Joseph “Doc” Stacher (born Gdale Oistaczer, 1902-1977) was a “a genial, shrewd, witty gent” who could be “homicidally tough,” wrote “Voice of Broadway” columnist Jack O’Brian (Monroe News-Star, March 17, 1977). Closely aligned with fellow Jewish Mobsters, Meyer Lansky and Abner “Longie” Zwillman, this immigrant had “galvanic” power and extreme wealth.

Here are some facts about Stacher that provide insight into the man and his life in organized crime.

1) Stacher was involved in various gambling businesses in North and South America, from slot machine distribution and bookmaking to casino ownership and management.

2) Throughout the years Stacher owned various pieces of real estate and commercial enterprises. His many assets included two homes, one in Beverly Hills, California and the other in Orange, New Jersey; nightclubs in California; hotel-casinos in Las Vegas, Nevada and New York (oftentimes, as a silent partner); and assorted other businesses. He even owned a hidden stake in Columbia Pictures. With Zwillman, Stacher owned Runyon Sales Co., which manufactured and distributed automatic coin-operated machines.

“[Stacher] was worth many millions (some experts’ estimates say he still can put his canny hands on upwards of $100 million at any given, or taken, moment,” wrote O’Brian (Monroe News-Star, 1971).

3) Between ages 22 and 26, while an active member of the Bugs and Meyer Mob during the 1920s, Stacher racked up a slew of arrests and charges:

1924, November 26:     breaking, entering and larceny
1926, April 21:               assault and battery
1926, August 18:           assault and battery
1927, June 7:                atrocious assault and battery
1927, July 11:                atrocious assault and battery
1927, August 15:           robbery
1927, December 4:       interfering with an officer guarding a still for federal authorities
1927, December 9:       atrocious assault and battery
1928, May 29:               an “open charge,” which later was dismissed

4) At Lansky’s request, Stacher organized a 1931 meeting, at the Franconia Hotel, of all of the top New York-area Jewish mobsters. They decided, at the conference, to join forces with the U.S.-based Italian Mafia. Charles “Lucky” Luciano, representing the Italian Mafioso, agreed, and the National Crime Syndicate was formed.

5) Stacher first got in tax trouble in 1952, when the Internal Revenue Bureau (IRB) claimed he owed $340,000 (about $3.6 million today) in unpaid taxes for the nine years between 1933 and 1941. After the IRB issued liens against him, Stacher paid the amount in full.

6) In the same year, a federal grand jury in New York indicted Stacher on charges of illegal gambling and conspiracy in connection with the Arrowhead Inn (which he’d owned with Lansky during the 1920s). After successfully fighting extradition from Nevada for a year, Stacher eventually returned to The Empire State in 1953 and pleaded guilty to 20 charges. He was fined $10,000 ($104,000 today) and given a one-year suspended jail sentence.

7) The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) revoked Stacher’s citizenship in 1956 and sought to deport him. This was because he hadn’t not disclosed his criminal record on his citizenship application 26 years earlier. The INS could not return Stacher to his homeland (what now is Poland), however, because federal law forbade deportations to Communist countries.

8) Stacher pleaded guilty, in 1964, to two counts of evading payment of federal taxes. He was fined $10,000 and given the choice of going to prison or leaving the country. He opted for the latter and sought refuge in Israel. Its Law of Return, passed in 1950, granted every Jew the right to immigrate there and become an Israeli citizen.

9) A rabbi/member of the Knesset, or Israeli parliament, defrauded Stacher. Worried that Israel would refuse him citizenship, Stacher asked friend Frank Sinatra to seek help from this politician who owed the crooner a favor. Also, Stacher donated to the same man $100,000 ($897,000 today) to be used for charitable purposes. The rabbi/Knesset member, though, used the money to build the Central Hotel in Jerusalem.

“Outraged at being ripped off, Stacher sued in a court case that drew headlines and laughs throughout the country,” reported Mafia Stories. “Israelis were amused that such a giant figure in American crime could be so taken by a meek-looking rabbi.”

