by Doug Swanson
The FBI believed that Levinson and former Nevada lieutenant governor Cliff Jones parked much of their share of the skim in a bank in Geneva, Switzerland, where they held numbered accounts. Periodically, Levinson had to distribute cash to other shareholders—to Doc Stacher, to Gerry Catena, to Lansky. Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo and Charlie “the Blade” Tourine got theirs too. Some of the stash was shipped in the sleeves of laundered shirts. But most went the time-honored way—stuffed into suitcases and hauled by armed couriers on passenger trains. Ida Devine, wife of Irving “Niggy” Devine, whose meat company supplied Vegas casinos, was a favored cash mule. Boarding the train in Las Vegas, couriers might stop in Chicago, Detroit, and New Jersey. Others would go first to Florida, then migrate up the Eastern Seaboard. Occasionally they made a side trip to Hot Springs, Arkansas. It operated like a milk run, once every thirty days.
When Catena received his monthly payout in New Jersey, he doled out portions to his subpartners. He would hand several thousand to Angelo “Gyp” DeCarlo, one of the great East Coast entrepreneurs of loan-sharking. And on a golf course near Newark, he passed a wad of cash to Anthony “Tony Boy” Boiardo, whose father, Richie the Boot, was reputed to have a private crematorium in the back of his mansion, where he disposed of his enemies.
Through it all, Binion fed tips to the FBI. “Almost daily,” a memo said, “Binion has furnished information on a confidential basis to Bureau Agents which has proven to be valuable . . . from an intelligence standpoint.” That may have been an exaggeration by an agent seeking to please his supervisors. Despite his new financial links to some of the East Coast’s most notorious gangsters, Binion generally provided inside scoops of little consequence—nothing on Levinson and Swiss bank accounts, nothing on Richie the Boot.
But he did help out with an interstate car theft. He also advised agents to keep a marginal ex-con named Danny Davis under watch because Davis “would not be prowling around . . . unless he intended to steal something.” And, he admitted to agents—now that he no longer required the ruse—that the story about Joe W. Brown owning 97 percent of the Horseshoe had been garbage. As usual, Binion employed pragmatic charm: twice he visited the ailing Kuykendall in the hospital.
His efforts finally paid off. On March 2, 1960, Binion’s FBI status officially changed. “This case is being closed as to the Anti-Racketeering, Top Hoodlum investigation,” Kuykendall wrote, “and Binion is being converted to a Criminal Informant.”
• • •
Binion hid his new law enforcement role from even his closest friends. Years after his death, some of his steadfast pals received the news with openmouthed astonishment. “That’s an absolute lie,” said lawyer Oscar Goodman. “Benny hated the FBI.”
Eddie LaRue, a Las Vegas private detective who occasionally did work for the Horseshoe, strongly doubted Binion would cooperate with the bureau. “I don’t think Benny would tell them anything.”
Billy Bob Barnett, a Texan who adored Binion, refused to accept the statements in FBI documents. When told about them for the first time, he stopped eating his lunch and stared out the window of a Dallas restaurant. “I’d no more believe that,” he said, “than I’d believe Martians just landed in that parking lot.”
Yet playing both sides functioned as a basic component of Binion’s lifelong strategy. He had exploited this type of arrangement since the days of his kinship with Bill Decker back in Dallas. By spoon-feeding some inside tips of questionable value to the local FBI functionary—who was, after all, under continual pressure from Washington to develop confidential informants—Binion duped his chief pursuers into believing he was now on their side. More important, he had them on his.
Binion and daughter Becky at the Horseshoe’s famous million-dollar display, 1969.
21
CHARLIE, ELVIS, AND THE REVOLUTION
Hell, all I want’s four walls and crap tables, and a roof to keep the rain off, and the air condition to keep people comfortable. Got to have that, you know.
—BB
In some ways, Las Vegas experienced the sixties like other parts of the country. It struggled, for example, with civil rights, and was occasionally derided as the “Mississippi of the West.” Casinos were strictly segregated. The black entertainers who headlined at Vegas clubs couldn’t sleep or dine there. “In Vegas for 20 minutes, our skin had no color. Then the second we stepped off the stage, we were colored again,” Sammy Davis Jr. recalled. “The other acts could gamble or sit in the lounge and have a drink, but we had to leave through the kitchen with the garbage . . . What they said was that they didn’t want to offend the Texans.” In a small gesture of protest, black actress and singer Dorothy Dandridge dipped her foot in the pool at the Last Frontier, and management responded by draining every drop of water. After Lena Horne spent the night in a cabana at the Flamingo, they burned the sheets. But in 1960, after a threatened march by the NAACP, club owners agreed to integrate.
