McDonough

1934-1935

An argument between two underworld men devolved into violence during a dance endurance competition in Hollywood, California on April 14, 1934.

Explosion Of Rage

At 7 a.m., the 21th consecutive hour of the walk-a-thon,* competing dancers sluggishly moved about the Winter Garden Auditorium floor. Mobster James “Socks” McDonough, among the spectators, sat at a table in a far corner, playing craps with some buddies.

Suddenly, angry shouting erupted and soon after, gunshots rang out, seven of them.

McDonough slumped in his chair. Chaos ensued.

Emergency personnel rushed the critically injured man to Georgia Street Receiving Hospital where he received emergency treatment for through-and-through bullet wounds to the chest and thighs. After, he was transferred to General Hospital. Reportedly, he had 15 scars from previous gunshots.

The Criminal Life

He likely had gotten those during his years as an alleged member of the Dean O’Banion** (né Charles Dean O’Banion) and Bugs Moran’s (né George Clarence Moran) North Side Gang in Chicago, Illinois. At the time of the walk-a-thon, McDonough had been in Los Angeles for about three years and continuing his criminal ways. At one point he’d been the city’s Public Enemy No. 1.

As such, police had questioned him frequently in connection with various crimes. In 1932, McDonough had gone to trial for allegedly participating in the $50,000 ransom kidnapping of E.L . “Zeke” Caress, betting commissioner at Agua Caliente, but the case again the Chicagoan was dismissed.

Hints Of Mob Involvement

Three to four hours after the potentially fatal incident, a citizen and former U.S. deputy marshal, H.W. Ballard, reported to police a car driving erratically in his neighborhood, about three miles from the Winter Garden.

An officer dispatched to the area discovered the reported car, parked, with actor Thomas O’Rourke, 37, behind the wheel. Lee Moore, 35, bookmaker, former prizefighter and previous bodyguard for professional boxer Jack Dempsey, was passed out in the back seat. When searched, Moore was found to have a small automatic pistol on his person. The officer took both men to the police station.

Faulty Memory, Denial

By this time, detectives working the McDonough case deduced, after hearing witness accounts, that Moore probably was the perpetrator. (McDonough knew who’d shot him but wouldn’t name the man.) On questioning, Moore said he was drunk and didn’t remember anything. O’Rourke relayed he and Moore had gone to the Winter Garden after attending the Hollywood Legion Stadium prize fights, but he didn’t recall a fight or shooting.

Moore was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon with the intent to commit murder and O’Rourke, for drunk driving. While in jail, awaiting trial, Moore served a previously received 30-day sentence for illegal gambling.

Underhanded Tactic

A few days after Moore’s arrest, Ballard received an anonymous phone call in which a man told him, “You better lay off if you don’t want to get yours.” Later, while the local resident was driving, a car pulled up alongside him, and the men inside verbalized a similar threat.

Meanwhile, McDonough remained alive, though barely.

“The shock from the seven wounds, police surgeons stated, probably will prove fatal unless the victim has unusual recuperative powers,” reported the Los Angeles Times (April 16, 1934.)

Mum’s The Word

By the time of Moore’s trial, in July, McDonough defied the odds and pulled through.

In court, nine witnesses, on the stand, suddenly couldn’t remember any specifics of the shooting despite having provided detailed accounts to detectives before. The Times described this phenomenon as “gangland’s shadow” dogging the witnesses. One of them recanted his entire former statement. O’Rourke pleaded the fifth. McDonough testified he didn’t know who’d shot him and denied ever having seen Moore before court.

Who’d gotten to these witnesses? It seems Moore was connected to a criminal entity, but which one? The Los Angeles Mob?

Because of their silence, none of the witnesses placed Moore at the scene of the crime. However, ballistics experts, determined the gun found on the defendant was the weapon that had been used, after comparing it to slugs and the bullet retrieved from the Winter Garden.