Eventually, Stacher recouped the money.

10) Stacher passed away in a Munich, West Germany, hotel room on February 28, 1977, reportedly from a heart attack, and his body was transported back to Israel. There, only eight people, all men, attended his funeral. He was buried secretly and the name on his grave was changed to conceal his interment site.

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The maximum security, federal prison opened in 1934 on Alcatraz Island, 1.25 miles from the coast of San Francisco, California. The facility housed 1,576 of the U.S.’ most dangerous felons, treatment of whom was, at times, brutal and inhumane there. Over time, the penitentiary infrastructure deteriorated to the point where it needed rehabbing. The U.S. government deemed it more prudent to build a new prison rather than overhaul Alcatraz and closed it in 1963.

Among the 1,576 criminals for whom The Rock was home for some duration are five Mobster-gamblers. They are:

Whitey Bulger

In 1956, at age 27, James Joseph Bulger, Jr. (1929-2018) Bulger found himself locked up in the U.S. Federal Penitentiary, Atlanta, facing 20 years for armed robbery of several banks and truck hijacking. When the warden learned the inmate had been plotting to escape, he had Bulger transferred to Alcatraz in 1959. Bulger remained imprisoned there until 1962, then served the rest of his time at two other federal prisons. He was paroled in 1965.

Subsequently, he was an enforcer for the Winter Hill Gang in Somerville (near Boston), Massachusetts. By 1979, he’d became the boss and controlled a large part of Boston’s bookmaking, drug dealing and loansharking operations. While in power, he sanctioned numerous murders and turned FBI informant in 1975.

Bulger went into hiding in the mid-1990s, thereby landing on the FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitives list. He eluded capture until 2011, after which he was tried and found guilty of 11 murders, federal racketeering, extortion and conspiracy.

After FBI agents found and arrested Bulger, he told CNN, “If I could choose my epitaph on my tombstone, it would be, ‘I’d rather be in Alcatraz,'” CBS in San Francisco reported (Aug. 12, 2013).

Frankie Carbo

Paul John Carbo (1904-1976) began his life of crime as a gunman for the New York-based Murder, Inc. enforcement-for-hire group. (He was arrested 17 times for murder and rumored to have assassinated Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel.)

Eventually, Carbo became a member of the New York City Mafia’s Lucchese crime family, a partner in a New Jersey bookmaking ring and a corrupt boxing promoter.

“Frankie Carbo had become the Mob’s unofficial commissioner for boxing and controlled many fighters,” Gary Jenkins wrote in Gangland Wire. In that role, he illegally generated revenue from stealing part of boxers’ purses, fixing bouts and gambling on those.

One of Carbo’s various boxing extortion schemes involved muscling in on the promotional rights to boxer Don Jordan after he won the world welterweight championship in 1958. Carbo was caught threatening promoter Jackie Leonard and convicted of conspiracy and extortion in a trial Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy prosecuted.

The feds sent Carbo to Alcatraz with a 25-year federal prison sentence. When the penitentiary closed in 1963, Carbo was relocated to the McNeil Island Corrections Center in Washington.

Charles Carrollo

For many years, Charles Vincent Carrollo (1902-1979) was the Kansas City Mafia’s lug man, collector of the tax it charged the gambling houses to operate. The Combine controlled a $20 million ($307 million today) a year gambling business in the city as well as other rackets. When the boss John Lazia was assassinated, Carrollo took over as the top dog.  

His reign was short-lived, though, because soon after, he was convicted separately of tax evasion, mail fraud (using the U.S. postal service to promote a gambling scheme) and perjury for lying on his naturalization form. While doing his eight years at the U.S. Federal Penitentiary, Leavenworth, he was caught trafficking narcotics and liquor into the facility. For that, he was sent to Alcatraz in 1943, where he stayed until he was granted parole in 1946.

