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

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

Chartrand’s bombed Cadillac

1968

On Aug. 27, 1968, a dynamite bomb rigged under his Cadillac’s floorboard caused the violent death of Richard “Dick” Louis Chartrand, 42, a co-owner of the Barney’s Club and South Tahoe Nugget casinos in Stateline, Nevada. Also, “a large amount of money” was stolen from his home safe (The Fresno Bee, April 10, 1970). (These events happened exactly 12 years before the bombing of nearby Harvey’s Resort Hotel.)

The Chartrand case went cold. Then in 1981, Douglas County Sheriff Jerry Maple reopened it, hoping for further information, but nothing came of it.

What We Know Today

The initial investigators were confident they knew who committed the vicious murder-robbery of Chartrand and why, according to The Sacramento Bee, the newspaper that in 1981 conducted a full inquiry of its own into the killing and published its findings (Part I, Part II, Part III, Aug. 27). What hindered the case moving forward 52 years ago was a lack of physical evidence, which the district attorney insisted on having to ensure a conviction.

The Douglas County sheriff’s office believed two men, Roy Fred Pursselley and Louis Glenn Ballard, carried out the crimes. Pursselley, 50, and Ballard, 54, at the time, were crime partners who both had served prison time in the 1950s for conspiracy to smuggle (in their case, parrots, across the Mexico border into Southern California). They were thieves with expertise in robbing safes and, thus, adept at using explosives.

The two ex-cons allegedly killed and robbed Chartrand for Irwin “Bud” Spencer Soper, Jr. in exchange for essentially $1,000 (Soper reduced Pursselley’s debt to him to $400 from $1,400.) At the time, Soper, Jr. co-owned the Montgomery Pass Lodge & Casino in Mineral County and was about to open, in the next six months, the Monte Carlo Resort in Laughlin, both in Nevada.

Soper’s motive behind having Chartrand executed and robbed, according to then Douglas County Undersheriff George J. Brautovich, was that Chartrand stopped paying Soper a portion of the skim from Barney’s Club. (Later, it was determined Chartrand in fact was taking money off the top from that casino.) Soper believed Chartrand was securing his own share in his home safe.

The involvement of the three men — Soper, Pursselley and Ballard — came to Brautovich’s attention through Paul N. McConkey, a man who employed Pursselley at his plumbing enterprise in Los Angeles. McConkey claimed to have seen Pursselley obtain dynamite and build, at McConkey’s business, what appeared to be a bomb. He relayed that a few days before Chartrand’s murder, Pursselley told him he was going to Reno to do a job, and Pursselley used the company truck and two company credit cards for the trip, on which Ballard accompanied him. The two returned to Los Angeles the day after Chartrand’s murder.

Soper, Pursselley and Ballard

“When all the information on the Chartrand murder was sifted, investigating authorities in Nevada and California were convinced that Soper, Pursselley and Ballard were their men,” the Bee reported.

In 1981, the newspaper team interviewed whom they could related to the case. Ballard was deceased (1975) by then. McConkey claimed he couldn’t recall anything about the 1968 events. As for Soper and Pursselley, “their basic position was that Chartrand was a friend,” according to the Bee. Pursselley knew both Soper and Chartrand from having played in their illegal gambling games. “Moreover, in Soper’s case, Chartrand was a valuable business associate and neither had any reason to want him dead.”

When the Bee reporters asked Soper if Chartrand phased him out of the Barney’s skim, he replied: “I have five points. I could bounce Chartrand off a wall and get my stock. I’m the last son-of-a-bitch that wanted Chartrand dead. Alive, he’s worth a quarter-million or better to me. Dead, he ain’t worth a quarter.” The quarter million was the amount Soper placed on the 5 percent hidden interest he allegedly held in Barney’s Club.

Today, Soper and Pursselley are dead. Pursselley went first, in 1987, at age 69, in Los Angeles. Soper followed in 1995 at age 71, in Laughlin.

Richard L. Chartrand

Chartrand And His Short Life

Born on April Fools’ Day in 1926 in Fresno, California, Dick Chartrand grew up in the same town. At age 18, he was drafted into the U.S. Army Air Forces during the final days of World War II.

“He was never the same after that,” his mother, Elizabeth Chartrand, said.

It was during his time in the military that he learned to shoot craps. After being discharged, Chartrand returned to Fresno and worked with his father, Louis Chartrand, in the real estate business until 1950 when he was reactivated as an Air Force reservist for the Korean War.

Subsequently, he provided a charter air service, flying people from Fresno to Nevada to gamble. At some point, he also sold used cars. An FBI memo indicated that in 1962, he was running illegal card and craps games in a small building in the rear of the Fresno Auto Auction sales yard.

