McGill Club in later years

1928

A woman named Gladys Anderson sued the McGill Club in McGill, Nevada for $5,000. It was the amount she claimed her husband had lost there playing poker.

The district court, however, dismissed her case because it lacked a cause of action (a set of facts sufficient to justify a right to sue and receive compensation from another party).

1907

A faro game with a $50 limit (at least $1,200 today) was underway in the Tonopah Club on a Thursday night in February. Colonel Abe F. Brown, one of the three proprietors of this mining camp saloon in Central Nevada, was playing. A wealthy man, he’d accumulated his assets via gambling enterprises and playing the stock market.

Soon, Brown lost $25,000 ($630,000-plus today). He wanted the maximum bet removed, but this required consent of his partners — George Wingfield and Ed Kennedy. The manager of the Tonopah Club telephoned and explained the situation to Wingfield, who was in the town of Goldfield at the time. Wingfield permitted him to raise the limit to $5,000 ($126,000-plus today).

Brown began betting $5,000 on a single card, and before long, he was about $100,000 ahead. But then his winning streak reversed and he lost repeatedly. Roughly 24 hours later, he’d amassed a debt of  $300,000 (at least $7.5 million today)!

“It is doubtful if ever such an enormous sum of money has been lost by one man,” reported the Reno Evening Gazette (Feb. 25, 1907).

Brown wanted to play $50,000 more, but the dealer convinced him to stop. The gambler seemed nonplussed by the misadventure.

“Brown was as cool as a cucumber after he had lost his fortune. He arose from the table, sauntered to the bar, where he took a drink, and bidding his friends goodnight, went off to bed.”

However, the next day and subsequently, he wouldn’t discuss the event and tried to keep it out of the local papers, to no avail. It was the talk of Tonopah.*

Settling Up

Kennedy, the club’s third owner, arrived from Goldfield shortly to settle Brown’s debt with him.  Because faro was a game played against the house and Brown had a one-third interest in it, in his capacity as co-owner he won $100,000 of his personal $300,000 loss, so his net debt was actually $200,000 (at least $5 million today).

To pay it off, Brown supposedly gave his Tonopah Club co-owners 11,000 shares of the Mohawk mine, valued at $17 apiece at the time, and some other stocks.

“His fortune went the same way it came,” the newspaper noted.

The whole unpleasant incident didn’t stop Brown from twisting the tiger’s tail. The very next night, he sat in on another faro game, albeit one for smaller stakes.

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* Tonopah began in 1900 when prospector Jim Butler discovered silver ore in the area.

Sources

Grave markers at San Quentin State Prison

1915-1935

James “Jimmy” Sidney Rogan, an active student and football player, was well liked by the principal of his high school in Tonopah, a mining boom town halfway between Las Vegas and Reno. In 1915, when the available ore in the town dubbed Queen of the Silver Camps was believed to be petering out and numerous residents, therefore, moved to the next hot spot, Rogan quit school in his junior year but wouldn’t tell Principal Chauncey Smith why. Smith encouraged him to stick with his education, to no avail. Rogan went on to work as a Southern Pacific brakeman running out of Sparks, then as a taxi driver in Reno.

In 1924, when in his mid-20s, Rogan got in a brawl in public in Reno, which led to a disturbing the peace charge. A judge fined him $20 ($475 today).

The next year, also in The Biggest Little City, Rogan and a friend, Bobby Gray, a Reno prizefighter, beat and robbed a miner of $80 and his shirt. When police questioned Rogan, he confessed and returned the money to his victim, who declined to press charges. The same judge, before whom Rogan had appeared in the past, gave him roughly 12 hours to get out of town. He did and found work as a seaman. (Gray was released and admonished to choose better associates.)

In Deeper Trouble

In 1932, Rogan, “the debonair adventurer,” and known San Francisco gangster, Rollie D. McAllister, lost $100 ($1,700 today) in the early morning hours while gambling in a speakeasy in Los Angeles’ exclusive Westlake neighborhood (Nevada State Journal, Oct. 14, 1933).

Around 5 a.m., they returned via taxicab after having decided they’d been cheated out of their money. Brandishing guns, they tried forcing the club’s owners, Harvey Crosby and Ben Harris, to return it. Also inside were Deputy Sheriff Rudolph Vejar, 36, who was investigating vice conditions, a bartender and a dealer.

