by Doug Swanson
Even after Rance Blevins was shot in the head for kicking in some glass, Horseshoe managers—the children and grandchildren of Binion, along with their functionaries—showed little tolerance for what they defined as misbehavior. That hardness extended to the ragged and the homeless, especially those who were black. Security men, who carried handguns and billy clubs, swept them from the casino and hustled them to the back alley—the same alley where Binion had given away hamburgers to poor kids—and made sure they knew never to return. Sometimes the guards knocked them around first. A Horseshoe waitress said she watched as security handcuffed a black man, used his head as a battering ram to open the back door, and threw him outside. In 1983, one woman had the audacity to enter the Horseshoe coffee shop as the white half of a biracial couple. A guard cuffed her, called her a “fucking nigger-lover,” kneed her in the tailbone, and tossed her into the street, where a cab nearly hit her. On other occasions, if the guards were in a gentler mood, they might simply escort the reject outside, hose him down, and steal his shoes. For some, this served only to humiliate. On a winter’s night, though, for a street dweller with only one suit of clothes and a single pair of shoes, it constituted brutal if not deadly treatment.
Those were mere preliminaries. The real punishment was reserved for those who tried to steal money from the casino. “You didn’t cheat at the Horseshoe,” Oscar Goodman said.
On occasion, the Binions made deals with known scammers—those who slid shims into slot machines, for example, or counted cards at the blackjack tables. Pull your schemes at other casinos, they were told, and you’re still welcome here. But, they were warned, don’t try any of these stunts at the Horseshoe. Those cheaters who were caught paid dearly, the Horseshoe way. “They run their house,” one prosecutor said, “like it’s the Wild West.”
Binion didn’t bother denying it. In fact, he bragged about it. “The most contemptible-looking human beings I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Well, we used to just beat the goddamn shit out of them.” He claimed he was talking about handbag thieves. “One day . . . they’s whipping a guy back in there,” he said. “[An] old woman come through there, and she heard ’em a-whipping him and a-hollering and taking on and said, ‘What are they doing to that man?’ The guy said, ‘That man stole a lady’s purse.’ She said, ‘Kill that son of a bitch.’”
Either the Horseshoe endured a continuing epidemic of purse snatchers, or—as usual—Binion was shading the facts. In a 1985 interview with the Wall Street Journal, he cast the Horseshoe’s tactics as part of a long-running comic bit. As the Journal described the plight of one gambler:
The customer had suffered an unlucky streak at the craps tables on money he had borrowed from the casino. The trouble began when he brazenly informed a pit boss that he wasn’t paying it back. Benny Binion, the casino’s crusty, plain-speaking founder, walked over and questioned the man. “He tells me he ain’t got no money,” Mr. Binion remembers. “I says, ‘Well, then you don’t need them damn clothes.’” Out went the naked customer, who quickly managed to don new attire and return with enough money to retrieve his confiscated clothes.
While the story recounted that situation with a certain wry detachment, in truth suspected cheaters were beaten by the dozens under Binion’s reign. The lucky ones left the Horseshoe with a couple of broken fingers. Others departed with fractured arms. A Horseshoe bartender said the incidents were so common he didn’t even notice them anymore. One guard admitted to an investigator that over the course of about ten years roughly a hundred patrons were beaten by security.
Even if a battered gambler called police, officers often didn’t respond. Police ate for free at the Horseshoe. Some even lived there. When narcotics officers needed a wad of bills to flash for a drug buy, the Binions provided it from their cashier’s cage. That might explain the treatment of an Arkansas man who in 1983 was pummeled and robbed by Horseshoe security. They apparently believed he had rigged a slot machine. After his punishment, he phoned the Las Vegas police and spoke to an officer, who said, “This is happening quite often down there.” The victim could file a complaint, police advised, but unless he had witnesses, nothing would come of it.
The man, a used-furniture dealer, said he then called the Horseshoe and talked to Ted Binion. “Look, I’m going to tell you how it is, brother,” Ted warned him. “You’ve got three choices. You can die and be buried in the desert, spend the rest of your life in an insane asylum or you can forget about it and be happy.” He added an advisory: “Quit bothering me. I know where you’re at.”
