The Rhythm Boys were all about patterns of sound and movement but in relation to slot machines, not music.

Danny Foster, Johnny Pugh and Robert E. Black made $1,000 (about $11,800 today) from playing the slots for a few hours at the Club Cal Neva in Reno, Nevada in late 1950. Casino management asked them to leave. They did.

Sometime after, they were making money off of the El Cortez Hotel’s slots. During that spree, two Reno policemen approached and ordered them to leave the city by the next night or there’d be “blood on the streets,” Foster later reported to the press (Reno Evening Gazette, Oct. 31, 1951). In their threat, the officers referenced the trio’s continued, local slot playing. The Rhythm Boys moved on, to Lewiston, Idaho.

Trail Of Winnings

Wherever the Rhythm Boys played slots, they won. They used a method for beating the machines that tipped the odds heavily in their favor, boosting slot payoffs by more than 10 percent, reportedly. Morrie Brodsky, manager at the Club Cal Neva, told news reporters he estimated that each of the Rhythm Boys had hit a jackpot once in every 15 plays in his casino.

More distressing to slot operators was that the rhythm method was legal. That fact made them “physically ill,” wrote The Lighter Touch columnist Frank Johnson (Nevada State Journal, May 4, 1958).

“Even today the mere mention of [Rhythm Boys] sends a chill through the gambling fraternity,” Johnson added. “It was that bad.”

Tricks Of The Trade

The Rhythm Boys were nicknamed after their technique. It involved first determining a slot machine’s timing cycle, by the sound the device’s air governor made. Next was repeatedly pulling the slot handle according to a certain rhythm, letting a specific amount of time pass between yanks. Doing so interfered with the timing, slowing it down or speeding it up, such that the reels then “literally floated,” Johnson wrote.

He explained that proficient rhythm players could land the first and third reels in the position they wanted them in and hold them there. Then they could wait for the middle reel to spin to the needed position for a winning row and once there, stop it.

“It’s in the way they pull the handle of the slot. You get it going with a rhythm to it, the right rhythm. And it’ll jackpot for you every time,” columnist Stan Delaplane wrote, quoting a blackjack dealer at Reno’s Circle RB Lodge (Reno Evening Gazette, Feb. 27, 1960).

Attention Mounts

Once in Lewiston, two of the Rhythm Boys, Pugh and Foster, enticed the local news reporters to watch them play by betting they could land several $2 jackpots and spend less than $50 in doing so.

Successful, the duo collected $210 ($2,300 today) in 45 minutes’ time, having fed the machine only $20.

That afternoon, Foster and Pugh entered the 600 Club in Lewiston, and the proprietor turned his slot machines so their front faced the wall.

In October 1951, despite many slot operators urging them to stop playing slots in Lewiston, the Rhythm Boys announced they planned to stay in Idaho for years and make a career out of cleaning up on the gambling machines.

Even Classes On It

The rhythm method had been around since before the Boys drew widespread attention to it. Reportedly, it originated in Las Vegas, Nevada, even was taught there, then expanded.  

Johnson explained in his May 4, 1958 column. “One of the first institutions of higher learning in Las Vegas was a special college for rhythm players conducted by the man who developed the system.  It was no cheap diploma mill. The cost was $500 plus expenses for two weeks of concentrated instruction. Probably there were no more than 30 or 40 graduates during the time the school was in existence, but they were enough to endanger the whole slot machine industry.”

An affiliated school was located in Idaho.

Rhythm Is Gonna Get You

The great publicity surrounding the three slots stars and their method, which the Rhythm Boys invited, was their undoing.

“The thing that really hurt was the fact the rhythm boys were so obvious,” Johnson wrote. “Other casino patrons seemed to catch on wherever they played. Pretty soon jackpots would begin falling all around the section where the rhythm expert was in.”

No longer able to play publicly, the trio sought to capitalize on their system by selling it, outlined in a booklet titled How We Beat The Slots, for $2 a pop. In the publication, they Rhythm Boys noted that “publicity barred us from playing in some clubs and made us unwelcome in others.”

To start, in early 1952, the rhythm method kings sent an estimated 30,000 letters to residents of Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho in which they offered their treatise for sale.

