Gambling and cheating at gambling go together like, well, coins in a slot machine or cards in a shoe. Seemingly, they always will despite various efforts — violence, laws/rules, surveillance, firings, procedures, technology and more — to thwart chicanery.

“The casino gambling business is especially susceptible to fraudulent schemes,” wrote Jerome Skolnick in House of Cards.

An Incongruous Trend

During the 17 years between 1931 and 1948, only four convictions on cheating charges were reported in the newspapers in Northern Nevada, and two of them were connected in a single case involving one club. This is despite cheating, by both players and operators/dealers, reportedly being rampant.

What It Means

One of the takeaways from this datum is that no amount or type of deterrents will stop people entirely from trying to cheat. “Operating a cheating and thieving gambling game,”* a gross misdemeanor, continued despite a substantial maximum punishment for it: a year in county jail plus a $1,000 fine (equivalent to about $17,000 today).

Also, the low conviction number suggests that prosecuting gambling cheating cases rarely were successful. Oftentimes, initial charges got reduced or dropped. Reduced charges often bore “little resemblance to the cheating one” and may have culminated in “a plea of guilty to disturbing the peace,” a state gambling official later would tell the Nevada State Journal (Aug. 22, 1968).

Further, the statistic highlights the common trend of gaming house operators managing  swindlers themselves, in their own ways, with severe beatings, breaking of bones, even shootings. Of the four successfully tried cases in Washoe County, one incident was reported by a club owner and involved cheating the house. Another was reported by a customer, and the remaining set was discovered by Reno police deputies; those involved cheating the customers.

One reason for meting out “justice” in-house perhaps was the gaming club owners/operators not wanting to risk jeopardizing their gambling license. If a charge of cheating at their business was substantiated, they could have gotten their license revoked for a year and, consequently, been unable to legally offer any games of chance. Once the 12 months were over, they’d have to apply for a new license, with no guarantee of being granted one.

Cases In Point

Here are the four cheating cases that, atypically, were addressed in and resolved through the legal system. 

1) 1939: George “Shorty” M. King, 49, and 2) George “Shorty” L. Coppersmith, 53, gambling operators at The Dog House at 130 N. Center St. in Reno

The two Shorties had leased the gambling concessions at the Dog House for four years. Previously, they’d co-owned the Tavern and at different times from each other, had a percentage interest in the Capitol Bar.

On the night of July 4, 1939, after two Reno chief deputies witnessed both dealers manipulating the roulette wheel, they left, returned when the cabaret was less busy and raided it. They dissembled the wheel right then and there and called in an electrician. He “traced connections from electromagnets in the rim of the wheel to push buttons along the edge of the table and a series of dry batteries concealed in a large foot rail under the table,” reported the Reno Evening Gazette (July 6, 1939).

One switch was hidden in the wooden backstop of the wheel’s large money drawer. To activate it, one simply pushed on the drawer. The other button was concealed under a faux screw head on an edge railing of the wheel’s table. Using those electric controls, the operators could make the steel-cored ball fall within certain groups of numbers on the wheel.

Further, the technician noted the batteries hidden in the metal rail had to have been put there within the previous two months because they had May 1940 on them and batteries generally were dated one year ahead.

King and Coppersmith were arrested and each assigned bail of $1,000 (about $18,000 today). The Dog House owners, Al Hoffman and Phil Curti, along with John Petricciani, then Reno’s Palace Club owner/operator, paid King’s bail in cash; Felix Turillas, then owner of Reno’s Silver Slipper and Northern Club, paid Coppersmith’s by check.

Why did Petricciani and Turillas chip in for the Shorties’ bail?

Ultimately, King and Coppersmith both were fined $1,000, but King also received a six-month jail sentence because he was listed on the gambling license as the wheel’s owner.

“The incident ended both men’s gaming careers in Nevada,” wrote author Dwayne Kling.

Hoffman and Curti claimed they hadn’t known a crooked wheel was being used in their club.

“The two men operated the crap table and the roulette wheel,” Hoffman said, referring to King and Coppersmith, “and the management got one-third of the profits. We didn’t have anything to do with installing the machine, or its operation” (Nevada State Journal, July 6, 1939).

