Blood Aces

by Doug Swanson

  Teddy Jane was a common, and arresting, sight on Fremont Street—a tiny, wiry woman with hair dyed bright red, walking her Chihuahua and her poodle, wearing high heels while puffing on a cigarette, shadowed by a stocky Horseshoe security guard. She still worked the cashier’s cage, and for a while slept in an office above it, before moving into the hotel. The rooms were small, and Teddy Jane accumulated clutter. As she filled the space with her various possessions, she would simply move to the room next door. When she packed that one full, she would move again. Over the years, she filled up nine rooms.

  Binion’s habit of happily giving away money enraged his frugal wife; this included his comping of meals for Horseshoe customers. “He’d pick up this check, pick up that check,” R. D. Matthews remembered. “Teddy Jane said, ‘Every time he walks through the restaurant it cost us a hundred dollars.’” She found the actual presence of currency comforting. When she couldn’t sleep at night, which was often, she would take the elevator down to the casino’s counting room, grab a bag of silver dollars, and go through the coins one by one, sorting and stacking them by date.

  The Binions’ older son had inherited a lot of his mother’s business savvy. Thin and bald, Jack Binion had the abstemious mien of a bookkeeper and the work ethic of a monk. “There ain’t nobody works harder than Jack,” his father said. “Long hour man.” Over the years, Jack gradually assumed management of the Horseshoe with all the cool of a supremely talented executive.

  The younger son, Ted Binion, often ran the night crew at the Horseshoe. Far more expansive than his brother, not to mention flashy, Ted boasted in the mid-1970s that his father’s club made more than any downtown casino, and “Binion’s Horseshoe has $15 million in the bank right now.”

  Ted appeared to have inherited the old man’s freewheeling traits without the mitigating pragmatism. He often spent much of the night shift smoking dope, keeping watch on the casino floor from the Horseshoe’s eye-in-the-ceiling vantage point. Rakish and engaging, he burned through money and good times. Ted wore his hair shaggy but dressed in cowboy clothes. He was highly intelligent yet completely undisciplined—a self-educated history buff and math whiz who also enjoyed gambling and strippers. “He was a cross between Larry Flynt and a bum,” said his nephew, Benny Behnen. “He’d leave home with $30,000 in his pocket, but he’d be wearing ratty denim, and he cut his own hair. He wouldn’t go home until the money was gone.” Once, when a woman wouldn’t sleep with Ted, he set fire to a succession of hundred-dollar bills to soothe his wounded ego. “Ted was brilliant. He had phenomenal insight into what life was about,” Oscar Goodman said. “But he had demons.”

  Chief among them was an addiction to black tar heroin. Ted rolled the heroin into a ball, put it on aluminum foil, lit it, and inhaled the smoke. “I’d find these little foil bowls all over the place,” a Horseshoe worker said. So it was no surprise to anyone that Ted Binion began to associate with Jimmy Chagra. Another émigré from Texas, Chagra had made his fortune by smuggling marijuana from Colombia on an oceangoing freighter, at which point he decamped for Vegas, where his heavy wagers on craps gained him instant fame. “In five minutes,” a friend said, “he might bet a million dollars.”

  Such heavy-stakes gamblers naturally gravitated to the Horseshoe, and Chagra’s frequent presence at the Binions’ place was hardly a secret, especially after he tipped a cocktail waitress $10,000 for bringing him a bottle of water. The “Gambling Gambit” column in the Las Vegas Sun reported in May 1979 that he had “created a sizable stir at the Horseshoe only about two weeks ago when he walked away with about $490,000 after an evening of craps and blackjack.” A haul like that was unusual for Chagra. Usually he lost—and lost big—which made him a welcome customer at the Horseshoe. Federal agents suspected he had other reasons for visiting the casino. Benny and Ted Binion “allegedly assisted major drug trafficker Jimmy Chagra in laundering money through the Horseshoe,” an FBI report said. “Additionally, investigation linked Ted Binion to Chagra’s illegal narcotics network.”