McAllister forced the proprietors to remove their shoes and lie down on the floor while Rogan kept the other people there on the opposite side of the room covered with two pistols. Finding only $68 in the owners’ pockets, McAllister ordered Vejar to remove his shoes and lie down with Crosby and Harris. McAllister began burning Crosby’s bare feet with lit matches to get him to disclose where the cash was hidden.

Suddenly Vejar drew his pistol and shot Rogan in the leg. The former Renoite returned fire, a bullet hitting Vejar in the mouth then penetrating his neck and spine. Vejar emptied his firearm at McAllister, mortally wounding him. Rogan peppered the room with gunshot as he backed out of the establishment. He then took the waiting cab away from the scene and asked to be let out at Washington Boulevard.

Vejar died in the hospital the next day. Rogan went on the lam.

Eleven months later, police found the “underworld character,” as he was described, in San Francisco, where he was visiting his mother before his planned exit from the United States (Nevada State Journal, Dec. 16, 1933). They arrested and extradited him to Los Angeles.

In late 1933, Rogan was tried on robbery and murder charges. During the court proceedings, he insisted that he was innocent in that McAllister had killed Vejar. The jury, after six hours of deliberation, however, found Rogan guilty on both counts.

The judge sentenced him to death on the gallows. In the meantime, he was to remain behind bars at San Quentin State Prison.

Attempts At A Reversal

The Supreme Court of California heard the case on appeal and upheld the conviction and death sentence.

Rogan’s mother and one of his sisters implored California Governor Frank Merriam to commute Jimmy’s death sentence. Five of the jurors who’d found Rogan guilty previously signed a petition for clemency as did Nevada Senator Pat McCarran, a friend of Rogan’s father.

In early February 1935, Rogan wrote a letter to Smith, his former principal/football coach/math instructor, telling him he was sorry for never following his advice way back when. He revealed why he’d dropped out of high school: he hadn’t made the basketball team while younger classmen had.

“In case the worst happens I certainly wanted you to know that I appreciate the things and the efforts on your part to assist me in every way,” Rogan wrote Smith (Reno Evening Gazette, Feb. 13, 1935).

On Feb. 8, 1935, the 32 year old was hanged at 10:04 a.m. Eleven minutes later, the prison physician pronounced him dead. To the end, Jimmy had maintained his innocence.

Sources

Photo from the Los Angeles Times: by Rick Meyer

Gwyndolyn Conger Steinbeck

1948-1950

Tragedy struck when the wife of famed American novelist, John Steinbeck, was in Reno, Nevada for a quickie divorce from him after 5½ years of marriage.

In 1948, while establishing residency in The Biggest Little City, Gwyndolyn “Gwyn” Conger Steinbeck developed a relationship with Leonard Wolff, a wealthy, former U.S. Army Air Forces bombardier during World War II. The 28-year-old man worked at a local hotel, had a son around a year old who lived with his estranged wife and his family owned a department store in his hometown of Denver, Colorado.

On a Friday night in October, a month after Wolff was granted a divorce decree on the grounds of desertion and mental cruelty, he and Steinbeck went to a late dinner with Wolff’s parents at the Mapes hotel-casino. Just after midnight, the younger Wolff and Steinbeck left the elder Wolffs and visited with acquaintances in the casino. At 3:30 a.m., the two stopped for a drink at the West Indies club, south of town.

While there, Steinbeck entertained herself at the slots, and, for hours, Wolff played 21. He ramped up his betting to $100 a hand and for all seats at the table. At one point, he asked for a new dealer, and Newell Benningfield, the owner, took over.

Steinbeck grew tired, laid down in Wolff’s 1946 Ford sedan outside and “blacked out,” she later said (Oakland Tribune, Oct. 27, 1948). Wolff ultimately lost $86,000 (an $851,000 value today) and wrote three checks — one for $7,000, one for $29,000 and one for $50,000 — to cover the loss.

“I hope these checks are good,” Benningfield told Wolff. The debtor said the smaller one could be cashed immediately but not the others as he first had to arrange his finances to cover them.

At about 10 a.m. on Saturday, Wolff dropped Steinbeck off at the ranch where she was residing. Also that morning, Benningfield tried to cash the $7,000 check, but the bank refused because Wolff’s signature on it lacked the middle initial he’d always included.

