Blood Aces Page 15
The two of them retired for a friendly chat, and Binion laid his standard charm on the reporter, depicting himself as nothing more than a rancher and businessman. Any notion that he would seek to harm poor Herbert Noble was the handiwork of liars. “I have never laid a toothpick in Noble’s way,” he insisted in McCormick’s newspaper rendering, which had Binion employing the syntax of an Oxford don. “I have no reason for wanting to do so.”
Throughout this conversation, Binion painted a self-portrait of a peaceful and reasonable man. Of course, that was before he heard about the napalm.
• • •
In early April 1950, Lieutenant Butler paid Noble a visit at his ranch. Butler, who had known Noble for years, checked in with him every couple of weeks to supply the latest news on the investigation into Mildred Noble’s death—which was to say, nothing solid. The police had dozens of leads, none of them good.
Like many others, Butler had been struck by Noble’s recent downward slide. His gray hair had turned silver and he had lost so much weight he appeared to have shriveled. His heavy drinking and insomnia had left him pale, tremulous, and hollow-eyed. Haunted and hunted, he was only forty-one but looked sixty-five.
On this day Butler drove northwest out of Dallas and into the farm community of Grapevine. Soon his unmarked car was kicking up dust on the rutted dirt road that led to Noble’s Diamond M Ranch. A barbed-wire fence strung on cedar posts lined the road. The rolling landscape was one of scrub oaks, pasture, and every mile or so, a farmhouse.
Butler turned off the road at Noble’s mailbox, rattled over the cattle guard, and eased into the ranch. After driving about three hundred yards, Butler saw him.
Noble was stripped to the waist, working beneath the bright red wing of a Beechcraft biplane with cross-country fuel tanks—a welcome sight for Butler, because he and Noble shared an interest in aviation. As a younger man, Butler had been a pilot too, until he lost his license for the stunt of flying beneath a bridge over the Red River. Now he got out of his car and walked toward the airplane. Noble grabbed his rifle and pointed it at the policeman. The astonished Butler said, “What the hell are you doing, Herbert?” He ordered Noble to put the rifle down. The two men stared at each other until Noble dropped the gun, sank to his knees, and began to sob.
It was all Binion, Noble blubbered. He got all the breaks, he killed Mildred, he had the money, and he grabbed all the power. “I never had a chance,” he said.
Butler looked at the airplane and saw that racks had been welded under the wings. Two military-surplus bombs lay on the ground near the plane, one a conventional explosive and the other filled with napalm, the jellied gasoline used for firebombing.
Noble confessed his plan: He would load the bombs onto the airplane and fly to Arizona. He would refuel at a private airstrip near Tucson owned by mobster Pete “Horse Face” Licavoli. Then he would fly to Las Vegas and, when he knew Binion and his family were at home, get his fiery vengeance by dropping his bombs on Binion’s house. He would be guided by the map drawn by Harold Shimley. Noble was not arrested after this confession of a plan to murder women and children—this was, after all, Texas. But Butler did make sure the bombs were safely disposed of.
Within hours, Binion’s Dallas connections had conveyed the details of Noble’s plot. Binion, who generally stayed cool toward death threats, went into something that resembled a panic. He hastily loaded his wife, his five children, and their nanny in the car and sped westward, across the state line. “They had warned Daddy,” said his daughter Brenda. “So we took off for California in a baby blue Cadillac.” Seeking to disguise himself, Binion ditched his standard western wear and tried to look like a typical tourist sightseeing his way through Santa Monica. “He had gray slacks, a navy blue blazer, navy suede shoes and no hat,” Brenda said. “The kids were cracking up.” He also took a golf bag. In it, Binion concealed his 12-gauge shotgun.
• • •
Sans napalm, Noble continued to drink heavily, and the combination of liquor and pills induced a certain lack of restraint. On a warm night in June 1950 he showed up at a West Dallas beer joint, drunk again. He spotted a couple of the dimmer lights from Lois Green’s gang, and he greeted one of them by clubbing him in the head with a full beer can. Two nights later, Noble was driving from Dallas to his ranch. As he turned onto the dirt road leading to his land, shotgun blasts came from a hunter’s blind in an oak thicket. The buckshot blew holes in the driver’s-side door and fender of his car, and punctured a tire. Noble, unhurt, ducked low and kept driving. He had survived murder attempt number nine, which only seemed to set fire to his agitation.
