1948

Mickey Cohen (né Meyer Harris Cohen) — violent Los Angeles, California mobster and gambling kingpin with ties to Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel and the Flamingo in Las Vegas, Nevada — suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder that led to him washing his hands 50 to 60 times a day.

In fact, the ritual saved his life in 1948. After shaking hands with stickup man, Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno, who was on his way out of Cohen’s menswear shop called Michael’s Haberdashery, Cohen immediately went to the restroom in the back to wash his hands.

Fratianno signaled the assassin team, headed by his best friend, Michael “The Bomp” Bompensiero, which stormed and shot up the store but failed to hit Cohen who was nowhere in sight.

1949-1953

Only months after Cleveland bar owner, Norman Khoury’s 1949 acquisition of Club Savoy in Las Vegas, Nevada, Allen Smiley, an associate of the then-deceased Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, unexpectedly approached him.

He introduced Khoury to Bob “The Fixer” Smith, who’d been prominent in Vegas’ gambling industry in the 1930s. Subsequently, Smith allegedly purchased a 50 percent interest in the casino from Khoury for $100,000 ($1 million today). However, Smith was broke at the time, a fact perhaps unknown to Khoury. 

The next week at 4 a.m. on Sunday, Smith appeared at the club with 10 men, plopped down $30,000 ($300,000 today) in cash and $1,400 ($14,000 today) of silver and informed the night casino manager, Pete Brady, Smith’s people were to replace Khoury’s dealers immediately, which they did. Khoury, the entity’s primary gambling licensee, wasn’t present. Under usual operating circumstances, with his own manager in charge and his own employees working the casino, he wasn’t required to be there.

Jack Durant, the casino manager at the Flamingo, a rival gaming house, showed about three hours later, flanked by widely known gambling figures. Among them were Smith, Smiley and Louis “Russian Louie” Strauss, who was believed to have murdered a man at a Lake Tahoe hotel-casino in 1947.

Durant played craps, starting with $5 chips and graduating to $500 ones. In 45 minutes, he won $67,000 ($671,000 today) but was paid only $20,000 ($200,000 today) in cash from Smith’s bankroll. Likely over the monetary shortfall, Durant and Brady got into a fist fight, which a bystander broke up.

When Khoury heard of the incident, he refused to pay Durant the remaining $47,000 ($470,000 today) of his “winnings” as he’d learned crooked dice, ones that only throw sixes and eights, had been used during Durant’s play. Because Khoury failed to pay the entire amount, the Las Vegas city commissioners suspended his gambling and liquor licenses, began a search for the crooked dice (which mysteriously went missing) and notified the state tax commission. Khoury was forced to close his establishment.

Khoury “charged that he was the victim of a fast shuffle involving a pair of dice that didn’t belong to the club, and he therefore is not obligated to pay off,” reported Long Beach, California’s Independent (Dec. 23, 1949).

When the city and tax commissioners tried to investigate what’d occurred at Club Savoy, none of the men present during the gambling spree, including Smith and Durant, could be found as they’d skipped town.

Possible Motive

Were these events, beginning with Smiley’s introduction of Smith to Khoury, a double cross by the Flamingo to force Khoury’s Club Savoy out of business?

If so, it worked.

In January of 1950, the tax commission revoked and suspended Khoury’s gambling license for six months for two reasons: 1) He let Smith’s people operate the games when Smith’s name wasn’t on the gambling license. 2) In allowing Smith, about whom he knew nothing, to take over operation of Club Savoy, and due to what ensued, specifically nonpayment of the debt, he generated negative publicity about the club and Nevada, as the story made headlines in numerous publications.

The suspension of Khoury’s gaming license, however, lasted longer than a half-year. When Khoury reopened Club Savoy as a bar in September 1951, the tax commission only allowed him a gambling license for slot machines.

Two years later, in 1953, Khoury closed Club Savoy for good.

What would’ve happened if Khoury had paid Durant the entire $67,000 at the time? Would he have kept his licenses and continued to run Club Savoy interruption free? Would the Flamingo have harmed Khoury and his enterprise some other way?

Sources

1955

When presumed-to-be-wealthy mobster, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, was slain at age 41, the estate he left was worth $35,609 (about $314,550 today).

Before his murder, Siegel co-financed and oversaw completion of the Flamingo hotel-casino in Las Vegas but ran up its development costs by several million and began bouncing checks.

In his earlier days, he was, among others, a bootlegger, hit man, thief and a founder/leader of Murder, Inc., the U.S. Mafia’s enforcement team.

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

Pat McCarran, U.S. Senator for Nevada, 1947

1933-1954

His unfavorable personal opinion about gambling notwithstanding, Patrick “Pat” A. McCarran (D-Nev.) — U.S. Senator between 1933 and 1954 — acted repeatedly on the industry’s behalf. Had he not, it’s likely gaming wouldn’t have emerged as The Silver State’s greatest revenue-producing economic sector — a positive or negative, depending on one’s view.

