by Doug Swanson
Never short of provocative quips, Yablonsky proclaimed that he had come to “plant the American flag” in Las Vegas. “We were working to turn it into a normal America.” To Yablonsky, Vegas featured more than a few odd circumstances and pairings. One of the oddest was Judge Harry Claiborne’s friendship, and frequent lunches, with Binion. “What would a man learned in legal terms have in common with an illiterate such as Binion?” Yablonsky wondered. After some study, he found what he believed to be the answer: corruption. “Binion,” he said, “would be the guy to go to if you wanted to put a fix in.”
He instructed his agents to reinvestigate the 1972 bombing death of William Coulthard, because he had no doubt that Binion bought it. “Oh, absolutely. There’s no question in my mind that Binion was behind that,” Yablonsky said years afterward. “He [Coulthard] wanted more money, and with Binion that would be enough.” The FBI nibbled around it for years, but never mounted a prosecutable case. “We just never could put it together,” Yablonsky said. Agents also looked into the shooting of Rance Blevins, hoping to find evidence of bribes and Ted Binion’s complicity, but came away empty there too.
Yablonsky had better luck with Claiborne, whom he accused of soliciting protection payments from a Reno-area brothel owner. Binion leaped to his best friend’s defense, in a Benny-like way: “Since I’ve known him, I don’t know of anything he’s done that was a violation of anyone’s law—other than maybe getting drunk. While he was under the whiskey, he may have said a thing or two he regretted. The point is, as a lawyer and a judge, he is absolutely honest. I don’t know a more honorable man.”
As Binion unwittingly hinted, Claiborne didn’t project the ideal image of a federal judge, at least as citizens outside Nevada understood the position. In addition to his near-constant presence at the Horseshoe, Claiborne had, as a Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist noted, “a taste for strong whiskey, frisky women and trim horses.” The Valley Times of Las Vegas struck a similar chord. “Claiborne doesn’t happen to look very judicial,” the paper said in an editorial. That understated the matter: with narrow eyes and a flicking tongue, Claiborne could have been dipped in snake oil. “Indeed,” the editorial continued, “a Hollywood director would be more likely to make him a two-bit hood in a 1938 Jimmy Cagney crime movie than a distinguished jurist.”
Many Las Vegans regarded such characteristics as typical if not admirable, and they viewed Yablonsky as an overzealous, overreaching outsider pursuing a local—and misunderstood—hero. Claiborne “socializes with women who happen to be attractive,” Oscar Goodman said. “And that, in Yablonsky’s perception, is part of a federal crime.” The same Valley Times editorial that described Claiborne’s gangsterish deportment also declared him to be innocent of any wrongdoing because he said so—no further evidence required. “The feds . . . should simply ask Claiborne the facts,” the editorial reasoned. “He’d tell them the truth, and that should be that.” The Las Vegas Sun, published by Binion loyalist Hank Greenspun, beat this drum relentlessly. The paper’s strategy consisted not so much of defending Claiborne as attacking Yablonsky. “The Nevada FBI chief came to Las Vegas with a preconceived notion that everyone in Nevada is evil,” Greenspun wrote. He later added, “We’re inviting . . . Yablonsky to sue us, because we charge him with an arrogant abuse of power and criminal misconduct.”
The FBI’s investigation of Claiborne dragged on for years, with multiple fits and starts, but finally resulted in the judge’s conviction on tax evasion charges and a sentence of two years in prison. Though Yablonsky regarded taking down Claiborne as a career capstone, it made him a pariah in influential Vegas circles. He had hoped to stay in the region after he left the FBI—perhaps picking up a lucrative consulting job at one of the casinos—but soon abandoned those plans. “He was run out of town,” Oscar Goodman said decades later with a smile.
The thought of his Vegas repudiation still causes Yablonsky to gaze at the wall in bewilderment. “In most cities, if you were nailing crooked politicians, you’d become a hero,” Yablonsky said almost thirty years later from the comfort of his Florida home. “In that place you were messing things up for them.”