End Of The Road

Eventually, savvy slot machine mechanics learned through the rhythm method course or the grapevine about this shortcoming of slot machines and sought to eradicate it. (Bud Garaventa, the foreman of Harrah’s Club’s slot machine repair shop, was one who attended the class, according to Johnson.)

The solution was a mechanism added to the inside of a slot machine. Described as windmill like, it spun when the slot handle was pulled and dictated how long each reel would spin. It prevented the floating of any and all reels but didn’t change the game’s odds.

“This [development] was at least six or seven years ago, and since then [the industry] has seen a rare slot machine not so equipped,” Johnson wrote in 1961 (Nevada State Journal, Dec. 27).

Sources

1934

A man named Hans Brucksmer played about $15 worth of nickels (about $300 today) in a slot machine at a place of business in Seattle, Washington and got only four coins back. He lifted the machine and took it to the local police station.

There, holding the device under one arm, he filled out a complaint form, claiming the machine had cheated him! (It’s unknown what he thought the machine’s purpose was.) Of course, no recourse was given to Brucksmer as his claim was meritless.

What did happen, though, was the police arrested and jailed the owner of the establishment for possessing illegal gambling paraphernalia.

Source: Reno Evening Gazette (Nev.), “Loses Nickels So He Complains Against Machine,” April 6, 1934.

1936

A single penny got Los Angeles store owner Ethel Jamison convicted.

One day at her shop, Police Officer James Mulligan placed a penny in the slot machine, pulled the lever, received a penny premium and cashed it with her.

He arrested her, as slot machines were illegal in California, and the case went to trial. The jury found her guilty of possessing a gambling device. She was punished with a 30-day suspended jail sentence.

Source: Reno Evening Gazette (Nev.), “Transaction of Lonely Cent Gets Woman Jail Sentence,” Oct. 17, 1936.

Irene Kite

1937-1939

In 1937, an Alton, Illinois woman took on the local gambling-Mobsters and the political machine … with an axe.

Motivating Factors

In Irene Kite‘s county of Madison, gambling was illegal, yet law enforcement and local government allowed certain establishments offering games of chance to operate openly. Her husband Carl’s card club had been one of them until the powers that be, at the behest of the area’s crime syndicate, refused him permission to operate in April 1937 after 15 years in business. This left the Kites without an income.

The majority of approved gaming enterprises were ones run by Mobsters, and they sought to get all independently owned places closed down.

The Syndicate heads in Madison County were: Harry Murdock, Harry Price, Paul Delaney and Cliff Phayer.

“With the exception of a few cities in Madison County, the syndicate had its grip everywhere — Granite City and Wood River being the chief places where the syndicate was barred. Alton, Edwardsville, East Alton, Venice, Madison, Collinsville and some of the smaller places were dominated in their politics, as well as their slot machine business, by one or the other of the divisions of gamblers who were plundering the people of the county,” reported the Alton Evening Telegraph (Nov. 2, 1938).

The article highlighted that the Mobsters’ slots were rigged to rarely pay out and when they did, amounts were small.

Her Killing Spree

On a Saturday afternoon in late December of the same year, Kite contacted a local newspaperman and informed him what she planned to do that night and why.

Later, she went from gambling club to gambling club in Alton, once inside apologized for the disruption and slayed as many syndicate-owned slot machines as she could. Familiar with the devices’ inner workings, she disabled each one with two targeted blows.

Kite maimed 14 slots in 7 bars before police arrested her.

Irene Kite, with axe, in action.

She did it “because that’s the only way I can get at those who allow one man to operate a gambling resort and won’t let the next man,” and she’d intended to embarrass the slot owners, she’d told the reporter (Alton Evening Telegraph, Dec. 20, 1937).

Kite emphasized she’d axe the slots again and again if she thought she had to.

“I’ve got a lot of axes — about a dozen of them — and I’m not going to quit until every slot is out of the city,” she said (Nevada State Journal, Feb. 15, 1938).Kite also had informed the newspaperman that in Alton numerous syndicate-operated gambling places already should’ve been closed but hadn’t been because no officer would serve the warrants. She’d estimated that about 14 of these warrants, all legitimate and signed by a judge, were on file; the reporter looked into the matter and confirmed the total to be 17.

Success And Fame

After spending a few hours in jail that Saturday night, Kite was released. No charges were brought against her for her destructive rampage.

