George Raft

1958-1959, 1966-1967

Having grown up in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen with various mobsters-to-be — Meyer Lansky, Joe Adonis, Frank Costello and others — he remained cordial with them throughout adulthood.

He had deeper relationships with two, first Owney Madden, who’d encouraged him to try acting, and later Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, when they both lived in Southern California.

Life had taken this gentleman in a different direction than that of his childhood peers. He became a famous Hollywood movie star, best known for his portrayals of underworld characters, such as Frank Rio (Al Capone’s bodyguard) in Scarface (1932). His film career spanned three decades, the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s.

When that was winding down, he shifted industries and worked in the one dominated by the likes of his syndicate friends: gambling.

He was George Raft, né Ranft (1895-1980).

Pearl Of The Antilles

Starting in spring 1958, at the age of 62, Raft served as the host and entertainment director for the Casino de Capri at the Hotel Capri in Havana, Cuba, then a newly built, luxurious, 19-floor hotel with a rooftop swimming pool.

A group headed by Charles “The Blade” Tourine, a caporegime for the Genovese crime family in the U.S., operated the casino; Lansky took a cut.

The job, however, was short-lived. At the start of 1959, revolutionaries overthrew then Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Fidel Castro immediately took power and quickly closed the casinos.

Thus, Raft’s employment on the island ended.

The Great Wen

His next similar gig, beginning in 1966, was as the debonair, personable host (and front man) of the Colony Club in London, England, a plush and hugely successful casino there.

“All that was required of him at the Colony Club was to play the role of George Raft — a role that he had lived for many, many years,” Lewis Yablonsky wrote in George Raft, noting that a sign above the property read, “George Raft’s Colony Club.”

Various members of the U.S.’ National Crime Syndicate co-owned the business as overseen by Lansky, and numerous Englishmen owned stock in it. Lansky’s American associate, Dino Cellini, also a co-owner, managed the casino, for which London mobsters, Reginald and Ronald Kray, dealt with and kept out troublemakers.

Raft, then age 70, worked from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. For his efforts, he earned about $200 a week ($1,500 today) and a 5% stake in the club. He also was provided with an apartment in Mayfair with a cleaning service and a maroon, $35,000 Rolls Royce with a chauffeur. 

“The Colony Club became the ‘in’ place in London, the place to see and be seen,” Yablonsky wrote. “Frequent guests were Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton; Ari Onassis and Jackie Kennedy; former Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren; and Charlie Chaplin.”

Raft’s stint at this gambling house also ended abruptly, in early 1967, when the secretary of Britain’s Home Office revoked Raft’s residency permit, thereby deporting and prohibiting him from returning, due to his alleged associations with U.S. underworld denizens. Along with Raft, England banned seven other Americans that year, including Lansky, Cellini and Tourine, all without any sort of due process.

The country had legalized gambling as recently as 1960 and wanted to get and keep out the mobsters from the States who’d infiltrated it since. Despite attempts to get the ban on Raft lifted, it remained in place for the duration of his life.

Photo from The New York Public Library Digital Collections

Sources

Bally Bell, 1938, Bally Manufacturing Co.’s first slot machine

1963-1970s

With assorted help from Mobsters starting in 1963, a small Chicago, Illinois-based pinball game maker, which had begun as Lion Manufacturing Co. in the 1920s, grew into the world’s largest slot machine developer, Bally Manufacturing Corp., by the 1970s.

And those underworld relationships later would damage its image and jeopardize some of its existing operations overseas and expansion plans for Nevada and New Jersey.

“Bally Manufacturing is one of the National Crime Syndicate’s more visible operations,” Pacific News Service reporters wrote in a May 24, 1974 article (The Capital Times).

