and practiced by the Department of the Interior within the Boulder canyon reclamation area relative to gambling, sale of intoxicating liquors, water pollution or sanitation” (Reno Evening Gazette, March 7, 1939).

Pittman also encouraged the Nevada State Park Commission (NSPC) to ban gambling and liquor sales in Nevada parks, which the agency did.

State Support

While Pittman worked in Washington, D.C. on the state park idea, Nevada legislators did so on the home front. They passed Senate Bill (SB) 133, which authorized the governor to accept a grant of land for a state park at Boulder Dam. They also approved SB 132, which authorized the NSPC to prohibit gaming and alcohol sales in the potential state park at Lake Mead.

The Finale

The fate of Pittman’s bill became known in August, when U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt vetoed it. His reasons for doing so echoed Ickes’ voiced criticisms of the Nevada state park prospect except those related to gambling and liquor.

“I firmly believe the Boulder Dam/Lake Mead region in its entirety should continue to be administered uniformly by federal government in the interest of the nation as a whole,” Roosevelt said (Nevada State Journal, Aug. 13, 1939). He added that the area warranted consideration as a national park or monument site. (About 25 years later, the federal government officially made it a national recreation area.)

Angry at the decision by Roosevelt, specifically that he’d based it on Ickes’ input, as reported by the press, Pittman issued a statement. In it, he suggested the U.S. president might lose support in western states due to his public land policy.

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* At the time, Nevada had four state parks, including the Valley of Fire, all of which the legislature had established in 1935.

Photo by Tony Webster

Sources

The Rhythm Boys were all about patterns of sound and movement but in relation to slot machines, not music.

Danny Foster, Johnny Pugh and Robert E. Black made $1,000 (about $11,800 today) from playing the slots for a few hours at the Club Cal Neva in Reno, Nevada in late 1950. Casino management asked them to leave. They did.

Sometime after, they were making money off of the El Cortez Hotel’s slots. During that spree, two Reno policemen approached and ordered them to leave the city by the next night or there’d be “blood on the streets,” Foster later reported to the press (Reno Evening Gazette, Oct. 31, 1951). In their threat, the officers referenced the trio’s continued, local slot playing. The Rhythm Boys moved on, to Lewiston, Idaho.

Trail Of Winnings

Wherever the Rhythm Boys played slots, they won. They used a method for beating the machines that tipped the odds heavily in their favor, boosting slot payoffs by more than 10 percent, reportedly. Morrie Brodsky, manager at the Club Cal Neva, told news reporters he estimated that each of the Rhythm Boys had hit a jackpot once in every 15 plays in his casino.

More distressing to slot operators was that the rhythm method was legal. That fact made them “physically ill,” wrote The Lighter Touch columnist Frank Johnson (Nevada State Journal, May 4, 1958).

“Even today the mere mention of [Rhythm Boys] sends a chill through the gambling fraternity,” Johnson added. “It was that bad.”

Tricks Of The Trade

The Rhythm Boys were nicknamed after their technique. It involved first determining a slot machine’s timing cycle, by the sound the device’s air governor made. Next was repeatedly pulling the slot handle according to a certain rhythm, letting a specific amount of time pass between yanks. Doing so interfered with the timing, slowing it down or speeding it up, such that the reels then “literally floated,” Johnson wrote.

He explained that proficient rhythm players could land the first and third reels in the position they wanted them in and hold them there. Then they could wait for the middle reel to spin to the needed position for a winning row and once there, stop it.

“It’s in the way they pull the handle of the slot. You get it going with a rhythm to it, the right rhythm. And it’ll jackpot for you every time,” columnist Stan Delaplane wrote, quoting a blackjack dealer at Reno’s Circle RB Lodge (Reno Evening Gazette, Feb. 27, 1960).

Attention Mounts

Once in Lewiston, two of the Rhythm Boys, Pugh and Foster, enticed the local news reporters to watch them play by betting they could land several $2 jackpots and spend less than $50 in doing so.

Successful, the duo collected $210 ($2,300 today) in 45 minutes’ time, having fed the machine only $20.

That afternoon, Foster and Pugh entered the 600 Club in Lewiston, and the proprietor turned his slot machines so their front faced the wall.

In October 1951, despite many slot operators urging them to stop playing slots in Lewiston, the Rhythm Boys announced they planned to stay in Idaho for years and make a career out of cleaning up on the gambling machines.

Even Classes On It

The rhythm method had been around since before the Boys drew widespread attention to it. Reportedly, it originated in Las Vegas, Nevada, even was taught there, then expanded.  

Johnson explained in his May 4, 1958 column. “One of the first institutions of higher learning in Las Vegas was a special college for rhythm players conducted by the man who developed the system.  It was no cheap diploma mill. The cost was $500 plus expenses for two weeks of concentrated instruction. Probably there were no more than 30 or 40 graduates during the time the school was in existence, but they were enough to endanger the whole slot machine industry.”