Speaking later to a private investigator, the Arkansan said he had decided to drop the matter. “I ain’t gonna be wanting to die,” he said. “I know they do things like that.”
So it went for years. Those who bothered to complain were bought off, frightened away, or simply ignored. But once in a while the Horseshoe would go too far—security guards might stomp the wrong person, or progress from serious punishment to savage. Then the authorities would be forced to act. And they would learn all over again that Benny Binion, though ailing and old, still had the juice.
• • •
About 10:00 a.m. on November 22, 1985, two friends, Barry Finn and Allan Brown, had a blackjack game going at a table in the Horseshoe. Brown was an engineer from California. Finn, a thirty-one-year-old airplane pilot, lived in the Las Vegas area. It had been a decent morning for them, as they were up a few thousand bucks. What they didn’t know was that Horseshoe security had been watching them the entire time, and believed the pair were cheating.
Managers had been on high alert at the Horseshoe, because word had leaked that it was a casino where blackjack players could use a scheme known as hole carding. It worked this way: After each player has been dealt two cards, the dealer checks his facedown card to see if his is blackjack, or 21. Sometimes the less-than-rigorous dealer might expose this hole card to the player to his left. When that player sees the dealer’s card, he signals its value to his partner, who adjusts his play accordingly.
Many gamblers found Binion’s place to be fertile ground for this tactic. “For some time now,” noted a gaming newsletter, “graveyard shift at the Horseshoe has had a reputation as being the best place in town to find sloppy dealers.” Such a scheme was not illegal, or even considered actual cheating—the Nevada Supreme Court so ruled in 1984—but those who were caught generally faced expulsion from casinos. The Horseshoe’s unofficial policy exceeded this standard.
After their dealer went on break, Finn and Brown picked up their chips and left the table. Plainclothes guards flanked them both and said, “Come with us.” Finn resisted, and the guards dragged him from the casino. “Big, beefy guys,” recalled Finn, who then weighed about 130 pounds.
As Finn later recounted it to a grand jury, the guards took him and Brown out the back door of the Horseshoe to a small building in the parking garage—the security office. Four or five guards pushed the two gamblers into a ten-by-ten windowless room with cinder-block walls. One of the guards was Steve Fechser, Binion’s grandson, who, at thirty, bore a striking resemblance to his grandfather at the same age. There was a desk in the room, along with a couple of chairs and file cabinets, and in one corner stood a wastebasket full of walking canes left behind by Horseshoe gamblers, the lost-and-found for the halt and lame. Someone slammed the steel door shut. That, Finn said, is when Fechser ordered, “Beat the hell out of them.”
A guard grabbed one of the canes, raised it, and began to strike Brown. Other guards used their fists and boots on both men. “They beat the crap out of us,” Finn remembered. “At least two of them were wearing cowboy boots. They kicked us with the points of the boots and stomped on us with the heels.”
Finn saw one of the guards pull a handgun. Then, Finn recalled, Fechser said, “Why are we wasting our time with these two? Let’s just take them out to the desert and kill them.” Fechser told one of the men to back the casino van up to the back door and added
, “Don’t forget the shovels.”
The punches and kicks kept coming. “I thought they were going to kill us,” Finn said. One of the men grabbed Finn and slammed his head into the wall. Finally it stopped, the guards gasping for breath, and Finn and Brown curled on the floor, bleeding and moaning. Fechser said, “I don’t think they’ve had enough.” And it started again. When at last it was over, Finn said, they opened the door and told the two gamblers, “Get out and never come back.”
A friend met the two next door at the Mint and called an ambulance. Finn spent nine hours in the emergency room at a Vegas hospital, where he learned that he had several broken ribs and a concussion. Brown suffered even more, with nine broken ribs and a lacerated spleen. He spent five days recovering at Sunrise Hospital. Without medical treatment, a doctor said later, he would have died.
