1946

Two brothers — Edward P. and George Jones — freely controlled Chicago, Illinois’ policy* racket for 25 years, beginning in the 1920s.

As a result, the two raked in money, $10 to $30 million per year, in nickels and dimes, primarily from the Caucasians and African Americans living in slums, which turned the siblings into multimillionaires. In one year alone, income from their operation, that spanned from Ohio to Idaho, was an estimated $4.5 million ($45 million today)!

On a Monday in May 1946, Edward Jones’ chauffeur drove him and his wife and cashier, Frances Myles, to Myles’ home. When the limousine arrived there, two masked men carrying submachine guns appeared, hit and grabbed Jones and tried to capture Myles, but she broke free and ran into her house. The abductors forced Jones in their car and sped away. Jones’ chauffeur and wife followed and a few blocks away, alerted police who then pursued and fired two bullets at the criminals. The gunmen fired back, shattering the squad car’s front window, injuring an officer and, ultimately, getting away.

Days passed.

Some underworld members speculated the kidnappers would hold Jones until he relinquished control of his policy business in the Windy City, or if he refused, murder him. In agreement with that motive, police theorized former Al Capone minions had taken Jones.

Their other hypothesis was that ex-cons who’d done time in federal prison with Jones (he served a couple of years for income tax evasion) had snatched him for ransom money. (Jones had been kidnapped twice before but hadn’t reported the incidents to law enforcement officers.)

Five days later, Jones was released. He said he’d been blindfolded while held but had been treated well, hadn’t spoken to his captors and couldn’t identify them.

A rumor then spread that Jones’ mother and sister had paid $100,000 ($1.2 million today) to free him.

Case Turns Cold

Police, as part of their crime investigation, tried to round up and question the usual suspects, 100 of them including former Capone associates, but the big-time players had disappeared. They included:

• Matt Capone (Al’s brother)
• Ralph “Bottles” Capone (Al’s brother)
• Sam “Golf Bag” Hunt
• Murray “The Camel” Humphreys
• Edward “Red” Meehan
• Anthony “Tough Tony” Capezzio
• Tony “Joe Batters” Accardo

Nothing came of the detectives’ efforts.

After the kidnapping, Jones moved into a 12-room mansion in Mexico City, Mexico, from where he continued to oversee his multistate policy enterprise.

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*In policy, also called numbers, players bet on a number they predicted would appear in a specific source on a given day. Originally, operators obtained the winning numbers through lottery drawings but that evolved into using baseball scores, pari-mutuel totals, cattle receipts and other combinations of figures that routinely appeared in the newspaper. Because players could wager nickels and dimes, even those who couldn’t afford even part of a lottery ticket could participate. Therefore, the game became prevalent in poor U.S. neighborhoods.

Sources

Photo from Pond5: “”The Road From Coins” by dbrus

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.

Sources

Grave markers at San Quentin State Prison

1915-1935

James “Jimmy” Sidney Rogan, an active student and football player, was well liked by the principal of his high school in Tonopah, a mining boom town halfway between Las Vegas and Reno. In 1915, when the available ore in the town dubbed Queen of the Silver Camps was believed to be petering out and numerous residents, therefore, moved to the next hot spot, Rogan quit school in his junior year but wouldn’t tell Principal Chauncey Smith why. Smith encouraged him to stick with his education, to no avail. Rogan went on to work as a Southern Pacific brakeman running out of Sparks, then as a taxi driver in Reno.

In 1924, when in his mid-20s, Rogan got in a brawl in public in Reno, which led to a disturbing the peace charge. A judge fined him $20 ($475 today).

The next year, also in The Biggest Little City, Rogan and a friend, Bobby Gray, a Reno prizefighter, beat and robbed a miner of $80 and his shirt. When police questioned Rogan, he confessed and returned the money to his victim, who declined to press charges. The same judge, before whom Rogan had appeared in the past, gave him roughly 12 hours to get out of town. He did and found work as a seaman. (Gray was released and admonished to choose better associates.)

In Deeper Trouble

In 1932, Rogan, “the debonair adventurer,” and known San Francisco gangster, Rollie D. McAllister, lost $100 ($1,700 today) in the early morning hours while gambling in a speakeasy in Los Angeles’ exclusive Westlake neighborhood (Nevada State Journal, Oct. 14, 1933).

Around 5 a.m., they returned via taxicab after having decided they’d been cheated out of their money. Brandishing guns, they tried forcing the club’s owners, Harvey Crosby and Ben Harris, to return it. Also inside were Deputy Sheriff Rudolph Vejar, 36, who was investigating vice conditions, a bartender and a dealer.

McAllister forced the proprietors to remove their shoes and lie down on the floor while Rogan kept the other people there on the opposite side of the room covered with two pistols. Finding only $68 in the owners’ pockets, McAllister ordered Vejar to remove his shoes and lie down with Crosby and Harris. McAllister began burning Crosby’s bare feet with lit matches to get him to disclose where the cash was hidden.

