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  But on December 26, 1946, to much fanfare and raucous celebration, the Flamingo’s casino, showroom, and restaurant opened, with the hotel itself still incomplete. A few stars were flown in, though bad storms grounded most of them in L.A. Among those in attendance that night was one newly arrived Texan, Benny Binion, who gazed about in hickish amazement. “That was the biggest whoop-de-do I ever seen,” he recalled. “They had Jimmy Durante, [Xavier] Cugat’s band and Rosemarie, in one show.” Binion somehow failed to mention Tommy Wonder and the Tune Toppers.

  As impressed as he was with the Flamingo, Binion liked its front man even more. Siegel was the “most accommodating, most likable fellow, had the best personality you ever seen,” in Binion’s view. “If he was a bad guy, he damn sure didn’t show it from the outside.” This was typical of Binion, who functioned as a sort of Will Rogers of mobsters. He had a similar assessment of one “Ice Pick Willie” Alderman, a notorious killer who was said to have gained his nickname by sticking that instrument through eleven victims’ ears until it penetrated their brains. Said Binion, “I don’t believe all that stuff. He was the nicest, kindest-hearted man . . . I never knew a kinder-hearted man than him.”

  Binion did not stand alone in his generous assessment of Bugsy Siegel. Many acquaintances found him to be exquisitely charming—or, at the very least, possessed of a certain command of the room. Not long after the Flamingo’s opening, the novelist Erskine Caldwell, author of Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre, visited the “resplendent” resort, as he described it. There he spotted Siegel winged by two bodyguards. “With his glowing personality, his handsome physique, and his expensively tailored dark-blue suit worn with a white-on-white monogramed shirt and black silk necktie,” Caldwell wrote, “it was a magical combination that stated Bugsy’s presence in unmistakable terms.” At the bar, loud talk dropped to a whisper as Siegel ordered drinks. “Bugsy blew a puff of cigar smoke at one of the briefly costumed cocktail girls,” Caldwell added. “She stopped as if mesmerized and stood there panting with a heaving of her breast until he motioned for her to go away.”

  When not causing conversation to halt and breasts to heave, Siegel could occasionally go berserk. There remains even now a substantial anecdotal collection describing how Bugsy earned the nickname—a loose synomym for crazy—that he despised. This includes the oft-repeated account of his pulling his gun on his schlubby publicity director, Abe Schiller, at the Flamingo’s pool. Schiller had done something to annoy Siegel. “On your hands and knees, you son of a bitch,” Siegel ordered. As Schiller crawled around the pool, Bugsy fired shots over his head and into the water.

  His financial backers could tolerate the occasional outburst of violent lunacy, but they wouldn’t put up with a huge and never-ending cash drain. From that first night the Flamingo hemorrhaged money, and even had to close briefly in early 1947. Siegel was many things, but an effective fiduciary was not one of them. So he was fired, mob-style. On the evening of June 20, 1947, as Siegel sat in the Beverly Hills mansion of his mistress, Virginia Hill, reading the Los Angeles Times, a gunman aimed a .30-caliber carbine through a window, then squeezed the trigger. Two of the rounds struck Siegel in the head, with one knocking out his left eye, and two hit his chest. He was killed instantly, and the photograph of his body—slumped in a blood-soaked tailored suit on a floral chintz sofa—ran in newspapers around the world.

  Now the Las Vegas aura began to assume a life of its own. Siegel wasn’t the first criminal to open a casino in Las Vegas. He wasn’t even rubbed out there. But dead on his girlfriend’s couch, his eyeball on the floor across the room, Siegel in halftone gave birth to an image that Las Vegas took to the bank.

  The city had entered the public consciousness as a criminal wild game preserve—or, more aptly, an adult amusement park—with an unmatched collection of murderous rogues reborn as legitimate businessmen, free to roam the streets. Las Vegas offered up something that no resort in the country could match, and it would be the subtext by which the city could sell itself for decades to come. These alpha hoods came with access to capital, and they brought their expertise, but they also imported a marketable air—not too much, the right amount—of menace.