The Unthinkable Occurs

Within 45 minutes of Wolff dropping off Steinbeck, passersby spotted his car wrecked, all of its tires flat, in the rocks about 200 feet off to the side of Mt. Rose Highway, south of Reno. They stopped to help, but Wolff waved them off.

Soon after, another driver pulled over and discovered Wolff inside the car, dead, with a bullet hole in his temple and a 0.38-caliber pistol at the scene.

Sheriffs ruled the incident a suicide, speculating that the recent divorcé first had tried to kill himself by running off the road and when that failed, had shot himself. He hadn’t been drunk or drugged, blood tests later revealed.

The coroner, Laurance Layman, agreed with law enforcement officers that criminal involvement hadn’t been a factor and further opined: “I don’t think the gambling had anything to do with Wolff’s death,” (Nevada State Journal, Oct. 29, 1948).

Wolff’s family, however, initially suspected foul play but, later, according to Layman, accepted that the fatal injury had been self-inflicted.

Early on, authorities questioned Mrs. Steinbeck and concluded she didn’t know anything about Saturday morning’s events. Seven days after Wolff’s demise, she got her divorce on the grounds of extreme mental cruelty, along with custody of her and John’s two children, ages 2 and 4.

Within the week, the coroner’s jury determined Wolff had died of a gunshot wound to the head, but didn’t specify how it’d happened.

Benningfield Wants His Money

Wolff’s estate was valued at about $34,000 ($337,000 value today). In February 1949, Benningfield filed a claim for $86,000 against it, which its executor, First National Bank, rejected.

In response, the West Indies owner sued in district court but, again, was denied the money because gambling debts weren’t collectable through legal action in Nevada. He appealed in May to the Nevada Supreme Court, which heard the case later that year.

In early 1950, the higher court concurred with its lower counterpart, which meant it was definite: Benningfield couldn’t recoup the $86,000.

Sources

Photo: by Luigi Corbellini

1952

When Ernest J. Primm owned the Monterey Club, a poker house in Gardena, California (a Los Angeles suburb), he claimed on his state income taxes the losses of his shills, up to $500 ($4,500 today) a month, as expenses or losses — illegitimate deductions.

Seven years later, it caught up with him. The state’s Franchise Tax Board assessed him $1,589 ($13,000 today) for that year when his enterprise grossed $1.3 million ($11.7 million today).

(Primm also owned the Embassy Club and Rainbow Club in Gardena and Club Primadonna in Reno, Nevada.)

1906-1909

An underage young man, Master Wadell, gambled at various games from poker to faro and lost big over the winter of 1906-1907.

His preferred playhouse was the Sixty-Six casino in the mining town of Rhyolite, Nevada. Subsequently, he sued the club’s three owners for what he claimed were his total losses — $10,000 (about $240,000 today).

During the trial in 1909, testimony revealed the proprietors allegedly had cheated repeatedly at various games, thereby swindling him out of large sums. None of that mattered, though, as the question before the court was whether or not a minor had the right to recoup money lost from gambling.

Wadell’s attorney argued that the defendants must repay Wadell as Nevada law prohibits casino proprietors from allowing minors into their establishments, never mind letting them gamble. He said that rule stood regardless of whether the individual said he was of age or looked it.

In the case of Wadell v. the Sixty-Six, the club owners’ counsel argued the law stated if an individual claimed to be 21, he couldn’t, after losing in a gambling house, take advantage of his own fraud and sue to recover his losses. Further, no statute existed that allowed for the recovery of money lost from gambling, he said.

Nevada law at the time — when some kinds of gambling were legal — stated that it was a misdemeanor for any gambling operator to knowingly allow anyone under age 21 to enter or play in their licensed club. (Previously, as of 1869, the legal gambling age had been 17.) To further protect minors, lawmakers in 1897 had allowed for parents of a minor to collect, in a civil action, between $50 and $1,000 from proprietors who’d allowed that child to spend time or play games in their gambling rooms.

In what was the first case of its kind in The Silver State, the jury found in Wadell’s favor in the amount of $2,762.40 (about $66,000 today).

“The decision makes a landmark in Nevada litigation and was one of the most hotly contested and longest cases ever tried in the state,” The Tonopah Sun reported (Reno Evening Gazette, June 8, 1909).

Sources