What it did get her was results. Alton’s Chief of Police Paul Smith ordered that all gambling in the city be stopped. And it was … at least for the time being.

“It is true that the slot machines are now in storage,” the Alton Evening Telegraph reported (Nov. 2, 1938), but the gambling syndicate hope, only until after election (on Nov. 8) when the prediction is made, if everything goes right, they will be out and in full operation again.”

Kite also garnered widespread fame. People and groups — the Alton Ministerial Association and the League of Women Voters, for example — admired and supported her. Eventually, the notoriety led to her and her story being featured, in March 1939, in Actual Detective Stories of Women in Crime, a hard-boiled pulp publication.

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Sources

1907-1945

Wanting to kick off 2021 with a positive blog post and being inspired by the $15.5 million jackpot win on Christmas Eve at Las Vegas’ Suncoast Hotel and Casino, we sought to present you with a list of early jackpot winners in Nevada. Our research, however, turned up more reports of slot machine robberies than legitimate payouts, so instead, here’s a roundup of jackpot-related anecdotes from Reno.

Ten-O-Win wheel of fortune

Lady Luck Is By Their Side

At the Granada Theater in Reno, the Ten-O-Win jackpot paid off three times one May 1938 evening, for a total of several hundred dollars. One of the winners was a University of Nevada student, George Folsom.

“Boy, that’ll put me through college next year,” he said (Nevada State Journal, May 7, 1938).

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In May 1937, a man named Pinky Barnes won the “Bank Night” jackpot of $250 ($4,500 today) at The Cedars in Reno. The club recently was revamped to be “thoroughly westernized,” whatever that meant exactly, and assumed the motto, “Ride a Horse” (Nevada State Journal, May 8, 1937).

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A slot machine at a club on Reno’s Center Street had the complete attention of two Klamath Falls, Oregon residents, Vernon Coy, 22, and Thomas Cave, 28, one early morning in October 1940. After intently feeding it half-dollars for some time, they hit the jackpot at about 3 a.m.

Instead of walking away with the payout, though, the two were carted off to jail because the coin that led to the win was counterfeit.

During a search, police officers found more than 90 counterfeit 50-cent pieces on them and many more sewn into the lining of their car. The two admitted to having made the fake coins back home, using plaster of Paris molds and Babbitt metal. They said they’d spent about 35 of them in Sparks and Reno, they said, buying supplies and playing the slots. While doing so, they added, they’d hit yet another jackpot, that one $42 ($780).

A federal grand jury indicted Coy and Cave on charges of counterfeiting, to which both men pleaded guilty. Ultimately, a judge sentenced them to time in a federal prison (then called a reformatory): 16 months for Coy and 18 months for Cave.

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“Too Much Of A Temptation”

In 1932, Reno police officers confiscated from a store a slot machine with a stuffed jackpot when they discovered the owner had been allowing young boys to play it.

“A slot machine jackpot brimming over with nickels was too much of a temptation for the Reno police officers at the city hall this morning and many times the wheels went ’round as the guardians of law and order sought to win the prize,” reported the Reno Evening Gazette (March 16, 1932).

The officers tried to win the jackpot but ran out of coins. They turned the machine around to face the wall.

As for the shop proprietor, he forfeited his $250 ($4,700 today) bail to avoid jail time.

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Mills silent jackpot bell slot machine, 1931

Unscrupulous Thievery

A 25-cent slot machine in the Barrel House on Reno’s Center Street was known for its big jackpots. On a summer night in 1907, a patron decided it was going to be his … the easy way. He punched and broke the plastic behind which sat the visible jackpot coins, grabbed the money and hotfooted it out of there.

When the elderly gambling-saloon’s man in charge realized what happened, he went after the bandit but tripped on a cigar butt, fell and rolled into a spittoon.

“By the time he could extricate himself from his reclining and embarrassing position, the thief had gone,” reported the Reno Evening Gazette (Aug. 14, 1907).

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Burglars smashed the window of a door to gain entry into Reno’s Wolf Den on Ninth Street on a Tuesday night in July 1945. Once inside, they busted a slot machine’s jackpot glass and pilfered the $4 ($58) there. They also swiped the money from the cash register … sans the pennies.