The Fresnan began investing in and helping run Nevada casinos in 1961, first Barney’s Club and then the South Tahoe Nugget. At the time of his murder in 1968, he was living in Nevada’s swanky Skyland subdivision on Lake Tahoe’s East Shore. He had a girlfriend but no children.

The Murder-Robbery Instigator

Bud Soper was three years older than Chartrand, being born on July 5, 1923 in Corona, California. He was a “tough-talking, beefy, gray-haired man, who [could] be engagingly garrulous,” according to Sacramento Bee reporters.

In 1953, when Soper was 29 and reportedly working as a locksmith, he was arrested with others involved in an illegal dice game in Southern California. It isn’t clear if he was running or playing the game.

“I come out of the gutter in L.A., crawlin’ on my hands and knees, runnin’ sneak crap games,” he later told the Bee, in 1981.

Supposedly, Soper worked as a handyman for a wealthy person who unexpectedly left him all of his assets upon his death. With those, Soper funded one or more Nevada casinos and, thus, reinvented himself as a legitimate gambler.

The first of his gaming businesses was the Montgomery Pass Lodge & Casino, which he and a partner debuted in 1963.

Six months after Chartrand’s murder, in 1969, Soper and another investor opened the Monte Carlo Resort. Nearly a decade afterward, a group of physicians acquired the property and reopened it in 1978 under a new name, Crystal Palace.

Soper opened his third gambling house, the Regency Casino, in Laughlin in 1980. The following year, he launched the Silver Strike Casino in Tonopah.

“I’m just a plain old dirty-assed gambler,” he said of himself in 1991.

On February 19, 1995, Soper died at 71 years old in Laughlin.

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Photos from The Sacramento Bee, Aug. 27, 1981

Sources

Harrah’s Lake Tahoe, Stateline, Nevada, 1973

1972-1973

Ladies and gentlemen, the story you are about to read is true. No names have been changed, as there were no innocents.

This is the city, Stateline, Nevada. It’s the gambling mecca of Lake Tahoe. Most people visit it to recreate, but some go there to commit a crime.

It was Tuesday, September 19, 1972. It was a chilly night.

Douglas County sheriffs were working the late shift when they got the call. At 10:40 p.m., five employees at Harrah’s hotel-casino were making a routine money transfer from the basement to the casino floor when an armed man stopped them on the stairs and shouted, “Give me the money, or I’ll blow your heads off.”

The suspect was described as roughly 5 feet 8 inches tall, 170 pounds, stocky, in his 30s, long haired and wearing dark glasses, a cowboy hat pulled down over his eyes and possibly a fake beard. His weapon was a .45-caliber automatic Colt pistol.

He grabbed the two bags from the workers, ordered them to back off and fled through the casino and out the door into the dark. He purposely dropped the bag containing chips, $4,500’s worth, ran about two blocks and crossed Highway 50 and then the state line into California. 

At a nearby motel, he hopped on a motorcycle, whose rider had been waiting for him. The bike didn’t start, again and again. The two dismounted, pushed it, finally got it going, jumped on and rode off.

The thief had stolen $178,500 ($1 million today), at that time the largest robbery ever involving a Nevada casino.

Quartet Of Suspects

The crime became a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) matter when the stickup man crossed state lines. Investigators had the motorcycle’s license plate, captured by a witness, to go on as well as possibly the testimony of an informant, Barbara White, who’d been in on the planning of the crime but had backed out before execution.

Agents found $125,000 of the stolen money, the wig, beard and gun buried shallowly in the backyard of the motorcycle driver. Four days after the crime, they arrested:

• Donald Leroy Rice, 35, of Stateline, Nevada, unemployed dealer, married, four-year resident
• Larry Joseph Swinberg, 36, of South Lake Tahoe, California, Harrah’s employee, married, resident of fewer than 30 days
• Jack Andrew Cozad, 37, of Stateline, Nevada, recent Harrah’s employee, separated, 12-year resident
• Thomas Richard Norman, 36, of Reno, Nevada, poker dealer in Reno’s Cal Neva Club, single, 8-year resident

The FBI tagged Rice as the stickup man; Swinburg, the getaway driver; and the other two, lookouts, one inside and one outside the casino.

The four faced federal charges of conspiracy and transporting stolen goods across state lines, and all but Rice, with aiding and abetting. State charges were conspiracy to commit armed robbery and robbery. Bail, mandated by federal and state courts, totaled $125,000 or $150,000 for each suspect.

One Turns Against Others

Legal wrangling began, with defense attorneys filing numerous motions, asking for separate trials, change of venue and more, all of which the judge denied.

