Blood Aces Read online

  Meadows was a squat gambler and hit man who was said to be afraid of no one but his wife. Matthews was described in an FBI report as a “burglar, armed robber, narcotics pusher, gambler, murderer,” though he was never convicted of any of those crimes. As a marine in World War II, he had fought in some of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific theater. When he came home to Texas, he joined Lois Green’s gang, and eventually went to work for Binion. “A strong-arm man for the collection of gambling debts,” the FBI said. As such, he quickly established a reputation: screw with Matthews and you would be dead, or would wish to be. “Everybody was afraid of R.D.,” said a friend of his, Mickey Bickers. “Everybody.”

  For this journey to Vegas, Binion had two immediate concerns. The first was the presence of agricultural inspection stations at state lines. There an overly curious trooper might search the car and find the stacks of cash, which could invite some unwelcome scrutiny. The second worry was the obvious one: hijackers who, learning of a carful of money crossing the badlands, might go after it like Wild West desperadoes robbing a stagecoach. Binion prepared for that by arming Meadows and Matthews with Thompson submachine guns.

  They left Dallas in the dead of night, heading northwest on a two-lane across the prairie, and then over the Staked Plains, where only isolated cattle towns broke the emptiness. Out here a man could drive for miles and never see anyone else. They crossed the Texas Panhandle, through some of the state’s great ranches, then finally into the desert. The men took turns driving and stopped only for food and gas.

  For someone who had ruled his kingdom for a decade, it was an ignominious flight: the deposed emperor of dice, now one step ahead of the police and his own inferior yet triumphant rivals. But Binion had learned early on that while a man might have to make his way with fist and blood, he sometimes had no choice but to give ground. And this was one of those times.

  “I just went to hollering,” he explained, “and lit out running.”

  PART

  TWO

  DEATH AND TAXES

  1947–1953

  Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, who had the vision for a great Vegas casino, but not the requisite management skills.

  9

  MOBBED-UP PILGRIMS

  There’s nothing on earth I like better than inflation and corruption.

  —BB

  He probably did not think about it in such terms, but Binion now embraced an American archetype. He had fled his past, headed west, and sought a fresh start in the wide-open spaces of the promised land. Doing so, Binion replicated the intrepid American homesteaders in covered wagons who had made the trek before him—though they had neither henchmen with tommy guns nor a cool million in the trunk. At least he wore a cowboy hat.

  Less majestically, Binion had joined one of the great migrations in American organized crime history: the mob diaspora of the 1940s. They came from New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Miami, and anywhere else they felt pressure from the competition or heat from the cops. And they were streaming to Nevada in their long black limos, with blond mistresses beside them and the high-dollar reek of Zizanie cologne. It was Manifest Destiny, felony division.

  The great historian Frederick Jackson Turner had declared the western frontier—which he called “the meeting point between savagery and civilization” and the very expression of American individualism—closed in 1893. But Las Vegas wasn’t closed even by 1946; it was, in fact opening up. This would come to represent a different sort of frontier: savagery and civilization meeting in an entirely new manner, and individualism expressed in ways not seen before. Within a mere fifteen years, U.S. attorney general Robert F. Kennedy would call Las Vegas “the bank of America’s organized crime” as mobsters—their careers born anew in the Nevada desert—skimmed millions from their casino operations. And in only a few decades, the Union Plaza Hotel in downtown Las Vegas would feature a show called Nudes on Ice, while at the Circus Circus you might watch a dwarf boxing a kangaroo.

  This magical transformation would commence as soon as the settlers staked their claims. Settlers like Benny Binion.

  • • •

  It was a broad desert basin of furnace heat between mostly barren mountain ranges, but it had a bit of water. Artesian springs gave the valley some grassy oases, which attracted both animals and people. Archaeological evidence indicates Native Americans lived there more than ten thousand years ago, and the Paiutes—a placid tribe that grew pumpkins and ate lizards—arrived around AD 700. Spanish explorers may have passed through the valley in the late 1700s, although no proof of that has been found.