Despite Hoffman’s denial, District Attorney Ernest Brown recommended that all gambling licenses pertaining to The Dog House be revoked, which required a unanimous vote by the county commissioners, but they didn’t pursue it.

3) 1943: Alfred Leo Rooney, 38, a 21 dealer at an unnamed club in Reno

The establishment’s owner reported to police that at his business, he’d caught Rooney, an employee, cheating while dealing 21. One of the game’s players was Rooney’s co-conspirator, who was interpreting the cards’ marks and winning … frequently. “The police allege that there was to have been a division of winnings between Rooney and the confederate,” the Reno Evening Gazette reported (Jan. 28, 1943). When police arrested Rooney, he claimed he was innocent.

Justice of the Peace Harry Dunseath held him over for trial and set his bail at $2,000 (about $30,000 today).

After deliberating less than an hour, the jury found Rooney guilty. Judge A.J. Maestretti sentenced him to six months in jail, no fine.

4) 1948: Clifford Sikes, 51, a 21 dealer at Dutch Garden** at 565 W. Moana Lane in Reno

Sikes had worked for 16 years as a dealer, at the Stag Inn, Cedars and Moana Springs Bar, before his stint at Dutch Garden.

On March 5, 1948, Sikes was dealing 21 to a table of men who all were friends, among them a Milton Brown. After Brown lost $25 (about $265 today) in about 15 minutes, another friend, Louis Ostanoski, who’d been watching the game, told Brown the cards were marked. To prove it, Ostanoski correctly guessed Brown’s cards without seeing them.

Sikes overheard the conversation and said he’d switch decks. He put the deck he’d been using in a drawer and started to unwrap a new one. Brown stepped around the table, retrieved the previous deck, fanned it out on the table and pointed to the marks — indentations in the corners of the eight cards. Sikes grabbed what cards he could and tore them up, but Brown pocketed the rest. Dutch Garden owner Fred Stengler offered to refund Brown the $25, but he declined.

Subsequently, Brown filed a complaint with the police and turned over to them, as evidence, the marked cards he’d retrieved. Sikes was charged with operating a crooked card game using a marked deck.

Sikes paid and was freed on $1,000 bail (about $11,000 today). On the stand at his trial, he denied knowingly having dealt marked cards. Sikes implied that the customers had marked the cards not him. He said he’d torn up the cards only because Brown had been mixing the old deck with the new. Stengler testified on his behalf.

Despite the defense put forward, the jury found Sikes guilty, in fewer than 15 minutes. Maestretti sentenced him to a $1,000 fine and six months’ jail time.

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* When The Silver State legalized wide-open gambling in 1931, it addressed cheating in that new law. It read, in part: “The use of marked cards, loaded dice, plugged or tampered-with machines or devices are expressly made unlawful.”

** The former Dutch Garden building today houses On Command 2, a pet boarding center, and previously was the Yen Ching Chinese restaurant site.

Sources

1935-1939

The reach of Reno, Nevada’s Mobsters into gambling during their heyday allegedly extended to a small Oregon hideaway for California’s rich and famous: Currier’s Village.

William “Bill/Curly” Graham and James “Jim/Cinch” McKay are said to have operated the gaming at the secluded resort with “their friends from Los Angeles,” according to Al Moe in The Roots of Reno, perhaps mobsters there such as Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. (Despite trying, this writer couldn’t determine the specific games they ran there.)

In his 2017 article about Currier’s Village, writer Finn J.D. John wrote that, according to rumor, the resort’s developer and owner Roy G. Currier “had some connections in organized crime, which were helping him out with advice and maybe financial assistance with his gambling and fine-dining operations.”

Currier, however, didn’t need financial backing; he was a multi-millionaire, having made his fortune selling pills for various ailments under the Currier’s brand. He likely needed an experienced casino manager, gaming workers and perhaps an enforcer.

The extent of McKay and Graham’s involvement in the Lakeside, Ore. casino isn’t clear, but assuredly they were getting a portion, if not all, of the gaming-generated revenue there.

Any gambling that took place at Currier’s Village at the time was prohibited, as the only legal betting activity in The Beaver State then was parimutuel wagering on horse (legalized in 1931) and greyhound (1933) races.

