With their involvement in Nevada casinos behind them, Silver State residents, Clifford “Cliff” A. Jones and Jacob “Jake” Kozloff, together accrued a string of gambling enterprises in and around South America.

Who They Were

Kozloff (1901-1976), was a Russia-born businessman who’d owned the Lebanon Valley Brewing Company in Pennsylvania for two decades. He’d sold it and moved to Las Vegas in the late 1940s. There, he’d invested in various hotel-casinos over the ensuing years, including the Thunderbird, Frontier, Golden Nugget, Royal Nevada and Hacienda.

Missouri-born Jones (1912-2001) was an attorney, had founded the Jones, Jones Close & Brown law firm and had been the lieutenant governor of Nevada between January 1947 and December 1954. He’d held interests in Las Vegas resorts, including the Last Frontier Hotel, Lucky Strike Club, Pioneer Club, Westerner Club and Silver Palace.

Kozloff

Jones

Driving Forces

Both men had a reason to focus on opportunities outside of the U.S. Regarding Jones, the Nevada Gaming Commission in 1958 made him (and other Nevada gambling licensees in a similar situation) choose between his Nevada and his international holdings. (Then, Nevada law disallowed simultaneous ownership of gambling enterprises inside and outside Nevada). Jones divested of his domestic holdings and kept the one he held in Cuba, the Havana Hilton casino, until Fidel Castro became Cuba’s prime minister. At that time, in January 1959, Castro closed all of the country’s casinos, kicking out all of the Americans, many of them Mobsters, who owned and ran them.

As for Kozloff, Nevada’s gaming regulators had denied him a state gambling license in 1956.

New Casino Ventures

In four years’ time, doing business as Caribbean American Investment Inc., a Liberian corporation, partners Jones and Kozloff added the gambling concessions at four international casinos, all in different countries, to their holdings. They were as follows.

1958: HAITI

The duo first had success in Haiti, when, in 1958, government officials asked them to run the Casino International in Port-au-Prince. Kozloff and Jones became the casino’s primary shareholders. According to their gambling agreement, the Nevadans got 60 percent of the gross casino revenues, the Haitian government got 20 percent and the rest went toward maintenance.

“Since putting new life in Haiti’s government-owned casino, [Kozloff and Jones] announced plans to enlarge their horizon to include a chain of gambling parlors strategically placed throughout the tourist-popular West Indies,” reported The Miami Herald (March 15, 1959).

Casino International

1959*: ARUBA

Caribbean American Investment next garnered the casino concession at the new, $5 million Aruba Caribbean hotel sited on the white sands of the island’s Palm Beach. New York architect, Morris Lapidus, who’d designed many Miami Beach buildings, designed the property for owner Condado Caribbean Hotels Inc. This Chicago-based company also owned the Executive Hotel in the Windy Cindy, eventually the headquarters of James “Jimmy” R. Hoffa’s International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

Aruba Caribbean

“[Aruba] is being called the new Cuba at the Caribbean, since many Americans who previously  wintered in Cuba are now visiting Aruba to take advantage of the island’s miles of white beaches, its new hotel accommodations and the ever-popular gambling casino at the Aruba Caribbean Hotel,” reported The Salt Lake Tribune (Jan. 29, 1961).

1960: ECUADOR

Early in the following year, Jones and Kozloff expanded into Ecuador. They landed the gambling concession at the just built, elegant 250-room Hotel Quito located in and named after the country’s capital. At the resort designed by U.S. architect Charles McKirahan in a modernist style, the casino offered an array of games, including craps, blackjack, chemin de fer, poker, roulette and slot machines.

“The most popular feature of the hotel to the guests was the casino, operated on a high level by operators from Las Vegas,” Garth C. Reeves wrote in The Miami Times (Dec. 8, 1962).

Hotel Quito

1962: SURINAME

In 1962, Caribbean American Investment added to their portfolio a fourth casino, located at another new hotel. That one was the 80-room Torarica Hotel-Casino on the river in Paramaribo, the capital of Suriname,** formerly Dutch Guiana. Chicago’s Condado Caribbean Hotels also built and owned this property.

As for all of the above gambling opportunities, the two Nevadan gambling entrepreneurs never pursued them, Kozloff told The Miami Herald. Rather, officials in the various countries sought out him and Jones and proposed that the duo take on their casinos.

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* In 1959, before Aruba, it appeared as if the Puerto Rican government was going to grant the gambling concession at the new Barranquitas resort to Caribbean American Investment, but, ultimately, it decided against it.
** Until January 1978, the country’s name was spelled “Surinam.” Now, it’s spelled “Suriname.”