Trials were held in 1972 (federal) and 1973 (state). Swinburg testified for the prosecution at both, giving up his accomplices and admitting to commandeering the motorcycle. He said that of the $178,500, he, Rice and Cozad were to get $52,000 apiece, Norman was to get $1,000 and White was to get $17,850.

The suspects were found guilty and were sentenced, in federal (1972) and state (1973) courts, respectively, to:

• Rice: 5 years’ prison, 8 years’ prison — to be served concurrently
• Cozad: 5 years’ prison, 5 years’ prison — to run concurrently
• Norman: 5 years’ probation, 3 years’ prison — the latter was suspended so he was to serve 6 months in jail then 5 years’ probation
• Swinburg: Probation (the state hadn’t charged or tried him)

An Unexpected Twist

Later in 1973, Douglas County sheriff’s deputies recovered what they believed to be the remaining $52,000 from the Harrah’s heist a year earlier.

When investigating an armed robbery of the people living in Rice’s former house in Stateline, officers zeroed in on four suspects, all South Lake Tahoe residents, and found the cash.

“Authorities did not disclose the evidence to support the statement the money might be part of the Harrah’s loot, nor would they say how much was reported taken in the Rice residence robbery,” reported the Nevada State Journal (Sept. 8, 1973).

Sources

1980

Thirty-five years ago, on August 27, an intricate bomb blasted a chasm that spanned six of the 11 floors of Harvey’s Resort Hotel. The explosion hadn’t been intentional but, rather, the result of the best idea experts could conceive of to disarm the instrument.

“To this day it remains the most bewildering improvised explosive device the FBI has ever encountered,” wrote Jim Sloan in Render Safe: The Untold Story of the Harvey’s Bombing.

The big, intricate bomb

The concept was to sever the detonators in the top metal box from the roughly 900 pounds of dynamite in the second case underneath by using a charge of C4 set off remotely, rendering the weapon ineffective. Fortunately, the premises and those nearby in Stateline, Nevada had been evacuated beforehand, and no fatalities occurred.

During the 34 hours the bomb had sat on the hotel’s second floor and numerous x-rays, tests and discussions about it had taken place, the FBI had sought to deliver the $3 million ransom (really only $1,000 and bundles of newspaper) and capture the extortionist at the drop. The attempt had been a bust, though, as the helicopter pilot, instructed to fly to a remote part of the Lake Tahoe wilderness and land where he saw a strobe light, couldn’t spot it. A second try had been planned, but the explosion had pre-empted it.

Harvey’s reopened nine months later, after owner Harvey Gross made $18 million worth of repairs and security enhancements to it.

Despite a $200,000 then $500,000 reward for information about the crime, it took about a year for the FBI to identify and arrest the perpetrators.

“Big John” Birges

The mastermind was a 58-year-old retired business owner, János “Big John” Birges, who’d demanded his two sons, John, 19, and James, 18, help him carry out his scheme.

“The Birges boys were still bound together by at least one thing: a terror of their father,” wrote Adam Higginbotham in his Atavist Magazine article

Money Was Motive

Birges, Sr. had needed money, as he’d gambled away his savings, owed $15,000 ($43,000 today) to Harvey’s (his favorite casino that he’d frequented often) and lacked any more assets to sell. Previously, to cover casino debts, allegedly he’d burned down his restaurant for the insurance money and had sold his home. Twice divorced, he’d been unhappy, ill with severe abdominal bleeding and snubbed recently at Harvey’s, when he and a female companion were asked to leave a VIP suite to free it up for a person of higher standing.

The elder Birges was sentenced to life in federal prison. In 1996, after serving 11 years, he died from liver cancer. His sons received immunity for their cooperation and for testifying against their father at trial.

Sources

Photos from FBI files

Because another route wasn’t available, in August, ranchers drove more than 200 cattle through the casino section of Stateline, Nevada, located at Lake Tahoe’s South Shore, en route to the bovines’ summer range in the California mountains.

Photo from freeimages.com: “Cattle on the Road” by Debbie Schiel

Casinos at Lake Tahoe in Stateline, Nevada, decades later, in 2008

1958-1959

Clarence Thayer grew ill with flu-like symptoms on Thanksgiving Day in 1958 while visiting his sister in Oakland, California. He was a well drilling contractor who lived in South Lake Tahoe. He and his wife Norma also owned a dry cleaning business that adjoined their home, which she ran and where he sometimes worked.

After an Oakland physician treated the 38 year old, he and his wife returned home. Soon after, he again got sick and sought care locally. When he failed to improve, he was admitted to Carson City Hospital, where he grew worse. He then was transferred to the Veterans Hospital in Reno, where he died on December 10 from what his physicians had diagnosed as pneumonia.