One night some months later he saw Jack Todd leaving Sonny Lefors’s West Dallas food store. Todd had been a member of Green’s gang, and knew his way around bombs. At one point he had been taken off an American Airlines plane at Love Field because he was carrying a stick of dynamite in his coat and three blasting caps in his luggage. Todd told police he was taking the explosives to New York for a fishing trip. When he heard about it, Noble offered a different theory. “That’s the same stuff,” he said, “that killed my wife.”
Now he had the man in his sights. As Todd walked from the grocery and fencing operation, Noble grabbed his rifle, stepped from his car, and said, “If you don’t tell me what you know, I’ll shoot your damn brains out.” He took a handgun from Todd. Then he forced him into the car and drove down Singleton Boulevard, headlights off. But they only went a couple of blocks before Noble—who had trouble steering while covering his passenger with a rifle—rolled the car into a ditch. The two men began to wrestle in the front seat, with Noble sinking his teeth into Todd’s arm and Todd biting off a piece of Noble’s right earlobe. Noble managed to get off one shot, but it hit the dashboard and exited through the hood. They were still fighting when sheriff’s deputies arrived, opened the car doors, and pulled the men out. Back to Methodist Hospital Noble went, for fifty-plus stitches, and this time no one took a shot at him from the hospital courtyard.
Though he got the worst of the fight, Noble was arrested for his brief abduction of Todd. At his jail book-in, an officer doing the paperwork asked him the routine question that was put to all arrestees: Did he have any identifying scars? “Yeah,” Noble said with a bitter laugh. “They’re all over me.”
• • •
Estes Kefauver’s organized crime committee began holding public hearings in the summer of 1950. They were an overnight sensation, in part because the Tennessee senator turned them into a touring production, hitting fourteen cities over fifteen months. More important, they were televised, and TV was now gaining its hold on middle-class households. With a witness parade of mobsters whose testimony ranged from penitent to defiant, the hearings offered high drama in the afternoon. Viewers skipped work to sneak home and catch the broadcasts, or they slipped off to movie theaters that were showing the hearings live. Many crowded into taverns, where over beers and shots, they watched flickering black-and-white images on a Philco above the bar. “Never before,” Life magazine wrote, “had the attention of the nation been riveted so completely on a single matter.”
The hearings gave many Americans their first exposure to real mob bosses, and turned Kefauver into a celebrity crime buster who had the moxie to confront snarling racketeers. The senators sometimes got more than anticipated, especially at one closed-door grilling that was not broadcast. There Senator Charles Tobey, a self-righteous New Hampshire Republican, pressed Bugsy Siegel’s former mistress, Virginia Hill, on why mobsters kept giving her piles of money. The “scorpion-tongued vixen”—one writer’s description—had finally had enough of the questions. “Because,” Miss Hill informed the senator, “I’m the best cocksucker in town.” Later, leaving the private chambers, draped in a mink cape, she was engulfed by reporters and photographers. She kicked one in the shins and slapped another. “Get out of my fucking way!” she screamed at them. “I hope the fucking atomic bomb falls on every
one of you.”
In July 1950, the Kefauver committee met in room 457 of the Senate Office Building to hear from Virgil Peterson, the director of the Chicago Crime Commission. While not so provocative as Miss Hill, Peterson had an encyclopedic, if imaginative, knowledge of the mob. Or, as an FBI agent once put it, “He’s got a great, big black brush that he dips in tar, and he just smears it all over.” Peterson’s testimony, which took two days, mentioned nearly every all-star of American organized crime: Lansky, Siegel, Lucky Luciano, Dutch Schultz, Frank Costello in New York, Tony Accardo down in Florida, and dozens of others. Peterson had their names, their records, their aliases, even their home addresses. And soon he began to tell the senators about “the king of the rackets in Dallas, Texas.”
