Blood Aces

by Doug Swanson

  I don’t worry about but one thing. That’s sickness. Sickness, you got trouble. Other things will go right away.

  —BB

  Binion was now an old man—and a rich one. In 1987 the Horseshoe had a net profit of more than $60 million. Under the direction of Jack Binion, the company bought the adjacent Mint Hotel for $27 million. That added twenty-five stories and three hundred rooms to the Horseshoe, and allowed for a major expansion of the casino. When his health would permit it, Binion spent time at the Montana ranch, which had now grown to 85,000 acres. He traveled there from Las Vegas in a chauffeured, customized bus. Other trips were made in a limo, such as one visit to the old homestead in North Texas. Binion took a reflective walk around the property and showed his driver where everything had once been. “That old house was right over there,” he said, “and the old well was out there.” Then he smiled. “I left here with two mules and a wagon,” he said, “and come back in a Rolls-Royce.”

  There were frequent tributes befitting a man of many years and much public generosity. He was named Man of the Year by the National Jewish Health hospital, as it showed institutional gratitude for big donations. A video produced for the ceremony featured testimonials from a number of Vegas luminaries, including another old racketeer in his dotage, Moe Dalitz. “He’s a very quiet man until he’s aroused,” Dalitz said of Binion. “But he’s never aroused unjustly.” Steve Wynn called Binion “the most unforgettable character I’ve ever met in my entire life,” and added, “He’s a perfectly honest man.” Others attested to the affection of Binion’s lifelong customers and compadres. “All the poker players love you,” said Bobby Baldwin, a former poker series champion. “You’re the greatest guy in the world.”

  For some time there was a statue of only one man on horseback in Las Vegas, that of Rafael Rivera, believed to be the first non–Native American to ride into the valley almost two centuries earlier. In 1988, a second one was added—of Binion. Atop a massive granite pedestal, Binion rose an additional twelve feet in bronze as he sat heroically astride one of his daughter’s favorite horses. With one hand on the reins and another gripping his lariat—and a little more svelte than most might remember—he now dominated the corner of Second Street and Ogden downtown. Like the man himself, the statue was a Texas refugee. It had originally stood outside a Fort Worth honky-tonk owned by Binion’s friend Billy Bob Barnett. But when Barnett went broke, the three-thousand-pound bronze Binion was unbolted in the dead of night and trucked to Las Vegas. Now it offered one more indicator of the city’s affection for the Cowboy. The governor of Nevada sent a proclamation, and the mayor of Las Vegas came and posed for pictures. “He’s the best damn human being I ever knew,” Harry Claiborne said shortly after the statue was unveiled. “He’s a credit to the whole human race.”

  Maybe so. But a few blocks away at the federal courthouse, the government was mounting one more attempt to take Binion down.

  • • •

  In 1989, after a three-year investigation, federal authorities in Las Vegas assembled a special—and secret—strike force, including officers from the metro police and the Nevada Gaming Control Board. Its mission was to infiltrate the Horseshoe. The Vegas feds proclaimed it to be “the top priority within their office,” a confidential memo said. Like many such undercover endeavors, this one had a name: Operation Benny Binion.

  Finally, authorities believed, they would nab him. To justify Operation Benny, they summoned years’ worth of bad behavior at the Horseshoe, most of which had already been aired. Customers had been beaten, they noted, and robbed, which constituted civil rights violations. One unsubstantiated report said a blackjack dealer who had been caught cheating the Horseshoe was handcuffed to a stream pipe in the basement for three days. Prosecutors also cataloged the family’s assorted relationships with mobsters, including Tony the Ant and Moe Dalitz, both of whom were, at this point, dead. One FBI telex even mentioned Jimmy “the Weasel” Fratianno’s account of having killed Russian Louie Strauss on Binion’s behalf. Strauss had been murdered more than thirty-five years before.

  Federal investigators also reinterviewed witnesses to the ten-year-old shooting of Rance Blevins, hoping once more to pin it on Ted Binion. John Koval, the cabdriver who had witnessed the sidewalk killing, said FBI agents showed up at his house one day and took him downtown for a special interrogation. “They hypnotized me,” Koval said, but nothing in his story changed. “Everything I said was the way I said it in the first place. They thought I got paid off by the Binions.” Agents also tried to pry a new version of events out of the man who had been convicted of the shooting. Strike force officials promised Walt Rozanski a spot in the federal Witness Protection Program if he would testify that Ted Binion had actually killed Blevins. He refused.

