Blood Aces Page 12

  The temperature at the club was not quite right, so Helm—who, in addition to his strong-arm duties, had custodial responsibilities—went to the casino’s equipment room at the rear of the building. Beasley joined him there. Once he had adjusted the air-conditioning, Helm turned to more pressing matters. He drew his Colt automatic pistol and began to beat Beasley about the head, striking him so hard that he fractured his skull in two places. Then Helm fired his gun at least twice. Somehow Beasley managed to rise from the floor and stagger out the equipment-room door. Helm pointed his pistol at the fleeing man’s back. A casino employee yelled, “Don’t, Cliff!” But as customers screamed and scattered, Helm resumed firing. One shot hit a bystander in the arm. Four shots struck Beasley in all: two through his arm, one through his aorta, and one in the back of the neck.

  Much later, Binion summed up Helm’s multiple shots as the simple diligence that a man such as Beasley required. “You’ve got to kill him sometime, ’cause this is the most dangerous son of a gun in the world,” he said. “So he just went ahead and done a good job of it.”

  With the shooting finished, Binion was summoned, as was Houssels. Helm hastily wiped the blood from his hot pistol and put it back in its holster, and the gamblers returned to their tables. Within minutes, wheels were spinning and dice rolling as if nothing had happened. Never mind that Beasley’s body still lay on the casino floor, blood pooling around him. The Las Vegas police finally showed, and not long after that, the phone rang at Harry Claiborne’s house.

  Claiborne was an angular Arkansas farm boy who had earned a law degree at a small Tennessee school. He spent some of World War II as a military policeman in Las Vegas, rousting wayward soldiers out of whorehouses and casinos. After the war, he returned to Las Vegas and joined the city police force. The Las Vegas department of 1945 was a less-than-stellar law enforcement organization—“a bunch of stupid cowboys,” in the words of the Clark County district attorney. They protected the powerful and did the bidding of the moneyed. Not a few of them were on the take. The department had twenty-five officers, three cars, and a high-ranking inspector who had ordered that driving-while-intoxicated arrests were to cease “because all my goddamned friends are drunks.” Thus the police department became a free taxi service, providing rides home to overserved locals.

  After passing the Nevada Bar exam, Claiborne joined the district attorney’s office in Las Vegas, one of two lawyers on staff, including the DA. He had been on the job less than three months when the phone call came regarding the Las Vegas Club. A detective told him, “We have a problem.”

  Police had gone to the club to investigate the shooting of Beasley, but Binion and Houssels refused to allow them inside. When he arrived at the casino, Claiborne found his entry blocked as well. Houssels met him at the door and advised him, “Harry, we take care of our own. That’s the way it’s always been and that’s the way it will be.”

  “It may be the way it used to be,” Claiborne said. “It will not be the way it is now, believe me. Times have changed.”

  “They can’t go back,” Houssels said, pointing to the detectives.

  Claiborne turned to the police officers around him and told them to go to a hardware store. Buy locks and heavy chains, he said. When they returned, he ordered, they were to empty the club and padlock the doors. “You don’t dare,” Houssels said.

  “Wait and see,” Claiborne answered.

  Houssels and Binion relented, and the detectives entered the club. By this time, Helm had had ample opportunity to get his story straight: he told investigators he had killed Beasley in self-defense. Beasley had tried to stab him, Helm said, and got close enough to slash Helm’s tie and shirt. A dull Boy Scout knife, said to be Beasley’s, was recovered from the floor of the equipment room.

  Claiborne confronted Helm. “Do you have a knife, Cliff?” he asked. Helm handed his own knife to Claiborne, who dropped it into a plastic evidence bag. “I think you cut your own tie,” Claiborne told him. “I think you held your tie and cut it with your own knife.”