The defense countered this fact by having Moore claim he’d purchased the gun at 7:30 a.m., roughly a half-hour after the shooting, “from a guy about 6 feet 8 inches tall in a Hollywood Boulevard beer hall” (Los Angeles Times, July 31, 1934).

Out Of Bogus Stories

Despite the setback for the prosecution, and no motive for the shooting made apparent, Moore was found guilty. The judge sentenced him to one to 14 years to be served in San Quentin State Prison.

The convicted man appealed the court’s decision and lost. He continued to fight, though, taking his case to the Supreme Court of California.

Best You Move On

In September, Los Angeles Captain of Detectives Bert Wallis called McDonough into his office. There, Wallis suggested the Mobster might want to leave the city or he’d likely get arrested for vagrancy. McDonough agreed to go. Wallis helped him procure a train ticket.

That night, he left on the Santa Fe, headed to Chicago. The press captured his departure.

What Comes Next

The following year, 1935, in May, the California supreme court reversed the lower court’s decision, on grounds the evidence on which Moore had been convicted had been insufficient. He was freed.

It wasn’t long, though, until he was in trouble again. He was arrested a year later for involvement in the July 1935 robbery of the Monte Carlo gambling ship.

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* Jack Kearns, current and former manager of professional boxers Mickey Walker and Jack Dempsey, respectively, promoted the event.

** Dean O’Banion headed Chicago’s North Side gang during the 1920s until rival Mobsters murdered him in 1924. Bugs Moran took over for O’Banion. Throughout the decade, the North Side Gang violently fought the South Side Gang, helmed first by Johnny Torrio then Al Capone. In 1929, seven of Moran’s men were duped and gunned down by Mobsters dressed as policemen, suspected to be South Side Gang members, in what is known as the Valentine’s Day Massacre.

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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.

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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 

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Calvin Kovens

1924-1995

A Miami, Florida businessman and convicted felon, involved with at least one Nevada casino in the 1960s, later got special consideration from President Richard M. Nixon.

Gambling History

Calvin Kovens bought The Sierra Tahoe hotel-casino in 1966, defying Nevada gambling authorities’ order that he not become involved with the resort. He acquired the property with a James “Jimmy” Riddle Hoffa-approved loan from the Central States, Southeast, Southwest Areas Pension Fund of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

Having debuted in 1964, The Sierra Tahoe comprised a set of buildings, one on Lake Tahoe’s shore, the other across the street, in Incline Village. After several iterations, the property became the Hyatt Regency Lake Tahoe Resort, Spa and Casino.

Kovens made an undesirable gambler, in the eyes of the Nevada Gaming Commissioners, as he was Mafia connected, was twice convicted of crimes and was due to serve prison time pending appeal. Though he couldn’t get a Silver State gambling license as a result, he remained the landlord of The Sierra Tahoe for three years. (During that time, he renamed the hotel Lake Tahoe Hotel, and lessor of the casino Arthur “Art” L. Wood renamed the gambling house Incline Village Casino.)

In 1968, the Nevada Gaming Control Board suspected Kovens had a hidden interest in the Carousel Casino in Las Vegas. He denied it, and the agents couldn’t prove it.

Criminal Background

Born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, Kovens served in the U.S. Army during World War II and moved to Miami in the early 1950s. Later in the decade, he launched two commercial real estate businesses: Ruedd Inc., a development company, and Cal Kovens Construction Corp., a building firm.

In 1962, he was fined $12,000 ($103,000) and placed on probation for loan fraud. He’d used Federal Housing Administration financing earmarked for a Miami shopping center for other purposes.

Subsequently, he became an expediter for the Teamsters pension fund. In 1964, he, as well as Hoffa and six others, was found guilty of mail fraud (five counts) and wire fraud (one count). The group had been providing false or inflated information to obtain loans as well as requiring and pocketing kickbacks. Kovens was sentenced to three years in federal prison and a $5,000 ($42,000 today) fine. (Hoffa got five years and a $10,000 fine).

