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  Once again the family talked of returning to Dallas, and they received at least one piece of encouraging news. Their old friend Bill Decker ran for sheriff in 1948, and easily defeated the incumbent Guthrie in a campaign financed in part by Binion. “Maybe I put up something like $3,500,” he said. “No strings attached to that money. I just give it to him for old times sake.”

  With the district attorney pursuing him, Binion still faced big legal problems in Texas. But that’s what lawyers were for, and Binion had plenty of them. Perhaps more important, old rivals had to be controlled—or, failing that, eliminated. He knew the professionals to hire for that job too. They were already hard at work.

  • • •

  Herbert Noble still operated his gambling operation, the Airmen’s Club, in downtown Dallas, and he maintained his ranch in Denton County, where he kept his airplanes. Almost two years had passed since someone had tried to shoot him. That changed on the night of May 20, 1948, as his car rumbled over the cattle guard at the entrance to his ranch. Someone—police believed it was Binion’s old assassin Lois Green—fired a shotgun from the darkness. Buckshot struck Noble in the arm and wrist, but he escaped by driving to his house. That was murder attempt number three.

  Next, on February 14, 1949, a friend of Noble’s happened to be taking a break outside the Airmen’s Club. When he saw a man crawling under Noble’s car, the friend ran upstairs to make a report. Police were called, and officers found dynamite and blasting caps beneath the Mercury. Thus Noble lived through attempt number four.

  And on the night of September 7, 1949, a ranch worker told Noble that a black Ford had been driving back and forth along the fence line. Noble grabbed a rifle, jumped into his own car, and found the Ford. Then came a chase, with Noble pursuing the Ford for six miles at high speed, until the Ford slid into a ditch. Several men piled out and began firing. Noble, despite being shot in the leg, fired back.

  The men got away, but an investigation sorted it all out. “This attempt was made by Jack Nesbit and Jim Thomas,” an internal police memo said. Thomas was the Binion hit man who had, some years earlier, murdered a doctor and his wife, and whose conviction had been reversed on appeal. Nesbit was a slow-witted gunman who worked security at Binion’s Dallas dice rooms. “Information was received,” the memo continued, “to the effect that Thomas and Nesbit had been hired by Binion” for the Noble attack. But as so frequently happened in these matters, the case slipped into limbo, and no charges were filed.

  Noble had now survived five efforts to kill him. The deadline poets at the local papers came up with two nicknames: the Human Clay Pigeon and the Cat.

  • • •

  Weary of dodging bullets, Noble began to give serious thought to forsaking the casino business—and escaping Binion’s enmity. He entered negotiations with a group of partners from New York to buy a decommissioned army airfield in Fort Worth. Noble’s plan: turn it into a private airport, with aircraft maintenance and repair services. No gambling, no fencing, no gangsters hanging around. This was to be a lawful enterprise, or at least that was what he told others. The closing for the sale was set for November 29, 1949, in Fort Worth.

  Noble’s wife, Mildred, greeted this news with joy. For years she had dreaded the late-night phone call telling her that Herbert was dead; soon she wouldn’t have to worry anymore. Like her husband, Mildred had risen from West Dallas poverty, but she had no active involvement in his criminal pursuits. Instead, she strove to fashion a life that modeled the city’s merchant class: domestic help, ladies’ luncheons, church committees, piano recitals, a house in town, and a retreat in the country. A thirty-six-year-old striking brunette, she sometimes wore a mink stole and feathered hats. The couple’s teenage daughter, Frieda, attended a boarding school in Virginia.

  Now, if Herbert were indeed to abandon gambling, Mildred need not change the subject when someone asked her what her husband did for a living. The couple made plans to celebrate the airfield purchase—and their freshly respectable life—with a candlelight dinner that night at home.

  The morning of November 29 dawned clear and cool. Noble put on a dark double-breasted suit, set off by a crisply knotted and dimpled silk tie, and left the house at 311 Conrad Street. Because he was escorting two bankers to the signing, he took the rare step of driving his wife’s Cadillac. “A nicer ride,” he explained. He started the car and pulled away from his tidy home in the quiet of the morning. As he drove down Conrad Street and through the leafy neighborhood, the big news on the radio was the predawn crash of an American Airlines passenger plane at Love Field, which had killed twenty-eight. Noble proceeded on, and within an hour he had reached Fort Worth, ready to buy some real estate.

