“Clint Stone” — Who am I really? / Photo by Geno Munari

In the autobiographical book, Cheater, the author Clint Stone (most likely an alias), paints himself as a lifelong gambling cheat. His specialty is mucking, using sleight of hand, one hand in his case, to introduce a card into play while removing another. A self-proclaimed crossroader, he’d plied his craft around the world.

“I was a cheater. A predator. Casinos my prey. I was hunter and hunted,” Stone described.

The book covers a brief period in midlife for Stone, in the early 1990s, following his release from federal prison, where he served five years “because I wouldn’t drop a dime,” he wrote. Once out, he makes Las Vegas his home and plans the ultimate casino heist of his decades-long career. In the meantime, he and various associates pull off various cheats, of gambling houses and high rollers. All are fully detailed, from prep to conclusion.

The book is fascinating and a fun read, but is it true? It Really Happened! investigated, and here’s what we learned.

The Real Deal

Las Vegas businessman, Geno Munari, watched Stone demonstrate his card skills, when the two met to discuss Munari possibly publishing Cheater. Munari subsequently published the book on Amazon.

Stone’s performance impressed Munari, a former dealer and magician well-trained and -experienced in detecting card cheats.  

“His one hand muck for blackjack, making a total of 12 into a total of 20 or even a blackjack (ace and a 10 valued card) is undetectable,” Munari wrote in Cheaters‘ introduction.

Munari videotaped Stone in action. Watch it here and decide for yourselves. DB: Find the video.

Down To The Nitty-Gritty

Many of the specific places and dates in the book aren’t accurate. For instance, Stone mentions a significant life event involving the Humboldt Hotel in Winnemucca at a certain point in time, which can’t be true as it had burned down prior and hadn’t been rebuilt. He didn’t use people’s real names either.

Perhaps Stone changed these details to keep himself and his accomplices from being identified or worse. This is understandable, but if so, perhaps he should’ve informed readers this is the case.

***SPOILER ALERT*** More significantly, the book climaxes with Stone and crew taking a casino for a multimillion slot machine jackpot. Did that really happen?

It may have!

Similar Jackpot Win

In Cheater, Stone describes his target as a $25 million jackpot slot machine in an unnamed casino on the Las Vegas Strip.

“I wanted that jackpot,” he wrote. “My desire to take off a multimillion dollar slot machine score was a slice of my reality. That same desire was also part of my non-reality, which would remain an undeveloped, negative image until I beat the machine.”

Stone claims to have rigged the slot to pay off and prearranged for an African American surgical nurse from Los Angeles to come forward and collect the money. He alludes to carrying out the theft in 1993.

In that year, though, the amount of Nevada’s slot jackpots was nowhere near that large. They didn’t reach $25 million until 2003, when a player won a $39.7 million jackpot at the Excalibur Casino in Las Vegas.

In 1992, as reported in local newspapers, an African American surgical nurse from Sacramento, named Delores Adams, landed a $9.3 million progressive Megabucks slot jackpot, a huge and all-time record amount in The Silver State at the time. For the win, she reportedly lined up four symbols on a $1 slot machine in Harrah’s Reno Hotel and Casino in Northern Nevada.

The similarities between the newspapers and Stone’s accounts suggest this event involving Adams is the one he describes in Cheater. They don’t, however, confirm the win actually was a heist.

If this was the career-topping cheat Stone asserts it was, why did he embellish the dollar amount?

Sources

Street photo of 2nd Street Reno in 1950, with Club Cal-Neva

In a likely unprecedented event, with all of the necessary equipment on hand, demonstrations of how a local casino operated its race horse keno game were provided to the judge and jury in a Reno, Nevada courtroom in 1950.

These presentations were part of the defense strategy during the three-day February trial regarding the civil court case, Leon Pierce v. Club Cal Neva.

Hedging His Bets

In his suit and when testifying in court, Reno resident and sporting goods store worker Leon Pierce alleged that the Club Cal Neva casino owed and refused to pay him $5,000 (about $60,000 today) for a winning race horse keno ticket he played in January 1949. Pierce claimed that the 10 horse numbers he chose to be winners, on a $1 ten-spot ticket, actually were. Pierce was the only witness for his side.