Tit For Tat?

After remaining free for seven years, Kovens began his three-year stint at the minimum security Federal Prison Camp, Elgin in Florida. After his first parole request was denied in June 1971, he allegedly came down with a fever and “symptoms of heart difficulty,” for which he was hospitalized (Sunday Gazette-Mail, June 16, 1974).

Consequently, in December, the parole board, in a unanimous vote, granted Kovens the early release date of May 1, 1972 due to his supposed medical condition. By then, he would’ve served 15 months.

Three days later, Nixon ordered Hoffa be released from the U.S. Penitentiary, Lewisburg in Pennsylvania.

About a week later, former Senator George A. Smathers (D-Fla.) intimated to Charles “Chuck” W. Colson, White House office of public liaison director, in a phone conversation that Kovens should be freed., Smathers relayed to Colson the following dialogue he’d had with Charles “Bebe” G. Rebozzo, a close Nixon friend (The Breaking of a President, 1975):

Smathers: “Bebe, It looks to me that this would be a pretty good thing to do. [Kovens is] the most popular Jew in Dade County, South Florida. … This I know would at least give the president, and those who are going to help in this area, a very strong basis for going to the Jewish community and saying: For God’s sake, the one guy that went to bat for him was the president.”

Rebozzo: “I think [Nixon] ought to do it.”

Smathers: “I agree. There’s no negatives on this; it’s all pluses. … I’m sure the president can do it, and I’m sure, actually, [parole board] Chairman George Reed would probably approve of it.”

Colson sent to White House Counsel John Dean a transcript of this phone call with Smathers with the note: “The attached is much too hot for me to handle. … Obviously, [Smathers] makes a very good point, and I would assume if there is anything we can do properly, we should. On the other hand, in view of the personalities involved here, I would think this has to be handled with extreme care.”

Kovens got paroled eight days later, on Jan. 6, 1972. He’d served 11 months of his 36-month sentence. He was 47.

“The past and present chairmen of the parole board in Washington denied contact or behind-the-scenes pressure in the release of Kovens,” reported The Daily Review (April 9, 1974).

Shortly thereafter, Kovens delivered $30,000 ($187,000 today) in cash, reportedly a campaign contribution, to John Mitchell, Nixon’s campaign manager.

Referring to this secret donation and financier Robert L. Vesco’s $200,000 cash payment, columnist Andrew Tully wrote, “If you think these cash transactions have a Mafia flavor, you said it, I didn’t” (Albuquerque Journal, Oct. 9, 1973).

A new law required that Nixon disclose all campaign monies he’d received and from whom, however, he left Kovens’ $30,000 off of the list.

End Of Life

The ex-convict lived another 23 years as a free man, until February 1995, when he passed away, not from cardiovascular disease but from complications related to myelodysplastic syndrome, a type of bone marrow disease that may evolve into cancer. He was 70.

In his obituary he was lauded for his philanthropy, including having raised $20 million for Miami’s Mount Sinai Medical Center and $5 million for Florida International University. Among numerous other honors, the Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce named Kovens Man of the Year in 1990, and the Florida International University and Tel Aviv University awarded him honorary doctorates.

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Their behavior at several Las Vegas casinos got them noticed. Then the dominoes fell.

Two men showed wads of C notes at the craps tables, tried to exchange some of them for casino bills and broke others into smaller denominations. Word got to the local police, who picked up and took to the station Raymond Philip Wilson, 33, and Frank James Ellsworth, 36, on Friday, July 8, 1955.

Officers in Southern Nevada found more than $85,000 in their pockets and at their high-end hotel room, stuffed in drawers and suitcases. Both refused to divulge where they’d gotten the money but said they’d done so legally.