  Binion alone might have been enough. But down the road from him, now helping to operate the Flamingo, was Gus Greenbaum, a bow-tied drug addict and bookmaker who had run the rackets in Arizona. “A heck of a good man,” Binion said. “Oh, hell, he was the best guy.”

  And more: David Berman, known to colleagues as Davie the Jew, arrived from Minnesota, where he had been a top mobster. Berman owned a lively and varied criminal past. At the age of eighteen he led his personal gang of bank and post-office robbers, and later served time in Sing Sing for kidnapping. To Binion, he was “another high-class guy.” Within days of Siegel’s death, Berman also took a management position at the Flamingo.

  Moe Dalitz, a notorious bootlegger who had grown into a syndicate heavyweight, was a Cleveland associate of Detroit’s murderous Purple Gang. “Very fine man, and a terrific businessman,” Binion said. With his mastery of funneling cash from questionable sources, Dalitz helped build the Desert Inn on the Strip.

  Moe Sedway, a Lansky officer typically described as a “ruthless dwarf,” drove over from L.A. “During periods of stress,” his FBI file noted, “he wrings his hands, becomes wild eyed and resembles a small dog about to be subjected to the distasteful procedure of being bathed.” On Sedway’s virtues, Binion is silent. Sedway, too, assumed a post-Siegel role in running the Flamingo.

  Here, then, were the founding fathers of modern Las Vegas: Benny, Bugsy, Davie, Meyer, Gus, and a couple of Moes. As far as Vegas and the world of gambling were concerned, Binion would come to outdo them all.

  The Las Vegas Club on Fremont Street, Binion’s first legal casino.

  10

  TEXAS VS. VEGAS

  My friends can do no wrong and my enemies can do no right.

  —BB

  Many of the newly arrived mobsters from the East, Midwest, and California aspired to be real-life versions of the heavies that actors like George Raft played in the movies, from homburgs to spats. Most were Italian or Jewish, and they tended to favor silky pin-striped suits from which they picked specks of lint with manicured nails. Cavorting with movie stars became a marker of status. Though not educated, they sought a patina of class via custom-made silk shirts and monogrammed underwear.

  Then there was the Cowboy. Binion’s trousers were perpetually unpressed, and the buttons of his western shirts—made from gold coins—strained at his generous paunch. His hair looked as if it had been cut by the least promising freshman at a failing barber college. With all the polish of a Piggly Wiggly clerk, he wore an up-from-the-sticks grin and delivered country bromides in a nasal twang. He sometimes greeted friends with the query “How’s your mammy?”

  Although mobsters like Lansky had recoiled at Las Vegas’s primitive state, Binion—more accustomed to rustic conditions than the average Flatbush Avenue hustler—believed he had been dropped into Nevada’s rendition of Eden. “Well,” he remembered, “wasn’t but something like 18,000 people here, and the most enjoyable place that you can imagine.” Sure, Las Vegas was filling up with criminals, but they weren’t the sort who would take your bankroll at gunpoint. “Everybody was friendly,” Binion said, “and there wasn’t none of this hijacking, there wasn’t no stealing, wasn’t nothing, just—hell you couldn’t get robbed if you hollered, ‘Come rob me!’” You could, however, get taken in a card game. Shortly after Binion’s arrival he lost about $400,000 in a high-stakes poker session.

  Despite that setback, Binion bought a house in Vegas on West Bonanza Road, a couple of miles from downtown and four miles off the Strip. Even then this was not the best neighborhood in town. The two-story structure’s stone-and-log exterior gave it the look of an overgrown cabin. It had previously served as an apartment house for women fulfilling their six-week divorce residency, and
out back was a wishing well where the soon-to-be singles could discard their wedding rings should the mood strike. Binion purchased the place for $68,000 cash without even setting foot inside. All he needed to know was that it was big—seven bedrooms—and sat on enough empty land for the family’s horses. With a strong enough fence, it would be what he wanted: half ranch, half fort. And if the doors to four of the seven bedrooms opened to the outside—well, he would let Teddy Jane worry about that when she got to town.