  Those running Operation Benny also hoped to prove that the Horseshoe was an absolute hive of criminal money laundering, especially under the auspices of Ted Binion. But first, they needed a Horseshoe insider, and here they bumped up against the Binions’ standard way of doing business, which was to depend on family and a close circle of devoted friends. “The Binions are very cautious of who they conduct business with,” an FBI report observed, “and it is practically impossible for someone unacquainted with the Binions to get close to them.” The only real inside informant the bureau had ever developed at the Horseshoe was Benny himself.

  The strike force decided to set up a sting operation. The plan: Rent three hotel rooms at the Horseshoe. Then, a “cooperating witness,” someone with knowledge of the Binions, was to be furnished with more than $100,000 in government money. As agents covertly watched and taped the witness, who would be wearing a wire, he would try to engage the Binions in a laundering scheme.

  If this was successful, authorities could seize the Horseshoe under the federal racketeering statute. Strike force officers reasoned that shutting the Horseshoe would be “a singular opportunity to strike at organized crime in the Las Vegas division.” And it carried, potentially, a tremendous public relations value. Nailing the Binions, said a memo to FBI director William Sessions, could “send a clear message to casino operators that the FBI is cracking down on [money laundering] activity.” Sessions was familiar with at least one of the characters who had been accused of laundering money at the Horseshoe; he had been the presiding judge when Jimmy Chagra was acquitted of murdering Judge John Wood.

  Now, near the end of 1989, the sting was approved by senior Justice Department officials and set to go. But the feds’ intricate plans were derailed by a funeral.

  • • •

  He hadn’t felt good for a long time, mainly because of his persistent heart trouble. “Breathing’s hard, walking’s hard, and I can’t do nothing,” Binion complained one day as he sat at his table in the Horseshoe restaurant. As he became increasingly infirm, he lived with his daughter Becky. He turned eighty-five, and soon he couldn’t walk at all, and the breathing seemed about to stop. A few days before Christmas 1989, he entered Valley Hospital in Las Vegas, and this time his chances looked worse than ever. “I’d asked the doctors in gambler’s terms what were his odds,” son Jack said, “and they told me six or eight to one against him.” As Benny would know, that was a sucker’s bet. Someone called a priest for last rites. Binion wanted to go that way, for as he once said, “Religion is too strong a mystery to doubt.” He died on Christmas Day.

  This was front-page news in Nevada, and the instant eulogists went quickly to work. One of the most perceptive summations came from columnist John L. Smith in the Review-Journal. “Revisionist historians will paint Binion as a sweet old man with a few minor blemishes in his youth,” he wrote. “You know, like a bare-knuckle-era boxer with a broken nose. That picture is not only a lie, but it does Binion a disservice. He was not simply a good old boy with a few scars; he was a living legend who crafted his image with muscles, blood and a keen eye for action.”

  Several years before, Binion had attended the Las Vegas fun
eral of an old and broke prospector, and observed the light attendance. “One thing I’ve noticed in this town,” he said then. “A man dies here and he ain’t got no money, he don’t draw worth a damn.”

  That wouldn’t be a problem now for the Cowboy. The memorial service at Christ the King Catholic—where Binion had been the first and largest contributor to build the church—drew about a thousand mourners. Some wore funeral finery, while others came in rodeo wear. Former mayors, ex-senators, and retired judges arrived, along with enough professional poker players to fill a couple of Strip card rooms. Mourners remembered him as a dedicated family man, generous philanthropist, and Vegas original. Steve Wynn, now the king of casinos in Las Vegas, addressed the gathering. “He was a man who never showed one shred of pretense . . . We will never see the likes of Benny Binion in our lifetime again,” Wynn said. “He was either the toughest gentleman I ever knew or the gentlest tough man I ever met.” Atop Binion’s coffin sat his cowboy hat.