An affiliated school was located in Idaho.

Rhythm Is Gonna Get You

The great publicity surrounding the three slots stars and their method, which the Rhythm Boys invited, was their undoing.

“The thing that really hurt was the fact the rhythm boys were so obvious,” Johnson wrote. “Other casino patrons seemed to catch on wherever they played. Pretty soon jackpots would begin falling all around the section where the rhythm expert was in.”

No longer able to play publicly, the trio sought to capitalize on their system by selling it, outlined in a booklet titled How We Beat The Slots, for $2 a pop. In the publication, they Rhythm Boys noted that “publicity barred us from playing in some clubs and made us unwelcome in others.”

To start, in early 1952, the rhythm method kings sent an estimated 30,000 letters to residents of Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho in which they offered their treatise for sale.

End Of The Road

Eventually, savvy slot machine mechanics learned through the rhythm method course or the grapevine about this shortcoming of slot machines and sought to eradicate it. (Bud Garaventa, the foreman of Harrah’s Club’s slot machine repair shop, was one who attended the class, according to Johnson.)

The solution was a mechanism added to the inside of a slot machine. Described as windmill like, it spun when the slot handle was pulled and dictated how long each reel would spin. It prevented the floating of any and all reels but didn’t change the game’s odds.

“This [development] was at least six or seven years ago, and since then [the industry] has seen a rare slot machine not so equipped,” Johnson wrote in 1961 (Nevada State Journal, Dec. 27).

Sources

Accardo

1935-1965

Tony Accardo, né Antonino Leonardo Accardo (1906-1992), is credited with reviving and expanding the Chicago Outfit’s gambling business in the 1940s after the organization’s head Paul “The Waiter” Ricca named him underboss. Accardo himself had his hand in various gaming enterprises before and after, too.

Accardo is the great-grandfather of the National Football League’s Bosa brothers:* Nick, defensive end for the 49ers and Joey, outside linebacker for the Chargers.

Individual Participation

As early as 1940, Accardo and some Outfit partners owned and operated the prosperous Owl Club, an illegal casino-nightclub in Calumet City, Illinois, on the corner of Douglas and Plummer avenues.

The Mobster-gambler also ran book, oftentimes under the name Joe Batters, a nickname Al “Scarface” Capone had bestowed upon him for his prowess in thrashing people with a baseball bat. In the early 1940s, for example, Accardo conducted a bookmaking enterprise out of the Ogden building at 192 N. Clark St. in Chicago’s Loop.

Not only was Accardo an operator of games of chance; he also was a player and thus, a gambler in both senses of the word. Reportedly, he was one of the best patrons of his own joint, the Owl Club. Even when he older and less mobile, he kept up the activity, placing bets via the telephone.

Group Activities

While underboss, Accardo shifted the Outfit out of labor racketeering and into other areas of organized crime, including gambling. He pushed the syndicate into three specific areas: slot machines, wire service and casinos.

Slots: The Chicago Mob broadened its footprint by placing slots in various establishments beyond the main street gambling house. These included gas stations, restaurants and bars and the group’s favorite targeted outlet, social clubs and fraternal organizations. The Catholic War Vets, the American Legion Posts, the CIO Steel Workers Club, the Polish Democratic Club, and the Italian American Republican Club, are just some of the many local ones.

After successfully flooding its territory in and around Chicago with slots, the Outfit expanded geographically. It hit the neighboring cities first, then nearby states and eventually Nevada.

“Accardo made sure that all the legal Las Vegas casinos used his slot machines,” wrote John William Tuohy in the article “Accardo.”

Wire Service: During the mid-1940s the Outfit took over the Continental Press Service, the wire service that distributed race results throughout the U.S. It did so by killing the operator, James Ragen, after he’d refused to partner with the Chicago Mob.

Once under its control, Continental “became so big and lucrative that an investigating Senate committee later called it the ‘life blood’ of the syndicate,'” reported the Chicago Tribune (Nov. 18, 1984).

Casinos: Three, during the 1950s, the Outfit pursued gambling in a bigger scale. It moved into owning stakes in and skimming millions from casinos. It stuck primarily to legal gambling jurisdictions, first Havana, Cuba, while that lasted, and then Nevada. For instance, by 1961, Chicago owned controlling interests in the Riviera, Stardust, Fremont and Desert Inn, in Vegas.

Despite having a major hand in the Outfit’s gambling (and other lines of business), Accardo always denied being one of the organization’s members never mind a boss. Instead, he claimed he merely was a beer salesman for a Chicago brewery.