(A similar case involving plain, not race horse, keno would happen a decade later at the Nevada Club in Las Vegas.)

Going for the Win

The Club Cal Neva and its defense team sought to prove that Pierce’s keno ticket had been filled out after the winning race was called. They alleged that Pierce’s ticket had been for race number 126, as shown by his receipt, but the winning race had been 127. For some reason, his marked ticket was in the pile of tickets for 127 not 126. Because Pierce’s ticket was for a non-winning race, the casino didn’t owe him any payout, its attorneys argued.

To help jury members understand, Club Cal Neva casino manager Samuel “Sam” A. Boyd* explained the bookkeeping and other operations of race horse keno, using the game implements brought into the courtroom for this very purpose. He showed how tickets were written and payoffs were made.

He said the ticket mixup could’ve been the dealer’s fault or an incidence of Pierce “capping the book.” If the latter, Pierce likely distracted the dealer and slipped a blank race 126 ticket on top of the blank tickets for race 127 then asked him to write a ticket for him. The dealer grabbed and filled out the top ticket.

The Double Whammy

The defense presented two additional witnesses. The first was Emmet Shea, a former, local race horse keno writer now living in Montana. Shea testified that when he’d worked at Harolds Club previously, Pierce had asked him two different times whether he’d be willing to collude with Pierce to produce a winning ticket.

“I told him he was nuts,” Shea testified (Nevada State Journal, Feb. 17, 1950).

Shea added that some time after that, when he’d managed keno for the defendant, he’d instructed his writers to ban Pierce from the game.

Next up on the stand was Rudy Stanch, a current Club Cal Neva employee. He said that in July 1949 Pierce had offered him $200 to testify in court that his employer had operated keno illegally. Stanch said he’d refused.

On cross-examination, Pierce denied all of the witnesses’ allegations. He didn’t know how his ticket wound up in the wrong pile, he said.

Out of Luck

The jury, comprised of seven women and five men, deliberated the case for about two hours.

The verdict was in favor of the Club Cal Neva. Ten jurors voted for the casino, one voted for Pierce and another voted for neither side (civil suits didn’t require a unanimous jury vote).

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What do you think about this case? Did Pierce have a legitimate claim or was he trying to scam the casino?

* Sam Boyd went on to co-found Boyd Gaming and grow it into one of the world’s largest gambling empires. The stadium at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas is named in Boyd’s honor.

Sources

Hands Up! by The Cowboy Artist, Joachim Lüdcke

1891-1935

“No matter in which position you face it, whether from front, above, below or at either side, the subject has you constantly under his eyes and his ‘gun.’ In fact, as you move, the figure appears to move with you.” This is how Reno Chief of Police John “Jack” M. Kirkley described the gunman in Hands Up!, the painting that adorned a wall of his office during his tenure, from 1919 to 1935.

Kirkley

The work of art was more than eye candy. An actual 19th century gambling-related crime in Nevada had inspired it.

In And Out

On Thursday, April 9, 1891 at about 11:30 p.m., “a tall man with a black silk handkerchief with eye-holes in over his face” armed with a six-shooter entered the faro room of Al White’s Palace Hotel and robbed the dealer, James Conroy, of about $800, a significant amount back then, reported the Daily Nevada State Journal (April 10, 1891).

Soon after, the police arrested a man who had $270 in gold coins and a 0.48-caliber revolver in his valise. He identified himself as Thomas Hale, a detective for the Chicago, Illinois-based Pinkerton National Detective Agency. His real name was Thomas H. Horn, Sr., but because he was working undercover in the area on a railroad wrecking case, he was reticent to tell it to them. Horn didn’t have the full $800 on him, so police theorized he’d had an accomplice, but they never identified or found one.

Horn went to trial for the crime, but the jury couldn’t decide one way or the other.

A Strong Defense

The state of Nevada retried Horn in September. During the proceedings, witnesses identified him as having been the robber. They described how he allegedly had come on the scene and yelled, “Hands up!” Then he’d held at bay numerous employees and gamblers, known to be gunfighters, and while doing so, had gathered the money and fled.

During cross-examination, Horn’s attorney highlighted these claims as ludicrous. He noted it was incredulous to think one person could control a dozen, gun-trained and -toting men for a period of time during which not one of them would resist or make a move.