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After a slot machine in Bar of Music in Reno was molested in September 1943, owner Murray Brody placed this unusual ad in the Nevada State Journal’s “Personals” section:

(Today’s value of the $125 payout is about $1,900.)

Sources

One Carlin, Nevada business owner learned the hard way that the state didn’t tolerate gambling operators cheating the players. 

Gino Quilici just had been granted a gambling license in August 1952 for the State Inn, in the small city about 270 miles northeast of Reno. Only three months later, the Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB)* found on the premises two illegal, “plugged,” three-reel, mechanical slot machines.

A $1 machine, sitting in the bar area, contained a percentage changer, or “jumper,” on the center reel, which prevented the three reels from showing a jackpot. A $0.50 machine in the café had a jumper on the right reel, preventing a jackpot and three other payoffs.

Quilici, who’d emigrated from Italy to the U.S. at age 15 in 1914, had owned the State Inn as well as the State Hotel, also in Carlin, since 1947. He’d held a gambling license for the hotel since 1950. His criminal record contained one conviction, for violating Prohibition in 1925 and for which he’d served 30 days in jail.

Made To Answer

At the hearing before the Nevada Tax Commission concerning the rigged slot machines in February 1953, Quilici testified that he’d bought the ones in question from someone in another state and hadn’t known they’d been tampered with.

The tax commissioners suspended Quilici’s gambling license for the State Inn for 15 days. This meant that for that period he had to turn around and keep his slot machines facing the wall. Presumably, Quilici complied. He was warned that next time the penalty would be more serious.

Events at that meeting set a precedent for how Nevada’s gambling regulators would, from that point on, deal with rigged slot machines cases. They’d impose a short suspension for first and minor offenses and longer suspensions or license revocation for second or large offenses. Previously, the agency had turned over the matter to local law authorities. In those instances, the cases oftentimes were dropped because prosecutors couldn’t prove the operators knew their slots were cheating customers.

Lesson Not Learned

Quilici tested the commission’s new policy six years later when NGCB agents again discovered a problematic slot at the licensee’s State Inn in April 1958. This time it was a $0.25 machine with a plug on the center reel, which kept a certain symbol from showing.

In this second incident, Quilici didn’t get off so easily; he was arrested. The machine was confiscated for possible use as evidence in court, if the case wound up there.

In fact, it did. Quilici stood trial in October. Again, he claimed ignorance. In less than 30 minutes, the jury found him guilty of allowing operation of a plugged slot at the State Inn. The judge fined him $1,000 (about $9,000 today).

The next month he had to answer to gambling regulators for this violation of the state gambling law. During that proceeding, Quilici resorted to the same defense. The tax commissioners revoked his gambling license for both the State Inn and State Hotel.

Tough, Economic Consequences

A gambling license revocation wasn’t for life in many cases, so a once-licensee could reapply for another one. Quilici requested a new license about seven months later, for eight slot machines at the State Inn and another eight slots at the State Hotel. The tax commission refused to grant him one due to his conviction on a gambling charge.

A month later, Quilici applied for a license for table games at the Star Hotel and Bar in Winnemucca, another of his properties.

“The application was deferred because the present operation did not indicate that he could handle another one,” it was recorded in the August 1959 NGCB meeting minutes.

In yet another effort, Quilici applied for the 16 slots total for his café and hotel, and in December, he, with his attorney, argued his case before the NGCB. Quilici stated he’d studied up on slot machines and now knew enough to determine whether or not they’ve been doctored.

“I won’t trust anybody but myself,” he said (Reno Evening Gazette, Dec. 2, 1959).

The board indicated it needed additional time to research and consider his case and, thus, deferred action on the repeat offender’s application.

Subsequently, in January 1960, on the NGCB’s advice, the tax commission refused Quilici a new gambling license on the basis of his previous license suspension and revocation.

A Different Tack

In July, instead of Quilici, Elijah I. Puett, owner of Puett Appliance Co. and a lifelong Carlin resident, applied for a gambling license for eight slot machines at the State Inn. The two businessmen had come to an arrangement wherein, in part, Puett would lease the machines from Quilici for $12.50 ($110) apiece each month, and Quilici’s employees would service them. It’s probable that Quilici also was to get a percentage of the earnings from the slots.