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* How Accardo and the Bosa Brothers Are Related

Sources

As Mark Estes, 28, played blackjack at a table in Nevada’s Las Vegas Hilton casino one day, he counted the cards. This involved remembering the cards dealt during each game and using a mathematical formula to calculate the odds of success of betting on any given hand.

Suddenly, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas grad student found himself in a back room on the property, being told he’d “wind up in the desert with a hole in his head” if he was caught counting cards again at the Hilton, Estes alleged. Because he refused to leave the casino after this threat, the staff had him arrested for trespassing.

Card counting was legal then, and Nevada gambling authorities didn’t regulate it. House rules of many of the state’s casinos disallowed the practice, and these enterprises could and did eject card counters and take other actions, like extra card shuffling, to impede their efforts.

Right To Play Cards

Estes, with help from the American Civil Liberties Union sued the Hilton, the Nevada Gaming Commission (NGC), the Nevada Gaming Control Board and the Las Vegas Police Department to try to stop Nevada casinos from refusing to play card games with card counters.

Estes’ complaint asserted the following:

• Card counters had to the right to play cards in a casino in any way they wanted.
• The state of Nevada was obligated to protect card counters.
• Nevada was encouraging unlawful conduct by allowing casinos to throw out card counters.
• Casinos can’t just let people most likely lose play cards in their establishments.

In his suit, Estes asked the court to declare illegal the existing gambling regulation that requires casinos to ban people whom the state deems to be “inimical to the interests of the State of Nevada, or of licensed gambling, or of both,” reported the Las Vegas Sun (Jan. 21, 1977).

“The case, expected to be a landmark for the NV gaming industry, will test the practice of card counting and whether casinos are in their rights when they eject a counter,” wrote the Reno Evening Gazette (Aug. 19, 1977).

Persisting In The Cause

After Hilton Casinos Inc. and the NGC asked the court to dismiss Estes’ case, Judge Joseph Pavlikowski did just that. Based on a previous ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, he determined that nobody has a constitutional right to play cards.

Estes appealed, and two years later, the Nevada Supreme Court heard arguments in the case. Estes’ attorney asserted that blackjack/21 is a game of chance, and players who have a chance of beating the house can’t be banned. Card counters are simply using their intelligence, he said, and casinos can’t kick out better players.

Hilton Casinos’ attorney countered that casinos’ right to ban certain players is a private business decision, one that Nevada gaming regulators recognize.

Ultimately, the high court jurists ruled in the Hilton and, thus, all Nevada casinos’ favor.

Battle Buddies

Before Estes took up the sword, another card counter, Kenneth “Ken” S. Uston, had launched the battle in 1976, when he’d sued Las Vegas’ Flamingo, MGM Grand and Marina Hotel and Casino for $14 million for what he’d claimed was “illegally” prohibiting him from playing cards at their establishments. This suit differed from Estes’ in that it didn’t allege state wrongdoing.

In federal court in 1978, U.S. District Judge Roger Foley decided Uston’s case. Foley ruled that Nevada casinos may disallow card counters from playing cards in their gambling house.

Over the years, Uston filed several lawsuits related to Nevada casinos’ treatment of card counters, but he lost them all.

For Ben Affleck and all other card counters, present and future, these two Davids, Estes and Uston, fought the Goliath of Nevada casinos, but unlike in the Biblical story, they didn’t prevail.

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Do any of you count cards? If so, how much of an advantage would you say it gives you?

Illustration from Pond5.com

Sources

With their involvement in Nevada casinos behind them, Silver State residents, Clifford “Cliff” A. Jones and Jacob “Jake” Kozloff, together accrued a string of gambling enterprises in and around South America.

Who They Were

Kozloff (1901-1976), was a Russia-born businessman who’d owned the Lebanon Valley Brewing Company in Pennsylvania for two decades. He’d sold it and moved to Las Vegas in the late 1940s. There, he’d invested in various hotel-casinos over the ensuing years, including the Thunderbird, Frontier, Golden Nugget, Royal Nevada and Hacienda.

Missouri-born Jones (1912-2001) was an attorney, had founded the Jones, Jones Close & Brown law firm and had been the lieutenant governor of Nevada between January 1947 and December 1954. He’d held interests in Las Vegas resorts, including the Last Frontier Hotel, Lucky Strike Club, Pioneer Club, Westerner Club and Silver Palace.

Kozloff

Jones

Driving Forces

Both men had a reason to focus on opportunities outside of the U.S. Regarding Jones, the Nevada Gaming Commission in 1958 made him (and other Nevada gambling licensees in a similar situation) choose between his Nevada and his international holdings. (Then, Nevada law disallowed simultaneous ownership of gambling enterprises inside and outside Nevada). Jones divested of his domestic holdings and kept the one he held in Cuba, the Havana Hilton casino, until Fidel Castro became Cuba’s prime minister. At that time, in January 1959, Castro closed all of the country’s casinos, kicking out all of the Americans, many of them Mobsters, who owned and ran them.

