1953-1955

In fall 1953, John “Fat Jack” Galloway was playing the card game, 21, at Leo Quilici’s hotel-casino, the El Rancho Hotel, in Wells, Nevada.

Fat Jack himself, in his early 40s, was the operator of a gambling saloon located 8 miles west of Fallon. Beforehand, he’d been employed as a dealer at Lake Tahoe and Las Vegas clubs and had served prison time on bunco and vagrancy charges in the early 1940s in California.

Leo’s son, Joe Quilici, 27, the El Rancho’s manager and a city councilman, was dealing to Fat Jack. Thinking Fat Jack was a tourist, Joe cheated him out of about $4,200 ($37,000 today); Joe’d often peek at the top card in the deck and deal the second card rather than the first.

After Fat Jack left the casino, another El Rancho dealer told Joe that Fat Jack was an undercover agent for the tax commission. Joe ran across the street to the Bulls Head Bar, and told his father, the proprietor, he’d been caught cheating. (Joe had been discovered dealing dishonestly previously, and his gambling license had been suspended but then reinstated. The same had happened to Leo for having cheated customers with a plugged slot machine that couldn’t pay out jackpots.)

The day after Fat Jack and Joe’s gaming encounter, Dudley Kline, 61, allegedly paid Leo a visit at his saloon. Dudley was second in charge of the Nevada Tax Commission’s gambling division that, since 1948, had been tasked with keeping games of chance in the state honest. Dudley told Leo that Joe had swindled a tax commission agent and that he, Dudley, might be able to help. Then he left.

Fat Jack then paid a visit to Leo several hours later. After deceptively introducing himself as a tax commission agent, Fat Jack reiterated that the problem of Joe cheating him could go away for $3,000 ($27,000 today), an amount he said he had to split with another person, presumably Dudley. Leo paid him the full amount.

In February 1954, after an investigation in which the Quilicis were the only witnesses, Dudley and Fat Jack were arrested. They were bound over for trial and released on $5,000 bond each.

Elko County District Attorney Grant W. Sawyer, who’d learned of the incident from an anonymous tipster, asserted that Dudley was an accessory before the fact to extortion but charged him as a principal because he supposedly “set the stage” for Fat Jack telling Leo that he, Fat Jack, was a commission member (Reno Evening Gazette, Feb. 11, 1954). Sawyer similarly charged Fat Jack.

Despite Dudley denying knowledge of any blackmail attempt, Robbins Cahill, the tax commission’s secretary, fired him. 

“The circumstances of this case dictate that we continue to dig. We are going to turn over every spade full around and weigh it carefully,” Cahill said (Reno Evening Gazette, Feb. 11, 1954).

Without a choice, Leo Quilici closed down the gambling at his two properties — standard procedure when cheating has been discovered.

Pursuit Of (In)justice

Sawyer’s charges against Dudley were dismissed twice. Two different judges, first in district then in justice court, granted Dudley a permanent writ of habeas corpus based on insufficient evidence to warrant holding him for trial.

In a third attempt to convict Dudley, Sawyer, in early 1955, filed an appeal with Nevada’s Supreme Court, challenging the writ.

“I have searched my conscience and I honestly believe there is evidence to hold [Dudley] Kline for trial,” he said, denying he was attempting to persecute him (Reno Evening Gazette, Aug. 13, 1954).

At that point, Fat Jack was awaiting trial pending the outcome of Sawyer’s appeal on Dudley’s case. He closed his gaming operation.

The higher court upheld the original writ, saying “there was no error in the conclusion of the district court that Kline had been held to answer without reasonable or probable cause or in the order discharging him from custody by reason thereof” (Nevada State Journal, April 14, 1955). This ended the legal ordeal for Dudley. Despite the outcome, though, he wasn’t reinstated on the tax commission.

Within the week, Sawyer dismissed the extortion charges against Fat Jack, believing the state wouldn’t be able to adequately prove a guilty verdict.

Was Dudley guilty or, perhaps, framed by Fat Jack and the Quilicis?

Sources

Louis Tom Dragna

1960-1967

Los Angeles mobsters, Louis Tom Dragna and John “The Bat” Battaglia, conversed in a hotel-casino cocktail lounge on the Las Vegas Strip one day in February 1960. But their visit was cut short when Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB) agents appeared with local police who arrested the two.

They charged them with vagrancy and threatened to arrest them the next time they appeared in Sin City (they soon after dropped the vagrancy charge).

Gaming authorities didn’t want either man in any Nevada casino, which they formalized via the “Black Book” two months after the undesirables’ arrest. The black book, whose creation had been in progress prior to the Dragna/Battaglia incident, contained the names of individuals casino operators had to keep out of their facilities or lose their gambling license.

The NGCB strictly enforced it, having those on the list kicked out of gambling clubs. Repeat offender Johnny Marshall (aka Marshall Caifano), triggerman for the Chicago syndicate with 18 arrests on his record between 1929 and 1951, found himself booted out several times.

“I agree with any measures necessary to keep the hoodlums out of Nevada,” said Nevada Governor Grant Sawyer. “The operators have a great responsibility to cooperate. We might as well serve notice on underworld characters right now that they are not welcome in Nevada and we aren’t going to have them here” (Nevada State Journal, Nov. 2, 1960).

Hashed Out In The Courts

That year, Dragna tested the constitutionality of the black book in the courts. He sought a federal court injunction against it and the members of both state gaming agencies. He claimed they caused Las Vegas hotels to refuse him entry, depriving him of his rights as a U.S. citizen.