Mickey Cohen

After 20-plus years of working for the National Crime Syndicate in Los Angeles, Meyer Harris Cohen (1913-1976) lost his battle with the Internal Revenue Service in 1961. At age 49, he was imprisoned at Alcatraz for a 15-year stint for evading and underpaying his federal income taxes.

He served three months there then bonded out, the only Alcatraz prisoner to do so. After six months of freedom, he had to go back. Twenty-eight days after his return, fellow inmates John and Clarence Anglin escaped the supposedly impenetrable island prison. Allegedly, Cohen had arranged for a boat to pick up the brothers and for help getting them to South America.

“All of these big named people — Mickey Cohen, Whitey Bulger — they all wanted somebody to try it and make it,” one of the Anglin’s nephews, David Widmer, told a news outlet in 2016. “If somebody made it, they would all get out.”

Cohen’s involvement in gambling went back to his years in Chicago during Prohibition. There, he worked for the Outfit, both running card games and other forms of illegal gambling and as an enforcer.

Eventually, Meyer Lansky and Louis “Lou” Rothkopf sent Cohen to the West Coast to help Siegel gain control of the territory. There, Siegel and Cohen established a horse racing wire service, launched operations in bookmaking, other gambling, prostitution and drugs, and controlled the labor unions.

Bumpy Johnson

Ellsworth Raymond Johnson’s (1905-1968) career in illegal gambling started with shooting dice for money as a youth. Later, as the head of organized crime in New York’s Harlem, he ran a $50 million ($750 million today) a year numbers, or policy, game, in an alliance with Charles “Lucky” Luciano.

To obtain that business, Johnson “ran roughshod over the numbers bosses of Harlem, giving them the option of working for him or losing their businesses altogether,” reported the New York Post (Sept. 23, 2019). “Most accepted the former and took $200-per-week ($3,000 a week today) salaries, forsaking the thousands they earned on their own.”

Johnson expanded his empire to narcotics, which led to his 1953 conviction and 15-year prison sentence for selling heroin. Ultimately, he served 10 years, at Alcatraz.

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Photo of Alcatraz Island: by D. Ramey Logan, from Wikimedia Commons 

Sources

During Nevada’s 1957 legislature, State Senator Kenneth Johnson (R-Ormsby), voiced his concerns about some of the state’s gambling licensees* simultaneously co-owning Cuban casinos.

He feared that:

• Nevada licensees might form alliances with U.S. mobsters in Havana, who primarily ran gambling there

• Nevada licensees might use those relationships to hide mob interests in their Silver State gambling enterprises

• U.S. lawmakers might grow intolerable of the political ties between Nevada licensees/their agents and the Cuban government

• U.S. lawmakers might, therefore, pass a law that eradicates legal gambling in Nevada

“I don’t like to see them use the stamp of respectability given them by Nevada as a magic wand to go into similar business ventures in other part of the world,” Johnson said (Reno Evening Gazette, Jan. 26, 1957). “From now on I’m going to dedicate my efforts to protecting Nevada’s gambling monopoly.”

Johnson, therefore, was tasked with studying the effects on the state of its licensees being involved in Cuban gambling.

Potential Stain On Nevada

Before he could report his findings as planned, prior to the next (1959) legislative session, events took place that forced Nevada’s gaming regulators to take a stand immediately.

In December 1957, Albert Anastasia was murdered. He’d been a boss of the Giambino crime family and head of Murder, Inc., the Mafia’s enforcement branch that was founded by notorious, New York mobster Meyer Lansky, who also was an associate of Charles “Lucky” Luciano.

New York police were investigating the angle that mobsters involved in Cuba’s gambling industry, Lansky in particular, had Anastasia whacked because he’d tried to horn in on that territory.

Cuba Gambing Exposé

In March 1958, LIFE magazine published an article, “Mobsters Move in on Troubled Havana and Split Rich Gambling Profits with Batista.” The subtitle was, “Old Familiar Faces from Las Vegas Show Up in Plush New Casinos with Plenty of Fast ‘Action’ to take Tourist Dollars.”