In his recitation of Binion’s history, Peterson touched most of the high points—the men he killed, the rings he controlled, the long feud with Noble. He also linked Binion to Jack Dragna of Los Angeles, “one of the most notorious gangsters on the West Coast” and the “Al Capone of Los Angeles,” who was deep into gambling, robbery, and extortion. Binion and Dragna, he said, were close friends and potential business partners.
Much to his coming disadvantage, Binion had progressed over the course of thirty years from minor hustler to regional viceroy to big-league racketeer. He was rich, he was powerful, and he was now in the bull’s-eye.
The Eldorado, lighting up Glitter Gulch, would soon become Binion’s Horseshoe.
13
THE BENNY BRAND GOES NATIONAL
The only people I don’t like is the ones that try to snatch my money away.
—BB
Dallas County officials kept trying to force Binion’s return to Texas, but they met with no success in Nevada courts. In August 1950 D. W. Priest, a state district judge in Las Vegas, granted Binion’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus, which in effect blocked extradition efforts. The judge also had some advice for Dallas prosecutors: leave Las Vegas “and don’t bother to come back.” Even pleas for divine intervention went unheeded. That same month, a Texas tent evangelist named Bernard C. Morris held a revival in Reno and prayed for Binion to be cast out of Nevada. But the Cowboy managed to stay put.
Prosecutors settled for second best, and took Harry Urban to court. Binion’s suave lieutenant—a “mild-looking middle-aged man,” in one reporter’s summation, “with a faultless manicure and a Countess Mara tie”—faced charges of operating a network of illegal policy games, the Hi-Noon, the Tip-Top, and the Silver Dollar among them. Witnesses for the state included an accountant who testified he had been shading the books for Binion and Urban since 1937, and that their tax returns vastly underreported their income. In a single year, he said, one Binion and Urban partnership—one among many—took in more than $733,000 in policy receipts, but reported a net income of only $23,000. Prosecutors introduced stacks of checks signed by Urban in Dallas and cashed by Binion in Las Vegas. Binion hadn’t even bothered to take them to the bank; he endorsed the checks at cashiers’ cages at various casinos. More came from the testimony of Pete White, an investigator for the DA’s office who had gone undercover to learn the inner workings of policy games. Disguised as a bum, with shabby clothes and a scraggly beard, White lived in fleabag hotels and listened to gambling deals through thin walls. He drifted from dice den to policy cave, taking notes when he could, and getting to know the precise routes of the bagmen.
On the strength of such evidence, Urban was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison. He also faced financial ruin as his home and its contents were sold to satisfy tax liens. “They didn’t even leave me the trash cans and the garden hose,” he lamented. His two Cadillacs—the ones with the custom-made holsters—went on the block too. Yet Binion, the bigger fish, remained free and prosperous in Las Vegas.
In the summer of 1950, District Attorney Wilson learned that Theron Lamar Caudle, the assistant attorney general in charge of the federal tax division, would be in Texas. Caudle was a large, voluble North Carolina lawyer with wavy brown hair and a grits-and-magnolia accent. He made his first stop in Tyler, in East Texas, for a bar association speech. Wilson loaded up the seized records from Binion’s operations and drove a hundred miles to meet with Caudle. The two had a brief chat and agreed to talk again in Dallas. Wilson was in pursuit of a solitary goal: to persuade federal tax officials to mount a case against Binion.
One day later, Wilson and Caudle met during a party in the presidential suite of the Adolphus Hotel in downtown Dallas, a few blocks from the district attorney’s office. Among the suite’s winged chairs and gilt furnishings, as some sipped coffee and tea from fine china and others downed good whiskey straight up, Wilson hauled out Binion’s tax documents again. Caudle, with his honeyed drawl, seemed to demonstrate a good grasp of the material, and he assured the district attorney that he would take a personal interest in the case. “This is the big one I’ve been waiting for,” Caudle said. “We’ll surely prosecute it.”
Wilson left the Adolphus feeling satisfied and optimistic. If the feds could get Binion back to Texas, Wilson would take it from there. But the DA soon found he had misplaced his confidence, for despite Caudle’s promises, the case languished. No one could say why, but it probably had something to do with President Harry Truman’s firing of Caudle some months later, after the assistant attorney general was implicated in a shakedown scheme. There were public accusations of discounted mink coats for Caudle’s wife and gifts of new cars and free trips to Europe in exchange for favorable treatment of tax scofflaws. Caudle denied much of it, but he did admit to taking a Florida fishing trip on a boat owned by a businessman under investigation for tax fraud. The name of the craft: The Naughty Lady. Caudle was convicted of conspiracy to defraud the government and sent to prison.