Because the serial numbers on their Benjamins were in sequence, Vegas police suspected they’d been involved in the April 6 holdup of the Chase Manhattan Bank in Queens, New York for $300,000, the perpetrators of which still hadn’t been identified. Police arrested Ellsworth and Wilson and booked them on suspicion of robbery.

Both suspects were ex-convicts from the Midwest and wanted on theft charges in different cities. They’d arrived in Sin City three days before, supposedly having traveled from Tampa, Fla.

Couldn’t Hold Them

Law enforcement officers concluded that the men hadn’t been involved in the Chase bank heist. Ellsworth was freed on $1,000 bond and fled the state with the duo’s $85,177 in crisp bills and $2,100 in gambling chips. (That $87,277 total is worth about $8.4 million today.)

The pair’s defense attorneys, Harry Claiborne and Calvin Magleby, retrieved the currency for their clients after filing a writ of mandamus charging that the police had obtained the cash and chips through an unlawful search and seizure, hadn’t informed the men of the charges against them and had detained them illegally.

“It’s my money. I didn’t rob anybody to get it, but let the police sweat it out,” Ellsworth told a newspaper reporter before disappearing (Reno Evening Gazette, July 11, 1955). He said he’d earned the money by selling magazine subscriptions and had saved it, over many years.

Wilson was released a few days later on $3,000 bail.

Way Beyond Robbery

The freedom of the duo was short-lived, however, as they were rearrested, Wilson in Las Vegas, Ellsworth in Omaha, Neb., on Tuesday, July 12 after the sequencing of the bills in their possession were matched to those owned by a 73-year-old widow in Philadelphia, Pa., Lulubel Rossman. Both suspects were extradited to The City of Brotherly Love.

Three days before Ellsworth and Wilson appeared in Las Vegas, Rossman had been bound, gagged, strangled and robbed of about $90,000, in $100 bills, that she’d kept in a safety deposit box in her home, a Hotel Adelphia suite.

Self-Gained Reprieve

Wilson went to trial first. A jury convicted him of first degree murder in May 1956, for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

With 19 years of time served, at the Huntingdon State Correctional Institution in Pa., he escaped from a farm work detail on June 12, 1975.

Subsequently, he created a life for himself in nearby Pottstown, Pa., where he remarried and quietly resided less than a block’s distance from the local police station.

After a decade of hiding in plain sight, though, officers found Wilson. They arrested him in his yard and returned him to Huntingdon.

Blood On His Hands

Ellsworth, on the other hand, had three trials, in each of which jurors convicted him of first degree murder and chose his punishment as life in prison over the death penalty. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned the first two decisions, however, and granted him new trials.

During the first, it came out, through the testimony of a jailhouse snitch, that Ellsworth, not Wilson, murdered Rossman, though Wilson was present when it happened. When being held in the Las Vegas jail for extradition to Philadelphia, Wilson told a man in his cell that the two robbers hadn’t had to kill Rossman but that Ellsworth had gotten “rambunctious.” The snitch testified at the trials of both defendants.

The verdict that stood finally came in November 1966, 11 years after the crime.

Photo from freeimages.com: “Free Gamble” by Lisa Kong

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Bones Remmer

An unpleasant, self-described “big gun,” Elmer “Bones” F. Remmer was “once one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s flashiest and most successful gambling czars,” having owned numerous clubs in which he offered illegal games of chance, noted the Oakland Tribune (June 12, 1963). Before solely working in Northern California, Remmer worked in Northern Nevada for the Wingfield syndicate, the local Mobsters who then controlled gambling there.

He likely is most associated with his Menlo Club in San Francisco, which he operated during the 1940s, and the Cal-Neva Lodge at Lake Tahoe in Crystal Bay, Nevada, which he ran in the 1930s in association with the Wingfield Syndicate. He also owned, during the 1940s, the 21 Club in El Cerrito, the Oaks Club in Emeryville, and the 110 Eddy and B&R Smokeshop in San Francisco — all in California.