  The procession to the cemetery was led by the Horseshoe stagecoach, pulled by six black horses. Binion made his last trip through Vegas the modern cowboy way. It was also the Benny Binion way. He had used the stagecoach to advertise the Horseshoe at rodeos and livestock shows for years. Binion was promoting his business until the very end, and then some.

  He also took a victory to the grave, as Operation Benny Binion had lost its biggest target. With his death, he beat the FBI one last time.

  • • •

  Most of the great organized crime chieftains—those who lived long enough anyway—saw their toughness squeezed from them. They went to prison and came out broken, like syphilitic Al Capone. Or they were reduced to shuffling through the streets in a bathrobe to feign insanity and avoid prosecution, like Vincent “the Chin” Gigante. Or, in the manner of Meyer Lansky, they walked their dogs in gelded, dwindling retirement. Few of them emerged from thugdom with an enhanced and celebrated glory, but Binion did so. He didn’t renounce his past, or overcome it. He made it a crucial ingredient of his triumph, inseparable from the man, and it stayed with him until the end.

  Binion’s funeral had its share of tributes and tears, but like many such memorial services, it was a sanitized and grieving affair that couldn’t capture his essence, or the breadth of his accomplishment, or the regard in which he was held. To understand that would require traveling back from the funeral a couple of years, to his eighty-third birthday.

  His family decided to hold a big party, and rented the Thomas & Mack Center, the basketball arena of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Admission to the event was free. So was the beer. Willie Nelson performed, and the place was packed. Only a mile from the highway on which Binion had first rolled into town, with tommy guns and a trunk full of cash, they all gathered to honor the boss. Gene Autry, the original singing cowboy, was there. So was Hollywood star Dale Robertson. Moe Dalitz, by now deaf and two years from the mausoleum, came as well. One-eyed R. D. Matthews, who had been with Binion on that first trip from Dallas to Vegas, took a seat on the stage with the guest of honor. “Thank you for coming,” Binion told the crowd. “I never dreamed it’d be anything like this. I’ll do it again someday. God bless you all.”

  After Willie Nelson played, Hank Williams Jr. and his band turned the volume up so loud that Binion and his family got up and left. Late in the evening the beer ran low, and a few fights broke out. Maybe more than a few. But the real celebration had occurred earlier that night, after a mammoth, four-tier birthday cake appeared, and the crowd sang “Happy Birthday” in beery unison. Some eighteen thousand people were on their feet, clapping and shouting. Then they began to chant, “Benny! Benny! Benny!”

  All the mayhem, all the bodies, all the car bombs, and all those who had tried to take him out had slipped to the hazy past, but none of it was forgotten. It had instead distilled into legend. Binion had outshot his rivals, outspent them, outmaneuvered them, and outlived them. Now, in the place to which he had fled forty-one years before—where his cunning and his vision coursed through the city’s veins—the adulation rose to the rooftop. “Benny! Benny! Benny!” they cried, and the noise filled the arena. “Benny! Benny! Benny!” The old man in the cowboy hat smiled and waved. “Benny! Benny! Benny!”

  He had become the most beloved gangster of them all.

  Benny near the end, still keeping his eyes on the play.

  Epilogue

  BACK IN THE SADDLE

  The sky’s my home. I can go anywhere. I never did see no place that I just thought I couldn’t leave. I was raised in a wagon too much, moved around too much. I don’t miss nothing after I leave it.

  —BB

  It took a few years, but the authorities finally abandoned Operation Benny Binion. Eight Horseshoe employees had been indicted. But the charges were dropped, the head of the strike force said, because “the evidence we obtained didn’t stand up.” The Binions didn’t need the federal government to damage the family and its business. They could handle that task themselves.

  Ted Binion slipped deeper into his addictions, and lost his gaming license because of drug problems and associations with mobsters. “Ted had three loves in life,” said friend Michael Gaughan. “Ted loved pussy. Ted loved dope. Ted loved to fish. His first two loves killed him.” He died in 1998, at the age of fifty-five, of an overdose of heroin and Xanax. His girlfriend, a former topless dancer, and another man—with whom she was consorting—were convicted of murder in one of Las Vegas’s more spectacular trials. They were later granted a new trial. In 2004, the two were acquitted of murder but convicted of lesser charges related to the theft of about $7 million in silver that Ted Binion had buried in the desert. Like his parents, Ted enjoyed silver.