  Claiborne’s boss, Clark County district attorney Robert Jones, termed this a “brutal gangland killing,” and immediately asked for forensic help from the FBI. One of his investigators airmailed Helm’s knife and tie to the bureau’s lab in Washington, DC. A few days later the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Salt Lake City office, which oversaw Las Vegas, sent a telex, classified “urgent,” to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, warning that the fix was in. Binion and his pals were spending money and pulling strings in an attempt to free Helm, the telex said, and had enlisted the help of the sheriff’s office and police department. Binion, a Las Vegas resident for only a few months, already had the juice, according to the agent: “District attorney Jones stated today he cannot trust certain members of Clark County SO and Las Vegas PD who may attempt to assist defense.” Jones was a former FBI special agent.

  At Helm’s trial, two FBI lab technicians testified that microscopic fibers retrieved from the blade well of his knife matched silk fibers from his tie. No such fibers, they insisted, were recovered on the knife that was said to be Beasley’s. Clearly, Helm had slashed his tie himself in an attempt to make it appear that Beasley had attacked him. He was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life.

  Within hours of the verdict, the Las Vegas district attorney wrote a thank-you letter to FBI director Hoover, noting that “these two splendid agents made a remarkable impression on the jury by their straightforward, clear and convincing testimony.” Two weeks later, Helm was booked into the Nevada State Prison in Carson City.

  • • •

  Binion suspected for decades that his friend had been railroaded. “I did everything I could for him, but the thing was stacked against him in them days here,” he said. He insisted Helm wasn’t the real target. “They was wanting to get rid of me, too, really. They didn’t want me around here. I was a little too strong in the competition right then.”

  Because Binion refused to provide names to his interviewer (“They’ll know who I’m talking about”), such a claim may be easy to dismiss. But some pieces of evidence, long buried, back his suspicions. First, there’s a letter from Edward C. “Ted” Cupit, chief investigator for the Las Vegas district attorney’s office, to Hoover four days after Beasley’s death. Cupit had written to explain the physical evidence provided to the bureau. He added this: “I have given you all of this information to let you know how vital this case is to this city and to this office. There is a foreign gambling element here that we must control.” Convicting Helm, the letter said, would “go a long way toward giving us the upper hand on said element.”

  Second, there came an unexpected crusade by the warden at the Nevada State Prison. Arthur Bernard, a former boxer, bootlegger, and mine inspector, was a famously independent warden—a hard man when necessary, but a trusting one when he could be. He presided over a prison that had no chapel but did have its own casino, operated by inmates.

  Not long after Helm’s arrival, Bernard put him in charge of the prison stables. “He used to take my kids riding, took my wife and her friends riding,” Bernard said. “And he was honest. I would have sent him to Texas with my family and a checkbook and signed a bunch of checks, and when he came back they’d have been absolutely correct to the last nickel, and I know that nothing would have happened to my kids and my wife. He was just that good a man.”

  Helm talked about his case, and sufficiently intrigued Bernard that the warden read the trial transcripts. Bernard became convinced that Helm deserved a medal for killing Beasley, not a life sentence. On a trip to Las Vegas, Bernard tracked down one of the jurors, who was a friend of his. “How in the hell did you convict Helm on that murder charge?” Bernard asked him.

  As the juror told it, Helm’s strutting had done him no favors: “That little SOB came to court every morning in a brand new suit. A brand new Western suit, fancy cowboy boots. And he looked at us as if we
were dirt, like we were dirt under his feet.” But it was the forensic evidence—the fibers on Helm’s knife—and the testimony of the FBI lab technicians that proved crucial. “That’s what clinched it.”

  Some weeks later Bernard talked to the new head of the state parole board, Ted Cupit—the same man who, as the DA’s investigator, had urged the FBI’s help in controlling the “foreign gambling element.” Bernard mentioned the Helm case and said, “There’s something fishy about that.” Cupit looked uncomfortable and changed the subject. Months passed, and every time Bernard mentioned Helm to Cupit, he got the same reaction. Bernard said, “Ted, you know something I should know.”

  Cupit struggled for an answer. “If I tell you, it’s going to raise hell.”

  “I think you should tell me,” Bernard said. “This is not something we can play with.”

