From left to right, Mert, Lou and Al Wertheimer

1907-1958

Wertheimer was their name. Three of these four Michigan-born brothers became full-fledged, successful gambling operators in the first half of the 1900s, their reach spanning five states: Michigan, Ohio, Florida, California and Nevada.

“As gamblers, Al, Mert and Lou became almost as well-known Detroiters as the automobile pioneers. However, the only thing the Wertheimers built was their reputation as being fabulous spenders and operators of plus gambling establishments here and in other cities,” wrote Ken McCormick in the Detroit Free Press (June 9, 1953).

The brothers, from eldest to youngest, and their birthdates were:

Myrton “Mert”                    June 12, 1884
Louis “Lou”                        September 19, 1887
Alfred “Al” John                January 30, 1889
Lionel Abraham                 May 30, 1890 (he wasn’t involved in gambling)

Today, Mert’s 136th birthday, we take a chronological look at most (20) of the threesome’s gambling enterprises over five decades.

1900-1910s

The Wertheimers began their careers with offering illegal gambling in Cheboygan, their hometown, using billiards/pool halls as their front.

In 1907, Al and Lou opened and operated the New Cheboygan Billiard & Pool Hall, renaming it the Model Billiard & Bowling Parlor a year later. After a 1911 fire there, Al moved to Detroit; Mert went, too, in 1915. Lou stayed put until 1925.

1920s

Mert and Al spent this decade plying their unlawful trade at various venues, mostly in Detroit. Later in the decade, though, Lou and Al opened a club in Cleveland, Ohio. Because police raids of their unlawful businesses were frequent, the gamblers simply packed up and opened elsewhere.

Grand River Athletic Club, Detroit, Mich. Mert and Al opened this bowling, billiards/pool and gambling club in 1922.

Monte Carlo, Detroit, Mich. Mert ran this club of his from 1922 to 1927.

Colonial Billiard Parlor, Detroit, Mich. Mert and his friend, Raymond Reuben “Ruby” Mathis, opened the Colonial in 1923.

Park Avenue Health Club, Detroit, Mich. One of Al’s gambling enterprises, run out of the Charlevoix Hotel starting in 1923.

Shawnee Club, Cleveland, Ohio. Al and Lou launched the Shawnee in 1925 with the county sheriff’s blessing despite gambling being illegal in the state. A public official closed the club in 1931.

Aniwa Club, Detroit, Mich. Al’s project starting in 1929, this was the Wertheimers’ first high-class nightclub, offering fine dining, dancing and entertainment. After numerous raids for alcohol and gambling, both illegal, he changed the club to members only.

Chesterfield Club, Detroit, Mich. Mert partnered and co-ran the club with Detroit gamblers Lincoln Fitzgerald and Danny Sullivan. The trio operated as the Chesterfield Syndicate with Mert in charge and Fitzgerald second in command. Consequently, that trio would be convicted in 1946 of illegal gambling there, in Macomb County.

The syndicate operated with the permission of the Purple Gang, which controlled the Chesterfield and other gambling operations. Another set of brothers, the Bernsteins — Abraham/”Abe,” Joseph/”Joe”, Raymond and Isadore/”Izzy” — led this violent group, also involved in bootlegging, murder, extortion, armed robbery and kidnapping.

Colonial Billiard Parlor

Aniwa Club

1930s

During this decade, Mert moved to South Florida, and Al and Lou relocated to Southern California. Then, casino gambling in Florida was illegal as were banking* and percentage** games in California.

Beach and Tennis Club, Miami, Fla. For the upper class, Mert opened this place in 1931 in The Shadows mansion formerly of Carl G. Fisher. It offered dining, dancing, illegal gambling and illegal alcohol, no tennis.

Clover Club, West Hollywood, Calif. Al and Lou’s first gaming establishment in California, they ran it from 1933 to 1936.

Dunes, Cathedral City, Calif. Al and Lou opened it in 1936 on 20 acres just outside Palm Springs. Al closed it in 1941.