Mafioso Investors

Lion/Bally Founder Raymond Moloney, Sr. died in 1957, after which his sons, Ray, Jr., and Don took control of the business as president and director of sales, respectively. By 1962, the company was foundering. To help, Sales Manager William T. O’Donnell contacted Abe Green, reported front man for Gerardo “Jerry” Catena, then underboss of the Vito Genovese crime family in New York. Catena’s company, Runyon Sales, was involved in pinball distribution in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut and was Lion/Bally’s largest distributor.

Catena

Together, the following group bought Bally for $1.2 million ($10 million today), incorporated it and ousted the Moloneys:

• Jerry Catena (originally held an 8.3% interest, later 12.5%)
• Abe Green
• Barnet Sugarman (another Catena front man and Runyon Sales partner)
• Sam Klein (a Catena associate)
• Irving Kaye (a Catena associate)
• Louis Jacobs (his firm Emprise Corp.* financed the transaction)
• Frank Prince (an associate of Jacob)
• William O’Donnell

O’Donnell took the helm of Bally in 1963 with primarily East Coast mobsters as its investor-owners.

Mob-Linked Employees

• Dino Cellini: He was a top lieutenant of gambling chieftain Meyer Lansky and sold/distributed slot machines for Bally between 1964 and 1973 in London then the Bahamas and Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He sold the machines on behalf of the group of Mobsters, including Lansky, who owned the Colony Club in London, of which Cellini was the manager and actor George Raft was the front man. Prior to that, Cellini had worked in the 1950s for Lansky at his Riviera casino in Havana. 

• Michael “Mickey” Wichinsky: He had connections with Catena and other unsavory men during his hugely successful stint as Bally’s slot machine distributor in Southern Nevada beginning in 1964. Wichinsky’s nephew, Robert Petrin, was married to Catena’s daughter, and Petrin held a stake in one of Catena and Green’s enterprises, Automatic Merchants Co., in New Jersey. When Nevada gambling authorities appeared for a random audit of his Bally enterprise in 1971, Wichinsky telephoned Petrin.

Wichinsky admitted having business or social contacts with and/or catering to various alleged Mobsters, such as Cellini, whom he helped land a job representing Bally in Rome. Wichinsky, however, denied ever knowing or being affiliated with Catena.

• Joseph D. Testa, Jr.: This Chicago Mobster and reported close friend of Felix “Milwaukee Phil” Alderisio, Outfit enforcer and hitman, claimed to be selling slot machines for Bally in Australia, but O’Donnell denied that was true when government officials there confronted him about it. Australian gaming authorities spotted Testa in Sydney several times, the first in 1969, sometimes in the company of local mobsters. As such, regulators concluded Testa was there on behalf of one or more U.S. syndicates to strong-arm into and monopolize their country’s slot machines industry.

Mobs’ Funding Vehicle

The Teamsters Union’s Central States, Southeast, Southwest Areas Pension Fund, or Teamsters Pension Fund (TPF): Known as the Mob’s bank, the TPF was a major source of capital for Bally, providing it with a series of loans.

After Bally went public in 1968, the TPF itself and several of its trustees bought shares in the corporation. When the TPF loaned $12 million to Bally in the early 1970s, supposedly to finance building of the corporation’s first major Chicago plant, several fund trustees held Bally stock. They included International Brotherhood of Teamsters President Frank Fitzsimmons, Vice President William Presser and TPF Asset Manager Alvin Baron.

When other individuals pursued financing through the TPF for hotel-casinos, the trustees allegedly pressured them to buy the slot machines for their resorts from Bally. This was because “Bally’s 42,000 slot machines in Nevada casinos bring in over $250 million [$1.3 billion today] a year, helping the National Crime Syndicate make payments on hundreds of millions of dollars in loans the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund provided for casino construction over the last 15 years,” wrote reporters Lowell Bergman and Dee Stevens (The Capital Times, May 24, 1974).

Downsides To Affiliations

Bally’s relationships with organized criminals repeatedly dogged the corporation, first becoming a problem in 1969 when it applied with the Nevada Gaming Commission to assume distribution of its slot machines in Nevada. 