  At midmorning, Mildred Noble walked out the front door of the Conrad Street house. She planned to go to the Noble ranch and pick up their maid, who would help prepare the celebratory dinner. Mildred crossed the yard and got into her husband’s black 1949 Mercury. It was parked at the curb. She pressed the Mercury’s starter, which ignited the nitroglycerin gel that had been hidden behind the dashboard sometime in the night.

  The explosion could be heard from eight miles. It shattered windows for blocks, and destroyed the Mercury down to its chassis. One of the car doors sailed over two rows of houses and landed in someone’s backyard next to a child’s sandpile. Shards of metal were driven into the doors and outside walls of houses a hundred feet away. And what was left of Mrs. Noble lay in the green grass of her front yard.

  After the roar, silence. A neighbor, a woman who had known Mildred for years, ran over. She gazed at the smoking corpse, but it was so bloody, blackened, and shredded that the woman didn’t recognize her friend. She returned to her house, called police, and retrieved a sheet to cover the body. Then came the sirens.

  In Fort Worth, thirty-five miles to the west, Noble sat in the office of U.S. Attorney Frank Potter. He had finished signing the last of the land-transaction papers when someone said he had a phone call. He picked up the receiver, listened briefly in silence, then said, “Dead?” After a moment he put the phone down and turned to the others in the room. “The bastard killed my wife,” he said.

  He drove himself in a fury back to Dallas, and then to the funeral home where Mildred’s remains had been taken. At the back of the mortuary, he cradled what was left of her in his arms, moaning and wailing. That afternoon a reporter went to his house and found Noble alone and bereft in his darkened living room. Noble pointed to a rusty smear on his face. “See that?” he said. “That’s my wife’s blood . . . I wish it had been me.” To another reporter he said, “They killed an innocent woman and one of the best women who ever lived. I worshipped the ground she walked on.”

  Noble bought her a solid-bronze casket. It weighed two tons—too heavy to be carried by six or eight men; it had to be rolled—and was reported, at $15,000, to be the most expensive ever purchased in Dallas. “It is of a type,” the Morning News observed, “used by the Henry Ford family.” More than seven hundred mourners packed the chapel for Mildred’s funeral, while four hundred others waited outside. The procession of cars to the cemetery stretched for two miles.

  One day after Mildred Noble’s death, Captain Will Fritz, head of the Dallas police homicide bureau, informed the public that he had questioned a “29-year-old underworld member” as a suspect. But the gangster “did not tell us anything that would help,” Fritz said, adding that there was a “standing price of $5,000 on Herbert Noble’s head.” That was a lowball estimate. Many in Dallas gambling circles had heard someone could collect at least $20,000 for killing Noble. Others said the bounty had risen to $50,000. Everyone knew they were talking about Binion’s money.

  The twenty-nine-year-old to whom Fritz referred was Binion’s close associate R. D. Matthews. Police believed he and Lois Green had put the dynamite in Noble’s car, possibly with assistance from some roving Kansas City safecrackers who had expertise in explosives. Matthews denied any inv
olvement, and it quickly became clear there was no hard evidence to use against him. It took police more than two years to coerce Matthews into taking a polygraph test. When he finally relented, he showed “very strong reaction,” which indicated deception, to this question: “Did you use . . . rifles to cover the Noble residence the night the bomb was planted that killed Mildred Noble?” And he showed a “very good reaction,” also indicating deception, to this one: “Did you ever plant a bomb in any of Noble’s cars?”

  From the vantage of six decades later, Matthews provided a simple rationale for his dismal performance on the polygraph, the same explanation he gave to the Dallas police officer who made him take it: “I told him those tests record if you’re nervous,” he said. “I told him, ‘You make me nervous.’” Of Mildred Noble’s death, Matthews added, “I didn’t have a goddamn thing to do with it.”