• • •
Binion had escaped another attempt by the feds to hammer him, but now he faced bigger concerns. His younger son’s heroin addiction and erratic actions had become hard to ignore. It wasn’t just that Ted liked to cruise Vegas in a limo, firing a .45 at the sky from the moonroof. The FBI suspected that he was part of a drug-smuggling ring operating from Bermuda through Florida to Las Vegas. “Teddy Binion is believed to be one of the main suppliers of cocaine in the Southern Nevada area, and is also a heavy cocaine user,” an agent wrote. Another agent said, “[Ted] Binion uses the casino cage at the Horseshoe Hotel and Casino to launder the drug money.” Though no charges were filed, it was clear to his father that Ted had fallen deep into troublesome associations and bad behavior. “Ted broke Daddy’s heart,” daughter Brenda said.
Binion had already been through a wrenching ordeal with his oldest daughter, Barbara. Although she had abandoned her early plans for an armed-robbery ring, she—like brother Ted—had her demons. “Used dope,” her father said.
Barbara had struggled for years with deep emotional problems, and with a heroin addiction of her own. She had been married and divorced three times. “She had a lot of Benny’s young blood in her,” a friend of Binion’s said. At one point she tried to commit suicide with a shotgun. She put the barrel in her mouth and shot off part of her cheek and jaw, but lived. “They did all sorts of reconstructive surgery, but it was still a horrible mess,” said a family acquaintance. As a result of the wound she couldn’t see well and was in near-constant pain. She spent much of her time in bed, and a lot of the rest with the wrong crowd.
Binion responded to his daughter’s addiction by threatening to declare a bounty on Las Vegas drug dealers. Ted Binion may have made it more than a threat. An FBI memo said Ted ordered the ejection of one of Barbara’s boyfriends from the Horseshoe because he thought the man had supplied his sister with drugs. “I’m going to waste that fucker,” Ted was reported to have boasted. The next day, the FBI said, “the boyfriend was found dead in the desert with half his head blown off.”
In the summer of 1983, with Binion in Montana, other family members planned a trip to Disneyland. “Well, they come down here to meet,” Binion said, referring to the Horseshoe, “and Barbara come down here and she’s kind of lit up.” The others left for California, and Barbara stayed behind. That night, she was seen at the Horseshoe about four in the morning, talking to a friend. Then she went to her modest Las Vegas house, less than two miles from the casino. She was found there hours later, dead of an overdose.
Family members refused to believe Barbara had committed suicide. She only wanted to dull her facial pain, they said, and had swallowed too much codeine. “She got it accidentally, I’m sure,” Binion said. He took some solace in one of her final acts. Days before she died, Barbara had asked her father for money, and vowed to go straight. “I said, ‘All right,’ and I give her $5,000,” Binion said. “Now what I feel good about, she got on this jag, but she still had $4,800” when she died. “She didn’t piss it off. Her intentions were still good. She might have spent some of that $200, but she still was just shooting around a little. She wasn’t really getting down at it like they do.”
Among those comforting Binion in the days after Barbara’s death was Doyle Brunson, whose own daughter, Doyla, eighteen, had died the year before of heart problems aggravated by bulimia. Brunson said Binion, though deep in grief, maintained a stoic front in public. “He took all the phone calls from people giving him condolences,” Brunson said. “He handled it very well. But that was his first-born. So it was very tough.”
While Binion mourned with public poise, Barbara’s mother remained bereft. “By God, she can’t get over it,” Binion said of Teddy Jane. “She thinks she’s the cause.” In the aftermath, daughter Bren
da said, Teddy Jane “spent months walking around with Barbara’s baby pictures, crying.”
• • •
Through it all, Binion seemed to be a one-man tourism engine. Most of his fellow rackets kings who had pioneered Vegas decades before were long gone now. But he kept at it—promoting the town and writing big checks. In 1984, he helped pay for the National Finals Rodeo to move from Oklahoma City to Vegas. This would bring tens of thousands of visitors to town every December, which had always been the slowest month for casinos, when resorts would paint the rooms and replace the carpet.
