1935

Although it was a Ponzi scheme, its lure of big money was too strong for many Renoites to resist. One chain letter business, the Opportunity Club, popped up overnight as part of the nationwide craze in 1935. In five days, it garnered more than 5,000 participants (about one-quarter of Reno, Nevada’s population then).

“The business has been well organized and every section of the town has been invaded with ‘investors’ seeking to attract their friends into a ‘sure thing,’” reported the Nevada State Journal (May 15, 1935).

How did it work? A customer bought two copies of a letter from a broker for $5 (an $86 value today). He then sold them to two people who signed for and received two more letters from the broker. Each of those two sold their letters to two other individuals and so on. Each letter contained six names. The payout for the top name getting 64 people to buy each of his two letters was $256 ($4,400 today). That amount was $320 minus the per-letter 20 percent broker fee of $32. One name moving to the top of a letter would put $12,288 in the company’s coffers.

While it sounded enticing for the public, it wasn’t. The deal depended on an individual getting 128 (64 per letter) people to pay the $5 apiece at the broker’s office. That would move him up one spot on each letter. The payout also required 128 people for each of the other five names on the letter, or 640 individuals, also paid $5 apiece in person Further, an individual couldn’t get the reward until he advanced to the top of two letters.

The Weak Link

When District Attorney Ernest Brown learned of the racket, he demanded the Opportunity Club cease operations immediately and threatened its manager, Ralph C. Perrin, and other principals with prosecution if they didn’t comply. Brown declared such a business fraudulent because it involved an element of chance and, therefore, violated Nevada’s anti-lottery law, in which it defined:

“A lottery is any scheme for the disposal or distribution of property, by chance, among persons who have paid or promised to pay any valuable consideration for the chance of obtaining such property, or a portion of it, or for any share or any interest in such property upon any agreement, understanding, or expectation that it is to be distributed or disposed of by lot or chance, whether called a lottery, raffle or gift enterprise, or by whatever name may be known.”

The following morning, Perrin applied for a gambling license. That night, the sheriff noted a sign on the club’s door, “Operating with Permission of the Sheriff” — a false statement. On the D.A.’s orders, the sheriff closed the club and arrested Perrin and three others. All were arraigned and released on their own recognizance pending an upcoming jury trial.

A second chain letter brokerage — the Golden Chain Letter Club — was about to open but given the heat on Opportunity never did.

Perrin asserted the chain letter business:

• Wasn’t a lottery as chance didn’t play a role
• Didn’t have the chance of any investor losing (ha!)
• Didn’t involve a drawing

If the business were a lottery, they argued, then so were other types of currently licensed games, such as roulette, keno, 21, horse racing, etc.

They gathered petition signatures of people who believed similarly. Perrin claimed to have received 1,500 signatures from less than one day’s effort. In the meantime, many who’d bought letters asked the D.A.’s office what would happen. Would officials ensure the investors got what the broker promised them? Would they lose their money? At that point, it totaled about $25,000, which Perrin said was being held for investors in a trust.

Taken To A Jury

Five days after Brown ordered the club closed and with chain letter activities finally halted, the Opportunity Club trial began. Two days in, Justice of the Peace James Sullivan declared Brown’s complaint against the defendants defective, thus ending the case. Brown said he’d issue a new complaint against the men only if they restarted the business. Opportunity’s lawyer said the men intended to operate if the city granted them a gambling license — a long shot.

Three days later, the city council, also believing the chain letter gig was a lottery, denied Perrin a gambling license. He then tried to obtain one from the neighboring city and his hometown, Sparks. It, too, for the same reason, refused to grant it. That was the final break in Northern Nevada’s chain of chain letter enterprises. It’s unknown what happened to the money investors already had paid to Opportunity.

Photo from pond5.com: “JOIN Chain Links” by 5@iqoncep

Sources

1935

When two United States state governors made a friendly bet, neither knew it would become problematic.

They wagered each other their state would win the upcoming football rivalry between the Minnesota Golden Gophers, a national powerhouse, and the Iowa Hawkeyes, the loser having to award the other a prize hog.

Minnesota beat Iowa, 13 to 6, leaving Governor Clyde Herring to make good on the wager. He set out for St. Paul, accompanied by a 320-pound, thoroughbred porker named “Floyd of Rosedale” in honor of Minnesota Governor Floyd Olson and the pig’s birthplace — Rosedale Farms. (Floyd, the pig, was the brother of “Blue Boy,” an Iowa State Fair grand champion boar and actor in the 1933 Will Rogers film, “State Fair.”)

“I’ll drive the pig into Governor Olson’s office and if the police arrest me for violating an old city ordinance, I’ll get an immediate pardon from my host,” Herring said (Reno Evening Gazette, Nov. 13, 1935).

Herring delivered the bounty to Olson.

“The boar refused to pose for pictures until the executives pulled him from under a desk, slapped his sleek sides and tugged on his ears to steer him into position,” wrote the United Press (Nevada State Journal, Nov. 14, 1935).