  Teddy Jane Binion died in 1994, and a family struggle for control of the Horseshoe followed. After a particularly nasty lawsuit, Becky Binion Behnen—Benny and Teddy Jane’s daughter—bought out her siblings and took over, after which the Horseshoe suffered a short but rapid decline. In 2004 the IRS seized $1 million from the Horseshoe to satisfy unpaid union benefits, which forced a sale to Harrah’s Entertainment. What had been strictly a family operation was now a small cog in the world’s largest gaming company. It opened seven new Horseshoes in such non-Vegas locales as Cleveland, Ohio, and Tunica, Mississippi.

  The Fremont Street original was sold, and as of 2013, it was called Binion’s, though no family members have a role. Except for the missing electric horseshoes, the red-and-blue lighting out front looks much the same as always. The club’s bar is named Benny’s Bullpen, and the steakhouse has been christened Binion’s Ranch. There’s even a Binion’s Hall of Fame Poker Room.

  But the casino floor is Benny blasphemy, with only four dice tables and most of the space given over to about eight hundred slot and video poker machines. Tourists fill the place now, as the legendary high rollers have moved on to other tables in other rooms. Parked out back is one vestige of the glory days: the Cowboy’s old white Cadillac Fleetwood, with the horns of a longhorn steer attached to the hood.

  Binion’s original house on Bonanza Road still stands, but barely. In 2004 the Las Vegas planning department proposed taking possession of the home and converting it into a cultural and historical center. Those plans fell through after the family refused to deed the property to the city. By 2013 it was a sad hulk in an empty landscape—abandoned, boarded-up, and gutted by fire. A locked gate and No Trespassing signs kept vagrants and curiosity seekers away. The lush grove of trees died long ago, and the surrounding blocks are an expanse of battered apartments, homeless camps, and industrial sites.

  In bright contrast, the World Series of Poker has soared to success beyond anyone’s expectations. Harrah’s bought the tournament when it purchased the Horseshoe, and in 2005 relocated it to the Rio, a massive hotel and casino just off the Strip. No longer would the players and railbirds be seen in Glitter Gulch. The game moved from the intimate, if decrepit, confines of the Horseshoe’s c
asino to sprawling, cavernous meeting rooms with the charm and atmosphere of a warehouse.

  The Horseshoe version of the series had been a cozy gathering, where a spectator could imagine he was watching Dolly, Slim, and Titanic reading faces and working the odds at a backroom game off a hidden side street. But the Rio rendition featured a great sea of tables and players stretching anonymously to the distant wall, with the constant sound of shuffling poker chips like plasticized crickets. The Horseshoe tournament was loaded with characters. They wore top hats and smoked cigars. The Rio series has a bunch of guys in hoodies and Ray-Bans, sipping Red Bull. But they come by the thousands to play.

  Binion had once expressed his devout hope that the poker series might grow to fifty participants. In 2013, its main event competition—the No Limit Hold’em World Championship—had 6,352 players, and awarded a total of $59 million in prize money. Harrah’s became known as Caesars Entertainment, and its World Series of Poker reaches eighty-four countries on five continents via ESPN. Every year, the final tournament is held in Las Vegas. It is, the press release minions at Caesars have claimed, “the longest-running, largest, richest and most prestigious gaming event in the world.”

  That by itself is not a bad legacy for a cowboy with a second-grade education, hailing from the Texas hinterlands.

  • • •

  Binion’s statue could stay in one place no more than could Binion the man, and in 2008 the sculpture was moved again. This time it left Vegas on the bed of a pickup truck, the real-deal cowboy rolling past the fake Venice, the ersatz Paris, and the phony New York of the Strip. Binion’s likeness had a new spot in a new casino, South Point, on the outer reaches of the city’s suburban sprawl, twelve miles south of downtown. South Point’s owner, Michael Gaughan, had bought it from the proprietors of the former Horseshoe for one dollar. “It’s a great piece of artwork,” Gaughan said. “The birds had crapped on it for four or five years.”