  For the moment, Binion needed to concentrate on the Las Vegas Club, a Fremont Street casino fronted by J. Kell Houssels. A businessman with no whiff of a mob past, Houssels had his hand in all sorts of enterprises—restaurants, cab companies, thoroughbreds, and casinos. He was a Vegas old-timer who had come to town in 1929, and bought a one-third interest in a poker room. This became the Las Vegas Club.

  Fred Merrill, Binion’s Dallas friend, was an investor. Another was Nick “the Greek” Dandalos, who was already promoting his reputation as the greatest gambler in the history of the world. Meyer Lansky also had a stake, which allowed him to install two of his associates, Gus Greenbaum and Moe Sedway, as casino managers.

  Mob executives aside, this was no Flamingo. “This Las Vegas Club wasn’t the most beautiful place you ever seen,” Binion recalled. “It was a old, run-down kind of place.” That description may have been charitable. Like some other joints in Glitter Gulch, it operated from a bare-bones gambling room offering table games, slots, and a bar. With banks of fluorescent lights and chrome-legged chairs, the club possessed all the ambience of a down-at-the-heels lunch counter.

  Working with Houssels, Merrill, and the others, Binion did business as he had in Dallas, which brought the proprietors of other Glitter Gulch casinos to a quick boil.

  These rivals were especially unhappy that Binion’s betting limits in craps were higher than in nearby casinos, which meant the high rollers flocked to the Las Vegas Club. Binion recalled one dice player who was putting down $40,000 a roll, and was at one point a $300,000 winner. “The guy played so long,” he said, “his feet got tired.” Binion ordered his porters to wash the gambler’s feet with cold beer. The dice rolling continued, and when the man was done, he had lost $470,000. “Back in them days,” Binion said, “that was a whole lot of money.”

  Other club owners tried warning Binion that he would go broke. “And he says, ‘That doesn’t worry me in the least,’” recalled Robbins Cahill, a former member of the Nevada Tax Commission. “He says . . . ‘I can always get a new bankroll, but I can’t get new customers. But as long as they don’t take my customers, and my play, why, I haven’t got anything else to worry about.’”

  Binion also paid his dealers more than the prevailing wage in Glitter Gulch. “I didn’t pay no attention to what they was paying dealers around here or nothing,” he said. This, too, enraged rival operators. “There’s some old guys around here . . . that weren’t too damn good in my book. They gave me a little bit of trouble on account of all this, you see . . . Some of them was a little bit on the jealous order.”

  As their resentment grew, his competitors plotted retribution. All they needed was an opening. Clifford Duane Helm, a former Dallas rodeo champion, gave it to them.

  • • •

  At forty-two, Helm had retired from the bronc-busting circuit a banged-up man: he was missing several teeth and drew whistling breaths through a crooked nose that had been broken by many falls from many horses. Other accidents claimed the tips of three fingers and all of a fourth. Helm was short, compact, and happy to settle arguments with a handgun.

  He worked as Binion’s bodyguard and casino security officer at the Las Vegas Club. Before Binion brought him west, Helm’s one major brush with the law occurred in 1941. He had been in his Dallas home, wondering where his wife might be. The answer came to him when he looked out the window about three in the morning and saw her stepping from a taxi, arm in arm with her first husband. Helm walked outside and, in his own front yard, shot the man in the face. A Dallas County grand jury no-billed Helm on a murder charge—as expected, police records noted, “inasmuch as [the] assault [was] caused by victim’s illicit association with Helm’s wife.”

  Binion adored Helm, describing him “as honorable and honest as any man I ever had anything to do with.” A good cowboy, a good blacksmith, a good cook, hunter, and fisherman. “Son of a gun could do any damn thing,” Binion said. “He was a good guy.” Helm made a different impression as he strove to maintain order at Binion and Houssel’s casino. “A cold-blooded, vicious son-of-a-bitch,” one Las Vegas law enforcement official called him. “He strutted around like a peacock all of the time wearing two silver forty-five caliber pistols in his holster and always dressed in black.”

  But a cold-blooded strutter with sidearms was what the Las Vegas Club needed. Like other Fremont Street establishments, it catered to a rough mix of crusty locals, desert rats, construction crews, and the occasional tough package who drove from L.A. They gambled, they drank, they fought, they drank some more. Helm had the perfect temperament—mean and unforgiving on his nicer days—to deal with such a crowd. Also, he was now and then called upon to handle trouble from back home.