Colonial House, Palm Springs, Calif. Al aimed to capture the elite as customers with its 1937 debut. “This one masqueraded as a ‘private hotel,’ but just about everyone in town knew there was a secret staircase hidden behind a cupboard in the pantry that led to an underground casino, bar and bawdy house,” Bob Schulman wrote in the HuffPost (May 15, 2013).

Royal Palm Club, Miami, Fla. Miami city councilman Arthur Childers owned the club, and Mert operated its gambling starting in 1937.

Kaufman’s Plantation, Hallandale Beach, Fla. Mobsters Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo, Julian “Potatoes” Kaufman and Meyer Lansky owned the casino, which Mert helped run beginning in 1939.

Beach and Tennis Club

Dunes

Royal Palm Hotel

1940s

This decade took Mert and Lou to Reno, Nevada, where gambling had been legal since 1931, while Al remained in California.

Bonanza Club, Reno, Nev. Lou bought into the business in 1944 and ran it until the Mapes’ 1947 debut.

Colonial Inn, Hallandale Beach, Fla. Mert was involved with this Lansky-owned property only for the 1945 winter season.

Robbin & Robbin / Nevada Club, Reno, Nev. Around 1945, Mert, Fitzgerald, Sullivan and Mathis wormed their way into and took over Robbin & Robbin, renaming it the Nevada Club afterward.

Mapes, Reno, Nev. Lou and partners, Bernard “Bernie/Mooney” Einstoss, Frank Grannis and Leo Kind, leased and ran this hotel’s casino starting in 1947.

Mapes and Riverside hotels

1950s

This decade marked the end of the Wertheimer brothers’ gambling involvement and their lives.

Riverside, Reno, Nev. Mert took over the lease and operation of this hotel’s gambling concession in 1950. In 1951, Lou joined Mert at the Riverside and worked alongside him for a few years.

Al passed away in 1953 at age 64.

In 1955, Mert, Mathis and others bought the entire Riverside property from George Wingfield. In 1958, Lou died at 70 then Mert followed two months later at 74.

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*Banking games = those in which bets are placed against a house, bank or dealer

**Percentage games = banking games with relatively disproportionate odds

Sources

1947

This year, the United States’ Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) co-financed construction of a gambling enterprise via its $975,000 loan for the Mapes hotel-casino in Reno, Nevada.

Under Attack

Three years later, Senators William Fulbright (D-Ark.) and Paul Douglas (D-Ill.), members of a committee investigating the RFC’s past lending practices, publicly criticized the group for using federal funds for what included a gambling enterprise and for doing so knowing two of its operators — Louis “Lou” J. Wertheimer and Bernard “Bernie/Mooney” Einstoss — had ties to the underworld. Further, in making the loan, the RFC had overruled the determination of the San Francisco office and Washington RFC review committee not to grant it. The loan went through.

It was “poor public policy” for the RFC to help “big-time gambling,” Fulbright said (Nevada State Journal, July 4, 1950). “It’s a very serious matter to involve public money with characters of this kind.”

Intended Use

The federal government had established the RFC in 1932 to boost the country’s confidence, recapitalize banks and stimulate loans during the Great Depression. The corporation was to help state and local governments finance public works projects and provide loans to banks, businesses, railroads and agricultural entities.

With respect to the Mapes’ financing, RFC officials argued that in places like Reno where gambling was legal, loaning money to a hotel with a casino was no different than doing so for a hotel with a bar. They argued that the casinos’ profits were minor and, therefore, irrelevant. They insisted the Mapes loan was sound and in the public’s interest, and collateral was ample. They denied knowing about Wertheimer and Einstoss’ mob connections.

Douglas agreed the loan was legal but questioned its ethicality. He countered that the gambling areas generated 98 percent of the Mapes’ net profits.

Ultimate Fate

The federal government disbanded the RFC in 1957. The Mapes closed in 1982.