  Cupit unloaded his story on Bernard: He had a brother-in-law on the Las Vegas police force who, during the investigation of the Helm case, furnished a house for a secret meeting of prosecutor Claiborne and police detectives. “And what they did there,” Cupit said, “they took Cliff’s knife and the tie from the courthouse, where it was supposed to be under lock and key. They stripped some threads out of the tie, and they put it in the knife, and they sent that to the FBI.”

  Bernard went straight to Cupit’s brother-in-law, who confirmed the story, even providing a written and signed account. Anxious and anguished, Bernard took this new information to the chief justice of the state supreme court, who also sat on the board of pardons. “Let me think it over,” the chief justice told him, “and I’ll see that justice is served one way or another.”

  And then nothing happened. The justice sat on the evidence; each time Bernard inquired, he was told to be patient. “I’m still thinking,” the justice said. “I haven’t forgotten.” He was apparently a slow thinker, because Helm spent more than six years in prison, until one afternoon when a guard captain came to Bernard’s office and said, “Warden, there’s something wrong with Cliff Helm.”

  He had fallen from a horse at the prison corral and had suffered a subdural hematoma. Bernard summoned the best brain surgeon in the state—he may have been the only brain surgeon in the state—to operate on Helm, but the surgery failed. Helm died a convicted murderer at forty-nine.

  • • •

  For Binion the Helm episode provided an early and humbling lesson in the ways of Las Vegas. In Dallas the solution to a problem with a competitor was pretty simple: control him or kill him. But Vegas had far more crosscurrents, and more plentiful and muscular operators. If he were to survive, Binion would have to learn to maneuver in this new landscape.

  Nine months after Helm’s conviction, Binion ran into Harry Claiborne on a sidewalk in downtown Las Vegas. It was Claiborne’s last week with the district attorney’s office; he had decided to enter private practice. Given his bitterness and suspicions, Binion could have shunned Claiborne, or threatened him, or plotted his destruction. Instead, he said, “I want to hire you.”

  Claiborne reminded Binion of his prosecution of Helm. “From all I hear,” he said, “you don’t like me very well.”

  Binion looked Claiborne in the eye and said, “Well I didn’t know there was a goddamn law that said you had to fall in love with your lawyer.” They laughed and shook hands.

  Within days Claiborne opened his law office. It was at Binion’s Las Vegas Club. He soon went to work addressing his new client’s most pressing legal problems. As Binion told him, “I got some troubles coming from Texas.”

  The two of them became inseparable companions. “Me and Claiborne is the best friends on earth,” Binion said many years afterward. “He’s as honest as the day is long.”

  Yet Binion never shed his belief that the man who became his best pal had helped railroad Cliff Helm. “I don’t doubt but what Claiborne kinda feels bad about that,” he said. But a man has to do what is necessary to survive and thrive. “He had bosses,” Binion reasoned.

  Through all the decades of intimate friendship and close professional relationships, Binion insisted, he never asked Claiborne about the case. If he never forgot the injustice visited upon his good friend Helm, he also refused to let it interfere with his business. “I just kinda kept a-rollin’,” he said. “I don’t look back. Old guy told me one time, said, ‘Don’t never look back, or holler whoa in a bad place.’”

  Brutal killer Lois Green finally meets his match.

  11

  “A KILL-CRAZY MAN”

  It lasts a long time when I get mad.

  —BB

  Binion’s wife could not shake her homesickness. At the mere mention of Dallas, Teddy Jane would break into tears. Binion missed the place too, despite his stated philosophy of never looking back, and he made secret trips. “He snuck in a lot,” daughter Brenda said. He sometimes brought his children on these long Cadillac rides from Nevada to Texas, with Gold Dollar at the wheel. But he had to take special precautions, especially as the car sped through backwater burgs, where he feared his kids might contract polio. “We’d drive through these little towns,” Brenda said, “and he’d roll up the windows and tell us to hold our breath.”