  Shortly after Binion’s arrival in Las Vegas, Charles Melton “Sonny” Lefors came to town—the same Sonny Lefors who had helped kill Bob Minyard back in Texas. Jug-eared and balding, Lefors owned a West Dallas store that doubled as a fencing operation. He was at once inept, conniving, and deadly; cops and fellow thieves alike considered him completely untrustworthy. Lieutenant Butler of the Dallas police knew only one way to be certain Lefors was playing straight: “You know how you can tell when you are getting close to the truth on Sonny?” he asked. “He just shits all over himself.” Butler recalled questioning Lefors about a particular gangland killing, “and, boy, he filled his britches full.”

  Lefors had driven from Dallas to Las Vegas in his pickup truck and brought his wife, claiming to be looking for business opportunities. But anyone who knew about the festering feud in Dallas figured that Herbert Noble, who had given Lefors a .38 Special and $1,000 to make the trip, had sent him to case—or kill—Binion. As often happened, Lefors went about it all wrong. He had emerged from a Las Vegas casino late at night and was walking along a downtown street when a Cadillac pulled next to him and eased to a stop. Helm stepped from the car, grabbed Lefors, and forced him onto the front seat. Binion sat in the back and stared in silence. As the driver pulled away and headed for 2040 West Bonanza Road, Helm kept his gun on Lefors.

  Binion’s house was dark as the Cadillac, its tires crunching the desert hardpan, crept to the separate servants’ quarters in the rear. Binion and Helm dragged Lefors from the car, took him inside the quarters, and searched him. “Sit down and shut up,” Binion told him. Then, his manner calm and his voice quiet, he began asking questions. He asked Lefors about Dallas, about his old friends, and about Noble, especially about Noble. This continued for nearly two hours. It’s not clear whether a terrified Lefors offered his usual proof of truth telling.

  Through it all, Helm asked Binion again and again to let him kill Lefors. They could bury him in the desert, Helm argued, and no one would ever know what happened. Gun in hand, he begged to do it. “He almost got on his knees,” Lefors said later. But Binion told Helm no, that he didn’t want any unnecessary killing. Lefors’s grateful response was an offer to help Binion, once back in Dallas, any way he could. For Binion, it was a satisfactory outcome. He now had a mole—a craven, stupid, double-crossing one, but a mole nonetheless—in Noble’s operation. Helm, however, was deeply disappointed that he hadn’t been allowed to shoot somebody. He would get another chance soon.

  • • •

  Johnny Beasley’s real name was Frank Ferroni Jr., but he had changed it to something more cowboy-like. Beasley stumbled into Las Vegas as yet another Dallas henchman and former rodeo hand imported by Binion. He was a drug addict who had served time for second-deg
ree murder, and even when off the dope and not killing anyone, he posed a threatening annoyance. Back in Dallas he had been given to dropping by Binion’s house to cadge handouts. Binion, who had yet to bring his family to Las Vegas, didn’t want his wife forced to deal with someone like that. “He was crazy,” he said. “So I just loaded him up and brought him here.”

  For a couple of months, Binion said, Beasley was “straight as a string,” working at the Las Vegas Club as a shill—a decoy player who lured real gamblers into the game. But then, as Binion described it, “he gets on that dope again.” On the afternoon of March 25, 1947, Binion was home with the flu when he got a call from the club: Beasley had been caught stealing. Binion put him on the phone. “Beasley,” he said, “you’re going to have to leave. Where do you want to go?”

  New Jersey, Beasley answered, where he might find some work with Jim Eskew’s famous Wild West show and rodeo. So Binion, ever the soft touch for an old cowboy, instructed Cliff Helm to escort Beasley to the train station and buy his ticket east. During the one-block walk to the depot, Beasley hatched another plan. He told Helm to pay his bus fare to Kingman, Arizona—much cheaper than a train ride to New Jersey—and give him the balance of the cash. Helm said he needed permission to do that, and the two returned to the Las Vegas Club.