“The casino action wasn’t very surreptitious at all. It didn’t have to be,” John wrote. “The whole place was on private property — Currier’s very own 160-acre townsite. No cops, no district attorneys, and of course no liquor-control agents were allowed in Currier’s Village.”

Various Attractions

Along with gambling, the summer resort offered fine dining (entrées included fillet mignon with mushroom sauce; roast young tom turkey, walnut dressing and cranberry sauce; and special cut New York sirloin steak), dancing and live entertainment (The Ink Spots, Sons of the Pioneers and more) in the 40-by-90 foot Pier Café situated at the end of the Tenmile Lake pier. Outdoor opportunities included fishing, horseback riding, swimming, boating and water skiing.

Currier’s Village drew the likes of Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Lily Pons, Charles Laughton, Sydney Greenstreet and Roy Rogers, who paid $250 a week (about $4,700 today) to stay there, in the 36 luxurious cabins, electrified and heated by steam from nearby hot springs, with garages and designated parking spaces.  

Possible End Of The Run

In 1939, Graham and McKay were convicted of mail fraud and sentenced to serve years in the U.S. Penitentiary Leavenworth. Coincidentally, that same year, Currier sold Currier’s Village to a San Diegan named Edward Jackson. That year most likely marked the end of the partnership among the three men related to gambling at Currier’s Village.

Sources

1938, 1946

Notorious mobster, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, borrowed money several times from his friend, actor George Raft, according to the biography George Raft, for which author Lewis Yablonsky interviewed the subject on numerous occasions.

Siegel first asked the man he’d known since childhood for a loan in roughly 1938, in the amount of $20,000 ($364,000 today). It was to invest in Anthony “Tony” Cornero Stralla’s Rex, a gambling ship anchored off of the Southern California coast. Raft obliged.

Over the ensuing months, Siegel paid back Raft but in numerous cash tranches of $500 and $1,000.

“George was puzzled because he had heard that his ‘pal’ was betting $2,000 to $5,000 a day on his horseraces, fights and ballgames,” Yablonsky wrote.

Siegel’s final loan request came in around 1946, when he pleaded with Raft for $100,000 ($1.3 million today), which he needed, he’d told him, to save both the Flamingo hotel-casino in Las Vegas and his own life. The actor, who didn’t have that much money on hand, dipped into his annuity fund and borrowed from various sources to get Siegel the full amount.

Raft never got repaid because shortly thereafter, the mobster was murdered.

Photo: From freeimages.com: “The Stack” by Jon Syverson

George Raft

1958-1959, 1966-1967

Having grown up in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen with various mobsters-to-be — Meyer Lansky, Joe Adonis, Frank Costello and others — he remained cordial with them throughout adulthood.

He had deeper relationships with two, first Owney Madden, who’d encouraged him to try acting, and later Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, when they both lived in Southern California.

Life had taken this gentleman in a different direction than that of his childhood peers. He became a famous Hollywood movie star, best known for his portrayals of underworld characters, such as Frank Rio (Al Capone’s bodyguard) in Scarface (1932). His film career spanned three decades, the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s.

When that was winding down, he shifted industries and worked in the one dominated by the likes of his syndicate friends: gambling.

He was George Raft, né Ranft (1895-1980).

Pearl Of The Antilles

Starting in spring 1958, at the age of 62, Raft served as the host and entertainment director for the Casino de Capri at the Hotel Capri in Havana, Cuba, then a newly built, luxurious, 19-floor hotel with a rooftop swimming pool.

A group headed by Charles “The Blade” Tourine, a caporegime for the Genovese crime family in the U.S., operated the casino; Lansky took a cut.

The job, however, was short-lived. At the start of 1959, revolutionaries overthrew then Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Fidel Castro immediately took power and quickly closed the casinos.

Thus, Raft’s employment on the island ended.

The Great Wen

His next similar gig, beginning in 1966, was as the debonair, personable host (and front man) of the Colony Club in London, England, a plush and hugely successful casino there.

“All that was required of him at the Colony Club was to play the role of George Raft — a role that he had lived for many, many years,” Lewis Yablonsky wrote in George Raft, noting that a sign above the property read, “George Raft’s Colony Club.”