His philanthropic efforts were generous and broad, with big donations for a number of Las Vegas hospitals and private schools. Little League teams got money too. When Binion learned of the plight of Clifford Henry Bowen, a Texas bank robber turned poker player who had been framed for murder in Oklahoma, he helped pay Bowen’s substantial legal fees. Bowen was freed on appeal, and took up semipermanent residence at the Horseshoe.
Binion seemed to be riding a crest of wild commercial success, effusive publicity, and general public acclaim. Then he almost died.
He was at least twenty pounds overweight, having long favored a diet that ranged from fatty to fried. He had smoked much of his life. All of it was catching up with him in the form of congestive heart failure. Twice in 1984, while he was hospitalized, his heart stopped, and he was revived with a defibrillator. A new heart drug called amiodarone worked well, and helped get him up and out of the hospital bed.
The health problems slowed Binion down some, but softened him not much at all. Although a nurse now accompanied him when he traveled, he still kept a .22 handgun in his pocket. As was his custom, the hammer of the pistol had been filed down so it wouldn’t catch on the fabric if he had to draw in a hurry, because no one knew when an eighty-year-old man with a nurse at his side might encounter a gunfight. “He said that [a .22] is the best gun for shooting someone,” friend Bob Hinkle remembered. “He said, ‘That’ll tear somebody up.’”
A few years after the near-death episodes, Binion told a Las Vegas journalist that during one of his heart failures he had briefly encountered Jesus. “He had long hair, like you see in the pictures, and I don’t believe he was a very old man,” he said. “You have to remember, I wasn’t there long enough to see much. You die longer than a second, you stay.” Jesus said only one thing to him, Binion recalled. He said, “Benny?” Binion didn’t say if this indicated that the Savior was uncertain of his identity or just surprised to see him.
The interviewer allowed that Binion might meet Jesus again. “From what I’ve been told,” Binion said, “I’m supposed to go the other way.” Not if you repent, the writer said. “That’s the problem,” Binion said. “There’s some of it I can’t repent. I’ve tried, and I just can’t.”
• • •
Maybe he couldn’t obtain divine forgiveness, but governmental absolution in the form of a presidential pardon remained possible. He had already been turned down four times, including twice by Jimmy Carter, in 1978 and 1980. That second chance with Carter had been looking good until Binion popped off about a Mafia stool pigeon named Jimmy “the Weasel” Fratianno. In court testimony, and later in a best-selling tell-all book, The Last Mafioso, Fratianno said that Russian Louie Strauss, Binion’s former bodyguard, had tried to blackmail Binion. Fratianno claimed he helped strangle Strauss, and Binion paid him $60,000.
“Which is bullshit,” Binion said. He was outraged at the allegation—not that he was accused of ordering the killing of Strauss, but that he had hired a sniveling rat like Fratianno to do it. “Now some reporter called me,” Binion said, “and he was putting it on me pretty strong, and I said, ‘Listen go back and tell them FBIs I’m still able to do my own damn killings.’” This might have been industry-standard bravado in Vegas, but it attracted immediate, and unfavorable, notice in Washington. “Goddamn, I made a mistake,” Binion said. “It did set ’em off.” Soon afterward, he claimed, the Carter administration used his statement “as an excuse for not giving me no pardon.”
It wasn’t only the old man who had been indiscreet. Yablonsky, the former FBI special agent, remembered having lunch with a couple of colleagues at the Horseshoe shortly after Fratianno’s book was published. “Ted [Binion] came running up to the table and said, ‘That book is a piece of shit,’” Yablonsky recalled. “He said, ‘My father never gave a contract to kill that son of a bitch. If he’d wanted him killed, he would have done it himself.’”
But that was a different time. Now, with Ronald Reagan in the White House, Binion’s hope for a pardon sprang anew. “When ol’ Reagan went in there,” he said, “I just thought he was going to do wonders.” In 1984, with help from his friends, he launched one more campaign. “I want to be free. I want my rights restored,” Binion wrote in a pardon application. “It has been almost 40 years since I under reported my income and I have been law abiding since.” Covering his bets as usual, he also made a campaign contribution to the president. “I knew my pardon was coming through there and would be on his desk. I sent him $15,000,” Binion said. “Don’t look like to me he’d take my money and turn it down now, does it?”