Herring In The Crosshairs

The Iowan governor learned a man named Virgil Case had obtained a warrant to be served on Herring upon his return to Des Moines. The document charged the governor with unlawful gambling, a misdemeanor punishable by a fine up to $500 and a prison term of one year. Case was active in the Des Moines Social Justice Club and an editor of the monthly Des Moines Times-Examiner.

“I raise hell with public officials — and governors too — because they should be the first to set an example for others,” he said (Nevada State Journal, Nov. 14, 1935).

The governors found the charges amusing. Herring asked Olson to be his attorney in the matter, as he’d been district attorney of Minneapolis previously. Olson jokingly reassured Herring that if he remained in Minnesota, he’d be safe from extradition.

Back in Des Moines, the assistant county attorney, C. Edwin Moore, filed a motion to have the charges against the governor dismissed and to have Case’s motives for filing the action investigated. Then the publisher of the weekly Des Moines Post News, Ray McAndrews, filed a petition asking that Moore’s motives be investigated as “nothing in the Iowa code book authorized the procedure being followed” (Oelwein Daily Register, Nov. 23, 1935).

About two weeks after the troublesome wager, the court addressed the matter. Judge J.E. Mershon vacated the charges against Olson on the grounds of no jurisdiction as the wager had been consummated in a different county. Mershon ordered that information Case had filed be released and McAndrews’ motion be removed from the records.

In Memoriam Of Floyd

Unfortunately, “Floyd of Rosedale” died from swine fever a few years later. However, a Minnesota artist memorialized him in bronze, and the Iowa and Minnesota teams have wagered that coveted statue every year since.

Sources

1935

Stanford University’s (California) Indians and Southern Methodist University’s (Texas) Mustangs were to vie in the Rose Bowl football game on New Year’s Day, and this meant trains of people traveling from The Lone Star State to Pasadena.

Texas officials warn any gamblers with ideas of operating games of chance on those trains that special agents will be on board to curtail such activities. (The game odds favored the Mustangs, yet the Indians won, 7 to 0.)

Photo from freeimages.com: by J. Hodge

1935

Police discovered John S. Parks, a 67 year old, carrying a loaded Colt 45 automatic on a downtown Reno, Nevada street around midnight on a July Monday.

With blood streaming from his nose and smeared on his face and clothes, Parks refused to say what had caused his injuries.

After taking him to the hospital, they jailed him. He was released the next day on $200 bail until his trial for carrying a concealed weapon.

It then came to light that Parks had engaged in fisticuffs that night with a co-worker, Frank Soares. Both men were dealers in the Colombo Hotel’s gambling club. Witnesses said Parks had hit Soares first after a heated argument, after which Soares, 38 years younger, had bested him. Parks had threatened to kill his adversary.

History Of Violence

The altercation with Soares wasn’t Parks’ first. In 1922, he’d shot a porter at the Overland Hotel in the hallway outside the room in which he’d been staying. Parks, who’d been drinking earlier, had grown angry when he’d asked for a second room key, and William Hubbard had responded that one couldn’t be procured until the next morning. Parks had drawn a revolver and when Hubbard had run, he’d shot twice, hitting him in the neck.

“I am a southerner and hot headed,” Parks had told the arresting officers (Nevada State Journal, July 13, 1922).

Fortunately, Hubbard eventually had recovered.

When the case had gone to trial, the jury members had failed to reach a verdict after more than six hours’ deliberation, so the judge had discharged them. A second trial had ensued, in which jurors had found Parks guilty of assault with a deadly weapon, a lesser charge than the first — assault with intent to kill. He’d served two years in the Nevada State Prison.

Unexpected Outcomes

Eleven days following the scrap between Parks and Soares, the elder gambler died in the hospital from brain injuries caused from a fractured skull. Law enforcement arrested Soares but waited to charge him until an autopsy of Parks could be undertaken to reveal the cause of death.

Ultimately, the coroner determined Parks hadn’t passed away from the wounds he’d sustained from his fight with Soares. Having been cleared of any wrongdoing, the dealer was released.

Sources

1934-1935

Today, 80 years later, the circumstances of actress Thelma Todd’s death remain a mystery, and the case still is one of Hollywood’s infamous unsolveds.

A deep cover-up precluded the truth about the incident from surfacing. On December 16, 1935, the famous, 29-year-old blonde was found dead in her garage, her beaten, slumped body behind the wheel of her brown phaeton. The cause of her death was ruled accidental carbon monoxide poisoning from her car’s engine.

One theory behind the fatal event, however, purported in the book, Hot Toddy, is that the powerful Mafioso, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, had her murdered. He wasn’t just a low-level syndicate soldier. He was a boss, the first official head of the modern Genovese crime family, and made his mark in New York by splitting the city into five such dynasties. Meyer Lansky and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel were associates.

Luciano and Hot Toddy, as friends nicknamed her in her youth, began a casual relationship that evolved into a sexual dalliance by 1934. That year, the actress and her friend and neighbor, Roland West, opened a restaurant called Thelma Todd’s Café.