Here are 10 true tidbits about Remmer:

1) He was shafted by “It Girl,” actress Clara Bow in September 1930, when she stopped payment on three checks totaling $13,900 (about $198,000 today), which were meant to cover the gambling debt she’d racked up at the Cal-Neva Lodge. (This was even after he’d gifted her with a bottle of whiskey when she’d arrived at the property.)

2) His wife divorced him the following month on grounds of physical and other cruelty. She claimed she’d given Remmer $15,000 ($220,000 today) to buy into the Cal-Neva Lodge and quoted him as telling her, “I got so much publicity out of Clara Bow’s bum checks that now I know everyone and am hobnobbing with the elite. You’re no help to me now — just a detriment.” In the divorce settlement, Remmer had to pay her $15,000 ($270,000 today) in cash and $150 ($2,700 today) per month as alimony.

3) Remmer freely paid off state and local politicians to ignore his illegal gambling operations in the Golden State’s Bay Area. For one, he donated $170,000 ($1.9 million today) in campaign contributions to California Attorney General Frederick “Fred” N. Howser.

4) He was arrested and charged with intoxication, along with three others, following a drunken fight in the Encore bar-restaurant in West Hollywood one early morning in December 1950. The other brawlers were Edmund M. Scribner, a Bakersfield gambler who’d worked for Remmer before; Thomas J. Whalen, St. Louis gambler, and his companion, actress Vici Raaf.

5) While in police custody following the melee, he was served by federal agents with a subpoena, which he’d been dodging, to testify at the upcoming Kefauver Committee hearing. During the hearing in 1951, Remmer couldn’t be found, as he allegedly was waiting it out in Mexico, and never testified. One that threat was gone, he returned to Northern California.

6) Remmer went to trial twice, in 1948 and 1949, in San Francisco for operating illegal gambling houses and using business fronts to do so. Both cases ended in hung juries.

7) Jury tampering was alleged during Remmer’s first tax evasion trial in 1951-1952. An outsider, who claimed to know Remmer, approached and suggested to one of the jurors he make a deal with Remmer, insinuating Remmer would pay for a vote in his favor. The juror refused and notified the judge. The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated but concluded nothing untoward had occurred. Ultimately, on appeal, the conviction of Remmer stood, and no charges against the reported interloper were pursued.

8) He was found guilty of federal tax evasion in 1952, but the appeals court ordered a retrial because of the alleged jury tampering. Tried again in 1958, he was found guilty a second time, and the higher court upheld the decision. He was sentenced to a $20,000 fine (about $185,000 today) and five years in prison. He served 2.5 of those, at the Federal Correctional Institution, Terminal Island in San Pedro, California, getting paroled in 1961.

9) He had money problems later in life. Before prison, Remmer paid the requisite pieces of casino income to various mob bigwigs, including Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, New York mobster; Johnny Rosselli, member of the Chicago Outfit; and Jimmy Lanza, head of the San Francisco crime family. Remmer also freely gave money to various local and state politicians. After paying the Internal Revenue Service his tax arrears of $63,000 (about $530,000 today), finances were tight. After prison, he sold cars, until his death four years later, for his brother William Remmer, who co-owned a lot in Oakland, California.

10) Nicknamed “Bones” as a joke because of his fluctuating, 225- to 300-pound size, he is said to have struggled, all of his adult life at least, with an endocrine disorder. Remmer passed away after “undergoing treatment following surgery for a glandular ailment” at age 65 in 1963 (San Mateo Times, June 12, 1963).

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1975

When a notorious American stayed at the Hyatt Lake Tahoe, it was three months after Hyatt Hotels Corp. acquired the resort and a time when Nevada wanted to portray a clean gambling industry.

The infamous guest was Carmine “Lilo/The Cigar” Galante, boss of the Brooklyn, New York-based Bonanno crime family and, according to the U.S. Justice Department, then one of the country’s highest-ranked organized crime figures.

