Harrah’s Lake Tahoe, Stateline, Nevada, 1973

1972-1973

Ladies and gentlemen, the story you are about to read is true. No names have been changed, as there were no innocents.

This is the city, Stateline, Nevada. It’s the gambling mecca of Lake Tahoe. Most people visit it to recreate, but some go there to commit a crime.

It was Tuesday, September 19, 1972. It was a chilly night.

Douglas County sheriffs were working the late shift when they got the call. At 10:40 p.m., five employees at Harrah’s hotel-casino were making a routine money transfer from the basement to the casino floor when an armed man stopped them on the stairs and shouted, “Give me the money, or I’ll blow your heads off.”

The suspect was described as roughly 5 feet 8 inches tall, 170 pounds, stocky, in his 30s, long haired and wearing dark glasses, a cowboy hat pulled down over his eyes and possibly a fake beard. His weapon was a .45-caliber automatic Colt pistol.

He grabbed the two bags from the workers, ordered them to back off and fled through the casino and out the door into the dark. He purposely dropped the bag containing chips, $4,500’s worth, ran about two blocks and crossed Highway 50 and then the state line into California. 

At a nearby motel, he hopped on a motorcycle, whose rider had been waiting for him. The bike didn’t start, again and again. The two dismounted, pushed it, finally got it going, jumped on and rode off.

The thief had stolen $178,500 ($1 million today), at that time the largest robbery ever involving a Nevada casino.

Quartet Of Suspects

The crime became a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) matter when the stickup man crossed state lines. Investigators had the motorcycle’s license plate, captured by a witness, to go on as well as possibly the testimony of an informant, Barbara White, who’d been in on the planning of the crime but had backed out before execution.

Agents found $125,000 of the stolen money, the wig, beard and gun buried shallowly in the backyard of the motorcycle driver. Four days after the crime, they arrested:

• Donald Leroy Rice, 35, of Stateline, Nevada, unemployed dealer, married, four-year resident
• Larry Joseph Swinberg, 36, of South Lake Tahoe, California, Harrah’s employee, married, resident of fewer than 30 days
• Jack Andrew Cozad, 37, of Stateline, Nevada, recent Harrah’s employee, separated, 12-year resident
• Thomas Richard Norman, 36, of Reno, Nevada, poker dealer in Reno’s Cal Neva Club, single, 8-year resident

The FBI tagged Rice as the stickup man; Swinburg, the getaway driver; and the other two, lookouts, one inside and one outside the casino.

The four faced federal charges of conspiracy and transporting stolen goods across state lines, and all but Rice, with aiding and abetting. State charges were conspiracy to commit armed robbery and robbery. Bail, mandated by federal and state courts, totaled $125,000 or $150,000 for each suspect.

One Turns Against Others

Legal wrangling began, with defense attorneys filing numerous motions, asking for separate trials, change of venue and more, all of which the judge denied.

Trials were held in 1972 (federal) and 1973 (state). Swinburg testified for the prosecution at both, giving up his accomplices and admitting to commandeering the motorcycle. He said that of the $178,500, he, Rice and Cozad were to get $52,000 apiece, Norman was to get $1,000 and White was to get $17,850.

The suspects were found guilty and were sentenced, in federal (1972) and state (1973) courts, respectively, to:

• Rice: 5 years’ prison, 8 years’ prison — to be served concurrently
• Cozad: 5 years’ prison, 5 years’ prison — to run concurrently
• Norman: 5 years’ probation, 3 years’ prison — the latter was suspended so he was to serve 6 months in jail then 5 years’ probation
• Swinburg: Probation (the state hadn’t charged or tried him)

An Unexpected Twist

Later in 1973, Douglas County sheriff’s deputies recovered what they believed to be the remaining $52,000 from the Harrah’s heist a year earlier.

When investigating an armed robbery of the people living in Rice’s former house in Stateline, officers zeroed in on four suspects, all South Lake Tahoe residents, and found the cash.

