willie martello – Gambling-History.com https://gambling-history.com History of Gambling in the U.S. Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:02:57 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0 https://gambling-history.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/cropped-Kings-Castle-Chip-32x32.png willie martello – Gambling-History.com https://gambling-history.com 32 32 Quick Fact – Desert Getaway https://gambling-history.com/quick-fact-desert-getaway/ https://gambling-history.com/quick-fact-desert-getaway/#respond Mon, 10 Jun 2019 22:58:36 +0000 https://gambling-history.com/?p=3615 1961

This ad for the El Rey Club invited people to escape one sunny desert town (Palm Springs, California) for another (Searchlight, Nevada), as the enticement ran in the former’s newspaper, The Desert Sun.

Owner Willie Martello began chartering groups of people to and from his casino this same year after he paid about $1 million of his own money to build a landing strip in the middle of town.

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