His mother, Lillie Thayer, requested an autopsy be done, and his widow agreed. That examination revealed the deceased’s kidney, liver and brain to be saturated with arsenic! Thus, the forensic toxicologist determined cause of death to be poisoning in small quantities over an extensive time period.

Toxic Source Found

El Dorado County Sheriff Ernest Carlson began an investigation and, early on, ruled out suicide. He administered polygraph tests to all persons of interest.

In interviewing Thayer’s mom Lillie, a 76-year-old former registered nurse, he learned she’d suspected her son was being poisoned for some time and that’s why she requested the autopsy. In separate conversations, she’d shared her suspicion with Norma who “didn’t say anything” and Thayer (Oakland Tribune, Jan. 4, 1959).

Carlson discovered Thayer never had told any of his treating physicians about the poisoning possibility, and it’s unclear why he hadn’t. He had, though, complained to a Lake Tahoe doctor as much as a year earlier about symptoms like the ones that resulted in his death.

In the Thayers’ dry cleaning establishment, Carlson found a few bottles and one mysterious Mason jar containing cherry soda and some jars of root beer concentrate — all tainted with arsenic.

More Details Emerge

During a lie detector test, the housekeeper, Mary Dalhoff, admitted to having taken about 15 bottles of the cherry soda to the dry cleaning business and placing them in the storage room. As far as she knew, she said, they were unadulterated at the time. She’d obtained them from the casino bar at Harrah’s Lake Tahoe, in Stateline, Nevada, on the south shore.

She denied knowing anything about the Mason jar or the concentrate. The results of Dahloff and her husband’s polygraph exams were “satisfactory” (Reno Evening Gazette, Jan. 26, 1959).

During Norma’s lie detector test, she said she’d moved the soda to keep it from freezing and after doing so, had seen her husband drink bottles of it from time to time.  

While the news media never reported the outcomes of widow Norma and mother Lillie’s polygraphs, presumably they showed no deception or were inconclusive because no arrests were made … ever.

The case went cold.

Sources

Photo from Wikimedia Commons: by Constantine Kulikovsky

1957-1960

In June 1957, a federal grand jury secretly indicted the owners of the Wagon Wheel Saloon and Gambling Hall (Harvey’s today) at Lake Tahoe in Stateline, Nevada — Harvey A. Gross, and his wife, Llewellyn — for failing to pay more than $45,400 (about $395,500 today) in joint income taxes over a three-year period.

YEAR	ACTUAL NET INCOME	FILED NET INCOME	ACTUAL TAX DUE	TAX PAID	TAX SHORTAGE
1950	$67,964.02	$26,905.53	$30,134.50	$6,558.60	$23,575.90
1951	$51,657.11	$42,755.92	$20,586.26	$15,336.88	$5,249.38
1952	$99,945.32	$77,069.60	$56,335.54	$39,742.24	$16,593.30

This wasn’t Gross’ first charge of evading taxes. Four years earlier, he’d been arrested for evading $500 ($4,600 today) in federal liquor taxes. The federal government said the former and current counts indicated a pattern of tax evasion; Gross’ attorneys described them as a series of government harassment of their client.

A Compelling Tale

The way the income tax story played out is filled with twists:

1) Three months after the indictment, Gross, age 52 at the time, sued a former bookkeeper, Lee Alvin Dorworth, and a Nevada-based Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agent, E.O. Draper. Gross alleged that Dorworth, who’d worked for him a decade earlier, had stolen from the Wagon Wheel a small notebook, a memo book and two ledger sheets containing financial casino records when Gross had fired him in July 1948 and had given them to the tax agency. In the suit, Gross asked for return of the items and $50,000 (about $435,600 today) in damages.

In December, a federal judge ruled the IRS had the right to examine and copy certain financial records allegedly taken from the business via clandestine means. Gross withdrew the lawsuit.

2) During the income tax trial, which got underway in March 1959, Gross’ lawyers presented a defense of shoddy accounting on the part of an employee (not Dorworth mentioned above).

3) At one point in the legal proceedings, Gross’ wife collapsed, supposedly from the stress of it all, and needed assistance leaving the courtroom. 

4) At the request of attorneys on both sides, Judge Sherrill Halbert declared a mistrial because the transcript of testimony supposedly was “inaccurate, incomplete and inadequate,” containing more than 200 errors and omissions (Reno Evening Gazette, March 18, 1959). A new trial date was set for September.

