Lucky, the horse, and its owner, Susan Wallace, play roulette at the Club Cal-Neva in Reno, Nevada

1950

Susan Wallace, a 24-year-old, “plucky blonde” who resided in Hollywood, California, needed money to further her opera studies (Nevada State Journal, Jan. 8, 1950). 

In early January, she sent telegrams to the casinos in Reno, Nevada — Harolds Club, Harrah’s Club, Bank Club, Club Cal-Neva, Palace Club, Riverside hotel — asking if they’d be amenable to horse roulette and if their casino could accommodate a horse and its size.

Unlike rat roulette, where the rodents are part of the gambling equipment, equine roulette involves a horse actually playing the game . . . well, with a bit of help.

Wallace would be in The Biggest Little City in a few days, she informed them, and wanted her white stallion — which she’d named Lucky because of his past gambling success — to play roulette with her there.

“‘Lucky,’ the horse, has never been known to draw to a soft 17 or crapped out in a friendly game in the stables among his buddies or in any flourishing casino,” reported the Nevada State Journal (Jan. 5, 1950).

Varied Responses

Three clubs replied via Western Union. A Harolds Club official asked how old Lucky was, noting the legal age for gambling was 21. Well, whew!  Lucky was eight in horse years, which was said to be equivalent to about age 32 in a human, so he was legal.

Ed Dowd of the Riverside Hotel told Wallace he wanted to host her and Lucky when the property expansion, in progress at the time, was done.

The Club Cal-Neva was the only casino to extend an invitation. It was through the manager Morrie Brodsky with this dispatch: “‘Under due consideration, Club Cal- Neva extends to you and your horse ‘Lucky’ all our gambling courtesies and privileges heretofore known only to man. Please be advised gaming limits and house policy must be adhered to. May the best animal win. Please advise your date of arrival. Regards’” (Nevada State Journal, Jan. 8, 1950).

Raising Awareness

Four days later, upon her arrival with Lucky, Wallace informed the press that a group of Los Angeles men, who believed in Lucky’s gambling acumen and Wallace’s singing ability, had given her $10,000 (nearly $1 million today) for the trip and gambling. A percentage of her and Lucky’s winnings would be hers to use for operatic training. She said she planned to stay in Reno as long as her money lasted or until she won a certain, undisclosed amount.

Whinnying At Roulette

On the 8th, the Homo Sapien-Equus duo hoofed it over to the Club Cal-Neva where they engaged in Lucky’s favorite game of chance. To play, Wallace would extend a silver dollar, which Lucky would grasp between his teeth. He’d move his head back and forth along the numbers and drop the coin on one of them. For each wheel turn, he’d select three numbers, and Wallace would bet on the same ones.

“Tourists raised their eyebrows and were quite surprised but most Reno residents dismissed the entire affair as one of those things they had to contend with,” noted the Nevada State Journal (Jan. 10, 1950).

On the second day, Wallace admitted gambling with Lucky was a publicity stunt to further her singing career, either with her winnings or from a well-paying singing job that might result from the press coverage.

After three days of play, the two were up by $600. The subsequent day they lost, but Wallace wouldn’t say by how much.

Media Go Silent

How the woman and horse fared subsequently or how long they were in Reno weren’t reported. Could this mean they stopped playing that day and left town soon after? Or did they perhaps lose the whole $10 grand before returning home?

Sources

1954-1962

Each time her husband, Ernie Kovacs, lost big at poker, actress Edie Adams bought herself a chinchilla coat or antique harpsichord.

When the bills for those purchases arrived, he’d say, “We can’t afford this!”

She’d respond, “Simple, just stop gambling.”

Photo from The New York Public Library Digital Collections, 1967-1986, Billy Rose Theatre Division: “Edie Adams”

1934-1935

Today, 80 years later, the circumstances of actress Thelma Todd’s death remain a mystery, and the case still is one of Hollywood’s infamous unsolveds.

A deep cover-up precluded the truth about the incident from surfacing. On December 16, 1935, the famous, 29-year-old blonde was found dead in her garage, her beaten, slumped body behind the wheel of her brown phaeton. The cause of her death was ruled accidental carbon monoxide poisoning from her car’s engine.

One theory behind the fatal event, however, purported in the book, Hot Toddy, is that the powerful Mafioso, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, had her murdered. He wasn’t just a low-level syndicate soldier. He was a boss, the first official head of the modern Genovese crime family, and made his mark in New York by splitting the city into five such dynasties. Meyer Lansky and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel were associates.

Luciano and Hot Toddy, as friends nicknamed her in her youth, began a casual relationship that evolved into a sexual dalliance by 1934. That year, the actress and her friend and neighbor, Roland West, opened a restaurant called Thelma Todd’s Café.

Exploitive Ulterior Motive

Luciano wanted to lease the top floor of her eatery to run a gambling club there, where he believed the wealthy Hollywood stars who frequented her café would spend lots of money. At the time, only poker and other player-against-player card games and horse race betting were legal in California. He sensed the strong-willed Todd wouldn’t permit it, so he employed devious tactics to get her to comply.

Luciano sent some of his goons to torment and wear down West, who managed the restaurant. They forced him to change vendors to those controlled by the mob and siphoned money from the business. As for Todd, Luciano got her addicted to speed, hoping it would make her submissive and willing to do whatever he wanted.