Various members of the U.S.’ National Crime Syndicate co-owned the business as overseen by Lansky, and numerous Englishmen owned stock in it. Lansky’s American associate, Dino Cellini, also a co-owner, managed the casino, for which London mobsters, Reginald and Ronald Kray, dealt with and kept out troublemakers.

Raft, then age 70, worked from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. For his efforts, he earned about $200 a week ($1,500 today) and a 5% stake in the club. He also was provided with an apartment in Mayfair with a cleaning service and a maroon, $35,000 Rolls Royce with a chauffeur. 

“The Colony Club became the ‘in’ place in London, the place to see and be seen,” Yablonsky wrote. “Frequent guests were Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton; Ari Onassis and Jackie Kennedy; former Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren; and Charlie Chaplin.”

Raft’s stint at this gambling house also ended abruptly, in early 1967, when the secretary of Britain’s Home Office revoked Raft’s residency permit, thereby deporting and prohibiting him from returning, due to his alleged associations with U.S. underworld denizens. Along with Raft, England banned seven other Americans that year, including Lansky, Cellini and Tourine, all without any sort of due process.

The country had legalized gambling as recently as 1960 and wanted to get and keep out the mobsters from the States who’d infiltrated it since. Despite attempts to get the ban on Raft lifted, it remained in place for the duration of his life.

Photo from The New York Public Library Digital Collections

Sources

Late 1970s, 2000s

Fay and Jessica were young, capuchin monkeys living on the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) campus, where two professors in the department of psychology intended to teach them how to gamble, in the late 1970s. (The female primates were named after actresses Fay Wray and Jessica Lange, who’d starred in the successive King Kong movies.)

Through their work with Fay and Jessica, Dr. Terry J. Knapp, now a UNLV emeritus professor of psychology, and the late Dr. Charles Rasmussen, a physiological psychologist, endeavored to learn more about gambling behavior, including the circumstances under which the monkeys would gamble and what the gambling would lead to.

They based their study on renowned psychologist B.F. Skinner’s view on gambling. He purported that the variable ratio schedule of reinforcement, or the intermittent unpredictable nature of wins in the case of gambling, motivates people to persist in the activity for long stretches with little or no payoff.

Knapp and Rasmussen chose monkeys for the research because it seemed more feasible to carry out than on people gambling in a casino.

The Methodological Plan

First, the professors would teach Faye and Jessica to press a bar in their cage for a nickel. Then they’d teach them the nickel has value, that they could spend it, for an apple piece or a look in the mirror. Then the researchers would introduce gambling; they’d teach them that instead of using the nickel for the rewards they knew, they could put it in a gambling machine and either lose the nickel or gain more nickels. 

“Just to demonstrate gambling behavior will be a step that hasn’t been demonstrated before,” Rasmussen said (Las Vegas Sun, Oct. 2, 1977).

The Unexpected Outcome

Knapp and Rasmussen successfully got Jessica and Faye on a token economy, in which they earned nickels for bar pressing and could spend them in several ways, although it took some doing. (A big challenge initially was getting the monkeys to not immediately toss away the nickels after realizing they weren’t edible.)

The study was at the point where gambling would be introduced when Faye and Jessica died unexpectedly, about six months apart, due to indeterminate causes. Their demise curtailed the research before any conclusions could be drawn.

“[It was] a sad ending for us as we became very attached to them,” Knapp said in a written interview. “We never followed up with other monkeys as new federal lab requirements made it nearly impossible except for [at] primate research centers.”

Monkeys And Money

Decades later, in the 2000s at Yale University, behavioral economist Keith Chen taught seven tufted capuchin monkeys to use money to see how they would behave with it.

They demonstrated an ability to economize, to respond to cost fluctuations and to gamble. Interestingly, when presented with two choices of chance with the same odds, but one presented as a potential loss and the other as a possible win, the research subjects preferred to gamble on the latter.

“Capuchins’ choice both is very sensitive to changes in prices, budgets, and expected payoffs and, to a lesser degree, displays both reference dependence and loss aversion,” Chen concluded (Journal of Political Economy, 2006).  Reference dependence is the concept that people evaluate outcomes relative to a reference point and then classify gains and losses. Loss aversion is the theory that people prefer avoiding losses to getting equivalent gains.

Overall, the subjects of Chen’s research demonstrated behavior like that of their human counterparts.