This represented progress, though modest and spotty, and the Horseshoe was slow to comply. “Benny Binion being the strong man that he was in the community, the situation with his Horseshoe club was different,” said Dr. James McMillan, president of the Las Vegas NAACP. McMillan’s group did not press the matter at the Horseshoe because of Gold Dollar, the ex-chauffeur who had gone back to work for Binion. “This guy was six-foot-six inches tall and weighed 300 pounds. A rough, tough, bad cowboy,” McMillan said of Gold Dollar. “Him being a security guard there, we felt that we just couldn’t challenge Binion at that particular time. We let that alone. Binion took his own time hiring black people, and he took his own time letting black people in.”
While the Horseshoe evoked a time-stands-still quality—not much about it had changed since it opened, and it showed not the slightest aspiration to trendiness—it made cameo appearances in two of the decade’s great dramas. After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and Jack Ruby’s shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald two days later, the FBI began probing the old Dallas rackets scene. That included a visit to some of Binion’s associates, R. D. Matthews among them. “They said Ruby had my phone number in his pocket,” Matthews said. “I didn’t believe it.” He and Oswald’s killer were hardly companions: “I knew Jack Ruby to speak to him on the street. That’s all.” Agents also questioned Lewis McWillie, a friend of Ruby’s. McWillie had worked for Binion at Top O’Hill back in Texas, ran a casino for Meyer Lansky in Havana, and was later employed at the Horseshoe. The FBI appeared to learn little from either of these interviews.
A few years after JFK’s death, the Horseshoe’s second brush with sixties infamy came when Charles Manson and his “family” breezed through town, taking the time to pose for a photograph in front of Binion’s million-dollar display. After this exercise in bourgeois tourism, Charlie and his deranged acolytes kicked off their wave of gruesome murders in Southern California.
Such brief and strange encounters aside, many of the celebrated countercultural events of the decade had little effect on Binion’s casino or, for that matter, the beating heart of Las Vegas. Other towns could concern themselves with Woodstock or the Summer of Love. Las Vegas was busy fawning over the ghost dance of the Rat Pack and paying good money to see lounge singers in velveteen tuxes croon “Danny Boy.” In much of America, 1967 will be remembered as the year when a hundred thousand Vietnam War protesters marched on Washington, when Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin played the Monterey Pop Festival, when groundbreaking movies like The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde hit the screens. In Las Vegas, it’s the year that Elvis Presley married Priscilla Beaulieu at the Aladdin.
Vegas may have inhabited an insular world—light on the psychedelic, heavy on the ring-a-ding-ding—but it was about to shake and rattle from its own seismic shifts. The nation’s most famously eccentric billionaire played a big role. So did a motley collection of poker players. But first, the feds took their shot.
• • •
At the U.S. De
partment of Justice in Washington, newly appointed attorney general Robert F. Kennedy launched a campaign against organized crime. This extended to one of its main generators of illicit cash—the casinos of Nevada. Throughout the sixties, money from Teamsters union pension funds flooded Vegas, and the Teamsters had multiple connections to numerous crime syndicates. Union loans financed the construction of Strip showcases like Caesars Palace, a Greco-Roman extravaganza of imported marble, elaborate fountains, and elegant gardens, where Victor Borge played the main room. From mob-connected Vegas operations, millions in skimmed cash flowed out of town to criminal enterprises across the globe. As far as Kennedy was concerned, it was dirty money in and dirty money out.
In 1963, FBI agents installed phone taps, approved by Kennedy, at a handful of Las Vegas’s leading clubs, including the Stardust, the Sands, the Fremont, and the Desert Inn. Kennedy had proposed, then abandoned, a dramatic and headline-grabbing raid on the state’s casinos. Even as plans for such a grandstanding move remained on the shelf, the Justice Department’s desire for its own brand of Vegas action endured. In 1964 the FBI’s Las Vegas office produced a 245-page report titled Nevada Gambling Industry. Via dozens of confidential informants, the bureau described in elaborate detail the secret mob ownership, hidden skimming operations, and international connections of the major Las Vegas casinos. The federal government clearly intended to mount an offensive.