Over time, Charley Lucifer, as he was sometimes called, realized Todd was not a pushover, and she learned more and more about his underworld dealings. Their relationship deteriorated, and they saw each other less and less. Eventually, Todd started dating a businessman from San Francisco with whom she was infatuated.

Meanwhile, Luciano’s underworld nemesis in town, Frank Nitti, threatened to horn in on his interests — prostitution, gambling and drugs. Already, Nitti had shut him out of his shakedown of the movie industry after agreeing to include him. Consequently, to maintain an empire in Los Angeles, Luciano believed he needed Todd’s café more than ever.

He approached her with his plan. Despite knowing that refusing Luciano of anything could, and likely would, get her killed, she said no. For that, he saw her as a problem. He tried to persuade her to change her mind by other means, like having menacing men sit in the restaurant all day every day. Around Thanksgiving in 1935, he again pressured her face to face, to no avail.

“Toddy later told friends Luciano had wrangled with her all night about giving him the storage room for gambling,” wrote Andy Edmonds, the author of Hot Toddy. “He was insistent and vowed he would not walk away without the papers. They had argued violently in the car, Thelma refusing to give Luciano what he wanted.”

Luciano informed her that as of January 1, 1936, he’d be operating a gambling club on the third floor of her restaurant despite her protests.

Todd, though, remained resolute in her refusal to allow it. To thwart his plan, she turned the space into a steakhouse and opened it before he could move in.

The Slippery Slope

In early December, she called the Los Angeles district attorney’s office to relay what she knew about Luciano’s underhanded dealings and connections to other mobsters. She didn’t tell the person who’d answered the phone what her business was, only that she wanted an appointment to speak to the D.A. Little did she know that he was under Luciano’s control and that Luciano had an informant in the office.

In mid-December, Luciano insisted she go to dinner with him. She said no, but he forced her to join him. He took her to a secluded home where he grilled her about her knowledge of his “business” and what she’d told the D.A.’s office. She tried denying she knew anything, but Luciano knew better, became enraged and slapped her hard.

Todd spilled it all. Then figuring she was as good as dead, she purposefully provoked his fears of getting arrested for past actions and losing his foothold in the City of Angels. She claimed she’d hidden evidence, including photos, of his underworld operations and that she’d snitched on him to the FBI — both of which were bluffs.

Irate, Luciano made a phone call, in which he supposedly ordered a hit on Todd, drove her to a Christmas tree lot at her request where she picked out a tree then dropped her off at her home around midnight.

In the morning, her maid discovered her dead in the garage. Luciano left Los Angeles later in the day and never returned.

Sources

1930

Silent film star, Clara Bow, spent one September evening in 1930 playing illegal gambling games at a Lake Tahoe, Nevada casino. Both winning and losing at roulette, craps, 21 and the dice game, chuck-a-luck, she requested a high roll. The Cal-Neva Lodge obliged, allowing her to play as high as $300 per roll or card.

When she was in the red for about $5,000, the casino manager, Elmer “Bones” M. Remmer implored her to stop, but she refused. Throughout the evening, she lost $13,900 (a $198,000 value today), which she covered with three checks.

Then she stopped payment on them.

Clearly, the red-haired siren hadn’t known whom she was tangling with at the Cal-Neva! The owners, James “Jim/Cinch” C. McKay and William “Bill/Curly” J. Graham, ran Reno then, controlling its illegal gambling trade (Nevada legalized open-wide gambling in 1931) and operating speakeasies, brothels and more. “Bones” was their trusted partner and enforcer who did whatever they asked.

“‘Bones’” rarely met a man he liked, or a meal he didn’t, and he was just as likely to finish either one off,” wrote Al Moe in “Roots of Reno.”

If Bow hadn’t been a star, she might’ve been physically harmed or worse for stiffing the casino.

Another Ballsy Move

At the time, gambling was mostly illegal at the time. Some games were allowed—poker, stud-horse poker, five hundred, solo and whist—along with slot machine play only for the sales of cigars and drinks and social games only played for drinks and cigars served individually or prizes not exceeding two dollars in value.  As such, the casino’s owners couldn’t sue Bow for the money she owed. McKay tried to get her movie studio, Paramount, to cover the debt, but its executives refused, saying it was the actress’ personal matter.

Soon after, Bow issued a statement about the matter. She claimed the casino lacked a “rightful claim” against her, insinuating it had cheated her, charging her for $100 chips when she’d played with 50-cent pieces and changing the amount on her checks.

“I will gladly accept service of any legal documents,” she said. “I always pay every honest debt promptly” (Reno Evening Gazette, Sept. 24, 1930).

The Cal-Neva’s attorney refuted her accusations, calling them ludicrous. He noted that Bow had cashed the checks with the casino, which gave her the money upfront to use as she wished.

Bow never paid what she owed.

Sources

1950

For Hollywood’s Academy Awards, Las Vegas, Nevada casinos offered even money on All The King’s Men, the favorite for Best Movie. The other nominees and their odds were Battleground, 5 to 2; The Heiress, 9 to 2; and Twelve O’Clock High, 10 to 1.

In fact, Sin City had it right; the Oscar for Best Movie went to All The King’s Men, a story loosely based on the career of Huey Long, former Louisiana governor who, for one, allowed mobsters to run illegal gambling freely in the state in exchange for payoffs. (A remake of the film came out in 2006.)