“When taught to use money, a group of capuchin monkeys responded quite rationally to simple incentives; responded irrationally to risky gambles; failed to save; stole when they could; used money for food and, on occasion, sex,” wrote reporters Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt (The New York Times, June 5, 2005).

Photo from freeimages.com: by Scott Liddell

Sources

Reno Joe in the Mapes lobby

1950-1956

A novel, animated gambling device began to appear in Nevada casinos in 1950. It debuted in the lobby of Reno’s Mapes hotel-casino in the fall and “got a big play from visiting Shriners,” reported the Nevada State Journal (Nov. 12, 1950).

They were one-armed bandits, or life-sized outlaws whose torso was a slot machine and whose arm and gun-toting hand constituted the lever.

Donning a white plastic cowboy hat, a red bandanna over their lower face, jeans and boots, the men’s eyes lit up in red when a player got a payout. In some models, they shouted “jackpot” when the bars aligned horizontally. The Mapes’ version garnered the name “Reno Joe.” 

The showcasing of Reno Joe resulted in numerous calls from Silver State casinos to the manufacturer for large orders of the Bandit. However, because Character Manufacturing Co. (CMC), on South Virginia Street in Reno, hand carved and custom made each one with individual characteristics, it only produced them in limited numbers. The brand of slot machines it used in them also differed occasionally but typically was a Mills or a Pace.

A Popular Novelty

In 1951, the Nevada Club in Reno installed in its bar area four Bandits, ones wearing hatbands bearing the casino name. They held Jennings Standard Chief slot machines, at the request of Lincoln Fitzgerald, the club’s co-owner and gaming manager.

The same year, LIFE magazine published in its May 18 issue a photo of the five Bandits in Stockmen’s Hotel and casino in Elko, in Northeastern Nevada. Those boasted gray and white polka-dot bandannas and red slot machines.

To entice people to play the slots, the Las Vegas Club in Southern Nevada, in 1952, commissioned 15 Bandits for its casino. They were beefier and better resembled men than Reno Joe, and had two arms and patterned shirtsleeves. Some lacked the bandanna.

These slots became the club’s icon, getting face time on advertising matchbooks and decal-postcards. The message on the latter was to see for oneself “the 15 generous gentlemen of the Old West at the Las Vegas Club.”

Other casinos, too, including Vegas’ Mint, purchased and incorporated the Bandit into its gambling offerings.

Artists And Products

Character Manufacturing Co. (CMC) began in 1948. During that time, various individuals carved its products.  One of the first was Sundance Cravat, a well-known Reno cowboy skilled in various handcrafts, including wood carving.

CMC hired cowboy artist Frank Polk when he claimed he could do a better job than had been done. During 1951 and 1952, Polk crafted more than 90 pieces for the company.

Other slot machine figures CMC made were the Gold Miner and the Cocktail Waitress, which was plastic. The latter was noteworthy for various wigs and apparel each of them wore. Reno’s Golden casino added 21 Cocktail Waitresses in 1956. They nearly met their demise during the fire ten years later that razed the building but were saved.

(CMC’s slot-less products included oversized, hand-carved Native Americans and talking horses.)

Sources

1931

The Big Baccarat Table in Nice (France) was sketched by cartoonist, Pierre de Régnier, aka Tigre (1898-1943), and ran in newspapers with this description:

“From left to right: Mme. Ephrussi, the French multimillionaire widow who lives at the gaming tables; Andre Citroen, the rich automobile manufacturer, whose fortune represents motor cars; Yves Mirande, the famous playwright whose wealth comes from the plays he writes, such as The Man in Evening Clothes, Ta Bouche, One Kiss. Next to Mirande is the Aga Khan, ‘spiritual leader’ of the Indian Mohammedans, whose fortune is represented by elephants and jewels; then a prosperous Paris man-dressmaker, with his different gowns.

Behind are Erskine Gwynne, Henri Letellier, with his Paris Journal, and Jefferson Davis Cohn, with some of his Pullman cars. On the middle of the table a banco is ready. There is a champagne bottle, a Citroen car, the Chasseur de Chez Maxime, an elephant belonging to Aga Khan and the manikins.”