Marshall also sued each gaming regulator along with Governor Sawyer for ($100 apiece) and the Desert Inn (for $150,000), whose staff had kicked him out.

In 1961, a U.S. District Court judge dismissed Dragna and Marshall’s suits on the grounds that gambling isn’t a protected federal civil right and the matter was a state one.

Marshall Pursues The Cause

Within the following year, Dragna dropped his appeal upon being sentenced to five years in prison for extorting the manager of a boxing champion.

As for Marshall’s case, the appellate judges remanded it to federal district court for trial. One justice suggested that “Nevada has as much right to keep suspect persons out of its casinos as Texas ranchers have to ban cattle with hoof and mouth disease” (Nevada State Journal, May 13, 1962).

Subsequently, Marshall lost in federal court and again appealed. In 1966, six years after gaming authorities distributed the black book, the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld its use. It noted that neither being put on the list nor being denied entry to casinos was unconstitutional.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in 1967, refused to hear the case, finally answering the civil rights question.

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1950s Las Vegas Showgirl

1958-1961

The debut of topless showgirls in Las Vegas roused disapproval — not surprising given it occurred early in the “Leave it to Beaver” era.

The Stardust was the first to abandon bras and tops, doing so when it unveiled a show featuring the Bluebell Girls for the hotel-casino’s 1958 grand opening on The Strip. Other casinos soon followed suit, leading to an outcry from a Nevada-based Catholic Bishop, Robert J. Dwyer.

Dwyer condemned such shows as “filth,” a “flouting of morality” and a threat to “the public decency of our commonwealth.” Via letter, he clarified to all Nevada priests that no Catholic, resident or tourist, “is permitted to be a spectator of such entertainment” as doing so constituted a sin and “there is no vacation from the Ten Commandments” (Reno Evening Gazette, July 6, 1961).

In response to this flak, some properties, like the Dunes, vowed to continue their risqué shows because the public enjoyed them whereas others, such as the El Rancho Vegas, instructed their performers to cover up.

Later that year, two Nevada senators introduced what became known as “the bare bosom bill,” which would ban casino acts involving nudity. The state legislature killed it.

Migration North

This quelled the issue until about three years later, when two Reno hotel-casinos boarded the bandwagon, putting on shows featuring partially clothed women — the Riverside’s “Le Crazy Horse Revue” and the Golden Hotel’s “Playmates of Paris.”

Dwyer reiterated his views.

“If nothing is done to correct the situation, the state may well find itself in the position of a moral leper, and leprosy demands drastic treatment,” he said (Reno Evening Gazette, July 6, 1961).

The newly formed Nevada Gaming Commission, in its first meeting, in 1961, raised the controversial subject. The members doubted gambling regulation extended to showgirls’ exposed breasts so they referred the matter to Nevada Attorney General Roger Foley.

Foley volleyed back with an opinion the commissioners likely didn’t want to hear, that the agency holds the power to ban casino shows involving nudity. Governor Grant Sawyer approved of Foley’s determination. For whatever reasons, though, decades of commissioners since have let bare bosoms be.

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1931-1965

Nevada’s early gambling industry was “wrapped in a segregated White Curtain” (Reno Gazette-Journal, Feb. 27, 2008).

Between 1931, when Nevada legalized gambling, and 1965, African Americans were banned from gambling or even being present in the Silver State’s Caucasian-owned casinos, for fear their presence would scare away white patrons. Typically, any black person who entered a casino would be asked to leave. The only exception was African American men in military uniform, who, in rare cases, were allowed to stay and play.

These hospitality businesses, however, employed blacks as restroom attendants, maids, shoe shiners, cooks, janitors and porters. Owners required African American entertainers who performed on the premises to come and go via the rear or side doors and use the service elevators to not be seen.

In contrast, Asian- and African American-owned casinos permitted blacks entry and gambling privileges. For instance, blacks made up about 90 percent of guests at Bill H. Fong’s New China Club, in Reno. The Asian-American-owned Cosmo Club and the black-owned Harlem Club were two other integrated gambling places in Northern Nevada.

In Sin City

In Las Vegas, prior to the debut in 1955 of the first desegregated hotel-casino, the Moulin Rouge, African Americans weren’t thrown out of gambling clubs on The Strip but were made “to feel unwelcome,” wrote Wallace Turner in Gamblers’ Money. The Moulin Rouge was owned by one black man — boxing champion Joe Louis  —and two white men — Alexander Bisno and Louis Rubin. Although wildly successful at first, the enterprise only lasted a few months, closing and going bankrupt later in the same year.

Frank Sinatra, using his influence, advanced the idea that African Americans should and must be afforded equal rights. He forced the issue when he refused to perform at Las Vegas places where a mixed audience wasn’t allowed and when, on behalf of the Rat Pack, he wouldn’t accept gigs at venues that prohibited Sammy Davis, Jr. from staying in its hotel.

Five years later, NAACP president, Dr. James McMillan, and Nevada’s first black dentist, Charles West, asked to meet with civic leaders and, if refused, threatened a march down the Las Vegas Strip in protest of racial discrimination.

Subsequently, Nevada Governor Grant Sawyer, city officials, local law enforcement and hotel owners convened at the Moulin Rouge’s coffee shop to discuss blacks’ exclusion from the Strip. Out of that tète-a-tète came a pact — the Moulin Rouge Agreement — to end segregation immediately, but only at hotel-casinos on the Strip.

Full Inclusion

It would be another five years before African Americans could gamble freely in any Nevada casino. That came with the 1965 passage of a revised state Civil Rights Act. The amended law expanded anti-discrimination to specifically encompass casinos and bars.

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