Of the surreptitiously taken photos in the piece, one depicted Meyer Lansky and a woman leaving the Riviera casino. The description noted that he carried a “satchel reported to have contained $200,000 from cashier’s office” and went on to state, “Lansky was returning to U.S., where he was picked up for questioning in the Anastasia murder case.”

Meyer Lansky, known as the mob’s accountant, had gambling interests from coast to coast in the United States and had been a key player in the Mafia’s development of Las Vegas. Another image showed Meyer’s brother, Jake Lansky, in Cuba’s Nacional casino.

Spotlight On Silver State

The LIFE article stated Nevada’s casino industry was spotless: “Ever since the Nevada boom hit full stride in the ’40s, the gambling mob has been ‘legit,’ shunning the back streets and peepholes, running scrupulously honest tables, keeping books and paying income taxes.” (This was partially valid.)

The piece, though, also revealed that some Silver State licensees were entangled with major mobsters in Cuba, where the industry wasn’t so clean. (This was true.)

The Lanskys managed Cuba’s Nacional casino while owner Wilbur Clark, co-owner of the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, was the front man and three other Desert Inn shareholders were investors. Meyer also owned a piece of the action at the Havana Riviera casino with three Nevadans tied to the Sands and the Fremont hotel-casinos in Sin City.  

The other Nevada gaming licensee involved in Cuban gambling was Clifford Jones, the co-owner of the Thunderbird Hotel in Las Vegas, who owned a percent interest in the Havana Hilton casino.

“Nevada, which has already been and is under fire, cannot stand idly by when licensees participate in activities which in any way bring notoriety or discredit to the state,” the Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB) wrote in a report (Reno Evening Gazette, April 25, 1958).

The rumor in Cuba then was that the all-powerful in Las Vegas orchestrated the LIFE exposé and were supporting Fidel Castro to collapse Havana gambling. Many Nevada gamblers didn’t like the industry’s booming success in the island nation where the swanky hotels and casinos were larger than any in Las Vegas.

In Or Out?

The LIFE article spurred the Silver State’s gambling regulators to act. In April, they demanded that the eight licensees with financial interests in Cuban casinos choose Nevada or Cuba, as they no longer could operate in both places.

All of the gamblers selected Nevada and claimed they’d divest their Cuban holdings but noted it might take some time.

A new Nevada regulation followed that bars all state gambling licensees from engaging in casino operations in any other state or nation.

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* Gambling licensees and/or casino owners or operators are referred to as gamblers

Sources

Photo from the University of Miami Libraries’ Digital Collections

Illinois Club, circa 1900

1860s to 1960s

“The loose buckle in the Bible Belt” and “Las Vegas before Las Vegas had water” — these were Hot Springs, as described in the press (Hot Springs, 2013).

This Central Arkansas city boasted illegal, yet wide-open, gambling for about a century, from the late 1860s until the late 1960s, making it the only United States locale with such a history. That run was interrupted three times: around the start of the 20th century, immediately preceding the onset of World War I and between roughly 1946 and 1948.

They heyday of Hot Springs gambling was from 1927 to 1947, during which more than 10 major and many small casinos existed. In 1931, for example, this home of 16,000 people welcomed roughly 15 times as many visitors.

Hot Spot For Gambling, Fun

Hot Springs was hugely popular among the notorious, wealthy and famous. “Millions of people visited the spa city to gamble” despite its remoteness, wrote Robert Raines in Hot Springs.

Along with games of chance and horse races, the recreation destination offered opportunities to soak in hot baths (the city’s name came from its abundant geothermal springs); drink, even during Prohibition, particularly the revered, locally distilled moonshine; golf; watch Major League Baseball spring training games; and use brothel services.