  The first non–Native American known to have set foot in the valley came seeking business opportunities. Rafael Rivera, a scout for a New Mexico trader, trotted in on horseback in late 1829. The springs came to serve as a way station on a branch of the Old Spanish Trail, the famous trade route from Santa Fe to Southern California. At some point the place was called Las Vegas, Spanish for “the meadows” or “marshy plains,” depending on the translation. Army captain John Frémont and his topographical corps arrived in 1844, and he was the first to put Las Vegas on a government map. A minister, mountain man, and cannibal named Bill Williams used Las Vegas as a base for his marauding band of horse thieves in the 1840s. In 1855, some thirty Mormons were the first non-Natives who actually tried to settle. At the instruction of Brigham Young, they intended to convert the Paiute Indians to Mormonism and establish a mission. Neither effort proved successful. Drought killed most of the crops, and what little remained, the Paiutes took. Most of the Mormons were gone within a few years. As a valedictory, one of them called the valley the land the “Lord had forgotten.”

  But there was life in the place yet, thanks to the building of a rail line across the desert between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles. By 1905 track work was complete, and trains began passing through Las Vegas, which served as a watering and repair stop. A town took rapid shape, and within months it enjoyed its first spate of land speculation and ballooning real estate prices. Soon bars and casinos flourished, and whorehouses did heavy business in a section of town known as Block 16. The speculative fever cooled, the state outlawed gambling, and in the mid-1920s, Las Vegas hit economic hard times several years ahead of the rest of the country. It stood a good chance of becoming another wasting desert whistle-stop.

  Three monumental decisions by the state and federal government saved it. In 1927 the state legalized a three-month divorce, and four years after that reduced it to six weeks, the fastest in the United States. From around the country the unhappily married—Mrs. Clark Gable among them—fled to Nevada. After residing for a mere month and a half, they could be relieved of their wedded misery. The local chamber of commerce promoted the city as the chic capital of splits—“Gable Divorce Booms Las Vegas” was the headline on one of its photomontages sent to newspapers nationwide—and some entrepreneurs opened dude ranches in the area for guests establishing their temporary residency.

  The second big boost came in 1928, when President Calvin Coolidge signed the bill to dam the Colorado River at Boulder Canyon, only twenty-five miles from Las Vegas. This was one of the great public works projects of its day, and meant millions of dollars and thousands of jobs for southern Nevada. Soon workers and federal funds began pouring into the state.

  Salvation number three was the great watershed moment for modern Nevada: in 1931 the state legislature made gambling legal again. Within months, casinos opened, and the timing could not have been better. The men and women—mostly men—building what would become Hoover Dam found themselves living in a federally controlled company town, Boulder City, where drinking and gambling were prohibited. They needed somewhere to spend their money and blow off steam. That place was Las Vegas.

  Downtown on Fremont Street rows of bars—despite Prohibition—and casinos called to the workers and their paychecks. Large, bright neon signs of establishments such as the Boulder Club, the Gol
den Camel, and the Northern Club, whose display included four dice and a royal-flush poker hand, lit the desert night. This spectacle gave rise to the name Glitter Gulch. The clubs were packed nearly every night, and the whores on Block 16 once again had a rush of customers.

  • • •

  Then it slowed. By 1936 the dam was completed, and many of the workers departed. Las Vegas attempted to promote itself as “The City of an Assured Future,” but that was hardly so, at least until it took advantage of a couple of additional breaks.

  For a town in the middle of a deathly wasteland, it was blessed with a good location. With the population beginning to swell in Southern California, Las Vegas—only about three hundred miles to the northeast—was well positioned as a haven for escape. It lay far enough away to be a refuge, and conveniently over the state line, but within a day’s drive. That’s where Californian Guy McAfee went.

  Known to everyone as the Captain, McAfee commanded the Los Angeles police vice squad. He also operated gambling houses and brothels—he was married to a Hollywood madam—and had ties to organized crime. This arrangement worked well until a new mayor pledged to clean up L.A. McAfee resigned and fled the city. By 1938 he had established himself in Las Vegas, where the business activities forbidden in L.A. were perfectly legal, or close to it. McAfee operated the Pair-O-Dice Club on Highway 91 south of town. He christened that lonely road “the Strip” in a tribute—however ironic, perverse, or prophetic—to the Sunset Strip in L.A., and the name stuck.