“Authorities did not disclose the evidence to support the statement the money might be part of the Harrah’s loot, nor would they say how much was reported taken in the Rice residence robbery,” reported the Nevada State Journal (Sept. 8, 1973).

Sources

1962

How ’bout a game of burro? Fred Carrier, a Stateline, Nevada accountant, developed a gambling game with this name, the concept for which came to him in a nightmare.

Based on magnetism, it featured a plastic burro that rotated in the middle of an octagonal table. The player had a choice of betting on which part of the animal ended up facing him/her or on any one, two or four of eight colors.

I’m guessing state gaming regulators didn’t approve the game, but does anyone know for sure?

Illustration from pond5.com by Vac

Because another route wasn’t available, in August, ranchers drove more than 200 cattle through the casino section of Stateline, Nevada, located at Lake Tahoe’s South Shore, en route to the bovines’ summer range in the California mountains.

Photo from freeimages.com: “Cattle on the Road” by Debbie Schiel

Sal “Tar Baby” Terrano

1930s-1952

Salvatore “Tar Baby” Orester Terrano is one of numerous criminals whom Nevada gambling regulators approved to own a casino in the state.

In May 1947, the tax commission granted the Northern Californian, then 43, a probationary, 30-day gambling license to offer roulette, craps, 21 and slot machines at the Twin States casino at Lake Tahoe in Stateline. This approval was after the agency had conducted an investigation into Sal Terrano’s past.

The Dirt

What that should’ve revealed was Terrano:

• Had been selling opium out of the Dog House, a Reno, Nevada gambling club where he’d worked as a dealer in the 1930s.

• Had been convicted in May 1939 for narcotics trafficking between San Francisco and Reno. Then 34, he’d been caught with four five-tael tins* of opium (about 10 pounds) in his car in a hidden rear compartment while driving into Northern Nevada.

The drugs had come from Eugene “Rosy” Bastida and Ernest “Ole” C. Olson, owners of the Turf Club, a San Francisco bar and bookmaking place, who’d gotten the crew of the USS Chaumont, a Navy transport ship, to smuggle them in from Asia twice a year.

• Had served seven years, from 1938 to 1945, of his decade-long sentence in Nevada State Prison.

Back To Tahoe

The case of Terrano also was one in which the two pertinent, gaming license-issuing agencies diverged in their decision.

Once free, the ex-convict received that month-long gambling permit for the Twin States Club in spring 1947 from the state tax commission.

However, simultaneously, the licensing board of Douglas County, in which the club was located, refused to give Terrano a gambling or a liquor license because the business was “not the type of establishment wanted in Douglas County,” said Sheriff James Farrell, likely referring to one where drugs were sold and/or consumed on the premises (Nevada State Journal, May 16, 1948).

Without the county’s approval, Terrano couldn’t be involved with gambling at the Twin States. He returned to San Francisco where he dealt drugs and sold merchandise like Jumping Jimminy and King Kong toys out of his Twin States Novelty Company store.

Ad in The Billboard, Jan. 6, 1951

Nabbed Again

Five years later, in March 1952, while living in the Mapes hotel-casino in Reno, he was arrested again for the transportation and sale of narcotics. He’d been dealing heroin for Waxey Gordon (né Irving Wexler), who’d run the West Coast branch of a nationwide, multimillion-dollar narcotics syndicate until he’d been imprisoned for pushing drugs in 1951. Gordon was a mobster and former bootlegger and illegal gambler.

Terrano was sentenced to four years to be served at the Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. Per the judge, he was sent to a hospital in Fort Worth, Texas to get clean before being taken to the Kansas prison.

He died in Leavenworth six months later, at 49, supposedly following minor surgery on an obstructed coronary artery. He was interred in a family plot in the Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery in Colma, California.

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* A five-tael tin, a standard-sized opium container, roughly resembles a deck of cards in dimensions and shape. One tael equals about half an American pound; a five-tael tin equals about 2.5 pounds.

Sources