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  For the first time, the authorities had breached Binion’s inner wall. As word of this assault flashed through Dallas and out to Las Vegas, it brought a rumor too: that Herbert Noble had tipped the police to the location of the evidence. The informants in Binion’s orbit could not say for certain if this was true or not, but it didn’t take long—three days—for Binion’s operatives to react.

  • • •

  Somehow his six patrolling Chihuahuas failed to alert him to the danger, and for one evening his level of paranoia dropped strangely to nil. On New Year’s Eve 1949, Noble walked out the front door of his Dallas home about 9:00 p.m. as if he had not a care in the world. His daughter was inside the house with a friend, and Noble had decided to go to the drugstore. Now he stood only about twenty feet from where his wife had been blown up one month before. As he moved to shut the door, he was bathed in whiteness. He turned toward the street, and a car’s spotlight blinded him. Next came gunfire.

  The first shot missed, but not the second. A bullet from a high-powered rifle shattered Noble’s left arm, ripped through his hip, and lodged near his spine. He staggered against the door, pounding with his good arm. When his daughter opened the door, he stumbled in and collapsed on the floor. The car sped away.

  An ambulance rushed Noble to Methodist Hospital, where doctors initially thought he had been hit in the back with buckshot. Then they realized they were seeing the bone fragments from his arm. Noble was seriously wounded, but he would live. He had now survived murder attempt number seven.

  Although he wouldn’t say much to police about what had happened—as usual—Noble gave an interview to reporters from his hospital bed. “I am a gambler, and I have been, that is true,” he admitted. “But I have never done anything to deserve these attacks.”

  Then, for reasons known only to him, Noble turned ominous. “I can’t go on any longer like this. I am at the end of my road,” he said. “I am afraid I am going to have to take the law into my own hands.”

  His remarks hit the papers in Nevada the next day. “Gambler Threatens to Make Own Law,” read the headline in the Reno Evening Gazette. Even a Las Vegas casino owner who couldn’t read very well knew what that meant.

  • • •

  Noble’s recovery from his latest wounds proved long and arduous. More than five weeks after he was shot, he still remained in a private room at Methodist Hospital, in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. As urban hospitals went, Methodist enjoyed something of a bucolic setting. Its brown-brick main tower rose well back from busy Colorado Boulevard, and its grounds featured several secluded courtyards framed by tall oak trees. These courtyards were dimly lit after dark, so no one noticed when, on the night of February 6, 1950, at about 11:00 p.m., a man stood in one of them and aimed his .30-caliber carbine at a fourth-floor hospital window. The window’s blinds were tightly drawn, but the man with the rifle could see a shadowy silhouette behind them.

  Noble, in his pajamas, was stepping from his hospital bathroom when the rifle’s bullet came flying through the window glass. The bullet struck the ceiling above his bed and blew a hole in the plaster. “It sounded like a cannon,” Noble said. He dropped to the floor, crawled to the wall, and unplugged a lamp, leaving the room dark. He reinjured his arm when he went down, but was otherwise unhurt.

  The inept gunman at least had the sense to be long gone by the time police arrived. Police Chief Hansson took a strikingly relaxed attitude as he surveyed the scene. The chief apparently believed snipers fired through hospital windows in Dallas as a routine matter. “Criminal activity like this is cropping up all the time,” he said. “This is not the first time we have had a gang shooting in Dallas.” Hansson also issued a mild rebuke to the would-be assassin, as if he had done nothing more than blow his car horn in the hospital’s quiet zone. This, Hansson said, was “a person with wanton disregard for people who already are sick.”

  District Attorney Wilson offered a more straightforward summation, one that alluded both to Lois Green’s recent exit and the raid on Binion’s policy game headquarters. The shooting, Wilson said, was a “straight revenge proposition.”

  Police said they had no plans to post an armed guard on Noble, but hospital orderlies did manage to drape a couple of dark blankets over the window. Noble climbed back into his bed and ruminated on his latest close call. “It looks like the good Lord is with me,” he said, while admitting that this divine protection offered some room for improvement. “I’m getting a little gunshy,” he added.