  The first gambling hall and full resort on the Strip was developed by another Californian, a hotel man named Thomas Hull. Las Vegas legend has it that Hull’s car overheated on Highway 91 en route from L.A. to Salt Lake City. Waiting for help, he noticed the number of autos with out-of-state plates passing him, and inspiration struck. A far more likely story is that he was sold on Las Vegas’s future one day while having drinks with a local businessman at the Apache Hotel downtown. Whatever the provenance, by 1941 Hull built and opened his sprawling, sixty-six-acre motel complex, the El Rancho Vegas, complete with a pool, a casino, a showroom, and ample parking, all designed to entice motorists.

  Another Strip resort, the Last Frontier, followed a year later. Its air-conditioned rooms, upholstered chairs, and private baths with tiled floors added a note of semi-refinement not found on Fremont Street. So unaccustomed was the town to having the furniture match the drapes that the Las Vegas Review-Journal remarked with wonder upon the coordination. What’s more, the newspaper rhapsodized, “the color scheme in the bath harmonizes with the theme in the adjoining bedroom.” The Last Frontier imported some star power too: Sophie Tucker, “the Last of the Red Hot Mamas,” played its theater.

  Though they were little more than dressed-up dude ranches, by Vegas norms these operations represented a great leap forward. And they marked, for the city, the dawn of middle-American mom-and-pop tourism, if mom and pop sought color-coordinated desert luxury and racy excitement. The chamber of commerce brought in out-of-town journalists who obligingly praised “tony joints” and “swank, million-dollar hotels” to which Hollywood stars flocked. In 1940, Look magazine called Vegas “the most sensationally cockeyed and self-consciously wicked place on earth” and an “American Gomorrah.”

  The 1941 movie Las Vegas Nights featured the uncredited screen debut of an up-and-coming young singer named Frank Sinatra, although the critic for the New York Times was unimpressed by the film: “There is precious little humor, little life, little anything,” wrote Bosley Crowther, “save an excess of dullness in this labored musical show about a troupe of indigent entertainers adrift in the Nevada gambling town.” Nonetheless, Las Vegas—and the nascent Strip in particular—had begun to attract some attention.

  Most of the downtown casinos continued to flourish, but they were, in many cases, operated by relative small-timers. The joints attracted a crowd of minor-league cardsharps as well as a growing collection of junior hustlers, more of whom stepped off the train every day at Union Station. A photograph from the era of a card game at the Northern Club on Fremont shows a slickster with a pencil-thin mustache and a snap-brim fedora playing a poker hand against a gussied-up cowboy in a western tie and a neatly creased hat. It looks like Nathan Detroit squaring off against Tom Mix.

  All of this received a big boost with the outbreak of World War II. The 1943 opening of a magnesium plant southeast of Las Vegas, which processed metal for bombs, provided six thousand jobs. The U.S. Army Air Corps established a gunnery school at a Las Vegas community airport, and by the end of the war, about eleven thousand servicemen were stationed there. Not a few of them wished to gamble and drink, and like the workers who built Hoover Dam, they went looking for excitement in Vegas clubs. Or, when circumstances required, the excitement came to them. The El Rancho and Last Frontier sometimes sent entertainers to the military camps for shows—public service combined with advertising—for the boys going off to war.

  Las Vegas had managed to revive itself yet again, and began to enter the nation’s consciousness as, in the words of one resident, “a sunny place for shady people.” But these were the preliminaries. The real fun and fireworks would begin when the big boys took over.

  • • •

  To operate a Las Vegas casino, even a small one, was not something for the uninitiated or the inexperienced. Odds had to be calculated, dealers supervised, security maintained. Casino patrons were unlike those at most other businesses; instead of purchasing a service or product, they tried to walk away with the establishment’s money, via skill, luck, or cunning larceny. There were no training grounds for people running gambling dens except the dens themselves. The universities didn’t teach it, any more than they taught auto theft, and trade schools wouldn’t touch it. Nor was there a collection of promising young executives being carefully groomed through the corporate hierarchy of sales divisions and branch offices. The people who knew how to operate casinos were those who had done it elsewhere, which made them outlaws.

