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

1931

Belle Livingstone wasn’t the typical Nevada gambling club owner.

She’d acted on the stage and screen in the 1890s. She’d mingled with royalty and wealth in Europe and the United States. During Prohibition, she’d operated a speakeasy on New York’s Park Avenue. During that stint, she’d been arrested three times and spent 30 days in jail for selling alcohol to her patrons. She moved to Reno, Nevada in 1931, the year the state legalized gambling.

“Reno, everybody said, was the obvious place for me; Reno was the widest-open town in America, where enforcement was a farce; in Reno the Truckee River sometimes ran dry, but never Old Man River Booze,” Livingstone wrote in her memoir, Belle Out of Order. “Besides, there was always the legal gambling!”

When Livingstone’s request for a gambling license came up for a county board vote, ranchers who lived near the location she’d chosen for her club objected. They said a casino in the neighborhood would be detrimental to the children residing there. They implored the board to investigate Livingstone’s “character and fitness to conduct such a resort” and ask her about her criminal record.

The licensing board, however, approved it in a 3-to-2 decision. In September, The Cowshed, Livingstone’s nightclub, debuted. The former cow-milking barn had been transformed into an entertainment hotspot offering gambling, dining and dancing, and it drew crowds, 1,700 people on opening night alone.

It was located on South Virginia Street, the main Reno thoroughfare, about two miles south of downtown. (For those who know the locale, it was at 2295 S. Virginia Street, which is about where El Pollo Loco is, across from the old Park Lane Mall site.) “You haven’t seen Reno if you haven’t seen Belle’s ‘Cow Shed [sic],’” advertisements declared (Reno Evening Gazette, Oct. 24, 1931).

Shortly thereafter, troubles surfaced for the owner/hostess. The newspapers reported that internal conflicts arose between Livingstone and her investors, and Prohibition agents raided the club, seized bottles of liquor and arrested its three bartenders.

The Octopus Rears Up

Livingstone, however, attributed the difficulties to the “four-headed Octopus which strangled every business that didn’t pay money into their till … no one could possibly operate without their sanction.” This tentacled animal that controlled Reno’s underground was financier George Wingfield and his three partners, William “Bill” Graham, James “Jim” McKay and an unknown third person, perhaps Reno Councilman William A. Justi.

“In spite of the fact that the governor had given me Nevada and the mayor had given me Reno, the underworld now gave me the works,” she added. “In the weeks that followed they installed in my place a man to provide my liquor, another to watch my cash register, others to stand back of my crap table and my roulette wheel. They carried out a campaign of psychological terrorism to the point where I felt obliged to hire a guard to watch my cottage while I slept. Finally came a complete blockage on my liquor, and what night club can exist without liquor?”

In a few months’ time, the Octopus successfully squeezed out Livingstone. In November, she headed to Dallas to run another club there.

A few days later, The Cowshed’s doors closed, and the entity became caught up in legal entanglements. In 1932, in abatement proceedings, a judge ordered the facility be locked for one year.

In May 1933, new management held a gala opening for The Cowshed, at which hundreds of attendees reveled. Success was fleeting, however, and the establishment closed and reopened a few more times before The Cowshed name was abandoned for good in 1937.

Sources

Presumably to gain money, power and notoriety, a small clique of men monopolized gambling in Reno, Nevada during the 1920s and 1930s through violence, payoffs, intimidation, threats and other gangster techniques. The industry mostly was illegal, with some games allowed, until 1931.

The syndicate’s modus operandi became the example of how it was done in Nevada, a guide for their mobster friends who, later, would rule gambling in Las Vegas.

Along with games of chance, the Reno Mob offered endless alcohol during Prohibition and sex for sale. The hotbed of vice that was The Biggest Little City, along with a relaxed divorce law, spurred tourism long before Vegas became the state’s largest metropolis and took over as that industry’s leader. Further, with their dollars (and perhaps coercion), the racketeers were instrumental in getting gambling legalized in Nevada.

George Wingfield

The Strings Puller

George Wingfield, Sr. (born 1876): The man with the vision (and gobs of money at the time), he initially orchestrated the launch of illegal gambling in Reno, choosing the few men to effect his plan, getting them trained in casino operations and having them run games in town. Wingfield wanted the buildings he owned to be filled and believed the offer of gaming in them would achieve that end. Although he, himself, was a savvy card player, he needed what he believed to be a cleaner image to carry out his other pursuits, such as politics.

