1948-1950

In between dispatch orders, a Las Vegas, Nevada taxi driver fleetingly picked up the announcement of horse racing information on his cab radio one day in mid-October, 1948.

He informed Clark County Sheriff Glen Jones, who contacted the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in Los Angeles. The agency immediately sent to Sin City two radio engineers — Robert Stratton and Raymond Day — to investigate.

Illegal Activity Uncovered

Their testing revealed that the broadcasts had taken place between 10:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. daily and had originated from equipment in Room 228 of Vegas’ Apache Hotel on Fremont Street.

The guest register showed a Charles Stauffer, 28, residing there.

Stratton, Day and Jones raided the space, discovering a rigged system for hijacking horse racing information — odds, entries, results and parimutuel payoffs.  Through a hole cut in the Apache room’s floor, which opened into an air duct that traversed the El Dorado Club’s ceiling, a microphone picked up the race details announced via loud speakers at that casino.

It fed the sound into a transmitter which then sent it to a receiver in the Santa Anita Turf Club, 60 yards away, across the street.

The stolen data originated from Chicago-based Continental Press Service, which collected them from the horse racing tracks and distributed them nationally via leased Western Union facilities. However, three men controlled distribution of that information in Las Vegas — Moe Sedway, Morris Rosen and Cornelius Hurley.

(Sedway owned the El Dorado Club. He and Morris Rosen owned the Golden Nugget horse race wire service. Both were mobsters associated with Meyer Lansky and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. Hurley was Continental’s Las Vegas manager.)

Hurley provided exclusive access to the race wire to Sedway and Rosen, who in turn sold the service only to select casinos in town. The Turf Club wasn’t one of them. In, fact, for unknown reasons, they’d turned down the owners — Ed Margolis and Sam and Dave Stearns — when they’d applied previously, leading to them tapping the wire.

Five suspects were arrested for the crime: The three Turf Club owners along with the man they hired to install the equipment at the Apache, John Melvin Cole, 26, and Stauffer, 28.

Attempted Double-Double Cross

Stauffer, who was in Nevada for a divorce, had been offered a fully comped room if he’d turn a transmitter on and off at two designated times per day. He’d agreed.

However, he’d figured out what was transpiring and tried to capitalize on that knowledge for added benefit. He’d told Hurley that for $6,000 he’d disclose where the “bootleg” transmitter was located.

Hurley had negotiated the price down to $4,000, but no deal had been finalized when the cab driver set the subsequent events in motion.

Wire Tapping Consequences

A federal grand jury indicted Cole, Margolis and the Stearnses in mid-1949 for violating the Communications Act of 1934, a felony. They were released on $1,000 bond apiece.

In federal court in February 1950, the men’s defense attorney asked for suppression of the evidence against them for two reasons:

The search warrant that law enforcement had used to get into the Apache Hotel room was illegal as it hadn’t been directed at any one person and that a deputy sheriff, rather than a requisite U.S. marshal, had served the warrant.

• Because Cole was illiterate, he couldn’t have written the confession presented.

• The judge granted both motions and dismissed the grand jury indictments against all four.

Cole was released, but the Stearnses and Margolis were charged with violating FCC regulations governing low-power radio stations, a misdemeanor. They all pled guilty and, ultimately, paid $1,200 apiece in fines.

As for Stauffer, he was charged with operating a radio station without a license, a felony with a maximum penalty of $10,000 and two years in federal prison. It’s unknown what sentence he received, if any.

Sources

Vivian Blaine in Guys and Dolls in New York, 1953

1955

At least 10 hotel-casinos on the Las Vegas Strip offered entertainment, typically marquee names like Liberace and Mario Lanza, who’d played Sin City time and again.

The Royal Nevada, though, changed it up with a first. They put on the musical, Guys and Dolls, featuring a number of the original Broadway cast members, including Vivian Blaine.

The estimated weekly cost was $55,000 (about $495,000 today), roughly $5,000 more than the weekly salaries of some in-demand stars.

Photo from Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library Digital Collections: “Guys and dolls,” 1953

1961-1966

Early in 1961, Michael Catrone, 60, an apartment complex owner, presented to the Nevada Club in Las Vegas a winning keno ticket for $25,000 ($198,000 today). Yet the casino’s general manager didn’t pay it because it was suspicious — the ink on the ticket was lighter than on other ones.

An internal inquiry revealed a discrepancy between the machine-generated original and duplicate. The copies typically were locked up and used to confirm a winning ticket.

Catrone complained to the Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB) the gambling house had stiffed him. The casino’s owner, Robert Van Santen, went to the police, claiming Catrone had tried to cheat the house and hired a private eye to look into the incident. Law enforcement, the NGCB and the district attorney’s (D.A.’s) office investigated.

Concluding that Catrone and two Nevada Club employees — Robert Pearson, 27, and Stanley Wagner, 28 — had colluded to take the casino, detectives theorized the perpetrators had run a blank ticket through the keno machine, then after the winning numbers had been posted, had opened the machine and had marked those digits on the ticket. The D.A. charged the three with attempting to obtain money under false pretenses (the doctored keno ticket) by defrauding the club.