  For someone who had been the repeated target of bullets, buckshot, and bombs, Noble seemed strangely surprised at the boldness of this latest attempt. “I didn’t think they would try to get me in the hospital,” he said. “They are watching every move I make.” He vowed not to be run out of Dallas. This yielded a large headline in the next day’s Times Herald: “Noble Determined to Stay Here Despite ‘Try’ on Life in Hospital.” Once again the news traveled to Las Vegas: newly defiant, the Cat had survived murder attempt number eight.

  He made no secret of his further intentions, going so far as to let George Butler of the Dallas police in on his plans to kill Binion. Noble said this could happen “sooner than anyone expected,” Butler wrote, because he had paid $400 to someone known only as Mike, who “was supposed to have been associated with the Capone family directly.” After that, Mike “went to Grand Prairie and telegraphed the money up the country.” In some jurisdictions, a confession of hiring a professional murderer might result in actual law enforcement, but as so often happened in Dallas, authorities let it drop.

  “This was reported to the Chief,” Butler wrote, “but no further investigation was made.” Perhaps Chief Hansson harbored lingering resentment over those crank calls to him at the zoo, although no proof of that existed. But the larger message was clear: anyone wishing to eliminate Binion had an unofficial endorsement from the top.

  Herbert Noble, after losing a piece of his ear in a fight with a Binion ally.

  12

  “TEARS ROLLING DOWN THE MAN’S EYES”

  Courage is a fine thing, but when the shooting starts, get down on the floor.

  —BB

  This was getting out of hand, even by Texas’s liberal standards for mayhem. The rest of the country had finally begun to notice all the gunfire and bombings in Dallas, and responded with unconcealed disgust. None other than the city of Houston, which did not enjoy a general reputation as a sanctuary of enlightenment, nosed into the act. The Houston Press dispatched a reporter to Big D to write about Green, Noble, and Binion. His story called Dallas a “city without shame” that was “reaping a whirlwind harvest from seeds of crime, corruption and gambling.” From Colorado, the Denver Post sent its own metaphorically inclined wordsmith, who found Dallas to be a “hell-broth” of crime. “This devil’s stew,” the Post warned, could “boil over anytime and splatter up the nice new shirt front the ‘Big D’ has slipped over its past.”

  In Las Vegas, a town seemingly inured to embarrassment over mobsters, Binion’s actual good deeds couldn’t escape the taint of his recent past. Early in 1950 he gave $1,000 to the University of Nevada basketball team so it could travel to a national tournament in Kansas City. It was an act of purest goodwill on Binion’s part, but when tournament officials learned of his donation, they canceled the team’s invitation. The Nevada State Journal claimed that Binion and his soiled gift had ruined the state’s reputation, such as it was. “The people of Nevada were made to look like a bunch of miscreants eager to grab an easy dollar regardless of its source,” an editorial said. “University regents, heads of public and semi-public institutions must be on their guard at all times to keep from being duped by the offer of money from individuals of the Binion calibre.”

  • • •

  Back in the hell-broth of crime, the law was working its own course toward him. Dallas DA Will Wilson wasted no time in using the material seized from Binion’s back office. O
n January 7, 1950, a week after the raids, he charged Binion and six others, including Harry Urban and Buddy Malone, with operating an illegal policy operation. Wilson blamed at least five homicides on the policy games: Ben Freiden, the rival shot by Binion and Malone; Sam Murray, the competitor killed by Ivy Miller; Raymond Loudermilk, who was shot by Binion’s henchman Bob Minyard; Minyard, gunned down in return; and Mildred Noble. “This,” Wilson said of the charges, “is the beginning of the final stage of the fight.”

  The first thing Dallas authorities had to do was force Binion back to Texas to stand trial. Several weeks later, he was placed under arrest in Las Vegas, but only briefly before his release on personal recognizance. “I think it’s a political frame,” he said of the Texas charges. His lawyer, Harry Claiborne, attempted to portray Binion as a victim deserving of sympathy. “It’s Noble who’s doing all the hollering,” he said, “but Benny is the one who had to close up and get out of Texas.”