• • •
These beatings of Finn and Brown were so severe, so outrageous, and generated such headlines that authorities realized they might have to do something, which created its own dilemma. A police detective tried to take Finn and Brown on a “walk-through line-up” at the Horseshoe, but another set of security guards ordered all of them to leave, which they did. Ned Day, a columnist for the Review-Journal, surveyed this legal scene: “The prickly hair is up on the back of the Binion clan’s collective neck,” he wrote. “And when it turns up, the affable, unfailingly courteous Binions become a group that no sane man in Las Vegas wants to cross. They can turn deadly serious faster than a startled West Texas rattlesnake.”
District Attorney Bob Miller, in whose lap this case had now landed, was one such sane man, as well as an ambitious one who envisioned a political future grander than the unceremonious office he now held. A run for lieutenant governor loomed on the immediate horizon. Beyond that, Miller—the son of a gambler with mob connections—harbored plans to be governor. To accomplish that, he had assembled a long list of campaign contributors, including the Binions, who had given him $30,000.
When an investigator wanted a search warrant for the Horseshoe—seeking security camera tapes and guard work schedules—Miller balked. “He said, ‘We do not execute search warrants at hotels,’” a prosecutor recalled. No one in the DA’s office had heard of such a policy before. Miller suggested that someone call the Horseshoe instead, and kindly ask that management voluntarily surrender any evidence as a matter of civic duty. To no one’s surprise, the Binions refused this request.
Some days later, a warrant was secured and a detective was able to enter the Horseshoe. The surveillance videotape for the date of the beating, November 22, had vanished, although the tapes for November 21 and November 23 somehow remained. A Horseshoe employee said she last saw the missing tape when she gave it to Fechser. The cane used to beat Brown had been spirited from the premises and destroyed by another guard.
Even with missing evidence, the case appeared stout enough that it could not be dropped. Miller then declared a conflict of interest: The family of the wife of one of his deputies leased property to the Binions. Therefore, the DA argued, his office could be disqualified from prosecuting the case, and a judge agreed. “Ingenious,” columnist Day observed of the tactic. “The Binions are a very wealthy and powerful family. They’ve been in town for a long time. They’re active politically. They have clout. Bob Miller, on the other hand, is a young man with high political ambitions . . . Well, he won’t have to take any heat now.”
The state attorney general’s office took over the prosecution in his stead. Three Horseshoe employees, including Fechser, were indicted for kidnapping, battery, and robbery. (The robbery charges had been lodged because the guards were accused of seizing, and not returning, Finn’s and Brown’s initial stakes and their winnings.) The case went to trial in state district court in Las Vegas before Judge Tom Foley, and that’s where the dark farce really began.
• • •
This was the same Tom Foley who, as a private attorney, had represented Binion in his tax case—for a fee of $200,000, according to the FBI—and whose brother had dismissed the tax charges against Sheriff Ralph Lamb. Tom Foley had also represented Barbara Binion Fechser when she was arrested as part of her armed-robbery cabal. Now he had Barbara’s son before him as a criminal defendant, and he seemed disposed early on to mercy. “He fixed it in his mind that the two victims were the bad guys,” said the prosecutor, assistant attorney general John Redlein. “Tom Foley did not want the Binion family put through this . . . He would have known Benny Binion for 40 years at that point and thought he was a jolly good guy.”
From the first, Redlein said, Foley expressed doubt that the defendants had committed a serious crime. “He came right out and said early on in the trial that they had all been overcharged . . . He tried to strong-arm me into reducing it to something not as serious, to a misdemeanor.” Redlein would not do that, and the case proceeded.