Suddenly Vejar drew his pistol and shot Rogan in the leg. The former Renoite returned fire, a bullet hitting Vejar in the mouth then penetrating his neck and spine. Vejar emptied his firearm at McAllister, mortally wounding him. Rogan peppered the room with gunshot as he backed out of the establishment. He then took the waiting cab away from the scene and asked to be let out at Washington Boulevard.

Vejar died in the hospital the next day. Rogan went on the lam.

Eleven months later, police found the “underworld character,” as he was described, in San Francisco, where he was visiting his mother before his planned exit from the United States (Nevada State Journal, Dec. 16, 1933). They arrested and extradited him to Los Angeles.

In late 1933, Rogan was tried on robbery and murder charges. During the court proceedings, he insisted that he was innocent in that McAllister had killed Vejar. The jury, after six hours of deliberation, however, found Rogan guilty on both counts.

The judge sentenced him to death on the gallows. In the meantime, he was to remain behind bars at San Quentin State Prison.

Attempts At A Reversal

The Supreme Court of California heard the case on appeal and upheld the conviction and death sentence.

Rogan’s mother and one of his sisters implored California Governor Frank Merriam to commute Jimmy’s death sentence. Five of the jurors who’d found Rogan guilty previously signed a petition for clemency as did Nevada Senator Pat McCarran, a friend of Rogan’s father.

In early February 1935, Rogan wrote a letter to Smith, his former principal/football coach/math instructor, telling him he was sorry for never following his advice way back when. He revealed why he’d dropped out of high school: he hadn’t made the basketball team while younger classmen had.

“In case the worst happens I certainly wanted you to know that I appreciate the things and the efforts on your part to assist me in every way,” Rogan wrote Smith (Reno Evening Gazette, Feb. 13, 1935).

On Feb. 8, 1935, the 32 year old was hanged at 10:04 a.m. Eleven minutes later, the prison physician pronounced him dead. To the end, Jimmy had maintained his innocence.

Sources

Photo from the Los Angeles Times: by Rick Meyer

1950s

The manufacture of slot machines, roulette wheels and other gambling equipment was big business in the United States until the mid-20th century when new federal legislation curbed it.

In 1950, the Kefauver Committee, officially the U.S. Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, began delving into the underworld’s involvement with gambling. The group’s findings and recommendations led to Congress passing the Transportation of Gambling Devices Act, a 1951 amendment to the Johnson Act. The law:

• Banned the transport of these devices to states where gambling was illegal

• Required manufacturers/distributors of gaming equipment for interstate commerce to register annually with the federal Department of Justice

• Mandated such paraphernalia crossing state lines be marked appropriately for shipment

The act, however, allowed interstate shipment into any state that passed a subsequent law exempting it from the federal provisions. Nevada did just that. Texas, though, on the other end of the spectrum, forbade gambling device making altogether. It was the only state to do so at the time.

Serious About Enforcement

The FBI cracked down on companies violating this act, and with the help of local police, conducted raids, seized equipment and pressed charges. A judge sentenced a Mississippi man found guilty of transporting six slot machines out of state to one year and one day in a federal penitentiary, a light sentence, he said, in that the offense occurred soon after the legislation banning it had been passed.

This law enforcement pressure caused many manufacturers to close shop and others, such as B.C. Wills & Co., to move to Nevada. Then one of the country’s two major roulette makers, it relocated from Michigan to Reno in 1954.

Sources

1947

This year, the United States’ Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) co-financed construction of a gambling enterprise via its $975,000 loan for the Mapes hotel-casino in Reno, Nevada.

Under Attack

Three years later, Senators William Fulbright (D-Ark.) and Paul Douglas (D-Ill.), members of a committee investigating the RFC’s past lending practices, publicly criticized the group for using federal funds for what included a gambling enterprise and for doing so knowing two of its operators — Louis “Lou” J. Wertheimer and Bernard “Bernie/Mooney” Einstoss — had ties to the underworld. Further, in making the loan, the RFC had overruled the determination of the San Francisco office and Washington RFC review committee not to grant it. The loan went through.

It was “poor public policy” for the RFC to help “big-time gambling,” Fulbright said (Nevada State Journal, July 4, 1950). “It’s a very serious matter to involve public money with characters of this kind.”

Intended Use

The federal government had established the RFC in 1932 to boost the country’s confidence, recapitalize banks and stimulate loans during the Great Depression. The corporation was to help state and local governments finance public works projects and provide loans to banks, businesses, railroads and agricultural entities.

With respect to the Mapes’ financing, RFC officials argued that in places like Reno where gambling was legal, loaning money to a hotel with a casino was no different than doing so for a hotel with a bar. They argued that the casinos’ profits were minor and, therefore, irrelevant. They insisted the Mapes loan was sound and in the public’s interest, and collateral was ample. They denied knowing about Wertheimer and Einstoss’ mob connections.

Douglas agreed the loan was legal but questioned its ethicality. He countered that the gambling areas generated 98 percent of the Mapes’ net profits.

Ultimate Fate

The federal government disbanded the RFC in 1957. The Mapes closed in 1982.

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