The commissioners denied Puett’s application with no prejudice to him, a man the NGCB agents found to be “of good character” (Meeting Minutes, January 1960), and cited Regulation 3.020, Section 1, as the reason.

That rule read, “The commission or the board may deem that premises are unsuitable for the conduct of gaming operations by reason of ownership of any interest whatsoever in such premises by a person who is unqualified or disqualified to hold a gaming license, regardless of the qualifications of the person who seeks or holds a license to operate gaming in or upon such premises.“

When it came to getting a new gambling license, like the people who’d played his plugged slots, Quilici wouldn’t hit a jackpot.

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* Formed in 1955, the Nevada Gaming Control Board served as the investigative team for the Nevada Tax Commission, which originally handled gambling licenses. In 1959, when the Nevada Gaming Commission was formed, it took over that responsibility from the tax commission.

Sources

One Thunder Buck, Thunderbird, Las Vegas, NV

1965-1966

When Nevada’s casinos switched the form of currency accepted in their $1 slot machines to a token from the nearly extinct silver coin in 1965, it had an unexpected result. People around the world wanted to collect the new pseudo-money.

Since the change went into effect following U.S. Treasury and Silver State approval in July 1965, “countless thousands of the tokens have been taken out of circulation,” reported the Las Vegas Sun in May 1966. “One Las Vegas casino executive said the inventory of the first order was depleted by 20,000 tokens so fast that a reorder was placed immediately.”

A Look At The Numbers

By Nevada regulation, all gambling houses had to have their own dollar token design, and they opted to change it, in some way, annually. For the first two years at least, only The Franklin Mint in Pennsylvania, owned and operated by the Numismatics Corporation, designed and manufactured The Silver State’s dollar tokens. Master sculptor-engraver Gilroy Roberts, responsible for the appearance of the Kennedy half-dollar for one, created the look of most, if not all, of them.

In 1965, the first year, 28 Nevada casinos, located in Lake Tahoe, Reno, Carson City, Las Vegas, North Las Vegas and Boulder City, purchased customized dollar tokens. These were either in a gold or silver color, depending on their preference. 

For collectors, the mint produced “proof-like” sets of all 28, meaning the tokens were made out of metals other than silver. The silver-hued tokens consisted of what the mint called Franklinium II, a copper-nickel-niobium alloy with some added columbium and strengthening metals. The gold-toned tokens were made out of Franklin nickel-brass. Proof-like sets in 1965 cost about $125 ($1,000 today).

Rio Suite Hotel & Casino, Las Vegas, NV Dollar Token

Also, the gambling tokens were sold individually, by coin collectors, for about $2.50 apiece ($20 today).

The Franklin Mint manufactured “proof” sets, too, comprised of pure silver coins, which were individually fed to and produced on a 360-ton press. Proof sets went for roughly $425 in 1965 ($3,500 today).

By February 1966, about 1.5 million dollar tokens were in use in the state, said Edward A. Olsen, chairman of its Gaming Control Board. By May, the number of Nevada gambling clubs using them was up to 46 and further spread geographically to include Sparks, Virginia City, Fallon, Beatty and Henderson. By year-end, the total was 72.

Because the Franklin Mint didn’t sell directly to the public, anyone who wanted a proof-like set had to purchase one from a dealer, paying a fee to do so, or visit every casino that used dollar tokens and collect the pieces in person, one by one. Proof sets only were available through a broker.*

Gambling Clubs Benefit

With every dollar token that patrons took home, the casino made money.

The gaming clubs paid the mint between 15 and 50 cents per token, depending on the quantity ordered, then sold them to guests for $1 apiece. Thus, any unredeemed token garnered the casinos between $0.50 and $0.85 each, and the margin added up. In the case of the Las Vegas club with 20,000 missing tokens, it amounted to $10,000 to $17,000 ($83,000 to $140,000 today).

“Thousands of [the dollar tokens] are being taken home by souvenir-conscious tourists,” Olsen said (Reno Evening Gazette, Feb. 10, 1966).

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* Today, on eBay, a 1965 proof-like set of the original 28 Nevada casino dollar tokens, pre-owned, sells for about $400; a pre-owned set from 1966 of the 72 of them goes for around $575.

Sources