Oscar Goodman represented Fechser, of course. Also sitting at the defense table was Harry Claiborne, still Binion’s closest pal. The former federal judge had served his sentence for tax evasion, doing time in an Alabama prison. He had also been impeached by the U.S. Senate, the first sitting federal judge to be removed from the bench in fifty years. As a result, the Nevada Bar asked the state supreme court to suspend Claiborne’s law license. The court refused. Ex-con Claiborne, attorney-at-law, was back in business. He represented the third guard, Emory Cofield, and this trial was his first after five months in a North Las Vegas halfway house. The judge issued a hearty welcome. “Isn’t it wonderful,” Foley said from the bench, “that Harry Claiborne is back in the courtroom?” Jack Binion also had a seat at the defense table, and Foley took the time to praise him as a good friend and a man of fine character.
Despite such remarks, and the legal talent arrayed against him, Redlein believed he had a good chance to win. For one thing, the victims would be able to make solid identifications of the men who beat them. But when Finn and Brown took the stand, their certitude wavered. Fechser “looked like” one of the men who had punched and kicked them, Finn testified. Brown could do no more than say he believed Fechser was among those who had assaulted him.
Finn later explained: “The day before the trial started we got a warning, from a friend of a friend. We were told it would be in our best interest not to positively identify the people involved.” Thus their haziness under oath. “We gave them what they wanted,” Finn said. “We thought they would kill us.”
The trial took three weeks. The jury apparently overlooked Foley’s statements and the star witnesses’ spotty memories, and found two of the Horseshoe’s men—Steven Dale Witten and Fechser—guilty of robbery, battery, and conspiracy. Cofield was acquitted. Finally, it seemed, the Binions would have to pay for the way they operated. The two defendants now faced as much as thirty years in prison.
But Judge Foley had not finished. Several weeks after the jury’s findings, he announced that he believed law enforcement officials—including Redlein—had acted improperly. “The trial atmosphere was so tainted” that it prejudiced the jury, Foley angrily and loudly declared from the bench. “I am disappointed and hurt deeply by the conduct of some counsel in the case.” With that, the judge overturned the jury’s verdict and ordered a new trial. Said Finn, “I didn’t even know he could do that.”
He could, though this seemed to push the bounds of suitable judicial behavior. “The good-old-boy network in Las Vegas told me there was no way they let the convictions stand, so I wasn’t surprised,” Nevada attorney general Brian McKay said. Letter writers to the Review-Journal expressed outrage. “After Judge Foley’s decision,” one said, “I walked by his courtroom and smelled the most awful odor.” Wrote another, “With his decision in the Horseshoe Casino trial it appears that Judge Thomas Foley has covered his markers with the Binion family.” And Jackie Jackson, a trial juror who had voted to convict the pair, wrote, “I am not proud of what our court system let happen with the Binion trial.”
&n
bsp; • • •
Yet all was not lost for the prosecution. With the attorney general’s backing, Redlein planned to appeal Foley’s judgment to the state supreme court, and he reasoned he had solid grounds. To file his appeal, however, he required the official transcript of the trial. But the court reporter had taken her tape—the mechanically produced shorthand record of the proceedings—and moved to Utah. She had not produced a transcript, she said, because she had been ill. Months went by, and still no transcript. Finally, “after years of waiting for her,” Redlein said, he arranged with the state court reporters board to have someone else do the transcription. That’s when the original court reporter told him the tape had been lost.
Redlein suspected the defendants might have played a nefarious role in the loss of the tape. “The Binions wouldn’t have been beyond saying, ‘It would be helpful to us if this transcript is not made.’” He had no proof of this, but it made perfect sense to a prosecutor who believed he had been swindled out of a verdict by the Binions’ cash and sway.
Finn and Brown did not walk away empty-handed; they filed suit against the Horseshoe and settled the case for $675,000, though much of that went for medical and legal bills. Fechser found work with another Vegas casino where, Binion said, the owner “just whips the shit out him” if he is seen drinking. This, Binion said, improved his behavior.
One man did emerge wholly triumphant. That was Bob Miller, the district attorney and Binion beneficiary who was reluctant to pursue the case against the Horseshoe. As predicted, Miller did indeed seek and win higher office. He was elected lieutenant governor the next year, then went on to serve for ten years as governor of Nevada.
Benny and his statue in downtown Vegas, before it moved yet again.
26
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DEAR BENNY