Such designs worked, strangely enough, to Binion’s advantage. He had been planning since his time in prison to reclaim the Horseshoe—and, by his telling, had a long-standing arrangement to do so. “I had a deal to get it back,” he said.
Under different circumstances, Ed Levinson, who had been using the Horseshoe as a cash spigot for his syndicate pals, would have been in no mood to talk. But he now found himself in the crosshairs. Here was a typical passage from the FBI’s gambling industry report, recounting an informant’s version of a conversation between Levinson and the vice president of the Fremont: “Levinson and Edward Torres were in the office at the Fremont Hotel on January 21, 1963, and counting money and ascertaining the amount to be skimmed. Levinson stated that Meyer, believed by the source to be Meyer Lansky, was getting the New Jersey money. When Torres remarked that he thought Meyer handled only the Florida area, Levinson replied that it all goes to Florida, then to New York and New Jersey.”
The FBI’s hot breath was no secret in Vegas, and when Binion presented Levinson and his associates with an offer to buy back the Horseshoe, they listened. Binion mortgaged the Montana ranch, borrowed nearly $2 million from the Bank of Las Vegas, and in 1964 purchased the shares of Levinson and associates. More than ten years after his Leavenworth exile, the founder of the Horseshoe had regained it. “Through hook or crook, I got it back a hundred percent,” he said. Some extra neon was soon added to the outdoor signage for all the gambling world to see: it was officially Binion’s Horseshoe again.
Order, Binion-style, was then restored. He sent Levinson’s puppets packing and brought his own friends and associates back into the operation. The restaurant once more served beef from his Montana ranch; a steak dinner, with potato and salad, could be had for a few bucks. And the horseshoe-shaped million-dollar showcase, which Levinson had removed, went back up near the main entrance. “That million-dollar display is, I’d say, just as good a advertising thing as they is in town,” Binion said, though it took a while to locate the right kind of currency for encasement in plexiglass. “We like to never found the ten-thousand-dollar bills.”
With his federal felony conviction, Binion had no hope of winning another state casino license. Instead, son Jack became the licensee, while Benny assumed a figurehead title: director of public relations. This was another sham. Not long after it was put in place, Binion described this new management setup. “My wife works here, and my daughter [Barbara],” he said. “They count the money and look after the office. And Jack is the boss. Ted’s the next boss.”
Still, no one doubted who was in charge. “Them boys,” Binion said, “mind me like they was six years old.”
• • •
Binion’s lawyers had fought in court for years to keep him from serving the remainder of his Leavenworth sentence, but they finally ran out of legal room. In the fall of 1965, a judge ordered him to do the rest of his time at the Clark County Jail. This pained Binion greatly, but it was a minor interruption. He strolled out in less than two months.
Back on the job at the Horseshoe, Binion as always worked his connections. In February 1966, he walked across Second Street to the Fremont, where he met with Levinson and U.S. senator Howard Cannon, Democrat from Nevada and long a recipient of Binion’s campaign contributions. They discussed the possibility of a senate subcommittee holding hearings in Las Vegas on the FBI’s use of electronic surveillance. While the gamblers had no love of hidden bureau microphones, they also feared the exposure that a hearing might bring, for many of them remembered Estes Kefauver and his crusading band of self-righteous publicity hounds. Binion said he opposed the hearing in Vegas. Levinson agreed, saying, “Hell, no, we don’t want them anywhere in the state of Nevada.” Cannon told them not to worry, that he would take care of it.
Because he still operated as a bureau informant, Binion gave the FBI a full account of the meeting that same day. Agents used this information to depict Cannon—in confidential memos—as a conniving hypocrite. Before he told his Vegas supporters he would derail the hearing, the senator had urged the subcommittee chairman to convene it in Nevada. He had raised the possibility for one purpose: so that he could kill it. This put the senator in the position, the bureau noted, of “emerging in the eyes of gamblers as the individual who can put a stop to any hearings that might be embarrassing to their interests.”