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* Emprise would be indicted in 1972 with Detroit Mobsters Michael Polizzi and Anthony Zerilli on charges of trying to obtain a hidden ownership of the Frontier hotel-casino in Las Vegas.

** Dino Cellini and Meyer Lansky also would be indicted in 1972, in Florida for conspiring to receive almost $200,000 ($1.2 million today) that players lost at the Colony Club in London.

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.

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* 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

Reggie, left, and Ronnie Kray

1960-1963

Esmeralda’s Barn in London, England initially flourished under the ownership of twin brothers and gangsters, Reggie and Ronnie Kray.

The place to be seen in the West End, famous politicians and celebrities frequented it — such as actress/author Joan Collins, actor George Raft, singer Judy Garland, actress Barbara Windsor, along with painters (and compulsive gamblers) Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. 

Then former boxer William Ives worked the door. Cy Grant was the resident singer. Others who performed at the club included Noel Harrison, Lance Percival, even a young Eric Clapton, who was in the band, Casey Jones & the Engineers, at the time.

Then Reggie went back to prison (he’d gotten out sometime in 1961), leaving Ronnie to run amok at Esmeralda’s. And he did.

Unintentional Sabotage

He began extending credit beyond the house limit and to people for whom it was beyond their means. This left the casino having to cover whatever Ronnie’s thugs couldn’t collect. This new credit policy opposed that of the manager, Laurie O’Leary, who knew that carrying huge losses for too long would put a gambling house out of business.

When the markers amounted to £2,000 in one week [about $5,700 then, $46,000 today], O’Leary mentioned it to Ronnie, who laughed, not understanding the nuances of running a gambling club. Desperate, O’Leary offered the twins £1,000 a week to stay out of the operation. Ronnie, speaking for himself and Reggie, refused.

O’Leary quit and opened a casino of his own, and his wealthy following made his place their new haunt.

“His club was soon what Esmeralda’s Barn would have been — one of the four top gambling clubs in London,” wrote John Pearson in From The Profession of Violence: The Rise and Fall of the Kray Twins.

Ronnie hired a different manager but banned him from having any say over credit. With the elite patrons leaving and Ronnie extending credit to almost anyone, the clientele soon became comprised of “playboy gamblers, gambling addicts, chancers and the chronically in debt,” according to Pearson.

“Violence crept in. Several drunken losers at the Barn were thrown down the stairs, and occasionally Ronnie instructed East End villains to call on members he considered ‘cheeky’ about their debts. What happened then was not his business: if somebody was hurt, an empty flat smashed up, this had nothing to do with him.”

The other West End gambling clubs that popped up in the interim also cut into Esmeralda’s decreasing profits. When the second manager tried to discuss the casino’s continuing to lose money, Ronnie told him he worried too much and replaced him with his own uncle, Alf Kray.

The Twins Are So Done

Eventually, Ronnie’s interest in Esmeralda’s waned, and he filled his time with other activities away from the property. When out of prison, Reggie focused primarily on expanding his West End casino protection extortion business. In 1963, the twins permanently left Esmeralda’s Barn, which was in debt and owed back taxes.

Today, the Berkeley Hotel stands where the casino once did.

Sources

1960-1963

Twins, Reginald “Reggie” and Ronald “Ronnie” Kray, gained notoriety as powerful and murderous gangsters in London, England in the 1950s and 1960s. During their reign of terror, their involvement in organized crime included protection rackets, drug running, money laundering and even gambling. (The 2015 movie, Legend, which features actor Tom Hardy as both men, depicts their story.)

By 1962, the Krays would own a casino, Esmeralda’s Barn, in the West End.

Typical Shady Activity

The events leading to it began when Reggie, the “more reasonable” of the two — Ronnie was a paranoid schizophrenic frequently off of his requisite medication — was serving a sentence in the prison at Wandsworth.