  The Binions were not charged with drug smuggling. Chagra was indicted in 1979 by a federal grand jury in Midland, Texas, for conspiracy to import marijuana and cocaine. The judge presiding over his case was John Wood, known as Maximum John for his harsh treatment of traffickers. Chagra was in enough trouble without having a black-robed avenger staring down at him, itching to order hard time. He now faced the very real possibility that Wood would put him away for life without parole. When a reporter in Vegas asked Chagra to reckon his chances of acquittal, Chagra answered that with Wood presiding, about fifty-fifty. But without Wood, he said, “much, much better.”

  Chagra’s odds improved when he met yet another Texan inside the Horseshoe. Charles Voyde Harrelson, the father of actor Woody Harrelson, had been a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman before finding bigger paydays as a coolheaded, cold-blooded killer for hire. One time, after receiving a fifteen-year sentence for murder, he responded, “That’s not so bad.” At the moment, he was between prison stretches. Harrelson and Chagra got to talking about the drug case and the tough ways of Judge Wood. One month later, the judge was dead, gunned down outside his San Antonio town house.

  Chagra was ultimately charged with conspiracy in Wood’s death. Enter Oscar Goodman, who destroyed the prosecution’s case, much of which had been based on the testimony of a jailhouse snitch. Although Chagra was convicted of drug crimes, he was acquitted of murder. “Thank God for Oscar Goodman,” he proclaimed as he walked from the courthouse. Harrelson did not fare nearly so well. In a separate trial—he was not represented by Goodman—he was convicted of killing the judge and sentenced to life in prison.

  • • •

  A few weeks before Judge Wood’s murder, Ted Binion had his own brush with a homicide case. Oscar Goodman was involved in that one too.

  It started with a man named Rance Blevins, who had grown up in Kermit, Texas, where he had been a pretty good high school football player. After a stretch in the army, he drifted for a while—through Austin and finally to Las Vegas, where he found a job on a drilling rig at the Nevada Test Site. Eventually he bought a trailer and married, and he and his wife had two children. But the marriage fell apart. Blevins, now thirty-eight, began to stay out all night, an easy thing to do in Las Vegas.

  One Monday in May 1979, a few minutes before 5:00 a.m., he found himself playing poker at the Horseshoe. After some losing hands, Blevins concluded that the dealer and another player were cheating him, and he started a loud argument. Horseshoe security guards hustled him from the place, but on his way out, Blevins managed a parting shot. He kicked a pane of plate glass, and it shattered. Then he committed what may have been his worst error. He ran.

  Blevins made his escape down Fremont Street as at least three men—a Horseshoe guard, a pit boss named Walt Rozanski, and Ted Binion—pursued him. From his parked car, a Las Vegas taxi driver named John Koval watched the chase, telling himself, “Oh, they’re going to fuck this guy up.” It took about twenty seconds for him to be proved correct.

  After one block, and at Third and Fremont, Blevins stumbled and fell. His pursuers surrounded him in the light of the flashing Horseshoe neon. One of the three men took a 9-mm handgun from the security guard’s holster and pressed the barrel against the top of Blevins’s skull.

  “He just pulls a gun out,” Koval recalled, “and shoots him in the head.”

  Without a pause, the guard, Rozanski, and Ted Binion turned and walked back into the casino, calmly leaving Blevins dead on the sidewalk for the crime of breaking glass.

  Now it was time for the Vegas version of criminal justice to swing into action. As soon as the first uniformed police officers made the scene, Koval offered to provide a positive ID of the shooter. He had once been a police officer in New Jersey, so he had a pretty good idea of how these things worked. “Let’s go in the casino and I’ll point the guy out,” he said. That’s when one of the Vegas cops looked toward
the Horseshoe, frowned, and shook his head. “We can’t go in there,” he said. “We’re not allowed.”

  Others did make the effort, with predictable results. About an hour later, assistant district attorney Dan Bowman arrived at his downtown office to find police detectives waiting for him. They said their attempts to enter the Horseshoe for a search had been rebuffed by none other than Oscar Goodman. “He told the cops that he represented all employees of the Horseshoe, and he was not giving them permission to go in,” Bowman recalled. It took Bowman about five hours to find a judge to sign a warrant. By that time, the gun that had been used to shoot Blevins had disappeared from the Horseshoe forever.