  In response to Dallas prosecutors’ extradition efforts, Claiborne argued that Texas officials could not prove Binion was in their state at the time of the crime. That meant he was not a fugitive and therefore not extraditable. This strategy derived from a quirk in the Nevada extradition statute that was designed to protect the state’s lucrative divorce trade. As a side benefit, it allowed racketeers in Las Vegas to direct their out-of-state operations relatively free from legal care.

  In private, Binion’s attorneys insisted the Texas authorities didn’t know what they were doing. “I don’t think I ever in my life have seen as many incompetent lawyers associated with one case as was in that case,” Claiborne said later. “I know that Will Wilson is highly respected, but he’s a first-class dumbbell . . . God have mercy on his clients.” Dumbbell or not, Wilson was making his own implacable progress in his attempts—however tortuous—to bring Binion to justice.

  “Eventually,” Wilson vowed, “we’ll get him.”

  • • •

  Additional pressure on Binion would soon come from an unexpected source: U.S. senator Estes Kefauver, a Democrat from Tennessee. An owlish, lanky lawyer with a fondness for Scotch and pari-mutuel wagering, not to mention the occasional hotel-room dalliance, Kefauver also harbored grand political ambitions. Though he had already attracted some notice—Time magazine had named him one of the nation’s ten best senators—he needed a big stage and a headline-grabbing crusade. A special commission investigating the mob would fill that bill nicely. In 1950 Kefauver launched the U.S. Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce. To no one’s surprise, it made Las Vegas one of its prime targets.

  In the years since Binion’s arrival, Las Vegas had enjoyed a period of strong growth, with advertising and publicity campaigns attracting waves of visitors, principally from Southern California. The Thunderbird and the Desert Inn joined the Flamingo as premier resorts on the Strip controlled by the mob. Along with some busy downtown clubs, most notably the El Cortez, they helped turn Vegas into a tax-free money machine, as skimming became a normal business practice. Millions in cash—the casinos’ handle—poured through the counting rooms, and racketeers siphoned much of it off the top before it could be recorded on the balance sheets. By one account, Meyer Lansky’s men skimmed $3 million for every $1 million reported. Every week bagmen left Las Vegas with bulging satchels of cash, en route to Chicago, Detroit, Miami, and other syndicate redoubts.

  Some of the most lucrative diverting took place at the Flamingo, where Davie Berman now had a piece of the ownership. “Wasn’t [Bugsy] Siegel or none of them guys tough like Berman,” Ted Binion, Benny’s son, once said. “He was a known killer.” Berman’s daughter, Susan, remembered him as a loving dad who taught her arithmetic with a slot machine and commissioned Liberace to perform at her birthday party. Susan Berman also witnessed skimming as a routine piece of business. “I was in the counting room,” she recalled. “I saw them go, ‘Three for us, one for the government, two for Meyer [Lansky].’ I helped them count the bills. They cheated the government. It was a crime, all right, but in the minds of my father and his friends it wasn’t a crime like having to kill people.”

  No one in Las Vegas, especially casino owners illegally evading taxes, wanted serious scrutiny from the feds, especially a showboating one like Senator Estes Kefauver. Binion’s engaging in a cross-country, bloody front-page feud with Noble was only turning up the heat. Berman let Binion know that he and his connected friends devoutly wished for this affair to be put to rest. To broker this peace, they needed a diplomat. That’s when someone—maybe Berman, maybe Binion—coughed up one Harold Shimley.

  • • •

  Shimley, a gambler and a con man, didn’t look the part of a big-money envoy, or act it. Tall, fat, slick-haired, and always on the make, he wore sunglasses indoors and tended to jabber. One police officer who knew him well had a succinct description: “stupid and devious.” On March 10, 1950, newly arrived in Dallas from Vegas, he arranged a meeting with Noble at a tourist court near Love Field to discuss the situation with Binion. “Your name and his name is the talk of the fucking country,” Shimley said. Noble, sniffing a setup, persuaded a friend from the police department, the ever-present Lieutenant Butler, to hide in the next room and record the proceedings.

  The summit began with some characteristic self-promotion. “I’ve been all over the country,” Shimley said. “Now I’ve made up with some people out there that own the big Flamingo Hotel—this eastern outfit that owns that joint.”

  Noble tried to get a word in. “Well, now—”

  “So now Dave Berman tells me—”

  “Who?” Noble said. “Who?”