  And now they were coming to Nevada to ply their trade. “They weren’t particularly Sunday school teachers or preachers or anything like that,” Nevada lieutenant governor—and casino owner—Cliff Jones once acknowledged. Instead, they were crooks, killers, and impresarios of corruption.

  In their own skewed way, they also served as visionaries. They found in Las Vegas—despite the effervescence of junketing newspapermen—little more than a pile of shabby buildings dropped onto a searing moonscape, with summer afternoon temperatures hitting 120 degrees. There may have been a few passably nice resorts on the Strip, most of them catering to motorists from Southern California, but much of Las Vegas remained little more than a sun-blasted watering hole.

  “It was in sorry shape,” said Meyer Lansky, known as organized crime’s chairman of the board for his vast web of gambling and money laundering. “Living conditions were bad. No one wanted to go to Vegas to gamble. Air connections were bad. And the trip by car was bothersome. It was so hot that the wires in the cars would melt.”

  Yet the racketeers saw the possibilities. This was, for them, the land of opportunity: the only place in the country where gambling was legally sanctioned by the state, and only minimally regulated. They could make their own rules in this Wild West town while forever ceasing to worry about authorities attempting to shut them down.

  Las Vegas didn’t just tolerate the mob. The city desperately needed the mob. These gangsters brought not only expertise but access to capital as well. It might have been capital obtained by loan-sharking, prostitution, narcotics, and extortion, but it spent like any other money. Few banks of that era were willing to make loans for start-up casinos, especially in a remote town in the desert. The racketeers may not have been the first to set up in Las Vegas, but they rode in with cash and talent in amounts not seen before. Their money and their smarts were the incubators for what was to become the largest collection of legal casinos in the world.

  • • •


  The mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel has traditionally, and incorrectly, received most of the credit for this great transformation. That derives in no small part from Hollywood’s characteristic mythmaking, most notably with the 1991 film Bugsy, starring Warren Beatty. The Las Vegas of that movie, when Siegel arrives, looks to be little more than a collection of shacks along a few unpaved streets. Siegel’s girlfriend takes a disgusted look at one of the town’s casinos and dismisses it as “this canker sore.” But Beatty’s Siegel has a Mojave epiphany: “I got it! I got it!” From this desolation will rise a glamorous, luxurious playground that only he can envision—the Flamingo.

  That wasn’t quite how it happened. A product of New York’s Lower East Side, Siegel had run with Meyer Lansky as a boy. In the 1930s Lansky—who had matured into an international crime magnate—sent him to California to operate the West Coast branch of Lansky’s syndicate. There Siegel worked his way into the Hollywood crowd, chumming with actors and bedding starlets. He came to Las Vegas in the early 1940s with the goal of seizing control of the race wire, which provided horse-track odds and race results to betting parlors.

  Siegel did that, but he also had the sense to see that Las Vegas was attracting more and more visitors, and that the opportunity was ripe for investment, expansion, and improvement. First he tried to buy the El Rancho Vegas, but the owner, Thomas Hull, rebuffed him. “You may say for me,” Hull told a local newspaper, “that the people of Las Vegas have been too good for me to repay them in that way.”

  The El Rancho might have been too plain for Siegel’s taste anyway. He soon vowed to build “the goddamn biggest, fanciest gaming casino and hotel you bastards ever seen in your whole lives.” What he really did was buy into a project already under way, that of Billy Wilkerson, a slick-talking California gambler, the founder of the Hollywood Reporter and the man who discovered Lana Turner. Wilkerson had begun work on the Flamingo, but had run out of money. Siegel, with mob cash from New York and Chicago, took over the project, and brought his grandiose vision: the Flamingo—the “fabulous Flamingo”—would be built with rare imported wood, the finest Italian marble, and other appointments fit for a latter-day pharaoh. It was to be an opulent gambling and entertainment showcase, a stately pleasure dome of legal sin that would deliver Hollywood glamour to the Nevada desert. Included as a bonus: a maze of underground tunnels that Siegel could use to evade any attempts on his life. Even the closets in his fourth-floor suite had escape hatches, which led to a garage with a getaway car. The Flamingo’s cost overruns soon exceeded $5 million, and the mobsters on the hook for those expenses, Lansky among them, grew increasingly impatient.