Sources

1940-1943

The Barn Club casino’s existence during World War II was rocky and, therefore, cut short.

It began in December 1940, when Jack Fugitt, an entertainment machine business owner, and Walter Oswald, assumed the lease of the Northern Club in Reno and remodeled and reopened the place as the Barn Club. It was located at 207 N. Center Street.* “The club had a bar, gaming tables, pinball machines, and numerous other amusements,” described Dwayne Kling in The Rise of the Biggest Little City.

The Northern Nevada gambling house got expanded recognition through the owners’ sponsorship of the local baseball team in the Sierra Nevada league, as it, too, was called the Barn Club, formerly the Reno Club.

New Games Operator

It’s unclear why, but in August 1941, Otell Micheletti, who went by “Mike” and was from San Francisco, California took over running the gambling component. Soon after, he purchased the gaming concession from Fugitt for $23,000 (about a $386,000 value today), and offered poker, pan, 21, craps and slots. Prior to this endeavor, Micheletti had managed circulation of The Examiner (San Francisco), the San Francisco Chronicle and several other Bay Area newspapers.

Uncooperative With Authorities

The Barn Club immediately got into trouble with the Washoe County licensing board, which had given it 15 days to hang curtains on its street-facing windows and move back its gaming tables from the front of the business or face losing its gambling licenses. This mandate, applicable to other casinos as well, was to counter the perceived effect of the gambling houses making the streets look like a ‘Hollywood carnival’” (Nevada State Journal, Sept. 21, 1941).

The owners didn’t comply. The board — comprised of the county commissioners, sheriff and district attorney — rescinded the casino’s gaming permits, and deputy sheriffs closed the gambling there.

Three days later, a Barn Club representative, George Green, requested restoration of the licenses. The board members agreed to it, provided the management alter the front as requested and have its employees fingerprinted. To try to purge and keep ex-convicts and other “undesirable persons” out of the local gambling operations, the licensing authorities, the next day, made official the directive for fingerprinting of all industry workers in the county.

The Barn Club met both stipulations; fingerprints were taken of 70 staff members.

Money, Money, Money

In October, Micheletti stopped paying Fugitt the monthly rent for the space. (Fugitt would sue the Barn Club owners in June 1943 for 10 months’ worth of unpaid rent.)

In February 1942, two different lawsuits involving Fugitt and Micheletti came to light. Since purchasing the gambling concession from Fugitt, Micheletti had tried to withdraw from the bank the $23,000 he’d deposited for the acquisition. When he couldn’t, he sued Fugitt to recover the money, on unknown grounds. Fugitt counter-sued and won that battle; the judge ordered Micheletti to pay Fugitt the full amount.

Four months later, 16 slot machines were stolen from the Barn Club. Did Micheletti steal them to make up for some of the $23,000 he paid Fugitt? Or did Fugitt swipe them to recoup some of the $23,000 that Micheletti never paid him? Or was the thief an entirely different party?

The Doomed Relaunch

On August 14, Micheletti, along with two co-owners, “Larry” Brady and Irving Cowan, held a grand opening for the Barn Club. (By this time, the original co-owners Fugitt and Oswald had sold their ownership interests, which Cowan eventually had assumed.)

Brady, who sometimes went by William Lawrence Brady but whose real name was William Lawrence Hunger, had gotten paroled in 1937 from Folsom State Prison on felony charges and, previously, had served a term at the Preston School of Industry, a California youth reform institution.

Irving Cowan may have been the Irving Cowan who had a long rap sheet and was associated with Los Angeles mobster, Mickey Cohen, but this remains unverified.

If the requisite county-required fingerprinting was being done, how did Brady, and possibly Cowan, end up as co-proprietors of a gambling house?

In November, Cowan was arrested at the Barn Club for assault and battery. Ten days later, federal officers arrested Brady after he brandished a gun in the Barn Club during an altercation. He was charged with carrying a firearm across state lines (between California and Nevada).