  • • •

  No one doubted that the car bomb had been meant for Noble, and now the grief and guilt consumed the man. Somehow, through all the attempts to kill him, he had assumed his family would be immune. “I have been a gambler, it is true,” he said. “But my family life was decent, and my wife, daughter and I had nothing to hide.”

  He pledged to cooperate with the police investigation—a lie—then added, “I don’t think the police can do much about it.” To Noble, the problem could be easily explained: the person who wanted him dead was too powerful, and too irrationally driven to murder, for the local cops to control. “All those plans to kill me have been made by the same man—a kill-crazy man,” he said. “The fellow who is behind this is 1,500 miles from Dallas right now . . . He’s a mad killer.”

  Noble refused to name this mad killer, but that was hardly necessary. “Why in the world he continues to try to get me,” he said, “is more than I can understand.” He later offered one explanation for Binion’s wrath: “I wouldn’t bow down to him.”

  At a terrible personal loss, he had survived murder attempt number six. It was at this point, his friends and associates agreed, that Noble slowly began to go insane.

  He bought six Chihuahuas that would yap at the sound of intruders. Then he installed floodlights around the exterior of his home, which he took to calling the “house of fear.” All night long, as he paced the echoing rooms, armed with a rifle and unable to sleep, the outside was lit like a state prison yard. When morning finally came, Noble would climb into his car and head for the cemetery. He visited his wife’s grave every day, and there he made a vow. Her killers might be caught by the police, he said, “and I want a front-row seat at the electrocution.”

  But if the police weren’t up to the job—and it was soon clear they would not come close to solving this crime—Noble had backup plans.

  • • •

  First, Noble sent an associate to visit R. D. Matthews at home. The man told Matthews he needed a place to stay for the night, so Matthews let him. Then Matthews went to bed, but not for long. “He shot me in the head while I was sleeping,” Matthews said. The man fired a .22-caliber pistol into his left eye—the bullet exiting at his temple—then ran away. Matthews staggered from bed, checked the damage in his bathroom mirror, and drove himself to the doctor. He lost the eye, but won the fight a few days later. The gunman “got killed,” Matthews explained some years afterward.

  Next, Noble went after Lois Green, Binion’s enforcer. Not one to keep his mouth shut, Green had been overheard in a bar, laughing and bragging to some prostitutes about blowing up a woman—Mildred Noble. That was all the evidence Noble needed. Now he had to wait for a phone call from a waitress he knew at the Sky Vu Club in West Dallas. She had promised to alert him whenever Green walked in.

  The Sky Vu was a cavernous dance hall and nightclub at the apex of Commerce Street and Fort Worth Avenue. It epitomized the provincial gangsters’ idea of class, and the members of Green’s Forty Thieves loved to take their girlfriends there, as did Green himself. The Sky Vu was owned by a friend of theirs, Joe Bonds, a former New York street hustler whose real name was Joseph Locurto. Short, bald, and plump, Bonds liked to hire underage girls and force them, in the club’s back rooms, to perform what an indictment would later describe as unnatural sex acts. Bonds’s wife was a former pinup girl and “singing comedienne” named Dale Belmont, a trim beauty with a thick mane. She usually starred as the Sky Vu’s headliner act, backed by Johnny Cola and his five-piece band. That served as the glittering entertainment lineup on December 23, 1949, as Green motored to the Sky Vu to join his friends and their mistresses. He parked his car in an alleyway between the club and a neighboring restaurant, the Semos Drive-In, and went inside for a night of drinking and dancing.

  While Dale Belmont sang and Green relaxed, two men in separate cars cruised the dark, nearby blocks. One was Herbert Noble, and the other was Sonny Lefors, who had pulled a thin rubber mask over his head. Both men carried shotguns.

  By 1:00 a.m. or so Green had enjoyed his fill. He settled his customary snap-brim hat on his rather large head and left the Sky Vu alone. In the dim alley, as he opened the door to his car, someone called his name from the shadows. He turned to look. There was a boom and a flash, then another. Green fell to the ground, his throat and chest ripped by buckshot. Within minutes he was dead.

