When Fulgencio Batista returned to power as president in Cuba in 1952, he aimed to foster a gambling empire from which he could generate revenue for his coffers. To facilitate casino development, he and his administration:

• Restricted gambling licenses to hotels or nightclubs worth $1 million or more

• Waived taxes, which were as high as 70%, on all building materials imported for new hotels

• Deemed all casino pit bosses, stickmen and dealers to be skilled technicians, so they’d qualify for entry into Cuba under two-year visas versus the typical six-month ones afforded to incoming workmen

• Subsidized construction costs of new hotels

Government-backed banks provided $6 million of the $14 million to construct the Havana Riviera, for instance. The pension fund of the Catering Workers Union of Cuba provided most of the $24 million for the Havana Hilton. Casino operators typically leased space for their operations from the hotel owners; a rate of $1 million per year was typical.

Consequently, lavish hotel and casino construction boomed, as did the gambling business. Cuba became what Mexico had been during Prohibition — a playground for wealthy Americans.

“Havana’s casinos are elegant salons with expensive chandeliers, brocade draperies and a mink-stole clientele … At the roulette tables the smallest chips are a quarter. At the craps tables they are a dollar — but nobody who really amounts to anybody thinks of betting less than a $5 chip,” described LIFE magazine (March 10, 1958).

Government taxes on the new casinos “were set ridiculously low: $25,000 for a license plus 20 percent of the profits,” LIFE reported. While this was the official cost, the true under-the-table fee was $250,000. “And no one has even tried to guess how big a cut the politicians demand at the end of the month.”

Further, Batista’s brother-in-law, Roberto Fernandez y Miranda, had a monopoly on the country’s slot machines from which he collected half the profits.

Las Vegas Gamblers Want In

Despite the corruption in Cuba (or perhaps because of it), eight Nevada licensees perceived an opportunity to make money by capitalizing on Havana’s gambling trend and dropped at least $400,000 into casinos there.

• Owner Wilbur Clark and associates, Thomas McGinty, Moe Dalitz and Morris Kleinmann, of the Desert Inn in Las Vegas leased space adjoining the Hotel Nacional de Cuba in which they opened and operated a $1 million casino called Wilbur Clark’s Casino International.

• Hy Abrams, owner, and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, investor, in the Sands in Las Vegas, and Jack Davis, investor in the Fremont hotel-casino in Las Vegas held a share of the Havana Riviera casino.

• Clifford Jones, co-owner of the Thunderbird hotel in Las Vegas, owned an interest in the Havana Hilton’s casino.

For these men, their investments were ultra-high risk and tenuous, as government depravity was rampant and political strife was high in Cuba.

“For the gamblers, the one completely unknown factor is the position of Batista himself,” LIFE noted. “If he fell from power, the gambling mob would have to make a whole new set of deals with a different bunch of politicians. The gambling trade might slow down.”

Sources

Pat McCarran, U.S. Senator for Nevada, 1947

1933-1954

His unfavorable personal opinion about gambling notwithstanding, Patrick “Pat” A. McCarran (D-Nev.) — U.S. Senator between 1933 and 1954 — acted repeatedly on the industry’s behalf. Had he not, it’s likely gaming wouldn’t have emerged as The Silver State’s greatest revenue-producing economic sector — a positive or negative, depending on one’s view.

Because gambling had become vital to Nevada — or “woven … in its various forms into the warp and woof of the state’s economic structure,” in the words of McCarran — he believed he had no choice but to do what he could to keep it thriving. But he felt like a “whore,” he said, defending gamblers (casino owners and operators), whom he considered “tinhorns.”

“In the climactic decision of his long and turbulent career, [McCarran] characteristically chose to justify and defend his beloved Nevada rather than take it into one more battle with poverty and want,” wrote the authors of The Money and The Power.

Inside His Bag Of Tricks

Here are 7 of McCarran’s pro-gambling efforts:

1) He intervened to get underworld denizens gambling licenses.

When Moe Dalitz, Cleveland mobster, applied for a gambling permit for the Desert Inn casino in Las Vegas in 1949, the Nevada Tax Commission said no based on his criminal background — bootlegging and illegal gambling. McCarran discussed the matter in person with one of his powerful friends, Salvatore “Sam” Maceo, Texas organized crime boss who previously had partnered with Dalitz in illegal liquor distribution.

After the McCarran-Maceo tète-a tète and supposed intervention by Maceo subsequently, state gambling regulators granted Dalitz a license.

2) He helped gamblers surpass other obstacles.

When mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel and the Nevada Projects Corporation, the cadre of mobsters financing the new hotel-casino, were having the Flamingo constructed in Las Vegas immediately following World War II, in 1946, construction materials were in shortage. As such, the Nevada office of the federal Civilian Production Administration allocated scarce materials on a project priority basis.

McCarran jumped the Flamingo to the top of the list so it could, and it did, receive construction materials without delay.

3) He got the scope of the Kefauver inquiry broadened.

In 1950, when Senator Estes Kefauver (D-Tenn.) pursued launching a congressional investigation into gambling nationwide, McCarran got the target expanded to encompass all types of organized crime — prostitution, narcotics, loan sharking, murder, extortion and labor racketeering — to lessen the resulting consequences to Nevada’s gambling.

The probing body became the United States Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce, or in short, the Kefauver Committee.

4) He delayed Congress’ approving the Kefauver inquiry.