No evidence suggested that Binion’s case had been part of the assorted bribery schemes, but the timing couldn’t have been better for him. Nevada authorities wouldn’t touch him, his lawyers had fought off all attempts to send him to Texas for state prosecution, and now a powerful man who had promised to pursue him in federal court was gone in disgrace. Once again he appeared to have given his enemies the slip. Binion’s legendary luck was holding.
• • •
Throughout November 1950, Lieutenant Butler of the Dallas police often went to the Fair Park office he shared with a Texas Ranger. He would sit down at his typewriter, roll in a sheet of paper, and record the latest violent hijinks of the usual punks and miscreants. These writings served to catalog the tips that he had collected, but also provided a release for his frustration. He always knew far more than he could act upon. Mildred Noble’s death, which had taken place a year ago and remained unsolved, left him especially disconsolate. “Noble has often made the statement—to lots of people—that if the Police did nothing about his wife’s murder by the time of the anniversary of her death, that he was going to do something about it himself,” Butler wrote one day. “No one would blame him. There are so many political ties in this mess that nothing would ever come of it if a man was arrested—which is not probable.”
As for Noble, once again someone had gone after him. “It is known that Saturday night some people went to the Noble ranch but he was not there,” Butler typed. “They were reported to have gone back the next day, Sunday, and set fire to some of Noble’s property. This was done to get him out of the house to fight the fire. Then they intended to kill him.” Because Noble failed to appear and no shots were fired, police didn’t classify it as a murder attempt.
Butler kept typing dense gray paragraphs of rumors, minutiae, and a couple of dire observations on the state of crime-fighting in the county. “The outlaws are in Dallas in droves. They seem to be having a convention in West Dallas,” he observed. “It is known that [Sheriff] Decker is very uneasy about the whole thing. His hands seem to be tied. Most of the punks are armed with pistols and some are carrying shotguns.”
It was, in other words, status quo in
Dallas, though perhaps a bit more ominous this time. As Butler wrote, “There seems to be a killing in the air.”
• • •
Las Vegas featured a number of notable performances the week of November 15, 1950. The Zany-Acks, a comedy singing trio, played spirited gigs at the Golden Nugget’s lounge. The Desert Inn brought in Minsky’s Follies, and no less than Arthur Godfrey proclaimed that the cast boasted “the most beautiful girls in the world.” But the real spectacle took place a few hundred feet from Glitter Gulch as the Kefauver committee’s road show made its Vegas appearance.
The brown-brick federal building at 300 Stewart Avenue contained a post office on the first floor and a cavernous courtroom on the second, where the judge’s bench—lacquered oak, lined with steel—was conveniently bulletproof. Three members of the committee, including Kefauver himself, set up shop there: a rectitudinous lineup of bespectacled men in gray suits. On this morning, the hallway outside the courtroom was thick with sharply dressed casino owners and rumpled newspapermen. A small journalism riot erupted as Cliff Jones emerged from the elevator into the second-floor hallway. Jones embodied the singular Vegas perfecta: in addition to owning a piece of the Thunderbird—a Strip palace whose construction had been financed by Meyer Lansky—he served as Nevada’s lieutenant governor. He therefore played the dual role of sworn witness and official in charge of welcoming the committee to town. “So many flashbulbs popped in his face,” one reporter observed, “that he was partially blinded when he went in to greet the senators.”
While the action played out behind the leather-upholstered doors, some of those who had been subpoenaed to appear waited on hard hallway benches, projecting studied nonchalance and forced jocularity. No one wanted to admit to fear of Kefauver and his grandstanding crew. “Privately, my father and his friends had joked that the Commission would never shut them down,” recalled Susan Berman, Davie Berman’s daughter. “They never had respect for politicians since they had made a career of bribing them.” Yet, she said, the casino operators regarded Kefauver and his committee with understandable wariness. “Who needed this dirty laundry aired before the nation?”