Mob Troubles

The 63 year old was on parole but allowed to travel. He’d been released from the U.S. Penitentiary, Lewisburg* in Pennsylvania 1.8 years earlier after serving 14 years of a 20-year sentence for a narcotics conspiracy conviction. Indeed, Galante had been responsible for trafficking heroin between the Bonanno family and the Giuseppe “Joe” Cotroni crime family in Montreal, Québec, Canada. 

Also at the time of his 1975 Lake Tahoe trip, Galante was “involved in a power struggle with Carlo Gambino, a New York crime boss, for the position of capo cli tutti capo — boss of all bosses in organized crime’s national high commission,” reported the Reno Evening Gazette (Aug. 18, 1975). As such, some law enforcement officials believed the true purpose of his West Coast excursion was to hold a summit with other underworld members.

Kept In Sight

Despite his criminal involvement, status and history, Nevada’s gambling regulators couldn’t kick Galante out of the Hyatt’s casino. Only those listed in their Black Book could be; it contained the names of personas non gratas in the state’s gambling houses.

Galante, however, could be watched, and watched he was. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Washoe County Sheriff’s Organized Crime Unit and others tracked his every move.

“Galante’s arrival in Nevada comes at a time when state and casino officials are stressing the crime-free aspects of Nevada gaming to members of the National Gambling Commission,” the Nevada State Journal (NSJ) reported.

The capo arrived in The Silver State looking like a “paunchy, retired janitor,” wearing a blue T-shirt, brown windbreaker and straw porkpie hat and “twisting, chewing and puffing on the legendary cigar which danced between his teeth below the gold wire-rimmed glasses which stayed halfway down his nose,” described the Nevada State Journal (Aug. 19, 1975).

After Galante checked in to the Hyatt Lake Tahoe in Incline Village, Tom Benham of the local organized crime unit, informed him that he and his activities would be scrutinized during his time in Nevada. “We want you to leave here as healthy as when you arrived,” Benham told him, according to the NSJ. Galante responded, “Thank you. I appreciate that very much.”

Benign Agenda

During his stay, from Monday to Saturday, Aug. 18 to 23, Galante, along with his three female traveling companions aged 35, 45 and 50, merely acted the tourist. The group went to the usual Lake Tahoe attractions, including the Ponderosa Ranch, the Incline Village Golf Course and the various casinos. They ate at several area restaurants and attended a couple of dinner shows.

Before Lake Tahoe

To start their adventure, the quartet had flown from New York to Los Angeles. There rented a car, a white Ford LTD, which then they’d driven to San Francisco. After staying the night there, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, they’d made their way to Truckee, where they’d slept at the Gateway Motel. The next day, they’d continued on to Nevada and the Hyatt Lake Tahoe.

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* While at Lewisburg, Galante was housed in cell block G, or “Mafia Row,” with James “Jimmy” Hoffa; Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano, member of New York’s Genovese crime family; and Vincent “Vinnie The Fat Man” Teresa, a former high figure in New Jersey’s Raymond Patriarca crime family.

Sources

Allen Smiley

Allen Smiley “was one of the most powerful gangsters in [California],” wrote author Gerald Horne in Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950. He was Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel’s partner and best friend and subsequently, Johnny Rosselli’s* right-hand man.

Somewhat in the shadow of these famed men and a private person, his story is less well known. So It Really Happened! unearthed these 10 interesting snippets about him:

1) Allen Smiley, né Aaron Smehoff and also known as Abraham Smickoff, dropped out of school in Canada at age 12 and three years later, entered the United States alone, through Detroit. Born to Orthodox Jewish parents in in Kiev, Ukraine in 1907, he and his family had immigrated to the Great White North when he was seven.

2) Smiley was involved in gambling in various ways in several states. With Siegel, he operated the Transamerica Wire Service, which provided race information from the California tracks, and he helped Siegel get the Flamingo hotel-casino built in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Smiley organized gambling junkets at various locales, including the Garden of Allah in West Hollywood, California; The Knickerbocker in New York, New York; the Argyle Hotel in San Antonio, Texas; the Colony Club in Gardena, California; and the Rex gambling ship, off of the Southern California coast.