  No one saw who did it. But not many hours after Green’s death, Noble walked into Lefors’s West Dallas grocery and slapped a morgue photo of Green on the counter. “There he is,” Noble said. The black-and-white picture showed Green’s corpse on a gurney, a sheet covering him from the waist down, with bloody holes in his face, neck, and torso. “There’s the dirty son of a bitch.”

  Police rounded up dozens of hoods for questioning, and quickly determined that no small number of people, including a few members of Green’s own gang, harbored reasons for wanting him dead. But no charges were filed against anyone, which might have been expected. Many officers expressed quiet gratitude that someone with a shotgun had finally managed to do what they had failed to accomplish for years: put Lois Green away for good.

  • • •

  If the cops were gleeful, many of the Dallas tough guys descended into grief. Three days after the Sky Vu ambush, Green’s funeral attracted a standing-room-only crowd of four hundred at the chapel of the Sparkman-Brand Funeral Home in Dallas. If Binion was among them—an unlikely event—he stayed unnoticed and out of sight. All six of the pallbearers had arrest records, including one with a murder conviction, and the preacher was an ex-con. The Reverend Alfred Palmer, late of the federal prison in Seagoville, Texas, where he had served a stretch for mail fraud, delivered a restrained eulogy. “He was loved and respected by those of his world,” Palmer said of the thirty-one-year-old Green. “He fought a good fight in that particular kind of world.”

  This gathering of the Dallas outlaw elite to pay final tribute to their “fallen chief” inspired reporter George Carter of the Times Herald to wax elegiac. “There were the safe burglars and narcotics thieves who had formed his board of strategy,” he wrote. “There were the prostitutes dressed in fine coats and wearing dark red lipstick and mascara that had melted under their tears.” And in the back rows, he noted, were those who aspired to be like Green, “satellites of an underworld they had never quite broken into—the common thieves who came in cheap clothing and looked on in awe.”

  Then the shiny steel casket was loaded onto a hearse. As the cortege left the funeral home, en route to the cemetery, undercover officers filmed the mourners from across the street. Many of the gangsters covered their faces with their hands as they drove away in their Cadillacs, following the black hearse. Off-duty Dallas motorcycle officers led the way, giving Green his final police escort.

  Betty Green, the gangster’s widow—“blond, attractive,” Carter observed—had sobbed openly through the service. But to say that she remained inconsolable in her loss would be incorrect. About a week after the funeral, the police racket squad kicked in the door to the apartment of one of Green
’s pallbearers. There they found Mrs. Green, along with Green’s former close friend and five ounces of cocaine.

  • • •

  With Green’s death, Binion had lost one of his most hardened henchmen, and then the situation took a turn that was, for him, even worse. One day after Green’s funeral, more than forty police officers and sheriff’s deputies gathered in the predawn. They went over their plans, and then fanned out across the county toward a dozen different locations in unmarked cars. These were raiding parties, led by Hansson, the Dallas police chief, and Wilson, the district attorney, and they targeted Binion’s North Texas operations.

  Binion liked to tell people he had relinquished all his Texas interests when he fled to Las Vegas. “I left the state of Texas three years ago and left everything I had there behind me,” he said. “I told the boys they could have the whole works.” The raiding parties were about to prove this a lie. Four carloads of them headed in different directions. One found little more than an empty office, and another encountered a locked safe. But one of them hit pay dirt.

  Right after sunrise, in silence, the raiders approached a riding stable a dozen miles northwest of Dallas. The stable itself, in a muddy field, looked unremarkable: a wood-plank exterior with peeling white paint, a rusty sheet-metal roof, and a few stalls. But when they forced open the door to the tack room, the police found a trove of evidence. Inside were seven men—all Binion cronies—with bundles of cash and policy game receipts. In the corner of the room sat an open safe that contained Binion’s tax returns and stacks of records that detailed his continued hold on the local numbers racket. The papers showed a strict managerial structure: branch managers divided the city into districts, shady accountants kept the books, and Binion, the absentee landlord, took up to 66 percent of the gross. This appeared to be paying him more than $1 million a year.