  Investigators had no weapon to dust for prints. Nor did they conduct a timely test for the presence of gunpowder residue on the hands of any of the three men who had been surrounding Blevins when he was shot. Jerry Blevins, brother of the dead man, phoned a detective to ask why such a test had not been done. “He said, ‘That’s not something we normally do,’” Jerry Blevins remembered.

  Koval, the cabbie, had no doubt that Walt Rozanski shot Blevins. Rozanski, the Horseshoe pit boss, was a twenty-four-year-old former linebacker for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, varsity football team. He stood six foot three and weighed 225 pounds. “It was the big guy who did it,” Koval said. But prosecutor Bowman had three eyewitnesses who would positively identify Ted Binion as the shooter. They were, in fact, unwavering in their identification of him.

  Taking on one of the most powerful families in Las Vegas, Bowman prepared his case against Ted Binion—and then watched it collapse. “All three witnesses mysteriously changed their story,” Bowman said. Now the three were saying that Rozanski had pulled the trigger. “I was just screwed,” Bowman said. “There was no way I could prosecute that case and win.”

  With Goodman at his side, Rozanski told the court the gun had discharged accidentally. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter and received probation. He never served a day in prison for the death of Rance Blevins.

  “And,” Bowman said, “Ted Binion walked.”

  • • •

  More than three decades later, it is no struggle to find people in Vegas—the ex-prosecutor among them—who believe Benny Binion fixed the case for his son. Bowman, now retired, relaxed on a stool in a Henderson, Nevada, bar and shook his head over the old riddle, still baffled. “I can’t understand,” he said, “how three witnesses would change their stories overnight.” His best guess: bribes. “Benny Binion had a lot of juice, and a lot of money to spread around. He took care of his own problems . . . In my personal opinion, I think money changed hands.”

  One man who might be able to clear everything up—Rozanski—has stayed silent. Book publishers and movie producers have offered good money for his story, he said, but he has turned all of them away. From a distance of years, he recalled the shooting’s aftermath obliquely. “I’m 58 years old now,” he said in a note, “and I often look back with sadness, heartache and dismay over what happened, what was lost and how it was spun.”

  He endured hard times after the shooting, Rozanski said, but he put himself back together. He does not blame Binion for his difficulties. “To this day,” he wrote, “I am proud to say I am grateful to have met and worked for Benny Binion! He was a great man!”

  On an autumn afternoon thirty-three years later, sipping coffee in a near-deserted diner in Florida, Rozanski laughed ruefully at the notion that Binion bribed him to take the rap. “Everybody said I got paid,” he said, “but I was sitting there living in poverty . . . I never got a penny.” He would not, however, give his account of what happened on Fremont Street on that morning so long ago. Rozanski glanced outside, toward a busy street, and hinted darkly of unnamed forces and possible murderous revenge against himself and others.

  “Each man’s destiny has their side of the story. Some never tell it! Some don’t get the chance,” he wrote in a note. “Some just wait till the time is right and some don’t tell because of who it would hurt! Believe it or not, Benny taught me that.”

  Promoting the World Series of Poker in 1976, Binion does The Merv Griffin Show with actor Jack Klugman (far left) and poker player Jack Straus (far right). Ironically, Griffin is the one dressed like a mobster.

  24

  U-TURN AT THE GATES OF HEAVEN

  Used to really live dangerously. And I was dangerous . . . Well, I don’t do that no more.

  —BB

  The early and mid-1980s brought Binion his greatest prominence and moments of deepest pain and disappointment.

  The poker world series was growing every year, but Jack Binion sought more national and international exposure. He hired a Los Angeles public relations specialist named Henri Bollinger, who spent a few weeks hanging around the Horseshoe. Bollinger found colorful poker players, such as Perry Green, an Orthodox Jew and fur trader from Alaska, and Mickey Appleman, a New Yorker with master’s degrees in education, statistics, and business administration. John Jenkins III, a Texan known as Austin Squatty for his cross-legged poker position, spent his non-gambling hours as a distinguished historian and rare book dealer. None of them quite fit Bollinger’s plans.

  Series entrant Stu Ungar had an irresistible story that could have been publicity catnip for Bollinger. He was a scrawny waif and gin rummy genius who had learned to gamble as a schoolboy in his father’s bar on New York’s Lower East Side. By the time he hit Vegas, many considered him the world’s greatest poker player. As a public face, Ungar had his drawbacks. He responded to reporters’ questions with either a mumble or a snarl, refused to bathe regularly, and indulged a cocaine habit that later killed him.