He was the ambassador of gambling relations, essentially a recruiter of high-rollers, for the Beverly Country Club in New Orleans, La.

As a player, he loved betting on and watching horse racing. “The race was the one clandestine addiction he couldn’t conceal,” wrote his daughter Luellen Smiley in her memoir Cradle of Crime.

3) Throughout his life, Smiley racked up numerous arrests, for bookmaking, running a wire service, transporting gambling cheating equipment, assault, suspicion of murder, robbery, extortion, operating without a liquor license, contempt of court and other crimes.

4) After Siegel’s murder in 1947, Smiley needed legitimate employment, as he faced possible deportation, having been indicted for falsely writing on an arrest form he was an American citizen. He asked Mob accountant Meyer Lansky if he could get back his $30,000 ($319,000 today) investment in the Flamingo, and Lansky consented. Smiley then invested the money in Texas oil exploration.

5) In 1949, at the Little Chapel in Las Vegas, he married Lucille Casey, a John Robert Powers agency model and a dancer at the Frank Costello-owned Copacabana nightclub in New York City. (The two divorced in 1962.)

6) After being convicted of falsely claiming citizenship, Smiley served nine months of a one-year sentence, from February to November 1951, at the McNeil Island Corrections Center in Washington state. He was paroled early for good behavior.

7) While imprisoned, he testified, somewhat belligerently and in handcuffs, before the Kefauver Committee.

8) Smiley contracted hepatitis B during adulthood. He’d told a confidant that he’d gotten it after being injected with blood from donors suspected of having the virus, at McNeil Island as part of medical research that used prisoners as subjects.** (We couldn’t verify that he’d been one of these test subjects but confirmed that such an experiment was done at that very penitentiary. The purpose was to determine if hepatitis B was or was not a blood-borne disease.)

9) Despite the federal government’s threats to deport Smiley to Canada or the U.S.S.R. upon his release from McNeil Island, Smiley was allowed to stay stateside and eventually become a U.S. citizen, which he did in 1966.

10) He died from hepatitis-induced cirrhosis of the liver. Near his life’s end, he chose to stop the antiviral treatment for hepatitis that he’d been on, knowing that as a result, his liver disease would worsen and cause his demise. He passed away at age 74 or 75 on March 6, 1982.

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* Johnny Rosselli was a Chicago Outfit member charged with ensuring smooth operations in Hollywood and Las Vegas.

** In the experiment, a total of 60 healthy, supposedly volunteer, prisoners at McNeil Island and at the U.S. Penitentiary, Lewisburg were injected. As a result, 27 of them contracted the virus; two at McNeil died not long after.

Sources

An innocent man was placed in law enforcement’s crosshairs in late 1930s Los Angeles for a heinous crime … the frame-up stuck.

George “Les” Bruneman

Caught Unawares

While strolling on Southern California’s Redondo Beach Strand, or boardwalk, with a female employee on a July Monday night after dinner with friends, George “Les” Bruneman, 40, was shot in the back. The bullet, which entered his left shoulder, pierced a lung and entered his abdomen. He survived but spent months in the hospital.

“I’m living on borrowed time,” Bruneman told a detective lieutenant. “I’ve got about six weeks more. They’ll get me the next time. They won’t send the same pair, though. They’ll send experts after me the next time” (Oakland Tribune, Oct. 25, 1937).

Bruneman owned/operated the Surf Club gambling house in Redondo Beach and had many horse racing bookmaking establishments throughout that Los Angeles County beach area.

In Cold Blood

Six weeks after his release from the hospital, on October 25, while drinking with friends in Los Angeles’ Roost Café in the wee hours, Bruneman was executed, sustaining four shots from a distance followed by six more at close range. An innocent bystander, Frank A. Greuzard, ran after the killers, but they fatally gunned him down, too.