Because gambling had become vital to Nevada — or “woven … in its various forms into the warp and woof of the state’s economic structure,” in the words of McCarran — he believed he had no choice but to do what he could to keep it thriving. But he felt like a “whore,” he said, defending gamblers (casino owners and operators), whom he considered “tinhorns.”

“In the climactic decision of his long and turbulent career, [McCarran] characteristically chose to justify and defend his beloved Nevada rather than take it into one more battle with poverty and want,” wrote the authors of The Money and The Power.

Inside His Bag Of Tricks

Here are 7 of McCarran’s pro-gambling efforts:

1) He intervened to get underworld denizens gambling licenses.

When Moe Dalitz, Cleveland mobster, applied for a gambling permit for the Desert Inn casino in Las Vegas in 1949, the Nevada Tax Commission said no based on his criminal background — bootlegging and illegal gambling. McCarran discussed the matter in person with one of his powerful friends, Salvatore “Sam” Maceo, Texas organized crime boss who previously had partnered with Dalitz in illegal liquor distribution.

After the McCarran-Maceo tète-a tète and supposed intervention by Maceo subsequently, state gambling regulators granted Dalitz a license.

2) He helped gamblers surpass other obstacles.

When mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel and the Nevada Projects Corporation, the cadre of mobsters financing the new hotel-casino, were having the Flamingo constructed in Las Vegas immediately following World War II, in 1946, construction materials were in shortage. As such, the Nevada office of the federal Civilian Production Administration allocated scarce materials on a project priority basis.

McCarran jumped the Flamingo to the top of the list so it could, and it did, receive construction materials without delay.

3) He got the scope of the Kefauver inquiry broadened.

In 1950, when Senator Estes Kefauver (D-Tenn.) pursued launching a congressional investigation into gambling nationwide, McCarran got the target expanded to encompass all types of organized crime — prostitution, narcotics, loan sharking, murder, extortion and labor racketeering — to lessen the resulting consequences to Nevada’s gambling.

The probing body became the United States Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce, or in short, the Kefauver Committee.

4) He delayed Congress’ approving the Kefauver inquiry.

Among his efforts there, he begged for additional time for the Judiciary Committee, which he headed, to consider the proposal, raised potentially related legal issues and suggested the matter be sent to the Senate Commerce Committee for its review as well.

Kefauver, however, received a green light, and his team conducted hearings in 14 major U.S. cities during 1950 and 1951.

5) He fought Congress’ agreement to levy contempt citations against Kefauver witnesses in general.

When subpoenaed to testify during the hearings, numerous gamblers either failed to appear or when they did appear, they refused to answer questions. Kefauver wanted them slapped with a congressional contempt charge* for obstructing the investigation. McCarran fervently argued against the idea but lost that battle. Once Congress approved one contempt charge, a slew followed.

6) He got contempt charges against multiple gamblers quashed individually.

7) He helped thwart passage of a bill to tax all gamblers.

Growing out of the Kefauver Committee’s findings, the House Ways and Means Committee, in May 1951, voted to impose a “10 percent gross receipts tax on bookies, numbers rackets operators and others who operate gambling pools” (Nevada State Journal, May 17, 1951). Kefauver urged that the tax bill from the House must be amended to incorporate all forms of gambling.

McCarran called on some Nevada gamblers to lobby against the bill while he fought it at the Senate Finance Committee level. He pleaded his case, that the “cumulative result would spell tragedy for the State of Nevada” and gambling, as a major economic component, needed protecting.

What eventually passed were a 10 percent tax on all wagers concerning sporting events or lotteries and a $50 annual occupational stamp excise for bookmakers and lottery operators. These mandates comprised a small portion of the much larger Revenue Act of 1951.

For these and his other interventions in support of gaming, McCarran was lauded by some and criticized by others.

—————————-

* Contempt of Congress is the criminal act of obstructing the work of the U.S. Congress or one of its committees, a misdemeanor punishable by a $100 to $1,000 fine or one-month to one-year imprisonment.

Sources

1940s

1946

Which famous hotel-casino debuted in Las Vegas, Nevada the day after Christmas in this year?

Hint: Jimmy Durante was the grand opening star; while on stage he destroyed a $1,600 piano (a $20,000 value today).

Esta Krakower Siegel

1946

Mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel’s wife, Esta (née Esther Krakower) filed for divorce in Reno, Nevada after 17 years of marriage. The two had wed when she was 18 and he was 23.

In the divorce settlement, Esta got their Hollywood house, their New York apartment, Bugsy’s Cadillac, $600 a week in alimony ($7,500 today) and $350 a week in child support ($4,400 today) for their daughters, Barbara and Millicent, who lived with her full-time.