NGCB agents looked into the matter and after receiving a confession from Wagner, told Van Santen he didn’t have to pay the $25,000.

In the preliminary hearing, the prosecution tried to introduce into evidence Wagner’s written and signed confession of his involvement, but the defense objected, noting the Nevada Club had offered Wagner $1,000 in exchange for the confession. (Was this true?) Later, claiming the casino had only given him $250 of the agreed upon $1,000, Wagner retracted his previous admission of guilt.

Prosecution’s House Of Cards

D.A. John Mendoza pursued a case against the three, all of whom pled innocent.

During the trial, which began in April 1962, the prosecution’s key witness, Frank Cirinna, a bartender at the Log Cabin, testified that Pearson had approached him about participating in an illegal keno ticket scheme. Cirinna, however, lied on the stand about his meetings with Van Santen, asserting he’d only met him once informally. (Had Van Santen asked or paid Cirinna to testify as he had about Pearson?)

Despite defense attorney Harry Claiborne grilling him about meeting with Van Santen more than once, Cirinna stuck to his story. When Mendoza questioned him, Cirinna admitted he’d lied but wouldn’t say why, so the judge had him jailed for contempt. After several hours, though, the judge freed him.

John Baptist Pollett (aka Johnny Dean) a former friend of Wagner and an ex-convict out on bail at the time for a disorderly charge in Reno, took the stand for the prosecution. During his testimony, it came out that someone, Dean refused to say who (perhaps Van Santen or his P.I.), offered him $3,500 to get a confession out of Wagner for the Nevada Club’s private investigator. Dean claimed he never got the $3,500. (Had Dean gotten the money or not? Was Dean supposed to give $1,000 of it to Wagner for his confession but only gave him $250?)

While Dean was on the stand, Mendoza filed a motion to dismiss the charges against all three defendants, as Claiborne had discredited his two key witnesses, Cirinna and Dean, and he didn’t believe he could win solely based on two document experts’ testimony. He noted that Cirinna and Dean, while testifying, had divulged information that Mendoza hadn’t known when he’d filed the complaint against the defendants. District Judge Compton agreed with the motion.

Back To The Money

Following the ruling, Van Santen reiterated his refusal to pay the disputed $25,000 because “the trial had nothing to do with the validity of the ticket” (Las Vegas Sun, May 2, 1962).

Claiborne tried to get the NGCB to force Van Santen to pay, to no avail. Mandating that a gambling win be paid or not wasn’t part of the NGCB’s role, Chairman Ed Olsen said.

“Our function is merely to determine whether the circumstances are such as to warrant the board in proceeding against a club’s license for unsuitable method of operation on the basis of a failure to pay a gambling win,” he added (Las Vegas Sun, Oct. 27, 1962).

Catrone and his attorney pursued a different tack for getting the money. They sued Van Santen and his corporation for $750,000 in damages for false imprisonment and malicious prosecution.

District Judge George Marshall, however, handed down a summary judgment in favor of the Nevada Club. On appeal, the Nevada Supreme Court, in 1966, unanimously affirmed the lower court’s ruling.

Sources

1964

The Dunes in Las Vegas, Nevada switched from writing off unpaid IOUs to claiming them as income, allegedly to keep Internal Revenue Service agents from harassing its customers — asking guests in the hotel if they paid what they owed.

On its fiscal 1965 income tax return, the hotel-casino reported as income $1.3 million (about $7.2 million today) in markers it considered not collectable. 

Photo from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ University Libraries

Howard Hughes, 1973

1968

Howard Hughes, billionaire industrialist, received the Nevada Gaming Commission’s blessing to buy the Stardust hotel-casino in Las Vegas for $30.5 million and moved forward with the acquisition.

He already owned five such properties on the Strip — the Castaways, Silver Slipper, Frontier, Sands and Desert Inn. (Adding the Stardust would’ve given him control of about 14 percent of Nevada’s gambling volume.) 

A few days before the deal’s closing, however, the U.S. Department of Justice asked Hughes to delay it by 90 days so it could investigate whether the Stardust purchase would violate the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.

Instead, he abandoned the transaction altogether.

1975

In the spring, Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder, a Las Vegas oddsmaker and bookie, punched, knocked down and kicked casino magnate, Nathan Jacobson, in a Caesars Palace hallway in a confrontation over a debt he claimed Jacobson owed him, so alleged Jacobson in his battery lawsuit against Snyder.

A witness told police they saw Snyder hit Jacobson’s jaw with a right hook, felling him. Jacobson had been part owner and president of the hotel-casino in the mid-1960s; Snyder had done public relations for the property then. The disputed debt was for a business deal — perhaps past gambling monies or wages owed.

The week after filing his suit, the 125-pound, 60-year-old Jacobson publicly challenged Snyder, 58, who weighed 185 pounds, to a boxing match, proposing the event’s proceeds go to charity.