1946

Owners of the Casa Vegas gambling club in Southern Nevada, Duke Wiley and Eddie Alias, announced their plan to acquire and convert a surplus, four-engine transport plane into a casino in the air. Slated solely for the then three-hour flight between Las Vegas and Reno, it was to offer on-board roulette, music and entertainment.

“This will enable tourists, harried business men and others to enjoy gambling while traveling and thus save time in the air,” Wiley told the local press.

However, it seems the idea didn’t fully take off and was scrapped.

Photo from freeimages.com, by Steven Kuijs

1948

The November 22, 1948 issue of Sports-Week roiled Nevada Wolf Pack fans and supporters.

Bevy Of Allegations

An article in that edition of the nationally circulated digest charged that the University of Nevada* (UN) football team had thrown the game against Santa Clara two weeks earlier, on November 7, “for the specific benefit of Nevada gamblers” — casino owners and operators and bookmakers — who’d made “a killing” on it (Reno Evening Gazette, Nov. 30, 1948).

The Nevada Wolf Pack had been favored in that game; the Santa Clara Broncos had been a 21-point underdog. The loss cost the Pack a bowl bid.

The story asserted that Renoites were saddened by the Wolf Pack’s 14-0 loss to the Broncos, except for an “exclusive group of bookies who were on the ‘in’ and a few dozen assorted Nevada football players who were on their payroll” (The Camden News, Nov. 20, 1948).

Those players, the article explained, which included All-America candidate, quarterback Stan Heath, received weekly paychecks from the area gambling clubs, a charge the casinos subsequently denied. (Some players worked in the gambling clubs only during summers, they said.)

The exposé noted that Nevada casinos donated large sums to UN in what appeared publicly to be a gracious act but in reality was to buy off the necessary officials so the football team would win or lose as instructed. Reno casino owners gave $30,000 (about $304,000 today) as “a direct subsidy to the university and planted their $40,000,000 per annum business [$406 million today] squarely behind the ostensibly noble purpose of building a national gridiron power,” wrote Don Freeberg, staff writer for the New York-based publication.

Up In Arms

The response in The Silver State to the Sports-Week piece was swift and adamant. Several Nevada attorney-politicians even volunteered to intervene: Patrick “Pat” A. McCarran, then U.S. senator  for Nevada; E.P. Carville, former U.S. senator and governor; and Morley Griswold, former governor.

As a policy, most of the large casinos in Northern Nevada didn’t accept bets on Nevada football games, they clarified through the media. Those that did noted that $500 ($5,000 today) at most had been wagered on the Pack-Broncos game locally.

UN’s newspaper, The Sagebrush, published an editorial demanding action against Sports-Week.

“If the athletic board sits back and allows this incident to pass unnoticed, many will reason it is true,” it read. “It is time to stop ignoring accusations and time to start making a few people eat their insidious remarks. In the event such action does not come, it is time for the board of regents to take over and protect its interests.”

School athletics officials — Joe Sheeketski, director of athletics and head football coach, and Harry Frost, chairman of UN’s board of athletic control — publicly denied the allegations. They had the law firm, Thatcher, Woodburn and Forman, demand that Sports-Week publisher Marty Berg print a full retraction of the story or face a libel suit. In their letter, the attorneys wrote:

“The University of Nevada athletic department makes a categorical and complete denial of the charges and insinuations contained in the article. The charges in your article are infamous, untrue and damaging to Nevada athletics, to the members of the athletic department and to the boys on the Nevada squad.”

Editor Backpedals, Sort Of

Berg issued a public statement in which he didn’t admit any wrongdoing or regret. Sports-Week hadn’t run the article with malicious intent or carelessness, he said. Rather, it published it “in the interest of clean sports in this country which is especially needed so far as college football is concerned.”

He shifted blame to UN officials, saying they’d read into the article charges that weren’t there, perhaps his way of backing off the accusations.

Yet, he seemed to re-level the allegations in his concluding remark: “We commend the Nevada situation to the governor of that state. We believe it warrants his inspection, if Nevada is to occupy any wholesome position in college athletics in this country.”

Berg agreed to print the Reno attorneys’ letter in full in the upcoming December 6 issue. Presumably, he did, as the university didn’t sue Sports-Week. Instead, it let the issue die a quick death.