As for Kozloff, Nevada’s gaming regulators had denied him a state gambling license in 1956.

New Casino Ventures

In four years’ time, doing business as Caribbean American Investment Inc., a Liberian corporation, partners Jones and Kozloff added the gambling concessions at four international casinos, all in different countries, to their holdings. They were as follows.

1958: HAITI

The duo first had success in Haiti, when, in 1958, government officials asked them to run the Casino International in Port-au-Prince. Kozloff and Jones became the casino’s primary shareholders. According to their gambling agreement, the Nevadans got 60 percent of the gross casino revenues, the Haitian government got 20 percent and the rest went toward maintenance.

“Since putting new life in Haiti’s government-owned casino, [Kozloff and Jones] announced plans to enlarge their horizon to include a chain of gambling parlors strategically placed throughout the tourist-popular West Indies,” reported The Miami Herald (March 15, 1959).

Casino International

1959*: ARUBA

Caribbean American Investment next garnered the casino concession at the new, $5 million Aruba Caribbean hotel sited on the white sands of the island’s Palm Beach. New York architect, Morris Lapidus, who’d designed many Miami Beach buildings, designed the property for owner Condado Caribbean Hotels Inc. This Chicago-based company also owned the Executive Hotel in the Windy Cindy, eventually the headquarters of James “Jimmy” R. Hoffa’s International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

Aruba Caribbean

“[Aruba] is being called the new Cuba at the Caribbean, since many Americans who previously  wintered in Cuba are now visiting Aruba to take advantage of the island’s miles of white beaches, its new hotel accommodations and the ever-popular gambling casino at the Aruba Caribbean Hotel,” reported The Salt Lake Tribune (Jan. 29, 1961).

1960: ECUADOR

Early in the following year, Jones and Kozloff expanded into Ecuador. They landed the gambling concession at the just built, elegant 250-room Hotel Quito located in and named after the country’s capital. At the resort designed by U.S. architect Charles McKirahan in a modernist style, the casino offered an array of games, including craps, blackjack, chemin de fer, poker, roulette and slot machines.

“The most popular feature of the hotel to the guests was the casino, operated on a high level by operators from Las Vegas,” Garth C. Reeves wrote in The Miami Times (Dec. 8, 1962).

Hotel Quito

1962: SURINAME

In 1962, Caribbean American Investment added to their portfolio a fourth casino, located at another new hotel. That one was the 80-room Torarica Hotel-Casino on the river in Paramaribo, the capital of Suriname,** formerly Dutch Guiana. Chicago’s Condado Caribbean Hotels also built and owned this property.

As for all of the above gambling opportunities, the two Nevadan gambling entrepreneurs never pursued them, Kozloff told The Miami Herald. Rather, officials in the various countries sought out him and Jones and proposed that the duo take on their casinos.

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* In 1959, before Aruba, it appeared as if the Puerto Rican government was going to grant the gambling concession at the new Barranquitas resort to Caribbean American Investment, but, ultimately, it decided against it.
** Until January 1978, the country’s name was spelled “Surinam.” Now, it’s spelled “Suriname.”

Sources

1936-1950s

The Palace Club introduced a new casino game to Nevada’s “Biggest Little City” on May 1, 1936. Renoites quickly discovered it, and its popularity soared, leading to a solid run over about a decade.

The emergence of this enticing gambling offering was “a major event in the development of Reno’s gaming,” Raymond Sawyer wrote in Reno, Where the Gamblers Go!“

It was race horse keno.

The game essentially was keno or Chinese lottery but with horse names instead of numbers or Chinese characters. The equine monikers — Shot Gun, Red Fox, Mixed Party, Wedding Ring, Rustic Lady and Fussbudget, for example — were entertaining.

To start, the Palace Club conducted the game every 30 minutes versus the then typical twice daily keno schedule. The announcing of the events was exciting, like actual horse races at a track. According to Sawyer, they went something like this:

“All right folks, they’re at the post! And they’re off on race number 57; the first one out is Jockey Number 16 on Main Street right down the main drag. A hell of a race and a hell of a bunch of horses! Next is Jockey Number 60 on Kay Dugan, that old Irish gal again. Next is Number 50 on Bally Boy, that bloody English horse. And next out is Number 8, on Ask Kate. I did — and nothing happened!”

How It Got To Reno

Palace Club pit boss, Frances Lyden, had seen race horse keno played in Montana and proposed to his boss, casino owner John Petricciani, that they debut it in Reno. He agreed.  