Ronnie crashed a party to extort Peter Rachman, a West London extortionist himself who was profiting off of charging tenants exorbitant rental rates. Ronnie demanded Rachman pay him £5,000 (about $14,000 then, $114,000 today) immediately or he’d take over Rachman’s Notting Hill territory; Ronnie would have his own heavies force out, violently of course, Rachman’s rent collectors and take their place. Rachman gave Ronnie a check for £1,000 (about $2,800 then, $23,000 today).

When Ronnie went to cash it the next morning, it bounced. He was irate; no one played him like that. With a Luger in hand, he went looking for Rachman but couldn’t find him. So Ronnie did as promised, and his men assaulted Rachman’s thugs.

The Olive Branch

Knowing his life was at stake, Rachman devised a way to make it up to Ronnie. He got word to him about a legitimately owned casino in the West End that just might be of interest. It was Esmeralda’s Barn, on the Knightsbridge end of Wilton Place. It’d begun in the 1950s as a nightclub but when the United Kingdom legalized gambling in 1960 via the Betting and Gaming Act, the owner, Stefan de Faye, had turned it into a casino.

Usurping The Business

On the veiled threat they’d might kill or maim de Faye if he refused, the Krays, through their soon-to-be full-time advisor Leslie Payne, forced de Faye to sell Esmeralda’s to them for £1,000.

De Faye and the other directors could maintain their positions and profits but essentially were stripped of any control. In reality, they wouldn’t get a penny, and in a short time, the Krays would oust those men entirely from the business.

(The twins’ older brother, Charlie Kray, who also was involved in their underhanded dealings, later said it was he who negotiated the purchase of Esmeralda’s, for £2,000 [about $5,700 then, $46,000 today], and Rachman never was involved.)

Start Of New Venture

After the one-sided deal was done, the Krays (Reggie then was out of prison on bail) with Payne, visited their new casino, in 1961, for the first time.

“It was an interesting evening; interesting for the twins, who gazed with mounting avarice and awe as the earliest of the night’s gamblers seated themselves at the rich baize of the tables and the chips began travelling; interesting for the club’s manager and principal shareholder who was waiting to meet the night’s big punters, ignorant of what had happened; most interesting of all for Leslie Payne, who held the company minutes of Hotel Organisation Ltd. [de Faye’s company] in his ever-present briefcase, and was waiting for a good moment to tell the manager and his co-directors that they had some new and unexpected partners,” wrote John Pearson in From The Profession of Violence: The Rise and Fall of the Kray Twins.

The casino boomed, thanks to the savvy manager, Laurie O’Leary, his rich friends and the way he ran the operation. The Krays gave O’Leary 50 percent of the profits and kept the rest.

This successful arrangement, however, wouldn’t last.

(As a bonus post, we’ll release Part II this Friday.)

Sources

Gambling inside the Knightsbridge Sporting Club in London, England in 1965

1976

“Next time try London. The odds are better,” boasted a sign in the McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas in 1976. The posting of this ad and possibly others resulted from an agreement between gambling industry representatives in London and Las Vegas to “swap promotions and high roller lists” (Las Vegas Sun, Oct. 15, 1976).

People playing games of chance in Nevada, however, would’ve found doing so in England quite different and vice versa, as many of the rules concerning casinos were diametrical.

Conservative v. Liberal?

Some might argue that England took a more conservative approach to the industry, with tighter restrictions, than Nevada. The U.K. admittedly had adopted more stringent laws in 1968 after a number of unsavory individuals had infiltrated gaming. Those changes led to a large drop in the number of existing casinos.

Nevada, too, had taken steps to gain better control of the industry, for example, forming two regulatory agencies — the Nevada Gaming Control Board (1955) and Nevada Gambling Commission (1959) — and instituting the Black Book (1960).

Here’s a snapshot of the gambling laws of the two jurisdictions in the 1970s.  When you compare them, what do you think?

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* In the 1970s, the one-time gaming membership fee ranged from $15 to $75 (a value of about $65 to $320 today), depending on the casino’s exclusivity.

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