If he knew about the true nature of Cannon’s machinations, Binion didn’t let it bother him; he had bigger plans for the senator’s influence. He had begun to think of pressing for legal action to clear his criminal record, and he wasn’t talking about some judge’s measly order to seal case files, or a governor’s declaration. Those things he could have tomorrow, with a single phone call. Binion was going to the top. He would seek a presidential pardon. With Cannon on his side, he reasoned, he might get it.
• • •
The decade’s next tectonic shift, Vegas version, occurred at 4:00 a.m. on November 27, 1966, when a private train from Boston stopped at a desolate crossing north of town. One of the world’s richest men emerged—carried on a litter—from a customized Pullman car. Howard Hughes was loaded into a waiting van and taken to his new home, the top floor of the Desert Inn.
Now in the crazed-hermit period of his life—at sixty-one he was gaunt, unwashed, and addicted to narcotics—Hughes liked the Desert Inn and the secluded aerie it provided. He felt so at home that he wouldn’t leave. This distressed Moe Dalitz, one of the DI’s owners. Hughes had agreed to depart by Christmas, but by New Year’s he was still there and showed no sign of decamping. Dalitz needed the two floors Hughes had rented—one for the man himself, one for his aides—for high rollers who would drop thousands, maybe millions, at the casino. Hughes, however, never left his quarters, and his staff, composed mostly of Mormons, didn’t gamble. This arrangement therefore cost the DI plenty. Management ordered Hughes to vacate. Never one to be shoved around, Hughes made the Desert Inn’s owners an irresistible counteroffer: he bought the place.
Hughes didn’t stop there. He purchased a number of Strip properties, including the Frontier, the Castaways, and the legendary Sands. He bought a small airline and an airport. He bought a TV station so that it would show the late-night movies he wanted to watch. When the mirrored sign at the Silver Slipper disturbed his sleep, he bought that place too. In only one year, Hughes spent $65 million in Vegas. The town now had a new type of owner—one with his own money, and beholden to no distant clan of hoods. Hughes’s buying spree ultimately helped ease the way for the Nevada legislature’s passage of the Corporate
Gaming Act of 1969, a revolutionary development in the history of the state. Now publicly traded companies could own casinos. Soon heavily capitalized corporations would begin buying and building ever more elaborate Strip resorts, elbowing aside the wiseguys. Hughes’s arrival opened the door for this defining characteristic of today’s Las Vegas.
Binion, of course, had been acquainted with Hughes as a relatively low-stakes gambler in their Dallas days. “Oh, I knew him a long time before, but I didn’t see him when he was here,” Binion said about seven years after Hughes’s arrival in Las Vegas. “Some newspaper guys come in here ask me, say that they understand that I know Howard Hughes . . . And I kinda rared back in my chair and like—just like I was gonna tell ’em something. ‘Well,’ I says, ‘I guess I know as much about him as anybody.’ Oh, they got all thrilled and said, ‘What do you know?’ I said, ‘Nothin’.’ So I don’t. I don’t think nobody knows anything.”
In familiar fashion, Binion looked on the bright side when considering the mysterious recluse. “Well, I don’t see that he’s any worse than any other corporation. Same thing, ain’t it?” Binion said. “I think Howard Hughes was good for this town. He spent a lot of money here, and I don’t think money hurts any damn place.”
• • •
Money also helps build a reputation, which Binion knew well. As other racketeers were bought out, sent to prison, or killed—the Riviera’s Gus Greenbaum got his throat slit in Phoenix—Binion continued to feather his image as a man of charity. On some afternoons, he and his grandson, Key Fechser, who was Barbara’s son, would pass out free hamburgers to hungry black kids who congregated in the alley behind the club. He was forever giving cash to busted rodeo hands drifting through the Horseshoe and to penniless gamblers needing one more stake. “Just pay me back when you can,” he instructed them. Some did, and some didn’t. “Now, I’ve damaged a lot of people, lettin’ them have money over the years,” he said. “I’ve drowned some of ’em, and I learnt better’n that.” Where some saw a soft heart, Binion insisted he simply considered giveaways a good business practice. “I’m kinda freewheeling,” he said, “and sorta like the old saying, of bread cast upon the water comes back.”