Among his efforts there, he begged for additional time for the Judiciary Committee, which he headed, to consider the proposal, raised potentially related legal issues and suggested the matter be sent to the Senate Commerce Committee for its review as well.

Kefauver, however, received a green light, and his team conducted hearings in 14 major U.S. cities during 1950 and 1951.

5) He fought Congress’ agreement to levy contempt citations against Kefauver witnesses in general.

When subpoenaed to testify during the hearings, numerous gamblers either failed to appear or when they did appear, they refused to answer questions. Kefauver wanted them slapped with a congressional contempt charge* for obstructing the investigation. McCarran fervently argued against the idea but lost that battle. Once Congress approved one contempt charge, a slew followed.

6) He got contempt charges against multiple gamblers quashed individually.

7) He helped thwart passage of a bill to tax all gamblers.

Growing out of the Kefauver Committee’s findings, the House Ways and Means Committee, in May 1951, voted to impose a “10 percent gross receipts tax on bookies, numbers rackets operators and others who operate gambling pools” (Nevada State Journal, May 17, 1951). Kefauver urged that the tax bill from the House must be amended to incorporate all forms of gambling.

McCarran called on some Nevada gamblers to lobby against the bill while he fought it at the Senate Finance Committee level. He pleaded his case, that the “cumulative result would spell tragedy for the State of Nevada” and gambling, as a major economic component, needed protecting.

What eventually passed were a 10 percent tax on all wagers concerning sporting events or lotteries and a $50 annual occupational stamp excise for bookmakers and lottery operators. These mandates comprised a small portion of the much larger Revenue Act of 1951.

For these and his other interventions in support of gaming, McCarran was lauded by some and criticized by others.

—————————-

* Contempt of Congress is the criminal act of obstructing the work of the U.S. Congress or one of its committees, a misdemeanor punishable by a $100 to $1,000 fine or one-month to one-year imprisonment.

Sources

Interior of the Bonanza Club in Reno, Nevada

1944

The debut of the Bonanza Club* on October 3, 1944 in Reno, Nevada, was doubly significant. Formerly the Barn Club, the new casino was regarded as one of, if not, the finest in the state; about $300,000 (roughly $4.2 million today) were spent on redecorating and equipping the place. It also was one of the first gambling houses in The Biggest Little City to have been funded and run by ex-Nevada mobsters.

Underworld Involvement

Financing to redo the property was provided allegedly by Moe Dalitz, Detroit mobster, and Frank “The Prime Minister” Costello, boss of New York’s Luciano (later Genovese) crime family. Their straw man, Wilbur Clark, who’d purchased and fronted the El Rancho Vegas in Las Vegas (1941) for Costello and mobster Meyer Lansky, bought the Bonanza Club in 1944 and ran it for only months. He would move on to open the Monte Carlo club in Las Vegas (1945), the Desert Inn, also in Vegas (1950), and the Tropicana casino and the International Casino, both in the 1950s in Havana, Cuba.

Mobster Louis “Lou” Wertheimer** officially took Clark’s place at the Bonanza Club the same year it opened. A former member of the Chesterfield Syndicate in Detroit, Michigan, he had numerous past arrests and gambling experience running casinos in home town Cheboygan and Detroit, Michigan; Cleveland, Ohio; and West Hollywood and Palm Springs, California. Wertheimer would sell his ownership in the Bonanza in advance and move to operating the Mapes casino when it debuted in December 1947.

A Look Inside

The elaborate Bonanza Club boasted a gaming section with two roulette, two craps, three 21 and one Big Six games along with 24 slot machines. It also contained a 58-foot bar with a full length mirror. In the 100-person dining room, lunch and dinner were served, and entertainment featured a two-piano ensemble or a violin-piano duo.

October 10, 1944 newspaper ad

Tom Douglas of California — designer of Ciro’s and LaRue’s, well-known Hollywood nightclubs — followed an 1890s theme to embellish the Bonanza Club’s interior and exterior. Inside, the walls and carpet boasted a “bonanza red” color, contrasted by the white ceiling frescoes. Lace curtains, gilded lamp fixtures from San Francisco’s Barbary Coast and plate-glass mirrors in heavy gilded frames further adorned the space.

“The most striking attribute of the Gay-Nineties motif club were the wall fixtures, eight-foot tall nude ladies who appeared to be holding the ceiling in place,” wrote Al W. Moe, in his Nevada Casino History blog. These busty figurines were custom made by a Beverly Hills firm, “which employed live girls to model and from whom were cast the delightful likenesses, completely charming as well as stunning, wrote Raymond Sawyer in Reno, Where the Gamblers Go!

The Architect

The club was built by Thomas E. Hull, the mobster-affiliated owner of Hull Hotels, which operated hotels it constructed, including the El Rancho in Las Vegas (until Clark and Detroit mobsters took over) and numerous non-gaming ones in California.

Initially, Hull, his sister Eunice Lewis and Larry Tripp co-owned the Bonanza Club. Tripp previously had helped open the El Rancho and, also in Southern Nevada, the Last Frontier Hotel (1942).

——————————-

* The Bonanza Club was located at 207 N. Center Street, Reno. The property today is part of Harrah’s Reno Hotel and Casino.

** Lou’s eldest brother, Myrton “Mert”  Wertheimer, ran the gambling at the Riverside Hotel starting in 1949 and bought, with a co-investor, the entire property from George Wingfield in 1955.

Photo from the University of Nevada, Reno’s Digital Collections

Sources