Lyden telephoned Warren Nelson, 23, whom he’d seen run the game in Great Falls, and asked if he’d be willing to start up and operate race horse keno at the Palace Club with a few experienced men of his choosing.

In late April, Nelson, arrived, with a crew — Jim Brady, Clyde Bittner and Dick Trinastich — and immediately got to work preparing and then launched the game.

At first, the Place Club generated about $200 to $300 (about $3,700 to $5,600 today) per day from race horse keno, selling each ticket for $0.10 ($1.80).

And They’re Off …

In its newspaper advertisements, the Palace Club described race horse keno as “the game that has taken Reno by storm.” The claim was true.

“It didn’t take long, not more than a week or so, for the new game to catch on,” Sawyer wrote.

Over time, at the Palace Club, Nelson began holding the “races” more often, first changing it to every half hour, then every 20 minutes and finally, every 10.

Eventually, $0.35 tickets replaced the $0.10 ones as the most common, $0.35 ($6.50) ones became most popular. Some players bought $0.50 or $1 tickets ($9.40 or $18.80).

“Soon we were writing $1,500 to $2,000 [$28,000 to $37,000] a day, and by the end of summer we were writing $5,000 [$93,000] a day,” Nelson said in Always Bet on the Butcher.

Competition Springs Up

Also starting in 1936, and over the ensuing years, other gambling places got in on the action, offering race horse keno themselves. Those gambling houses were the Wine House, Block N and Harolds Club in Reno; the Index Club in Winnemucca; Jill and Eddie’s in Fallon; and the Nevada Club in Stateline, to name a few.

When the Bank Club, the Palace Club’s nemesis, followed suit, the latter raised its game win maximum to $5,000 from $2,000. Later, Reno’s Frontier Club debuted its game with a $25,000 limit ($400,000), and that drew even more players.

In Southern Nevada, the first club received a gambling license for race horse keno in late 1939. There, the Las Vegas Club and the Boulder Club adopted the game early on.

Retiring The Game

Race horse keno in Nevada began fading out in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

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Sources

The Red Carpet in Biloxi was cheating its craps players by using a “juice joint,” a two-ton electromagnet that controlled metal-containing dice on a game table, in 1965. At the time, Mississippi prohibited all forms of clean, never mind dirty, gambling.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) launched an investigation. Agents learned that Harry Bennett, 63, had turned his three-bedroom home into The Red Carpet, which he ran. One room contained two roulette wheels, two blackjack tables and one Beat My Shake table. Another room housed two craps tables. The third room featured slot machines and a bar. The Red Carpet owner of record, however, was Dewey D’Angelo, 39, because Bennett had been under federal indictment in Iowa when he’d started the club.

A Widespread Network

Inquiries about the juice joint led federal investigators to Tulsa, Oklahoma businessman, Jack E. Kress, whose company had manufactured and had sold the contraption to Bennett for $15,000 ($125,000 today). Kress also helped install it in The Red Carpet’s concrete floor. The 1951 Transportation of Gambling Devices Act prohibited the crossing of state lines with any and all gambling equipment via any method (mailing, shipping, vehicle transport, etc).

Kress

Ultimately, as part of its query, which carried over into 1966, the FBI raided multiple illegal Mississippi casinos, in Biloxi, Mississippi City and Jackson, finding various cheating implements — magnets, weighted dice, marked cards and more. Agents also searched Kress’ factory, Kress Manufacturing Co. (see Part I).

Ultimately, the federal law enforcement agency arrested 15 people, including Bennett, D’Angelo and Kress, from Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma and Nevada.

Agents also collared Wilbur K. Sullivan (aka Pat Sullivan), 56. He owned and operated Christy and Jones Inc., a dice manufacturing firm in Las Vegas, Nevada and competitor of Kress Manufacturing. In 1965, FBI agents confiscated from Christy and Jones misspot dice, weighted dice and company records. Among them, they found evidence that Sullivan had manufactured and had shipped an order of crooked dice in June 1965 to illegal gambling operator, James L. Porter, in Gulfport, Mississippi.

In early April 1966, Sullivan renamed his enterprise to Las Vegas Card Co. and moved it to a different Sin City location. Two months later, he was arrested and sold the business to a former gambling equipment manufacturer.

Conspiracy, Aiding And Abetting

A federal grand jury indicted all 15 suspects on four counts related to illegal gambling. The first count was conspiracy to promote gambling (racketeering) through, one, transportation of a juice joint from Tulsa to Biloxi in a U-Haul trailer and, two, use of the U.S. mail. The second count charged aiding and abetting relative to the conspiracy. The final two counts alleged the use of two checking accounts to house funds collected for gambling debts.

About a month before the trial was to begin in January 1968, Bennett was found murdered outside his Biloxi apartment, having been shot eight times.