  Bollinger kept looking for a marketable star. After spending time with the tournament’s top man, inspiration hit him. Bollinger told Jack Binion, “Benny Binion is your brand.”

  Under Bollinger’s direction, the World Series of Poker began producing a steady stream of press releases that made the Cowboy the face of the event. Binion is “a folk hero,” said one dispatch. “A throw-back to the Old West,” proclaimed another. And: “He is a member of an elite group of men whose personal lives parallel the development of the American frontier.” It was pure public relations mythologizing.

  Before the 1981 series, Bollinger got a call from a British writer, Al Alvarez, who was proposing a piece for the New Yorker, which meant Bollinger had drawn the publicist’s equivalent of a royal flush. Alvarez, a distinguished poet and critic, came to downtown Vegas for the first time and discovered an alien but perversely fascinating landscape. The grimy sidewalks of Fremont Street, he observed, were thick with “the humped, the bent, the skeleton thin, and the obese, cashing in their Social Security checks, disability allowances, and pensions, waiting out their time in the hope of a miracle jackpot to transform their last pinched days.” For them, “Glitter Gulch is the absurd last stop on the slow train to the grave.” Yet inside the Horseshoe—“shabby, ill-lit and crowded at all hours”—Alvarez found the mecca of single-minded, hard-core gambling. He came away enchanted.

  Alvarez titled his account “Welcome to Dreamland,” and in it he depicted Binion as a peaceful lion-in-winter. “Benny Binion is now seventy-seven years old,” he wrote, “a genial, round-faced, round-bellied man, like a beardless Santa Claus in a Stetson, benign and smiling.” He waved at Binion’s bloody past, but left it there. “Tough times may make tough people,” he observed, “but age, reputation and great wealth turn tough people into lovable old characters.”

  The New Yorker piece, later published in book form as The Biggest Game in Town, vaulted Binion and his poker series into the ranks of the lower highbrow. Before long, Harper’s magazine, Le Monde, and the Times of London would send their erudite essayists to the Horseshoe too.

  Such attention solidified Binion’s role as one of the Horseshoe’s—if not Las Vegas’s—leading attractions. This phenomenon had begun some years before, thanks to the criminal headlines and
Binion’s television appearances. Binion’s friend R. D. Matthews dealt with it as the Horseshoe’s casino manager. “I didn’t have a floor show I could comp people to,” Matthews said. “So people would just want to come back to see Benny. Someone would say, ‘I want to see Mr. Binion. He’s one of my closest friends.’ I’d tell Benny who it was, and he’d say, ‘I never heard of that person in my life.’” But Binion would meet with these customers anyway, and treat them like boon companions. He would put on his cowboy hat, and maybe his buffalo hide coat, and pose for round after round of pictures. If they were from Texas, plenty of talk about home would ensue. “He knew how to treat people,” Matthews said.

  Yet it was more than that. Binion was the approachable racketeer, the affable killer, the conversational kingpin. For certain tourists and other gawkers, this was like Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride. Only in this case, the pirate—however genial—was real.

  • • •

  Joseph Yablonsky had dropped into this strange place in 1980. FBI director William Webster—J. Edgar Hoover, Binion’s nemesis, was long gone—personally asked Yablonsky to take charge of the bureau’s Vegas office. Yablonsky was a tall New Jersey guy who wore aviator glasses and smoked big cigars, and who had a gift for bluntness. He described one New York City criminal encounter this way: “Five Puerto Ricans sideswiped me. I chased them up the East River Drive to the Bronx. They got out of the car, and one of them came at me with a rum bottle. I shot him right through the dick.”

  Yablonsky’s talent for, and success at, FBI undercover bait operations had gained him the nickname the King of Sting. Now the bureau was depositing him in a city that could be considered one of the worst assignments it could offer—or the best, depending on the point of view. Previous federal agents in Las Vegas received free meals and show tickets from casinos, and could count on landing well-paying security jobs at the resorts when they retired from the FBI. As always, the town had its own ways of coopting, corrupting, and conniving. “I thought I knew it all,” Yablonsky said, “until I got there.”