  “Dave Berman,” Shimley said. “Owns the Flamingo. You understand?”

  “Just take it slow now,” Noble said.

  But Shimley poured it on: “He [Berman] says, ‘Shimley,’ he says. ‘Do you know this fellow in Texas?’ I says, ‘I’ve known the man twenty years . . .’ I says, ‘I don’t know what in hell this thing is all about, Dave.’” Berman explained that he was worried, Shimley said, “that this thing has gone far enough,” and that Noble and Binion needed to make peace. “And he says, ‘Why in the hell don’t you get together and straighten this thing up?’”

  Shimley also claimed he had Binion’s approval for the mission. But Noble was unconvinced, and asked, “The man out yonder?”

  “You ain’t kiddin’,” Shimley said. Binion was not only innocent of hiring the attacks on Noble, he said, but desperately wanted to catch the assailants as well. “He didn’t only convince me,” Shimley said, “he convinced the biggest mob in the United States.” In fact, he insisted, Binion had already spent $10,000 investigating the matter himself. “The man swears by the all God, and hopes that his five kids will all die, if he knows one . . . thing about the whole proposition from start to finish.”

  With that, Shimley picked up the room phone, got the long-distance operator on the line, and placed a call to Binion’s home in Las Vegas: “Hello, Benny. This is Shimley. Well, I’m in Dallas and I have done what I told you I thought I could do. And I think this whole thing can be straightened out 100 percent.” He spent a few seconds genuflecting to Binion, then said, “Now wait a minute. I want you to talk to somebody.” He offered the phone to Noble.

  The Cat didn’t leap to grab it. “Ask him what he wants to tell me.”

  “Well come on and talk to him,” Shimley said. “Fuck it. Man’s fifteen hundred miles away.”

  Noble hesitated, but took the phone, and the two bitterest of enemies finally had, after all the blood and tragedy, their man-to-man confrontation. A clash of the titans it wasn’t.

  “Hello, Benny. This is Herbert,” Noble said. “All right, how are you? Oh, I’ve got a little cold.” After responding to questions about his ranch—“we’re out in the country, partly anyway”—he managed to address the matter at hand. “Well, I just wondered—I just wondered—I didn’t know what, what the
score was.”

  Binion apparently preferred speaking with Shimley about such matters. “Yeah, wait a minute,” Noble said, “then I’ll let you talk to him.” Noble spent the rest of the conversation complaining about local newspaper coverage. “They done something to my wife here in the paper. I didn’t like it a damn bit.”

  And that was that. After less than a minute on the line, he passed the phone back to Shimley, who assured Binion that the matter would soon be resolved. “You be good, and we’ll see you soon,” Shimley said, and hung up.

  Then he went back to work on Noble, repeating his contention that Binion wanted to find the real killers. “Benny is on the square about this thing,” Shimley said. “I saw tears rolling down the man’s eyes, about your wife.”

  This sent Noble into a fit of stuttering. “I ain’t got my mind right half the time,” he managed to say.

  The summit ended with Shimley promising Noble, “I’ll get you through this, man.”

  That was true, but in a way that didn’t become clear until a couple of days later, during Noble’s second meeting with the corpulent con man. Shimley confessed that the phone conference with Binion, and all the protestations of Binion’s innocence, had been a ruse. In truth, he said, Binion had offered him $25,000 and ownership of his own Dallas craps game to kill Noble.

  Now, with the pressure building, Shimley decided it was time to take off for Tulsa, where he could hide. But before he left, he gave Noble a present—a map he had drawn, showing the location of Binion’s house on Bonanza Road.

  • • •

  The Cowboy was sticking to his story. A few days after the Shimley summit, the Dallas Morning News ponied up some travel cash and sent its ace crime reporter, Harry McCormick, to Las Vegas to find and talk to Binion. The dapper McCormick, who customarily sported a black derby, was walking down Fremont Street, gawking at the sights, when a man “dressed in the western style so often seen on the streets of this most unusual city”—McCormick’s words—approached him. It was Binion, wearing his white Stetson and alligator boots. “I heard you were looking for me,” he said, adding that he had nothing to hide.