The Dice Reveal

The U.S. government reduced the number of defendants in the trial to seven, Kress and D’Angelo included. Sullivan testified on behalf of the government. A total of 56 witnesses took the stand during the eight-day proceeding.

The jury deliberated for four hours and returned an across-the-board guilty verdict. Twenty months later, the appeals court would uphold all of these convictions in its September 1969 ruling.

In the meantime, a federal judge punished Kress with two consecutive sentences: for count one, five years in prison and a $5,000 ($36,000 today) fine, and on count two, a $10,000 ($71,000) fine and five years of probation.

Sullivan, sentenced for the same charges as Kress, received one year in prison followed by five years’ probation.

D’Angelo got three years of prison on count one; two years on count two, the sentences to be served consecutively; and a $3,000 ($21,000) fine on count three.

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Was this FBI investigation a productive or nonproductive use of time, money and effort? What do you think and why?

Sources

In its July 1966 raid of Kress Manufacturing Co. in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents seized a treasure trove of crooked gambling equipment that seemed headed to various Nevada casinos.

The haul included “hundreds of decks of marked cards and hundreds of pounds of crooked dice” (Nevada State Journal, July 27, 1966). The latter contained stamped logos of various major casinos in Las Vegas, Reno, Lake Tahoe and Elko along with smaller clubs throughout The Silver State. They included the:

Dunes — Las Vegas
Louisiana Club — Las Vegas
New Frontier — Las Vegas
Stardust — Las Vegas
Golden Bank — Reno
Riverside Hotel — Reno
Commercial Hotel — Elko
Crumley Hotel — Elko
El Bo Room — Wells
Cal-Neva Lodge – Crystal Bay (Lake Tahoe)

Agents also confiscated various other implements used to cheat at gambling. Among them were metal filings and discs used to weight dice; arm mirror manipulators and glasses used to read marked cards; holdout devices to secret away a desirable card for later use; magnets and magnetic coils used to control dice when rolled; and switches and relays used in rigging equipment like roulette wheels.

The search also turned up Kress invoices that showed the Tulsa gaming equipment manufacturer shipped its products to establishments throughout the U.S. Recipients included the Stardust and Riviera hotel-casinos in Las Vegas and the Citizens Club in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

Casinos Deny Wrongdoing

As soon as the news of the search and seizure went public, proponents of Nevada gambling reacted.

Officials from the Riviera, Stardust, Louisiana Club, Riverside, Dunes and the Commercial Hotel all publicly denied using any kind of cheating device. They never ordered gambling equipment from Kress Manufacturing, they said. In fact, they never heard of it.

“I never knew [Kress] existed until right now. This comes to me out of the clear blue sky,” said James Lloyd, president of Riverside Hotel Inc. However, he continued, “This happens lots of times. Some of these companies make crooked equipment to sell to crossroaders who try to cheat the house.”

State Agency Weighs In

Edward “Ed” Olsen, chairman of the Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB), the state’s gambling investigative arm, publicly made four points.

1) This happened before (which was true) and, thus, there is no cause for alarm. 

2) History shows that such cheating paraphernalia is not for Nevada casinos to swindle their customers with but, instead, it’s for individual career cheaters, or crossroaders, to use to cheat the gambling houses

3) To err on the side of caution, though, the NGCB will look into whether or not any of the state’s casinos ordered rigged equipment, but sending gaming agents to Tulsa isn’t necessary.

4) The Golden Bank Club, the El Bo Room and Crumley Hotel, the logos of which were on some of the found dice, no longer offer gambling or are out of business (this was true). The El Bo has been closed for 10 years.

Newspapers Take Side

When the Las Vegas Sun reported the news of the found cache of illegal gambling devices, it used the biased headline, “Foil Plot to Cheat Casinos.” It explained what that meant with a slanted lead, or opening line: “A national plot to cheat top casinos throughout Nevada was uncovered yesterday by the FBI in Tulsa, Okla.” (July 27, 1966).

Reno’s Nevada State Journal published an op-ed piece that refuted any possible merit to the notion some Nevada casinos cheated their customers. It read: “The gamblers and the state gaming officials know that the Tulsa dice were intended for use against the Nevada casinos. So, from a standpoint of the casinos being innocent of buying cheating gambling devices, there is no question. They just simply don’t do it” (July 18, 1966).

“Anyone who knows anything about gambling, however, knows immediately that the implication that the bigger Nevada gambling houses may be buying crooked dice or cards to cheat their patrons is just plain ridiculous,” the writer went on. “That the casinos, and particularly the big casinos, would risk, their licenses, representing millions of dollars in investment, by using crooked playing equipment is beyond comprehension.”

Also, the writer called out the FBI for intentionally misleading the public to think, by not saying otherwise in its report of the Kress raid, that the crooked equipment was intended for casinos not crossroaders.