  These were brief, quiet visits home, with an exit before anyone outside Binion’s local band of loyalists even knew he had arrived. He realized he had too many enemies on both sides of the law to come back for good. Should he move back now, he believed, Herbert Noble would try to kill him. Noble was, at the very least, discussing ways to make it happen. One associate told him all he had to do was park a car with a bomb in it next to Binion’s car.

  If the killers didn’t get him, the authorities would. Dallas County district attorney Will Wilson and his assistant, a bulldoggish former FBI agent named Henry Wade, nursed strong prosecutorial designs on Binion. Their strategy was to start small—putting pressure on the drones and lesser operatives—and work their way up to the top man. They began with a successful prosecution of the dice game operator at the Maurice Hotel in downtown Dallas. Binion had long controlled and profited from the game at the Maurice. Wilson proclaimed that the convictions for running a gambling hall were the first of their kind in Dallas in twenty-five years, and he promised more to come.

  Binion’s business was not proceeding so well in Nevada either. Kell Houssels, seeking a better real estate situation, moved the Las Vegas Club across Fremont Street, and this change required a new gambling permit—in general a routine matter. But the state tax commission, which licensed casino operators, would grant only Houssels permission to operate the new Las Vegas Club. All the additional investors—Binion, Merrill, Nick the Greek, and several others—were denied.

  The decision puzzled Binion. “The Las Vegas Club was a damn good operation. We got along good there,” he said. However, he didn’t try to fight the state regulators. “We just cut up the bankroll there and walked off.”

  He found other ways to make money. Perhaps the easiest was the secret funneling of millions of dollars from prominent Dallas bankers to Las Vegas mobsters. According to confidential Texas Rangers memos, Binion arranged for $4 million in loans from Dallas banks to “Las Vegas people.” Acting as a broker, he took a 5 percent cut, which gave him $200,000 for his trouble.

  At least $500,000 of the $4 million went from the Republic Bank in Dallas to the Las Vegas arm of the Cleveland syndicate, principally Moe Dalitz, to help build the palatial Desert Inn on the Strip. “Big-shot racketeers,” the memo noted of the Cleveland crowd. If such a stalwart Dallas institution as Republic was worried about exposure of its role in lending money to mobsters, protections were put in place. “This loan . . . was made in such a manner that it would be hard to trace back to the Bank as having been directly made to the gambling joint,” the Rangers memo said. The august bank’s legerdemain worked. Texas authorities took no action, and the casino bankrolling was never made public. For his efforts, Binion didn’t obtain a stake in the Desert Inn, b
ut he did secure a lifelong friend in Dalitz.

  Soon Binion got a chance to invest in another relatively modest Glitter Gulch casino, the Westerner. This time, his application sailed through the tax commission, which granted him a license to operate the club in June 1949. His tenure at the Westerner was an unhappy one. Binion said he “kinda got in there with partners that was recommended by somebody, and I just didn’t like it . . . And I didn’t care much about it, nohow.”

  Among those partners was Emilio “Gambo” Georgetti, semiliterate owner of a meatpacking business and an organized crime operator of the old school. His FBI file classified him as a “Top Hoodlum” out of Northern California, and said he was the slot machine king of San Mateo County, near San Francisco. During World War II, the bureau said, Georgetti’s Willow Tree club in Colma, California, was the largest gambling casino west of the Mississippi. Such bona fides aside, he and Binion failed to bond. Georgetti complained bitterly that Binion looked down on him and treated him “like a dog.” For his part, Binion said his partner brought disreputable associates—meaning Georgetti’s friends—to the Westerner. “They just weren’t the type of people I like,” Binion recalled. “I guess I’ve just been the boss, running these things with success so damn long, that if a guy ain’t just absolutely my type of a man . . . I couldn’t hardly be in partners with him.”

  Binion sold out and walked away from the Westerner and, potentially, from Las Vegas. “I decided I might leave,” he said. He considered moving for good to his ranch in Montana, but Teddy Jane didn’t like visiting there, much less settling in permanently.