Horn

Pinkerton

William A. Pinkerton, superintendent of the agency bearing his name, testified that Horn in fact was a detective employed by him and had been working a case in Northern Nevada at the time of his arrest. The jury acquitted the defendant.

Supposedly, the actual bandit remained on the loose and continued robbing people throughout the western states.

It Is Possible

Joachim Lüdcke, known in the American West as The Cowboy Artist, watched Horn’s trial in court. He boasted he could depict a man covering, with a pistol, numerous people simultaneously. Using an experienced Spokane scout and trapper nicknamed Death on the Trail as a model, Lüdcke created a watercolor version of Hands Up!.

H.G. “Doc” Brown, the owner of the The Owl Club in Spokane, Washington who knew Lüdcke, displayed this original in his gambling-saloon. Pinkerton spotted the artwork there. Given his connection to the story behind it, he asked Brown if he’d have Lüdcke paint a life-sized version for him in oil. The Cowboy Artist did, and Pinkerton hung the piece in his office.* The Pinkerton agency later used the image in its advertising.

A copy of this oil painting is what Kirkley displayed in his city hall office.

The Actual Perpetrator

Two years later, the Pinkerton agency tracked down and arrested the actual person behind the Reno faro bank robbery and many other similar crimes, newspapers reported. He was one Ed Wilson of Gifford, Iowa (according to The Jewelers’ Circular & Horological Review), aka Frank Shercliffe (or Shercliff), aka Kid McCoy, aka James Burke. Detectives caught up with him in Colorado.

The 20-something-year-old with several aliases was “one of the most daring, desperate, uncompromising of highwaymen and  general robbers,” described The Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette (Sept. 23, 1893). “The number of his crimes can only be guessed at, but their quality and the character of the man himself are so thoroughly well known that the police of the entire west say he is the hardest man they ever had to cope with.”

Wilson’s known offenses included robbing faro banks in Tacoma, Washington and San Bernardino, California in addition to the one in Reno and forcefully relieving two women of their diamonds in Salt Lake City.

Ultimately, the desperado was convicted of robbing a traveling jewelry salesman of $15,000 worth of uncut diamonds in November 1892 on a train going from Omaha, Nebraska to Sioux City, Iowa. A judge sentenced him to 17 years in the Iowa State Penitentiary.

Subsequently, Wilson was released on parole, which he then violated by leaving the state. His next run-in with law enforcement was in 1901 in Kansas City, Missouri, when police there arrested him on suspicion of stealing men’s traveling bags. During the takedown, Wilson tried to escape, and officers shot him in the foot. They returned him to Iowa.

The Final Twist

It may have been Horn after all who perpetrated the Reno faro bank heist, and he and the Pinkerton agency conspiratorially pinned it on Wilson, a known jewel thief.  

According to podcaster Simone Whitlow, “After this incident [in Reno] other Pinkertons began to view Horn as a ‘dirty cop,’ and would coerce him to move on to greener pastures – quite literally. His next role [was] officially a farm hand – unofficially an enforcer – for the Swan Land and Cattle Company, Wyoming.”

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* The original Hands Up! oil painting sold for $9,440 at auction in 2019.

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

1949

The Smiths, who owned and operated Harolds Club in Reno, Nevada appropriately named their casino Roaring Camp.

Generally, a roaring camp was “a gold-prospecting camp characterized by wild behavior, unrestrained drinking and gambling,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Specifically, Roaring Camp was an actual mining settlement in California’s Amador County, on the Mokelumne River where forty-niners prospected for gold.

Also, Roaring Camp was the name of the fictional California gold mining town in American author Bret Harte’s 19th century short story, “The Luck of Roaring Camp.”

Harolds’ Roaring Camp isn’t around anymore, but California’s Roaring Camp is, as a tourist spot, Roaring Camp Mining Co.

Source: Reno Evening Gazette (Nev.), March 30, 1949.

1928-1972

Samuel “Sam” F. Termini (1903-1972) was known as a small-time racketeer who worked at and operated gambling enterprises mostly for others.

Here are 10 interesting tidbits about him and his life:

Gambling History

1) Termini was associated with Kansas City Mobster Charles Binaggio. Born and raised in Missouri, Termini had worked for Binaggio before moving to California in 1939 and was one of his godsons.