An Opposing View

Op-ed writer Paul Harvey for The Ada Evening News in Oklahoma purported that Nevada’s gambling industry wasn’t as squeaky clean as it wanted the country to believe. In a published piece titled “No Gamble,” he wrote:

“Las Vegas is not going to incriminate itself. We are going to learn nothing new from this recent self-investigation. A hearing where the bosses are not subpoenaed and the witnesses are not under oath and the sessions are secret could hardly be anything but a whitewash. Accusers say the games are rigged and the cream is skimmed by the underworld before the casinos compute their taxable income, but you can hardly expect the State Gaming Commission to indict itself.

“We’d all heard the naive say, “Mathematical odds on cards, craps and roulette favor the house: they don’t have to cheat!’ Now the FBI has shown us that they do anyway. But the swindle goes on and the suckers stand in line and the casinos continue their business as usual” (Sept. 13, 1966).

Next week in Part II, read about the gambling investigation that led to the Kress raid, the indictment of 15 people including a Las Vegas-based dice maker and the legal outcomes for the key players.

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Louisiana Club chip photo: from the Museum of Gaming History’s Chip Guide

Sources

1980

Certain Intensive Care Unit (ICU) employees at a Las Vegas, Nevada hospital were putting money down on the date the critically ill people under their care would die, and some wagerers were ensuring they’d win, by interfering with the equipment helping keep the patients alive. This was the allegation a hospital worker made in March 1980 after overhearing a conversation at work about such activities.

An unknown number of hospital workers was immediately and temporarily suspended while the matter was probed. The Las Vegas police, the Clark County Coroner’s Office and the Clark County District Attorney’s (D.A.’s) investigators all got involved.

Gathering Of Evidence

Through their inquiries, the police learned that employees had been making death bets and tampering with lifesaving equipment had been happening. It came to light that the nurse supervisor of the 10-patient Intensive Care Respiratory Unit graveyard shift allegedly referred to herself as the “Angel of Death,” and her co-workers called her the same, as she allegedly had been involved in ending patient’s lives.

D.A. Bob Miller pursued a legal case against her and only her, for her alleged involvement in a specific patient’s death, despite there reportedly having been more than one such incident. That case was of a 51-year-old Florida man with multiple organ failure, who’d had his ventilator settings changed and who’d passed away soon after, on March 3.

Testimony Obtained

A grand jury proceeding ensued. During it the alleged victim’s wife testified that during his final days, he kept pointing to the machine. “Actually, tears were starting to come to his eyes, and he’d shake. He was nervous about something,” the Reno Evening Gazette reported her as saying (April 15, 1980). The wife also said that a nurse, on the day before her husband died, had asked her to sign a release allowing his body to be moved to the mortuary.

According a male nurse co-worker who testified, one night the nurse supervisor had asked him if the alleged victim had died yet. He’d responded that the man would be around for a while longer due to ventilator assistance. The nurse supervisor allegedly had remarked that she’d take care of that and then had decreased the patient’s ventilator’s oxygen flow drastically.

Within the hour, the 51 year old’s heartbeat began slowing. Another nurse had notified the nurse supervisor, who’d been playing cards at the time, about the patient’s heartbeat, and she’d responded that she was aware of it and not to worry, the co-worker testified. When the patient had been near death, as indicated by the heart monitor, the nurse supervisor had instructed another nurse to go into the patient’s room and pretend to try to resuscitate him. Soon after, the 51-year-old man died.

Another nurse testified that in a conversation on March 2 about a different patient, who’d been in a car accident, the nurse supervisor had said jokingly, “You just don’t know how to kill patients off,” as reported by the Reno Evening Gazette (April 18, 1980).

Miller confirmed death bets had been made among ICU workers at the hospital but, he said, had been small, 5 cents apiece. He added that there was no proof that any wagers had been placed in the case of the alleged victim. As such, Miller ignored them. The work suspension was lifted for all of the suspected employees except for the nurse supervisor.

To Be Held Accountable

The grand jurors returned an indictment, charging her with open murder* of a critically ill patient.

She was arrested, charged and jailed. About two hours later, she was free on $15,000 (about $47,300 today) bail. Subsequently, on April 4 she pleaded innocent, and the judge set a trial date, June 23.

On April 18, the accused responded to the allegations in an interview conducted by an out-of-state newspaper. She said that nothing unusual or untoward occurred on the night the alleged victim had died. Her only interaction with him had been to administer his medications and help him turn in bed. She emphasized that the patient’s doctor had deemed him terminal and that death happened often in their unit. She denied anyone ever having made death bets.

“I can’t believe this is happening to me,” she added. “The whole thing has gotten blown out of proportion. It’s like a horrible nightmare” (Reno Evening Gazette, April 18, 1980).