5) The court reporter, Marie McIntyre, who’d had the job for 14 years, told the media her transcript didn’t contain any mistakes, never mind 200 of them — a “ridiculous” claim, she said (Reno Evening Gazette, March 19, 1959). She added that the judge had told her in confidence the transcript was fine, but later, when asked whether he’d said that, he denied it.

6) In June, Gross entered a nolo contendre, or no contest, plea to the tax evasion to end the saga, which he said had made his wife terribly ill. (She would die six years later, in 1965.)

7) Whereas many casino owners have done prison time for tax evasion, Gross escaped that specific sentence. Instead, Halbert fined him $20,000 ($168,000 today), to be paid back within the next five years, put him on probation of the same duration and ordered him to pay all of his outstanding back taxes plus the court costs. As for Llewellyn, Halbert dismissed the charges against her.

“I will look with strong disfavor,” Halbert warned, “on any technical plea … to attempt to avoid adjudication. You must pay your taxes as any other citizen.” … The “sloppy bookkeeping” excuse was flimsy and wouldn’t be allowed again, he added (Reno Evening Gazette, Oct. 5, 1959).

8) In January 1960, based on Gross being “adjudged convicted” in the tax case and after the Nevada Gaming Control Board’s (NGCB) investigation, the agency recommended the gaming commissioners revoke the Wagon Wheel owner’s gambling license on the grounds he was “unsuitable” for running a casino in the state. However, in August, the ultimate arbiters, the Nevada Gaming Commission, in opposition to the NGCB’s stance, allowed Gross to keep his gambling permit.

Decades In Business

The Wagon Wheel, which the Grosses had opened in 1944, would eventually be branded Harvey’s and remain under the family’s control, even after Harvey’s death in 1983, until 2001, when the Harrah’s corporation would acquire it.

Sources

Sal “Tar Baby” Terrano

1930s-1952

Salvatore “Tar Baby” Orester Terrano is one of numerous criminals whom Nevada gambling regulators approved to own a casino in the state.

In May 1947, the tax commission granted the Northern Californian, then 43, a probationary, 30-day gambling license to offer roulette, craps, 21 and slot machines at the Twin States casino at Lake Tahoe in Stateline. This approval was after the agency had conducted an investigation into Sal Terrano’s past.

The Dirt

What that should’ve revealed was Terrano:

• Had been selling opium out of the Dog House, a Reno, Nevada gambling club where he’d worked as a dealer in the 1930s.

• Had been convicted in May 1939 for narcotics trafficking between San Francisco and Reno. Then 34, he’d been caught with four five-tael tins* of opium (about 10 pounds) in his car in a hidden rear compartment while driving into Northern Nevada.

The drugs had come from Eugene “Rosy” Bastida and Ernest “Ole” C. Olson, owners of the Turf Club, a San Francisco bar and bookmaking place, who’d gotten the crew of the USS Chaumont, a Navy transport ship, to smuggle them in from Asia twice a year.

• Had served seven years, from 1938 to 1945, of his decade-long sentence in Nevada State Prison.

Back To Tahoe

The case of Terrano also was one in which the two pertinent, gaming license-issuing agencies diverged in their decision.

Once free, the ex-convict received that month-long gambling permit for the Twin States Club in spring 1947 from the state tax commission.

However, simultaneously, the licensing board of Douglas County, in which the club was located, refused to give Terrano a gambling or a liquor license because the business was “not the type of establishment wanted in Douglas County,” said Sheriff James Farrell, likely referring to one where drugs were sold and/or consumed on the premises (Nevada State Journal, May 16, 1948).

Without the county’s approval, Terrano couldn’t be involved with gambling at the Twin States. He returned to San Francisco where he dealt drugs and sold merchandise like Jumping Jimminy and King Kong toys out of his Twin States Novelty Company store.

Ad in The Billboard, Jan. 6, 1951

Nabbed Again

Five years later, in March 1952, while living in the Mapes hotel-casino in Reno, he was arrested again for the transportation and sale of narcotics. He’d been dealing heroin for Waxey Gordon (né Irving Wexler), who’d run the West Coast branch of a nationwide, multimillion-dollar narcotics syndicate until he’d been imprisoned for pushing drugs in 1951. Gordon was a mobster and former bootlegger and illegal gambler.

Terrano was sentenced to four years to be served at the Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. Per the judge, he was sent to a hospital in Fort Worth, Texas to get clean before being taken to the Kansas prison.

He died in Leavenworth six months later, at 49, supposedly following minor surgery on an obstructed coronary artery. He was interred in a family plot in the Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery in Colma, California.

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* A five-tael tin, a standard-sized opium container, roughly resembles a deck of cards in dimensions and shape. One tael equals about half an American pound; a five-tael tin equals about 2.5 pounds.

Sources