2) Termini became involved in gambling in Kansas City, Missouri, where, reportedly, he owned and operated some type of business at 404 Independence Avenue where he offered illegal gambling

In Northern California, Termini managed the illegal gambling at the Willow Tree in Colma (San Mateo County), co-owned by Mobsters Emilio Giorgetti and Elmer “Bones” F. Remmer. He held this job from 1942 until the sheriff closed the club in 1947. Also, Termini owned a 10 percent interest in the operation.

Subsequently, in the same county, Termini, using the alias Sam Murray, rented some space in the Silver Saddle tavern-café, in which he debuted and ran the Skyline Club in Redwood City. The illegal gambling there included craps and blackjack.

Termini leased and managed the gambling concession at the Tahoe-Biltmore in Crystal Bay, Nevada during the warm weather season of 1949.

Starting around the mid- to late 1950s (see No. 9), Termini worked as a pit boss at the Horseshoe Club in Las Vegas, Nevada. At the time, his former associate Giorgetti owned it.

3) When Termini ran legal gambling at the Tahoe-Biltmore, Binaggio visited the financially troubled property and decided to bankroll his godson in what was to be “the biggest gambling joint west of the Rockies,” reported the California crime commission in its 1953 report. However, the assassination of Binaggio on April 6, 1950 ended the plan.

4) Police busted Termini for illegal gambling in 1928 at his Kansas City establishment and fined $25 (about $410 today).

Custom Home

5) Termini had a custom home built for him and his family in Hillsborough, California. Constructing a home at the time, in 1946, required veteran’s priority, which Termini didn’t have. So he transferred title of his property and obtained building permits for it in the name of a nephew, a World War II veteran living in Missouri, Jesse LaBoi. This was illegal.

6) Once completed, Termini’s home was an impenetrable fortress. A heavy electronic fence surrounded the property and was controlled from an underground room. This barrier was equipped with a ring of electric eyes linked to an alarm and motion activated floodlights. Gates allowed for entry but only through controls on the Terminis’ cars or by telephoning an unlisted number. The door to the wine cellar was armor plated. An house-wide intercom allowed Termini to hear any and all conversations taking place anywhere inside the home.

Suits Against Him

7) In 1951, the general contractor and the architectural firm that built and designed Termini’s house, respectively, sued him. The former asked for $103,000 ($1.1 million. The latter asked for $16,000 ($107,000 today). Both amounts were the unpaid balances owed them for their services. The case went to trial, and jurors ruled only in favor of Marshall. They awarded him $126,523 ($1.4 million), including interest and court costs.

8) The federal government tried Termini in 1952 for under-reporting his and his wife’s income and underpaying the amount of federal income taxes they owed. The years for which he was charged were between 1945 and 1949 for his taxes and 1945 and 1947 for hers. Termini was found guilty of tax evasion in the amount of about $92,000 ($976,000 today). The judge sentenced him to three years in federal prison and a fine of $20,000 ($212,000 today).

Last 20 Years

9) For the tax evasion, Termini spent three years in the McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary. After getting released, he reportedly lived and worked in Las Vegas. Eventually, he moved to Reno, Nevada.

10) Termini passed away on June 12, 1972 at age 69 in Reno. His body was interred at Mountain View Cemetery.

Sources

1953

Harrah’s in Reno, Nevada proposed, to event officials, the casino host an exhibit about gambling at the California State Fair. With a backdrop of silver dollars, the display was to contain gambling equipment and pamphlets on how to play various games, among other items.

The idea went over about as well as the handling of a casino cheat caught in the act.

“What they are advertising is against our state law,” said Dr. J. E. McConnell, a member of the fair board of directors. “I can’t see why we should give them anything — even lip service.”

McConnell said the proposal sounded “as if we’re being taken for a bunch of country yokels.”

(This wasn’t the first gambling-related story involving a regional fair.)

Source: Nevada State Journal, “Californians Scorn Exhibits on Gambling,” July 18, 1953.

1946

A Reno, Nevada casino hired a man, new to the city and gambling, as a shill. (A shill is paid to play games in a gambling house to entice others around to do the same.) The floor manager gave him $20 (about $300 today) to gamble with at a specific game, which he did for a while. Then the shill disappeared.  