His effort drew support from some of the most powerful people in Nevada. “He is a man of his word,” John Code Mowbray, a justice in the state supreme court, said in a letter to the U.S. Justice Department. “He has integrity. He is a loyal American.” Harry Reid, a congressman from Nevada destined to become Senate majority leader, wrote to say that Binion deserved a pardon because, in part, he had donated to the Las Vegas public TV station so his granddaughter could watch Sesame Street. Binion “is a tradition in this state,” Reid said. U.S. senator Paul Laxalt, a close friend and adviser of Reagan’s, told the pardon office it should grant one last wish to a deserving—and dying—man. “During his many years of poor health, which at times has put him at death’s door, he has maintained a strong wish to be pardoned,” Laxalt wrote. “He has the support of many respected Nevadans.”
The pleas on Binion’s behalf did not come solely from well-funded brokers of influence. A thirteen-year-old boy sent the president a handwritten letter in which he recounted his visit to the Horseshoe. “Mr. Binion was very nice and showed us his coin collection and his hotel,” the boy said. “He is a real nice man.” A fourteen-year-old boy who had been present on the same visit had this to add about Binion in his own letter to Reagan: “You would like him if you met him.”
It was up to the Justice Department’s pardon office to make a recommendation to the president, and such deliberations on these matters were kept confidential. But the department’s thinking was made plain in a 1985 memo from an assistant attorney general to the chief pardon attorney. “The Criminal Division last expressed its opposition to Mr. Binion’s pardon in 1978,” the assistant AG wrote. “Since then, all information which has come to the attention of this Division and to the public concerning Mr. Binion has been of a negative nature.”
The memo went on to warn that Binion’s Las Vegas operations offered all manner of reasons for concern. The Horseshoe “has figured prominently in recent prosecutions and investigations of . . . Judge Harry Claiborne and others as a repository and cleansing facility for illegal or unreported funds,” it said. “Current investigations will almost certainly result in additional public disclosures of this nature, making Mr. Binion an inappropriate subject for executive clemency.” It probably didn’t help Binion’s case that Reagan’s pal Laxalt had been accused in 1983 of having connections to a Nevada casino from which great portions of skim allegedly went to organized crime. No one in the administration wanted that dredged up again.
In the spring of 1986, Reagan denied Binion’s application. Back in Vegas, Binion received the word from a newspaper reporter. “I said, ‘Well, I swear, I hate that,’” he recalled. He began to tell friends that the refusal had given him a new reason to live. “I’m going to outlive that sumbitch,” he said of Reagan, “and piss on hi
s grave.”
It was a pretty good laugh line, and he repeated it often. But the pardon refusal had deeply disappointed Binion. He had exhausted his last chance, and he would die a convicted felon. He explained it in familiar terms. “Everything to me is like you throwed three. When you throw three on the dice, you’ve lost your money and you’ve crapped out. Anytime anything happens, I just say the dice throwed three. Crapped out.”
A roundup at Binion’s Montana ranch with, from left to right, casino mogul Steve Wynn, Ted Binion, Benny, Moe Dalitz, and Dalitz’s driver.
25
“THEY DO THINGS LIKE THAT”
Fear will not keep ’em from stealing. I’ve caught ’em, seen ’em, have ’em lay down on the floor, say, “Kill me! I’m a dog. I’m no good.” Damn near killed some of ’em, too.
—BB
People journeyed to Las Vegas to have fun and win money, and sometimes these seekers of pleasure and cash became overexuberant, or turned larcenous. If a customer caused an extraordinary disturbance, or if a gambler was caught cheating, casino security routinely called the cops. Several times a week, on average, managers filed criminal paperwork with the Clark County district attorney’s office, seeking prosecution of customers who cheated or stole. The Binions almost never lodged such complaints. That’s because the Horseshoe took care of its own problems. This approach made perfect sense if one were operating, say, an illicit dice room in Depression-era Texas, but perhaps less so for a legal enterprise in a tourist town. Yet such was Binion’s legacy.