Subsequently, Brady and Cowan sold their ownership interests, to Larry Tripp (who was associated with Chesterfield Syndicate member Louis “Lou” Wertheimer) and Joseph Scrivani, respectively.

By late 1943 and perhaps earlier, the Barn Club was shuttered.

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* The former Barn Club location now is part of Harrah’s Reno Hotel and Casino.

Sources

Interior of the Bonanza Club in Reno, Nevada

1944

The debut of the Bonanza Club* on October 3, 1944 in Reno, Nevada, was doubly significant. Formerly the Barn Club, the new casino was regarded as one of, if not, the finest in the state; about $300,000 (roughly $4.2 million today) were spent on redecorating and equipping the place. It also was one of the first gambling houses in The Biggest Little City to have been funded and run by ex-Nevada mobsters.

Underworld Involvement

Financing to redo the property was provided allegedly by Moe Dalitz, Detroit mobster, and Frank “The Prime Minister” Costello, boss of New York’s Luciano (later Genovese) crime family. Their straw man, Wilbur Clark, who’d purchased and fronted the El Rancho Vegas in Las Vegas (1941) for Costello and mobster Meyer Lansky, bought the Bonanza Club in 1944 and ran it for only months. He would move on to open the Monte Carlo club in Las Vegas (1945), the Desert Inn, also in Vegas (1950), and the Tropicana casino and the International Casino, both in the 1950s in Havana, Cuba.

Mobster Louis “Lou” Wertheimer** officially took Clark’s place at the Bonanza Club the same year it opened. A former member of the Chesterfield Syndicate in Detroit, Michigan, he had numerous past arrests and gambling experience running casinos in home town Cheboygan and Detroit, Michigan; Cleveland, Ohio; and West Hollywood and Palm Springs, California. Wertheimer would sell his ownership in the Bonanza in advance and move to operating the Mapes casino when it debuted in December 1947.

A Look Inside

The elaborate Bonanza Club boasted a gaming section with two roulette, two craps, three 21 and one Big Six games along with 24 slot machines. It also contained a 58-foot bar with a full length mirror. In the 100-person dining room, lunch and dinner were served, and entertainment featured a two-piano ensemble or a violin-piano duo.

October 10, 1944 newspaper ad

Tom Douglas of California — designer of Ciro’s and LaRue’s, well-known Hollywood nightclubs — followed an 1890s theme to embellish the Bonanza Club’s interior and exterior. Inside, the walls and carpet boasted a “bonanza red” color, contrasted by the white ceiling frescoes. Lace curtains, gilded lamp fixtures from San Francisco’s Barbary Coast and plate-glass mirrors in heavy gilded frames further adorned the space.

“The most striking attribute of the Gay-Nineties motif club were the wall fixtures, eight-foot tall nude ladies who appeared to be holding the ceiling in place,” wrote Al W. Moe, in his Nevada Casino History blog. These busty figurines were custom made by a Beverly Hills firm, “which employed live girls to model and from whom were cast the delightful likenesses, completely charming as well as stunning, wrote Raymond Sawyer in Reno, Where the Gamblers Go!

The Architect

The club was built by Thomas E. Hull, the mobster-affiliated owner of Hull Hotels, which operated hotels it constructed, including the El Rancho in Las Vegas (until Clark and Detroit mobsters took over) and numerous non-gaming ones in California.

Initially, Hull, his sister Eunice Lewis and Larry Tripp co-owned the Bonanza Club. Tripp previously had helped open the El Rancho and, also in Southern Nevada, the Last Frontier Hotel (1942).

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* The Bonanza Club was located at 207 N. Center Street, Reno. The property today is part of Harrah’s Reno Hotel and Casino.

** Lou’s eldest brother, Myrton “Mert”  Wertheimer, ran the gambling at the Riverside Hotel starting in 1949 and bought, with a co-investor, the entire property from George Wingfield in 1955.

Photo from the University of Nevada, Reno’s Digital Collections

Sources