Just when the manager thought employee and cash were gone for good, the shill showed back up.

“Here’s $800” ($11,500 today), he said. “I couldn’t win in here, so I went into the club across the street and had a little better luck!”

The two guys split the winnings 50/50.

Source: Nevada State Journal, “Nevada Story: This Couldn’t Be Elsewhere,” March 3, 1946.

1937-1970s

For Harrah’s, which debuted in Reno in 1937 as a bingo parlor, extensive advertising was key to its growth into one of Nevada’s largest gambling empires by the 1970s.* However, owner/operator William “Bill” Fisk Harrah‘s approach to publicizing his clubs primarily was to copy what competitor Harolds Club already had done.

“[Harrah’s] promotions were aimed at Harolds,” wrote Leon Mandel, author of William Fisk Harrah: The Life and Times of a Gambling Magnate. wrote. “In perfect accord with the Harrah style, they were — at least many of them — stolen from Harolds itself.”

A Humble Start

For about the first 10 years, during which the club solely offered bingo, and some employees themselves wrote ads for the business, keeping such work in house.

Then when the gambling tycoon expanded his business to a full casino in the mid-1940s, he engaged local firm, Wallie Warren & Associates, to assume advertising responsibilities. However, Harrah wasn’t impressed with the agency’s one advertising man, according to Mandel.

A Campaign With Teeth

Sometime in 1958, the gambler switched to Reno’s Thomas C. Wilson Advertising Co. One of the agency’s ad campaigns for Harrah’s was the “I won a jackpot” postcards. Here are some of the first ones circulated. (Warning: Much of the content is politically incorrect and offensive today.)

Note the images are oriented horizontally, all of the letters in “Harrah’s Club” are the same color, red, and the location cited is “Reno.”

Going Out Of State

In 1955 Harrah opened a second casino at Lake Tahoe in Stateline, and the postcards changed slightly as a result. Specifically, they now named the locations of both properties.

As the two Nevada Harrah’s operations grew, so did their advertising demands. In 1961, Harrah’s director of advertising, Jack E. McCorkle, sought an agency with the manpower to meet the gambling company’s needs.

After four months of searching, McCorkle contracted Hoefer, Dieterich & Brown Inc. in San Francisco, California. This firm’s efforts turned Harrah’s into a household name. 

The postcards evolved further.

Note the images now are vertically oriented, the casino name no longer includes “Club” and each letter in “Harrah’s” is a different color, none of them red.

Big Fat Copycat

It wasn’t Harrah’s but, rather, its biggest competitor, Harolds Club, that blazed the advertising trail for Nevada casinos. Harrah’s simply copied Harolds’ successful formula.

In 1941, the Smiths who owned and operated Harolds Club installed 25 roadside billboards** within 500 miles of their Reno gambling house, which indicated fun was to be had there. All of the signs challenged whoever saw them to make their way to The Biggest Little City, but none mentioned gambling.

Before Thomas C. Wilson Advertising created and placed ads for Harrah’s, it did the same for Harolds between 1946 and 1958. The agency was responsible for Harolds’ covered wagon symbol and its  “Harolds Club or Bust” slogan. It also advertised for Harolds in newspapers and magazines and on radio and TV.

“They did a good job,” Harold Smith, Sr., wrote of the Wilson agency in I Want to Quit Winners.

Harrah’s also put up billboards along the highways throughout the U.S.’ western states and advertised in the same media outlets that Harolds Club did.

Because the casino names, “Harolds” and “Harrah’s,” were similar, each starting with an “H” and containing seven letters, people often mistook one for the other.

“The more advertising Harolds did, the more people noticed Harrah’s,” Mandel noted.

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* Bill Harrah took his company, Harrah’s Entertainment Inc., public in 1971.

** The number of Harolds roadside signs rose over time to about 2,000 and appeared throughout much of the world.

Sources

The Louvre and Oberon Saloons in Reno, Nevada

1900-1906

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

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

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

1901

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

1902

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

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

1903

Bookmaking becomes legal in Nevada.

January: Thomas Ward joins Aguayo in management.

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

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

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

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

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

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

1904

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

1905

Slot machines now are legal in Nevada.

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

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

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

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

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

1906

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources