by Doug Swanson
These small incidents built heaps of individual goodwill. Like others in his line of work—Moe Dalitz being a prime example—Binion also understood that publicly acknowledged gifts on a much larger scale could provide a sure route to respectability. The city had no blue bloods. Philanthropy could vault a man, despite humble forebears and a checkered past, into the first rank of Vegas society.
Now that the Horseshoe rested safely in his family’s hands, Binion had big money to spread around. He directed thousands of dollars to local, state, and national politicians. The always prudent payoffs to law enforcement stayed on schedule. Such distributions fit the very definition of quid pro quo arrangements. With grander goals, Binion went far beyond that; he became one of the most generous donors to the local Catholic diocese. Part of that arose from the religion he found in prison, and part from strategic maneuvering. “Most Nevada gamblers,” a U.S. Department of Justice report observed in 1964, “support all church drives in order to curb opposition to their operations.” Schools and hospitals also received major gifts, in the tens of thousands, from Binion. On a more personal level, he donated to the Las Vegas High School Rhythmettes so they could travel with the football team, and purchased cattle every year from the local 4-H show.
With these gestures, Binion was rapidly emerging as one of the city’s great benefactors. At the same time, he gave aid and comfort to the feds, maintained his old friendships with the mob boys, and dabbled in the upper ranges of politics. It was, in a Vegas-skewed sort of way, the very picture of a model citizen.
Now was the time, Binion figured, to seek the presidential pardon that he wanted so badly. Twice, with Senator Howard Cannon’s help, he applied. And twice he was turned down.
It couldn’t have helped his application that his thug side, from all indications, never quite receded. As Binion noted a few years later, “If anybody goes to talking about doing me bodily harm, or my family bodily harm, I’m very capable of, thank God, of really taking care of them in a most artistic way.”
One December day in 1967, someone came to the family with inside information about a plot to kidnap and kill Binion’s son Ted. The informant had been part of the original scheme, but he now saw profit in exposing his co-conspirator. He fingered a friend of Ted’s, a cabdriver and petty criminal named Marvin Shumate, as the main actor. Benny Binion did not forward this matter to the police.
Shumate was last seen at a bar, after getting off work, at Flamingo and Paradise Roads. Days later, his body was found at the base of Sunrise Mountain. He had been shot in the chest with a shotgun and, in case that wasn’t artistic enough, in the head with a .357 handgun. Though police long had their suspicions that Binion had ordered Shumate’s murder, they never made an indictable case.
• • •
The money kept coming, though the Horseshoe anchored the wrong side of Vegas. Out on the Strip, one palace after another rose from the desert—grand resorts with mesmeric stage revues, tropical pools, and a tourist’s fantasy of decadent indulgence. But in old Glitter Gulch, the stretch of grind joints and pawnshops made Fremont Street feel like the sad end of a bad trip. Moderately heeled visitors enjoyed a choice: endure the grit and crumble of downtown—with cigarette butts in the gutters and gray-skinned dead-enders stuffing nickels into slot machines—or live like a modern emperor at Caesars? Luxury was only a $10 cab ride away.
Binion’s answer was to keep marketing the Horseshoe—which didn’t even have a swimming pool—as the purest place for the stone gambler. “There’s thousands of people comes on the Strip don’t even know there’s a downtown,” he explained. “That’s the reason I’ve got this high limit, to attract people downtown.” High limits let a craps player ride a hot streak, and Binion’s was the only spot in town, it was said, where a $5 bettor could become a millionaire. If you craved chorus lines and magicians, the Stardust and the Sands could give you that and more. But if you wanted to gamble like a cracker sultan, you went to the Horseshoe.
In an oft-told tale, a Texan named William Lee Bergstrom bet $777,000 at a Horseshoe craps table and won. He came back later and bet $1 million, and lost on a single roll. Not long afterward, penniless and alone, Bergstrom killed himself in a Vegas hotel room. “I knew him pretty well,” Ted Binion said, “and his reasons for suicide were more romantic than financial.” The Binions paid for Bergstrom’s urn, with an inscription memorializing the man—so directed by Bergstrom in his suicide note—as “The Phantom Gambler.”
The numbers were not made public, but many believed the Horseshoe to be the most profitable casino in Vegas. Five years after Binion regained the club, it was doing so well that Aristotle Onassis tried to buy it. “We would have sold it to him for $8 million,” Ted Binion said later, “but he wouldn’t give us but $6 million.” This was another stroke of Binion luck: the Horseshoe was about to assume even greater status, and it didn’t need help from any Greek shipping magnates.
In 1969, Tom Moore, a transplanted gambling impresario from San Antonio, hosted a Texas Gamblers Reunion—a series of high-stakes poker games—at his Holiday Hotel casino in Reno, 350 miles northwest of Vegas. Moore assembled an all-star cast from the poker underground, including Johnny Moss, Puggy Pearson, Sailor Roberts, and Doyle Brunson, also known as Texas Dolly. Here was something new. The usual run of gaming-room operators wouldn’t think of showcasing a bunch of cardsharps, much less giving them prime real estate on the casino floor. Casinos that tolerated poker generally confined it to small venues to the side of the main action, because it attracted scant attention and generated little in the way of profits. Unlike, say, blackjack or craps gamblers, poker players were playing each other—not the house—for the big pots. All Las Vegas casinos together had only about fifty poker tables. But Moore figured that fast-money players could spark some public interest during a slow time of the year.
The Reno gathering, alas, did not produce much extra traffic. It did, however, mark the first time that Doyle Brunson came face-to-face with the legend that was Benny Binion, who had traveled to Reno with son Jack. “I’d heard about Benny all my life. He was just a tough old cowboy,” Brunson recalled. As usual, Binion wore a western shirt with gold coins for buttons, and he moved through the room as if he owned it. “He just carried himself with an assurance that comes with self-confidence,” Brunson said.
Binion loved what he found at Reno, especially one contest in particular. “I’ve seen a lot of poker games. This one this time was the most thrilling game I’ve ever seen.” It featured Moss and Pearson, battling over $130,000. “Pug was down to $30,000 once. Johnny Moss was down to $30,000 once,” Binion said. “Johnny Moss come back, put Pug down to $30,000.”
Moss took the pot with—not uncharacteristically—a hand of nothing. “Johnny Moss bluffed, single ace,” Binion said. “Johnny’s a big bluffer.”
After Moore announced that this gamblers’ reunion would be his last, Binion and son Jack got to talking. It might be a good idea, they thought, if they had a similar tournament at the Horseshoe the next year. Gather a few of the top players, Brunson among them, and let them play for big stakes while people watched—a low-key affair that might occasion some minor publicity and bring extra people to the casino.
We could call it, Binion said, the World Series of Poker.
The World Series of Poker, with Binion at the center of the action.
22
ANOTHER ONE BLOWS UP
Anybody had done anything to me, I was sure to do something to them, but they might never know who did it.
—BB
As he strode through his casino—past the spinning roulette wheel, alongside the tumbling dice, and through rows of ringing slot machines—Binion could see at least two problems with a big-time tournament.
First, he didn’t have a poker room at the Horseshoe. Second, despite Binion’s enthusiasm for the thrilling business he had witnessed in Reno, poker contests generally didn’t offer
much as a spectator experience. Why would any sane person want to watch a bunch of paunchy middle-agers with pool-hall tans and stunted social skills, wreathed in cigar smoke, play a slow match full of prolonged silence, crawling action, and—in the form of folding—multiple pre-climax surrenders?
Yet such a display had its fascinations, not so much in the game itself as in the backstory of the players.
Elsewhere in the country, poker was illegal, so high-stakes affairs took place out of sight, in hotel rooms, social clubs, and off-the-books game rooms. Many of the better and richer players had to hit the road. And the best and richest of those traveled a familiar route known as the Texas Circuit, though it included Oklahoma, Louisiana, and a few other states. The life of the gambler who rode the circuit was naturally itinerant, and it was dangerous.
Doyle Brunson spent years “fading the white line,” as the players called it, from burg to city to tank town, chasing big suckers and bigger pots. “You had to worry about winning the money,” he said. “You had to worry about getting cheated while trying to win it, you had to worry about getting paid after you won it and you had to worry about getting arrested before, during and after.” And you had to worry about being robbed, which is why he kept a loaded shotgun in his backseat. Over the years, Brunson had been held up by thieves with guns, knives, and baseball bats. Some games operated as if under siege. “I played in a game in Oklahoma once, they had a .50-caliber machine gun sitting up on top of the house,” he said. “That place I don’t think ever got robbed.”
Many professional poker players had come up poor and unschooled, but not Brunson. He had been a star athlete at the college level, good enough to catch the interest of the NBA’s Minneapolis Lakers, but a broken leg killed his basketball dreams. He went on to earn a master’s degree in business administration. Although he had played poker as a student, Brunson sought a real career. He determined quickly that he wasn’t cut out for working nine to five, right after he drew his first check as a salesman of bookkeeping equipment. “I saw that I could make more money in one [poker] pot,” he said, “than what was in that entire paycheck.” He hit the road to play cards, though he told his parents he was a traveling insurance salesman.
In the 1950s, Brunson honed his skills in the collection of bars, hotels, and all-purpose dives near the Fort Worth Stockyards. Once a major shipping point for livestock, and later a concentration of packing plants, the stockyards began to fade and decay after World War II. Law enforcement had all but abandoned the area. “That’s the toughest place I’ve ever been, down on Exchange Avenue,” Brunson said. “It was like something out of the old West . . . I saw four people get killed on the street, right out in the open.” An argument had broken out on the sidewalk, and guns were drawn. “There were four or five guys on each side. They were shooting at each other like something out of a movie. The police really didn’t care.”
One of those making their fortunes along Exchange Avenue was Tincy Eggleston, a rotund hoodlum who was widely feared and loathed in Fort Worth. “Tincy was the most vicious and dangerous man on the Avenue, and that was saying something,” Brunson said. Eggleston’s shakedowns, threats, and general business model finally went too far. Police found his car parked near the stockyards in the summer of 1955 with blood dripping from the front seat. A week later his body was discovered stuffed in a well north of Fort Worth. He had been an associate of, among others, Benny Binion.
• • •
The first year of the World Series of Poker, 1970, drew a handful of players, but it was nonetheless—as Binion had envisioned—a collection of superstars. Among them were Moss, Brunson, and the irrepressible Amarillo Slim Preston. “The first time he comes into the Horseshoe, he tells a dirty joke,” Brenda Binion Michael remembered of Slim. “Because my mother’s there nobody laughs. He thinks nobody gets it so he tells it again.”
Binion solved the problem of where to play by having workers move some of the other games out of the way to make room for poker tables. Before long he had a gathering of outlaws with long sideburns and polyester slacks, playing stud.
The competition that first year had been loosely organized, and at the end of it the players were asked to vote on a champion. When each one voted for himself, Jack Binion asked them to vote for who they thought was second-best. Johnny Moss won.
There were a few other difficulties, but nothing Benny Binion couldn’t handle. At one point, a known poker game hijacker was spotted in the crowd. Binion sidled over to him and said, “You’re makin’ a lot of my customers uneasy.” The man responded that it was a free country and he wasn’t doing anything wrong. “Look,” Binion said, “you’re a young man, and you think you’re tough. I’m an old man and I know I’m tough. If you think not, let’s just go out in the parking garage right now.”
The thief got up and left without another word.
• • •
The next year the Binions changed the series to a winner-take-all tournament. Once a player lost his chips, he was out. Johnny Moss won that one too. Over the next several years, the series picked up momentum—more money, more players, more attention.
Generating notice for the tournament outside Vegas proved easier than Binion might have thought, because Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder had been fired from his publicity job by Howard Hughes. He knocked on Binion’s door seeking redemption. “He didn’t charge us anything,” Binion said. “He wanted to prove hisself, what he could do.” Snyder, also a football oddsmaker, worked his gambling and publishing connections across the country, and it didn’t hurt that he was pushing a product like none that had come before. “He put it in seven thousand newspapers . . . That’s pretty doggone good,” Binion said. “Hell, nobody thought you could get this much publicity out of this poker game. I didn’t. But he did.”
Even better, network shows such as CBS Sports Spectacular and ABC’s Wide World of Sports were now covering the tournament. “This poker game here gets us a lot of advertisement,” Binion said. Never mind that the Horseshoe was shopworn, low-ceilinged, lit like a Texaco station, and smelled of old Camels and last night’s beer. The hotel rooms weren’t much better. In later years, journalists who came to cover the series were quietly advised to stay across the street at Steve Wynn’s refurbished Golden Nugget.
For tournament players the Horseshoe was home, and Binion received them as if they were showcase acts, with good food and slavish attention—the winners especially, who took home gold bracelets and were treated like heavyweight champs. After all the years of resisting performers at his place, Binion finally had some. “He understood gamblers,” Doyle Brunson said. “He kind of adopted us.” The friendship between Brunson and Binion blossomed as the series grew. Brunson admired Binion’s business savvy: “He was successful in Vegas because he gave the public what they wanted,” and he gave his friends what they needed. “He helped everybody.”
In Brunson’s case, the help he required was the result of a run-in with Tony “the Ant” Spilotro, a Vegas mobster—Joe Pesci portrayed a character much like him in the film Casino—who famously squeezed a man’s head in a vise until his eyeball popped out. Now Spilotro had a plan for a poker-room cheating scheme, and he tapped Brunson to work with him. If Brunson didn’t comply, a friend advised him, Spilotro would “stick twelve ice picks in that big fat belly of yours.” Brunson sought an escape route through Binion, who put the word out that he had Brunson’s back, and helped negotiate his release from the scheme. “Without that protection,” Brunson said, “I have no doubt that Spilotro would have killed me.”
It was, he said, another example of the Binion way. “He was the wisest man I’ve ever known. He understood people better than anyone I’ve ever known. He was just really a great guy,” Brunson said, then added, “But if anybody bothered his business or his family, he was a dangerous guy.”
• • •
William Coulthard, a fifty-six-year-old former FBI agent and state assemblyman
in Las Vegas, had carved out a successful career as a lawyer. His real estate interests included a 37 percent stake in the property on which the Horseshoe stood. In the summer of 1972, Coulthard and Binion entered negotiations for a new lease. Coulthard rejected Binion’s offers, and Binion rejected his. Their talks turned difficult if not acrimonious. Herbert Noble’s survivors might have predicted how this would play out.
On the afternoon of July 25, another searing Las Vegas day, Coulthard walked out of his office in the Bank of Nevada building downtown—he was the bank’s general counsel—and onto the third level of the adjacent parking garage. He got into his four-year-old Cadillac. The car had been parked in its space for six hours, during which someone had placed, directly beneath the steering column, four sticks of dynamite. As soon as Coulthard settled into the driver’s seat, they blew. The blast destroyed the Cadillac, ripped a hole in the reinforced concrete, and caused five other cars to explode. It killed Coulthard, a father of four, instantly. “He was,” the Review-Journal reported, “blasted apart, burned and not facially identifiable.”
Homicide investigators, who were well aware of the Horseshoe lease dispute—and prior car bombings in Texas—questioned Binion, but came away with nothing but twangy denials. “Oh, he was tough,” Binion said regarding Coulthard’s demands. “That doesn’t make a goddamn bit of difference. We was not mad at him. Never was mad at him.” He suggested that other parties in the property ownership structure had reasons to kill the man. “He had control and he’s making a lease the other side didn’t like, his partners didn’t like . . . His brother-in-laws were mad at him.” Then this: “I ain’t saying who blowed him up. I know I didn’t.”