Snyder’s response? “I’ll have no comment concerning anything as asinine as him or that.”

Two years later, after Snyder began his stint on the CBS Sunday morning show, “The NFL Today,” predicting the results of each week’s upcoming football games, a hearing concerning the charges took place in Sin City. Jacobson, however, at the time lobbying for a new $60 million hotel-casino in Spain, didn’t show.

The judge dismissed the misdemeanor charges against Snyder.

Sources

1948

Mickey Cohen (né Meyer Harris Cohen) — violent Los Angeles, California mobster and gambling kingpin with ties to Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel and the Flamingo in Las Vegas, Nevada — suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder that led to him washing his hands 50 to 60 times a day.

In fact, the ritual saved his life in 1948. After shaking hands with stickup man, Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno, who was on his way out of Cohen’s menswear shop called Michael’s Haberdashery, Cohen immediately went to the restroom in the back to wash his hands.

Fratianno signaled the assassin team, headed by his best friend, Michael “The Bomp” Bompensiero, which stormed and shot up the store but failed to hit Cohen who was nowhere in sight.

August 5, 1943 Help Wanted ad

1937-1970

Card dealing was a male-dominated profession in Nevada’s casinos until 1937, when Harolds Club, in Reno, put the first woman at a 21 table to deal.

Co-owner Harold Smith previously had been hiring women, mostly family members, for other jobs on the gambling club floor — chip stacking and roulette wheel spinning, for instance — but never dealing.

Smith’s concern had been that women would be too-easy targets for cheaters and, consequently, the casino would get fleeced. (A total of up to 10,000 silver dollars sat on the various tables during a typical night.)

Smith, though, soon realized women could hold their own, and both genders enjoyed gambling with a “pretty, smiling dealer” (Lima News, Aug. 4, 1943).

With World War II and the resulting shortage of men to employ, women filled the gap at Harolds Club. By that time, 90 percent of the employees there were female. Smith launched a school to train women to become professional dealers. They learned how to deal cards, spin wheels, rake in chips, compute payoffs and watch for cheaters’ tricks, among other skills.

Smith advertised in local newspapers’ Help Wanted sections for recruits in ads indicating, “Men Please Do Not Apply” (Nevada State Journal, Aug. 4, 1943). The pay was $25 per week while attending his school, then up to $60 per week when hired. Students ran the gamut, and included housewives, divorcées (women living in Nevada the requisite six weeks to get an expedited divorce), telephone operators, school teachers, sales clerks, stenographers and newspaper reporters.

By 1943, casinos throughout Northern Nevada were hiring graduates of Smith’s school.

Slow To Change

It was the opposite in Las Vegas. Although women worked as dealers in nearby towns such as Henderson and North Las Vegas, none did on the Strip or in downtown Sin City until 1970, nearly three decades later.

That year, the Silver Slipper, a Howard Hughes-owned casino, hired the first — 47-year-old Jean Brady, who had years of experience from dealing at other Silver State gambling houses.

Sources

1969

Elvis Presley was one of the first headliners at the International Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.

His performances began a record-breaking run of 837 sold-out shows at the spot over the ensuing seven years. In his first month at the hotel-casino, Presley gave 58 concerts.

The venue booked him for two months a year and paid him a $1 million annual salary.

1945-1955

In the late 1940s, three bookies — or commissioners, as they preferred to be called — operated on Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, California under the name, Golden News Service. Hy Goldbaum, George Capri and Edward Cooke, all in their late 40s or early 50s at the time, specialized in assuming large bets that solo bookies couldn’t carry, and covering or placing them nationally with other bookmakers, which earned them the moniker, the bookie’s bookies.

The trio left California in 1949 and went to Las Vegas, Nevada, where they could ply their trade legally. Goldbaum went on to work at the Flamingo and the Stardust.

Two years later, the men became ensnared in a federal crackdown on bookmakers and were charged with income tax evasion and conspiracy, resulting from their having filed fraudulent returns. The government claimed the men together had done $6 million in business in California (about $70 million today!), but had only claimed income of $289,000 ($3.3 million today). Goldbaum also was charged individually for under-reporting his income.

They were convicted on 11 of 13 counts of tax evasion and conspiracy and sentenced to three years per count to be served concurrently.

“I’m convinced that a general conspiracy existed to defraud the laws of the United States, of Nevada and of California,” said the judge (Reno Evening Gazette, Feb. 5, 1952), but he also noted he imposed a lenient punishment because the defendants had been cooperative.

The U.S., however, wasn’t done with Goldbaum. The government filed a $1.6 million tax lien against him for past personal taxes it claimed he owed.

Time Served

After two years and five months at the McNeil Island Corrections Center, the three “commissioners” were released on $10,000 ($89,000 today) bail each, pending the outcome of their appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1955, it looked like they might catch a break when the justices ordered the lower federal court to reconsider its ruling.

But the court of appeals in California affirmed its earlier decision, making the case overall a win for the federal government.

Photo from freeimages.com: “Graphic of Abacus” by Cyndi Papia

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