Police theorized that Bruneman’s murder was related to a gambling feud of some sort, perhaps even rivals wanting his territory for themselves.

Pete Pianezzi, 1981

Seeking A Suspect

While various persons of interest were questioned and released, an informant led police to Peter “Pete” Attillio Pianezzi, an ex-convict from San Francisco, California with bank robbery charges pending against him. He was arrested for the murders of Bruneman and Greuzard.

Pianezzi went on trial for the killings in February 1940, when he was 38. In court, one of the owners and the bartender of the Roost Café identified him as being the shooter. The prosecutor went for the death penalty, but the jury couldn’t agree on a verdict.

In Pianezzi’s second trial, which ended two months later, the panel of his peers convicted him of first degree murder, and the judge sentenced him to life imprisonment at Folsom State Prison.

Around the same time, he was found guilty on three counts of first degree robbery netting $17,000 in bank holdings. For those, he was given three life sentences. All four periods were to be served concurrently.

Long Overdue Exoneration

Pianezzi served 13 years, getting released in May 1953. For the next several decades, he worked to clear his name with respect to the murders and always maintained his innocence regarding them. He especially wanted his wife Frances to see him cleared, but it didn’t happen by the time she passed away.

“I’ve been pretty upset and depressed,” Pianezzi said. “I wanted her to see it. But even if she’s not around, I’m going to hang in there. I didn’t commit the murders, and that’s it” (Folsom Telegraph, June 26, 1981).

In 1966, California Governor Edmond “Pat” G. Brown, offered Pianezzi a pardon on the grounds that he’d been rehabilitated. He turned it down though because he wanted exoneration based on his innocence.

Fifteen years later, in 1981, Brown’s son, California Governor Gerald “Jerry” Brown pardoned Pianezzi, then age 79 and retired from a job distributing newspapers in Mill Valley.

Moceri on left, Bompensiero

Later Revealed

Roughly four decades after Bruneman and Greuzard’s murders, the identity of the actual killers and the motive for the crime supposedly came to light. Two hitmen, members of the Los Angeles Mafia — Leonard “Leo/Lips” C. Moceri and Frank Bompensiero — committed the murders, according to Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno, one of their cohorts who became an FBI informant. Jack Dragna, head of that crime family, ordered the hit, he said. (Moceri and Bompensiero had died, by murder, before Pianezzi’s pardon, the former in 1976, the latter in 1977.)

What allegedly led up to the hit on Bruneman was a dispute between him and Johnny Rosselli, whom the Chicago Outfit had dispatched to Los Angeles to protect Nationwide, the only horse racing wire service provided in California at the time. Bruneman had been bootlegging the service. A rumor swirled that Bruneman wanted to take out Rosselli, then a respected member of the Dragna crime family. When Dragna heard it, he acted pre-emptively.

According to Fratianno, Moceri had described to him years earlier how the assassination had gone down and the fallout, concluding with: “Want to hear the payoff? The cops arrested some dago, Pete Pianezzi, and believe it or not, the son of a bitch was convicted and he’s still serving time on that murder rap. It’s a bum beef.”

Sources

Photo of Bruneman: from the Oakland Tribune, Oct. 25, 1937, by the Associated Press
Photo of Pianezzi: from the Arizona Republic, June 25, 1981, by the Associated Press

1934-1938

While doing time at Alcatraz, Alphonse “Scarface” Capone, infamous Chicago organized crime boss heavily involved in gambling, played the banjo and mandola (a large mandolin) in the prison band, The Rock Islanders, a rotating group of musicians who performed for the other inmates every Sunday. He also composed music. 

A few wax versions of banjo-strumming Capone in his cell on The Rock are on display at Madame Tussauds in San Francisco, California.

Photo from freeimages.com: by Dave Gilligan