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1944 stock certificate signed by Pat Mooney

1940-1953

In 1946, Pat Mooney, chief field deputy of the Nevada Internal Revenue (IR) Bureau office, made gambler-Mobster Elmer “Bones” F. Remmer* an offer he couldn’t refuse.

If the gambling club owner purchased $52,400 ($699,000 today) worth of shares in the Mountain City Consolidated Copper Co. (MCCCC) then his 1945 federal tax debt in that same amount would be erased and prosecution avoided. Mooney would prepare Remmer’s tax return to ensure that be the case.

The Bay Area-based racketeer accepted. Remmer paid $2,400 ($32,000 today) for 6,000 shares at $0.40 apiece.

Like him, hundreds of other California and Nevada and business people, including convicted abortionist Gertrude Jenkins of San Francisco, took a similar deal over the previous handful of years. Here are some of The Silver State gamblers who did so between July 1943 and May 1946 and what they paid:

These and all of the other people who bought MCCCC stock had tax problems that disappeared subsequently.

Mining Misrepresentations

Along with Mooney, the key perpetrators of the scam were Ernest M. Schino, chief field deputy for the tax bureau in Northern California, and Martin Hartmann, an ex-con turned MCCCCC sales agent. They told prospective shareholders that the corporation owned a reputable, producing copper mine sitting on valuable property that included 14 mining claims, a mill site and water rights. They touted the fact that the land adjoined that of the producing Rio Tinto copper mine in Nevada’s Elko County, owned by Anaconda subsidiary Mountain City Copper Co., a different entity from MCCCC. 

In reality, MCCCC didn’t have a working mine. The company had no value, and, thus, the stock was worthless. The property was nothing more than “a rathole in Nevada,” Frank Dwyer of the San Francisco Stock Exchange told the San Francisco Examiner (Aug. 29, 1950).

Mooney founded and incorporated MCCCC in 1937, allegedly spent $137,000 on some work there, including a geophysical survey of the land and some underground work in 1944, but that was all. By 1950, MCCCC had about 600 shareholders, a major one being Robert L. Douglass, an IR collector in Nevada.

Compounding The Crime

As promised, Mooney calculated and filled out Remmer’s tax returns not just for 1945 but for all of the five years between 1942 and 1947, a violation of IR regulations. Specifically, the bureau’s employees were prohibited from doing any work that could affect a person’s tax liability and/or from moonlighting in any capacity in which their personal and professional interests would conflict.

Scandal Sees Sunlight

In early 1950, the San Francisco Examiner exposed the IR scheme and the workers involved. Subsequently, William A. Burkett testified before Senator Estes Kefauver’s United States Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce in San Francisco in November 1950, telling them what he knew about it.  He previously quit his position as the IR intelligence chief for Northern California after his department ignored his reports on the MCCCC stock extortion in what he alleged was a coverup.

“The Internal Revenue office hearing [before the Kefauver Committee] showed … that established law enforcement and investigative officers were in many cases the exploiters rather than the exploited in their relationships with the underworld,” William Howard Moore wrote in The Kefauver Committee and the Politics of Crime, 1950-1952.

Probe, Legal Action Ensue

After an investigation by East Coast U.S. Treasury agents into related tax cases going back to 1940, the federal government pursued a lawsuit against Mooney, Schino and Hartmann for a single extortion case, the one involving Jenkins, the abortionist, who purchased $5,000 worth of MCCCC shares. By this time, Mooney was 81 and retired, Schino was 55 and fired. Hartmann was 63.

A federal grand jury indicted the trio for attempting to defraud the U.S. government by attempting to obstruct the IR bureau’s prosecution of Jenkins for income tax evasion.

Ralph Read, head of the IR bureau’s intelligence unit in San Francisco, said that his team, after investigating the Jenkins case years earlier, concluded “there was nothing involving any Internal Revenue personnel” and “there was nothing in the nature of solicitation of a bribe or any act to influence an Internal Revenue officer” (San Francisco Examiner, Aug. 30, 1950).

In early 1952, federal prosecutors tried Mooney, Schino and Hartmann together. A jury found all three guilty.

Schino and Hartmann appealed the ruling, but in December 1953, the Ninth U S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld it. Schino’s sentence was two years in prison, Hartmann’s was two years in prison plus a $5,000 ($49,000 today) fine. Mooney got two years’ probation and a $5,000 fine.

As for gambler-Mobster Remmer, he later was convicted of federal tax evasion and sentenced to a $20,000 ($194,000 today) fine and five years prison, of which he served 2.5.

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* Remmer’s gambling houses included the Cal-Neva Lodge at Lake Tahoe in Crystal Bay, Nevada; and in California, the Menlo Club, 110 Eddy and B&R Smokeshop in San Francisco; the 21 in El Cerrito; and the Oaks Club in Emeryville.

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