———————————-

* The university was located in Reno. Today, the university is called the University of Nevada, Reno to be distinguished from its southern counterpart, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, which didn’t exist then.

What do you think? Did the Wolf Pack throw the game for the casinos?

Do any of you have either of these Sports-Week issues, November 7 or December 6, 1948? It’d be great to see the article and subsequent letter in full.

Sources

Photo from University of Nevada, Reno’s Wolf Pack Athletics Digital Collection

1947-1952

Despite New York mobsters trying to scare her off, an ambitious woman — Elaine Townsend (née Margaret Helgeson) — held her own as a gambling operator in the late 1940s. Bright, young and gorgeous, she parlayed her chutzpah, commerce degree and drive into making gobs of money in Cuba.

Big Screen Worthy

Her exploits in Havana among gangsters, politicians, movie stars and secret agents were so compelling that Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz planned to make a movie about them with Ball in the lead role but never did. However, a different film about Townsend — Razzle Dazzle: The Elaine Townsend Story — is slated for release on Aug. 1, 2018.

Entrepreneurial Endeavor

The Wyoming-born go-getter traveled to the Caribbean island early in 1947, at age 27.

“I’d heard Cuba was the spot for free enterprise — and I was as determined as ever to make a lot of money,” said Townsend, the daughter of a cattle rancher who’d grown up poor (The American Weekly, Sept. 5, 1948).

Once there, she heard the gambling concession at the Gran Casino Nacional, Cuba’s only legalized gaming spot at the time, was being sold for the upcoming season. Soon after, the tall blonde learned it only had been awarded to the New York Mafia in previous years. She consulted some attorneys who told her women didn’t run games in their country.

None of that deterred her, however, and she bid on the enterprise.

After negotiating for months with officials, Townsend bought the dice and chemin de fer (a variant of baccarat) operations for $30,000 ($329,000 today). She opened them in July, four months before the New York gamblers typically did.

The Confrontation

She soon found herself face to face with three of those very men from The Big Apple in the Gran Casino.

“We heard you grabbed off the dice and chemmy gimmicks here,” one of them said (The American Weekly, Sept. 5, 1948). “We came down, hoping to grab them off ourselves, and this Cuban guy says, ‘Miss Townsend got them. They’re all hers. They’re not for sale.’ We thought maybe it was a gag. It isn’t true, is it?”

When she confirmed that it was, another of the trio told her the players would “clean her out in a week.”

“What you want to do it for, honey?” the first man asked. “It’s not your racket. You got … well, you got class. You ought to be home or someplace.”

“I don’t want to go home. I want to make a lot of money,” Townsend said.

“Look, we’ll give you $10,000 more than you laid out if you’ll sell to us,” the third man said.

“No.”

“Twenty thousand?”

“I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I’ve gone through a lot of anxiety over this thing. I’ve got to be repaid for that. And so far it’s been fun. I like it. I’m going to stick with it.”

The La Cosa Nostra representatives left her alone after that.

Never having worked in gambling before, Townsend hired New Yorker Connie Immerman, not a mobster, to run the games under her watch, as he’d run them years earlier. Most recently, Immerman, with two of his brothers, had co-owned and run Connie’s Inn, a Harlem night club from 1923 to 1934, when the Depression caused them to close it.

In Havana, Townsend went on to own an interest in the Jockey Club casino and operate the games at the Montmartre after Fulgencio Batista, who usurped the Cuban presidency by coup in 1952, legalized gambling in hotels, clubs and cabarets in 1954.

Amassing Cash

Before entering the gambling industry, Townsend had toiled to earn, save and invest her money. After working her way through and graduating from the University of Denver in Colorado at age 19, she worked, often simultaneously, an assortment of jobs — teaching, selling real estate and modeling.

In 1940, at 20 years old, she visited friends in Honolulu and, after seeing the potential to make money there, she stayed. First, she ran a photo studio. Then, with the start of World War II, she opened a chain of hot dog stands, to which she eventually added a costume jewelry counter. She also bought the pool table concession in an arcade. With her income, she played the stock market … successfully.

Subsequently, she investigated business opportunities in Mexico but, instead, wound up in Cuba, just seven years after her first entrepreneurial effort.

Sources