Exploitive Ulterior Motive

Luciano wanted to lease the top floor of her eatery to run a gambling club there, where he believed the wealthy Hollywood stars who frequented her café would spend lots of money. At the time, only poker and other player-against-player card games and horse race betting were legal in California. He sensed the strong-willed Todd wouldn’t permit it, so he employed devious tactics to get her to comply.

Luciano sent some of his goons to torment and wear down West, who managed the restaurant. They forced him to change vendors to those controlled by the mob and siphoned money from the business. As for Todd, Luciano got her addicted to speed, hoping it would make her submissive and willing to do whatever he wanted.

Over time, Charley Lucifer, as he was sometimes called, realized Todd was not a pushover, and she learned more and more about his underworld dealings. Their relationship deteriorated, and they saw each other less and less. Eventually, Todd started dating a businessman from San Francisco with whom she was infatuated.

Meanwhile, Luciano’s underworld nemesis in town, Frank Nitti, threatened to horn in on his interests — prostitution, gambling and drugs. Already, Nitti had shut him out of his shakedown of the movie industry after agreeing to include him. Consequently, to maintain an empire in Los Angeles, Luciano believed he needed Todd’s café more than ever.

He approached her with his plan. Despite knowing that refusing Luciano of anything could, and likely would, get her killed, she said no. For that, he saw her as a problem. He tried to persuade her to change her mind by other means, like having menacing men sit in the restaurant all day every day. Around Thanksgiving in 1935, he again pressured her face to face, to no avail.

“Toddy later told friends Luciano had wrangled with her all night about giving him the storage room for gambling,” wrote Andy Edmonds, the author of Hot Toddy. “He was insistent and vowed he would not walk away without the papers. They had argued violently in the car, Thelma refusing to give Luciano what he wanted.”

Luciano informed her that as of January 1, 1936, he’d be operating a gambling club on the third floor of her restaurant despite her protests.

Todd, though, remained resolute in her refusal to allow it. To thwart his plan, she turned the space into a steakhouse and opened it before he could move in.

The Slippery Slope

In early December, she called the Los Angeles district attorney’s office to relay what she knew about Luciano’s underhanded dealings and connections to other mobsters. She didn’t tell the person who’d answered the phone what her business was, only that she wanted an appointment to speak to the D.A. Little did she know that he was under Luciano’s control and that Luciano had an informant in the office.

In mid-December, Luciano insisted she go to dinner with him. She said no, but he forced her to join him. He took her to a secluded home where he grilled her about her knowledge of his “business” and what she’d told the D.A.’s office. She tried denying she knew anything, but Luciano knew better, became enraged and slapped her hard.

Todd spilled it all. Then figuring she was as good as dead, she purposefully provoked his fears of getting arrested for past actions and losing his foothold in the City of Angels. She claimed she’d hidden evidence, including photos, of his underworld operations and that she’d snitched on him to the FBI — both of which were bluffs.

Irate, Luciano made a phone call, in which he supposedly ordered a hit on Todd, drove her to a Christmas tree lot at her request where she picked out a tree then dropped her off at her home around midnight.

In the morning, her maid discovered her dead in the garage. Luciano left Los Angeles later in the day and never returned.

Sources

1935

In 1934, John Petricciani regained use of his Reno, Nevada, property he’d owned for 10 years and first licensed his saloon, the Palace Bar, for roulette and 21 games, one apiece. Prior, he’d leased space in the building to various business owners, including local mobsters, William “Bill” Graham and James McKay, who’d operated their Bank Palace Club on the top floor for three years.

In 1935, the Italian enlarged and remodeled the property, which included a bar, club and café, and added a 32-room hotel. He changed the name to the Palace Club and obtained licenses for eight games — two craps, two faro, two roulette, one 21 and one stud poker — along with six slot machines. The new and improved facilities debuted on June 1, 1935.

Three-and-a-half months later, police arrested Petricciani on a warrant for failing to pay license fees on several gambling devices. He was to stand trial.

When the state legislature broadly legalized gambling in 1931, the law mandated that casino owners or operators obtain a license and pay the fee for each of their gaming tables and slot machines. The required monthly amounts, due quarterly and in advance, were:

• $25 for card games for money
• $10 for slot machines
• $50 for other games

The court postponed Petricciani’s trial four times for various reasons; one was a suddenly announced, once-only state holiday in observance of completion of the Hoover Dam. Finally, in October, he paid the outstanding debt, more than $1,000 ($17,520 in today’s value), much of that being penalties.

City Attorney Douglas Busey capitalized on the occasion to publicly remind all gambling license holders to pay their fees on time.

Sources

1935

Avoiding darkness, they only emerged amid brightness, real or artificial. They congregated outside of every Reno, Nevada gambling club at the beginning of June, pestering the guests as they entered and exited. One night they even went so far as to invade the Palace Club casino.

They, Feltia annexa (Treitschske), or Feltia subterranea, or the granulated cutworm, infested the city by the millions!

Due to a short lifespan, they were expected to die (by natural causes, that is) within a week’s time.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons: Adult Feltia annexa by Donald Hobern