Bill Graham

Jim McKay

The Deadly Duo

James “Jim/Cinch” Carmichael McKay (born 1888) and William “Bill/Curly” James Graham (born 1888): After meeting in Tonopah, McKay and Graham became fast friends and crime partners. Wingfield had them learn the gaming business at one of his and Abelman’s casinos, The Big Casino in Tonopah, before he summoned them to Reno in the 1920s to establish illegal gaming there. While maintaining a thin allegiance to Wingfield, the pair quickly plotted their own course, which would, for starters, involve launching their own casino (Willows) and brothel (Stockade).  

William Justi

The City Councilman

William A. Justi (born 1873): Justi was the councilman for Reno’s liberal Third Ward, in which most casinos were located, between 1923 and 1944. He also was the council’s police committee chairman for a number of years. In those two roles, he could and did act on behalf of McKay and Graham, who allegedly owned him.

The Loyal Associate

Nathan “Nick” Abelman (born 1876): Abelman was Wingfield’s willing, sensible and most law abiding partner throughout the years. When he made Wingfield’s acquaintance in Goldfield, Nevada in 1904, he already had experience running saloons in the Midwest. Abelman went on to co-own, with various partners, numerous gambling enterprises.

The Willing Henchmen

These Reno Mobsters had a few, trusted men who worked at their various Northern Nevada casinos — Willows, Bank Club, Rex, Cal-Neva Lodge, Haymarket, Monte Carlo, Country Club — overseeing the gaming, ejecting troublemakers, assaulting cheaters, encouraging debtors to square up and the like. They also did other dirty work, such as menacing competitors and delivering graft. They were:

Jack Sullivan

Bones Remmer

Elmer “Bones” F. Remmer (born 1898): Jokingly called “Bones” due to his ample size, Remmer grew up in the Bay Area of Northern California. He was mean and feared. Seemingly more entrepreneurial than Sullivan and Hall, Remmer would go on to co-own the Cal-Neva Lodge, run several casinos and clubs on San Francisco Bay’s east and west sides and become embroiled with both Jewish-American, Italian-American and other mobsters.

Jack Sullivan né John B. Scarlett (born 1879): A professional boxer in his youth, Sullivan “was a large man with a brusque manner and an intimidating personality,” wrote Dwayne Kling in The Rise of the Biggest Little City. He moved to Reno from Tonopah with friend Henry “Tex” Hall in the 1920s. He would help open and run the Willows then own a portion of and operate Bank Club, both popular Reno casinos.

Henry “Tex” Hall (born 1878): A cowboy from Texas, Hall worked as a manager at several Graham-McKay casinos, including the Cal-Neva Lodge, of which he came to own a piece.

The Reno Mob’s dominion began to ebb when crises arose during the 1930s — financial ruin for Wingfield and prison terms for McKay, Graham and Hall.

The Business Model

These were the Mobsters’ 5 main tenets behind running unlawful gambling:

1) Pay Bribes: They paid whatever graft necessary — to members of the police force and sheriff’s office, the mayor, at least one city councilmember and some higher-level politicians — to continue their reign obstacle free. In return, they were permitted to serve alcohol until 1933 when Prohibition ended and offer gambling until 1931 when Nevada legalized it. In the instances they landed themselves in a legal bind, rare because they were generally protected from such occurrences, the officials in their pockets made the trouble go away.

2) Limit the Competition: The quartet decided who, if anyone, could open their own gambling enterprise in town. It usually had to be someone that at least one man in their group knew and/or would vouch for. If approved, however, the mobsters imposed stipulations, such as limits on the quantity or type of gambling offered. They demanded payments for being allowed to operate — 15 percent of the profits.

The gangsters were especially ruthless with men and women who opened shop without asking their permission beforehand and/or after they’d been warned to do so. In those cases, the four would  worm their way in and usurp the operation for themselves or, via threats, destruction of property and intimidation, they’d drive the proprietors out of their businesses and even out of town.

3) Do Whatever It Takes: The existence of laws didn’t deter the group, especially McKay and Graham, when they desired something. They exercised free will always and carried out (or, most often, had someone else carry out) whatever was necessary to remain on top in Northern Nevada’s gambling world. 

“Both were equally ruthless players within and outside the limits of the law,” wrote the authors of Baby Face Nelson about McKay and Graham.

4) Don’t Tolerate Cheating: McKay and Graham had no qualms about mangling and bloodying the bodies of cheaters, both customers and dealers, as punishment. Ironically, the zero tolerance rule didn’t apply to them; they ran various scams on primarily unsuspecting tourists, bilking them for fortunes at a time.

5) Reward Underling Loyalty:  The four acknowledged their subordinate’s obedience and solid work performance by affording them an ownership stake in one of their casinos.

Sources

Photos of McKay, Graham and Sullivan: from the University of Nevada, Reno’s Special Collections
Photo of Wingfield: from the Nevada Historical Society