1941

The man who played roulette in the Palace Club nearly every day for six months was noticeable for his suave appearance. Henry Helmut, age 47, had a bit of gray hair and sported a tasteful, waxed moustache, Pince Nez glasses with ribbon and sharp, tailored attire.

“He looked like a college professor out on a gay holiday and gambling club operators say he ‘was the most impressive piece of scenery’ they have had around in a long time,” reported the United Press (The Amarillo Sunday News-Globe, Dec. 7, 1941).

Eventful Work Shift

On Friday night, December 5, while Helmut was on the job, shilling for the Reno, Nevada casino, police officers arrested then turned him over to federal agents who’d flown in from San Francisco and New York. Helmut’s capture marked the end of a 1.5-year search for him that required 37,000 travel miles through the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

Helmut was wanted on a secret indictment in New York for conspiracy against the United States with international ramifications, the feds said.

The name Henry Helmut was one of 40 different aliases — including Paul Laval, Dr. Hoffman and Martin Helmuth — the dapper man had used. His actual name was Helmuth Hartmann.

On a search of Hartmann’s Reno hotel room, police found an unloaded Mauser firearm, about $350 in bills in the lining of his suitcase, gold ore and letters written in German.

Was he a German spy? Was he a drug trafficker? Was he involved in a counterfeit ring? Was he a Nazi?

The feds wouldn’t say, but they extradited Hartmann to The Big Apple to face trial.

Filling In The Portrait

More information about Hartmann later came to light. He’d been born in Germany but since had obtained American citizenship. He was associated with a New York gang. In fact, Reno Detective Captain Harry Fletcher surmised that Hartmann had been casing the local casinos on behalf of his East Coast colleagues who wanted to get into the business. The gambling club booster’s lavish spending around town on a 50 cents-an-hour income made Fletcher suspicious.

Hartmann had been an international racketeer and swindler (stock and matrimonial cons, for example), and had served time in prison. He’d been an associate of 1) Victor “Count” Von Lustig (an alias), the U.S.-based mastermind of an extensive counterfeit operation that law enforcement dismantled in 1935 and 2) Miroslav Skrivanek, a widely known narcotics trafficker in Czechoslovakia.

Recent Unlawful Activity

Hartmann had been apprehended in Reno for his involvement in an extensive conspiracy to smuggle drugs from Mexico and distribute them in New York City. The specific charges against him were conspiring to import, distribute, conceal and transport narcotics.

He’d acted as the liaison between Mafiosi in East Harlem —the 107th Street Mob — and opiate sellers south of the United States border. In doing so, he’d arranged for New York mobsters — Frank Livorsi, Dominick “The Gap” Petrilli and Salvatore “Tom Mix” Santoro, all with long records of violent crimes, from rape to homicide — to obtain a continuous supply of narcotics from Mexico. He’d accompanied these dealers on a drug buy, at least once, in summer 1940.

“The boys now have enough money to buy all the narcotics you can find in Mexico,” Livorsi had told Hartmann. “Do a good job for us” (Advisory Committee, Feb. 16, 1946).

In Northern Nevada, officers also had discovered opiates, in sample-size quantities, in Hartmann’s belongings:

• 200 grains of heroin
• 41 grains of raw opium
• 133 grains of morphine hydrochloride

Punitive Consequences

Once in federal custody, Hartmann divulged what he knew about the narcotics operations and fingered numerous accomplices. This led to a second indictment, in which he also was named, in Arizona, the state through which the drugs entered the U.S.

Hartmann was found guilty in both the Arizona (May 1942) and New York (July 1942) trials. In each, he was given a suspended sentence of two years’ prison time, with probation.

Sources

Photo from Wikimedia Commons: Pince Nez felts by Infrogmation of New Orleans

Sal “Tar Baby” Terrano

1930s-1952

Salvatore “Tar Baby” Orester Terrano is one of numerous criminals whom Nevada gambling regulators approved to own a casino in the state.

In May 1947, the tax commission granted the Northern Californian, then 43, a probationary, 30-day gambling license to offer roulette, craps, 21 and slot machines at the Twin States casino at Lake Tahoe in Stateline. This approval was after the agency had conducted an investigation into Sal Terrano’s past.

The Dirt

What that should’ve revealed was Terrano:

• Had been selling opium out of the Dog House, a Reno, Nevada gambling club where he’d worked as a dealer in the 1930s.

• Had been convicted in May 1939 for narcotics trafficking between San Francisco and Reno. Then 34, he’d been caught with four five-tael tins* of opium (about 10 pounds) in his car in a hidden rear compartment while driving into Northern Nevada.

The drugs had come from Eugene “Rosy” Bastida and Ernest “Ole” C. Olson, owners of the Turf Club, a San Francisco bar and bookmaking place, who’d gotten the crew of the USS Chaumont, a Navy transport ship, to smuggle them in from Asia twice a year.

• Had served seven years, from 1938 to 1945, of his decade-long sentence in Nevada State Prison.

Back To Tahoe

The case of Terrano also was one in which the two pertinent, gaming license-issuing agencies diverged in their decision.

Once free, the ex-convict received that month-long gambling permit for the Twin States Club in spring 1947 from the state tax commission.

However, simultaneously, the licensing board of Douglas County, in which the club was located, refused to give Terrano a gambling or a liquor license because the business was “not the type of establishment wanted in Douglas County,” said Sheriff James Farrell, likely referring to one where drugs were sold and/or consumed on the premises (Nevada State Journal, May 16, 1948).

Without the county’s approval, Terrano couldn’t be involved with gambling at the Twin States. He returned to San Francisco where he dealt drugs and sold merchandise like Jumping Jimminy and King Kong toys out of his Twin States Novelty Company store.

Ad in The Billboard, Jan. 6, 1951

Nabbed Again

Five years later, in March 1952, while living in the Mapes hotel-casino in Reno, he was arrested again for the transportation and sale of narcotics. He’d been dealing heroin for Waxey Gordon (né Irving Wexler), who’d run the West Coast branch of a nationwide, multimillion-dollar narcotics syndicate until he’d been imprisoned for pushing drugs in 1951. Gordon was a mobster and former bootlegger and illegal gambler.

Terrano was sentenced to four years to be served at the Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. Per the judge, he was sent to a hospital in Fort Worth, Texas to get clean before being taken to the Kansas prison.

He died in Leavenworth six months later, at 49, supposedly following minor surgery on an obstructed coronary artery. He was interred in a family plot in the Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery in Colma, California.

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* A five-tael tin, a standard-sized opium container, roughly resembles a deck of cards in dimensions and shape. One tael equals about half an American pound; a five-tael tin equals about 2.5 pounds.

Sources