Legal Wrangling

Before the trial date arrived, the accused’s defense attorney filed a motion, asking that the case be dismissed.

Before the judge, he argued that like “lambs led to the slaughter,” the D.A.’s office misled grand jurors into issuing their indictment (Reno Evening Gazette, May 24, 1980) and had given “12 medically ignorant people the right to speculate, to say that tampering with this machine caused [the alleged victim’s] death. The grand jurors hadn’t addressed the question of what actually caused the 51-year-old’s demise, the attorney said.

The Deputy D.A. countered, noting that evidence existed that showed the accused had been connected to the alleged victim’s death.

The Final Word

Ultimately, District Judge Michael Wendell dismissed the indictment** because the charge had not been “substantiated to a reasonable degree of medical probability” (Reno Evening Gazette, May 30, 1980). Specifically, for the charge to stand, it required establishment that “the criminal agency of another caused the death,” and that hadn’t been achieved. 

Consequently, the nurse supervisor was reinstated to her job and she returned to work.

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* An open murder charge is a general allegation of murder that encompasses the crimes of first- and second-degree murder and voluntary and involuntary manslaughter.

** Because the indictment was dismissed, identifying details of the accused, the alleged victim and the hospital were withheld from this post.

Clip art from clker.com: “Rod of Asclepius”

Sources

In case you missed it, Part I is available here.

1978-1984

Paul Michael Kodelja, who was about to stand trial on January 4, 1978 for his role in the kidnapping of Reno and Polly Fruzza and the theft of $1.22 million in cash from the First National Bank of Nevada in Las Vegas, was in trouble again. This time it was for purchasing a weapon while under indictment.

He bought the gun for his girlfriend, Linda Naomi Bruno, 36, for her to protect herself from her husband, Thomas Joseph Bruno. Linda said that in August 1977, because of her association with Kodelja, Thomas had beaten her to the extent that she was hospitalized, and he’d threatened to kill the two, the Las Vegas Sun reported (Dec. 3, 1977). Linda also noted that Thomas was involved in “syndicate-type work.”

Previously, Thomas had been the bodyguard of Kings Castle hotel-casino owner Nathan “Nate” S. Jacobson for about two years starting in September 1971. During that stint at the Incline Village-based resort, Thomas had been charged, along with Jacobson, of kidnapping, coercion and false imprisonment for allegedly beating up and holding the keno supervisor, suspected of cheating the keno game, against his will, overnight. (This story is covered at length in the book, A Bold Gamble at Lake Tahoe: Crime and Corruption in a Casino’s Evolution.)

In Las Vegas, Kodelja again was jailed and his bail set at $100,000. To cover it, Linda used her and Thomas’ two homes as collateral.

When the new year came, Kodelja was gone and so was Linda.

Craig Otte

Craig Otte, Kodelja’s reported accomplice in the Nevada crimes, remained in the wind.

Across The Border

A year later, on January 5, 1979, Toronto Metropolitan Police officers arrested a man for exposing himself to women at a local shopping center. In his possession were IDs for five different males with addresses in Ontario, Manitoba and New Brunswick. A fingerprint check, however, revealed the suspect’s true identity — Paul Michael Kodelja — and that he was wanted by the FBI.

In Kodelja’s Canadian apartment, the police spotted a map on which five banks were circled. That led them to $244,500 in cash ($872,000 today) and about $60,000 worth ($214,000 today) of diamond, gold, silver and platinum jewelry — 11 rings, seven sets of earrings, seven bracelets, four brooches, four necklaces and three sets of cufflinks — in safety deposit boxes. Officers also found Linda in Toronto and $10,000 ($36,000 today) in cash in her purse.

While in the Great White North, “to hide his identity, [Kodelja] paid cash for everything — $8,660 for a new car, $215 a month for the apartment and $1,001 for season tickets to baseball games,” noted The Lethbridge Herald (Jan. 15, 1979). “His next step was to be plastic surgery in Switzerland, and finally a life of luxury on a South Sea island.”

After a year on the run, Kodelja and Linda were extradited to Nevada. Subsequently, Kodelja pleaded guilty to the robbery and extortion charges and, ultimately, was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

As for Linda, whether she was charged and/or convicted of any crime(s), is unknown, but she and Thomas got divorced in November of that year.

Aloha From Hawaii

Kona police arrested Craig Otte at the island’s airport in June 1980 and returned him to The Silver State. He’d evaded capture for three years.

The fugitive accepted a plea deal and received two consecutive sentences, one for the Nevada kidnapping-robbery and the other for the 1975 Los Angeles bank robbery. He appealed, asserting that his sentences should’ve been concurrent based on the recommendation in the plea agreement. However, in 1984, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit disagreed, and thus, his back-to-back prison terms stood.

Sources