The notorious visitors to this city included a who’s who list of mobsters, most of whom were involved in gambling, and other, enterprises elsewhere. Among them were Joe Adonis, Jimmy “Blue Eyes” Alo, Albert Anastasia, Al “Scarface” Capone (who had his armored 1928 Cadillac shipped there by rail from Chicago to use while vacationing), his brother Ralph Capone, Mickey Cohen, Frank Costello, Sam “Momo” Giancana, Meyer Lansky, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Owney “The Killer” Madden (who retired in Hot Springs), Bugs Moran, Frank Nitti and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, along with New York and Chicago policy kings Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, Ted Roe, and brothers Edward, George and McKissack Jones. For these men, Hot Springs was a sanctuary of sorts, a place to get away from the stressors and dangers of organized crime, be left alone by rivals and law enforcement and enjoy a true vacation.

The gangsters who flocked to Hot Springs to hide and, sometimes, plan their next crime, many of whom were on the FBI’s Most Wanted list at some point, included Bonnie and Clyde (Bonnie Elizabeth Parker and Clyde Chestnut Barrow), Harvey Bailey, the Barker Gang members, John Dillinger, Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Alvin Karpis, Frank “Jelly” Nash (who was actually arrested by federal agents in the White Front Club there) and George “Baby Face” Nelson.

The influx of mostly law-abiding visitors included Hollywood stars, celebrity athletes, business magnates and politicians. Some of them were: Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Rudolph Valentino, Jack Dempsey, Rocky Marciano, Babe Ruth, Andrew Carnegie, F.W. Woolworth, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy. Big-name games of chance players, like Nick “The Greek” Dandalos, Amarillo Slim, Murph Harold, Lester “Benny” Binion and Titanic Thompson, also frequented Hot Springs. 

The Gambling Milieu

Primarily locals controlled the gambling, although a few ex-Arkansas mobsters owned interests in some of the enterprises over the years. William “W.S.” or “Bill” Jacobs from Memphis, Tennessee, who owned six clubs there, is recognized as the first gaming impresario of Hot Springs. After Jacobs died, gaming insiders asked New York mobster Frank Costello to take over, but he declined.  Instead, Jack McJunkins succeeded him, and later, H. Dane Harris assumed the role.

Once Owney “The Killer” Madden permanently moved to Hot Springs in 1935, he kept an eye on gambling and ran his own bookmaking/wire service there until his death in 1965. When Sam “Momo” Giancana inquired about buying a piece of the gambling action in the 1960s, he was turned down.

Over the decades, the major places to gamble and the years they opened (when known), included the:

Arkansas Club, Indiana Club, Illinois Club, Kentucky Club, Bridge Club, Arlington Hotel (1874), Southern Club (1893), Ohio Club (1903), Oaklawn Park Race Track (1905), Belvedere Club (1929) and Vapors (1960).

By 1964, only the Southern Club, Vapors and the Arlington Hotel remained as the large gambling spots, along with the race track.

Oaklawn Park Race Track

Despite gambling being illegal, the city charged such operations a tax, the amount depending on their size. When the city needed money, the gambling heads were expected to pay more, which they willingly did to keep running their establishments freely.

Gambling Gets Wiped Out … Mostly

The end of gambling in Hot Springs began with the election of Winthrop Rockefeller (R.), a grandson of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., as the Arkansas governor in 1967. While campaigning, he indicated he’d support a pro-gambling amendment should legislators pass one.

That they did when Rockefeller got into office, but he vetoed the bill. Later that year, he had all gambling eradicated in the city except for horse and dog racing.

For the next 40 years, the Oaklawn Park Race Track was the only legal gambling spot in Hot Springs. That changed in 2005, however, with passage of the state’s Local Option Horse Racing and Greyhound Racing Electronic Games of Skill Act, which allows race tracks to offer some electronic, casino-style games. (This has earned them the moniker “racinos.”) Excluding these racino offerings, gambling remains illegal in Arkansas.

Photo of Illinois Club, restored by Steve Sloan

Sources