Blood Aces Page 19
Binion also imported luxurious touches he remembered from Top O’Hill—free drinks and courtesy limo rides for gamblers were a Horseshoe trademark—but he democratized it as only a poor boy could do. Give them “good food cheap, good whiskey cheap and good gamble,” all of them, from the scuffed to the shiny. Maybe you drove a Rolls and lived in Malibu, or maybe your suit came from Sears and the wife clipped coupons at the kitchen table. It didn’t matter to Binion. The way to get rich, he loved to say, was to treat little people like big people.
With the Horseshoe’s opening, Binion had shaken his Texas refugee status and secured a place of triumph. Years later he would routinely be referred to as the king of gambling in Vegas. This is where it started, at the corner of Second and Fremont on the southeastern end of Glitter Gulch. “I’m just a gambler,” Binion said once. “I’m not a businessman.” He wasn’t a detail man either. He generally filed the fine points of business under the heading of a favorite phrase: “This, that and the other.” He kept no calendar, and rarely consulted a clock. “I don’t like too many appointments,” he said, “and I don’t like to be nowhere at a certain time.” But every morning he checked the chili from the Horseshoe kitchen to ensure that it conformed to Bill Decker’s jailhouse recipe. And he kept a sharp eye on the casino’s operations, though not from an office or by poring over the books. Binion managed his entire enterprise from a booth at the Horseshoe restaurant, where his sole accessory of executive life was a table telephone. As he had always done, he went with his instincts, and success followed.
Gambling was now a billion-dollar-a-year enterprise in Nevada, and Binion pulled his bounteous share. Money poured into the Horseshoe’s counting room so fast the staff couldn’t keep up with it. “Their money management system is simple,” one of their lawyers said. “Just pile cash on the floor until the pile gets too big, then start another one.”
Binion left tabulating of the take to a close friend, one Robert “Doby Doc” Caudill, a cattleman and junk collector who dressed in bib overalls accented with a diamond stickpin, and carried a pearl-handled revolver in his boot. He had been a bootlegger during Prohibition and—some lawmen believed—sold narcotics and stolen jewelry. This was the kind of finance man to whom Binion could naturally relate. “He come here in 1906 and done been to college,” Binion said, detailing Caudill’s accounting credentials. His frugality was such that even a movie star couldn’t bend it. “Sophie Tucker . . . went out to Doby Doc’s to see all of his junk,” Binion recalled. “So Sophie Tucker says, ‘Doby, give me a souvenir.’ He says, ‘There’s a 80-pound anvil you can have. Just pick it up.’”
At the Horseshoe, Caudill counted the cash after every eight-hour shift, before taking a nap in his room upstairs at the Apache Hotel. “Never got tired,” Binion said, “because he slept three times a day.”
• • •
Binion had the hottest dice tables in town, so why not bring in some card players to juice the scene that much more? Make it a contest between two of the most skillful poker players in the country. Pull them out of back rooms and put them on a world stage. It could be a marathon poker battle for the ages, and a publicity bonanza for the Horseshoe. Even the wily Binion couldn’t foresee that this would turn into one of the most storied duels in modern American poker lore. Some possibility exists that the event might have resembled the legend.
In relating the intimate history of high-stakes poker, at least in the first three-fourths of twentieth-century America, professional card players employed oral history in the manner of lost jungle tribes. This was a hidden game with arcane codes of behavior and no institutional governance. A secret and isolated society with an aversion to outsiders tended to stay secret and isolated. Academic gumshoes exploring the folkways of the five-card-stud demimonde had yet to appear in any number, and players themselves avoided outside scrutiny because that would expose them to their worst enemies—hijackers and tax collectors. Any suggestion of broadcasting a poker game on television would have been considered dangerous lunacy. Books by insiders were rare. If a big-time poker master were somehow inclined to write about his profession, it would be quickly dismissed as counterproductive. Why waste time scribbling when you could be winning money at the table?
But the players did at least talk about the games and their heroic fellow gamblers—many of whom tended toward the dangerously exotic, if not psychotic—to each other, and maybe a few trusted associates. News of big pots, crazy bluffs, savvy raises, strong-arm robberies, and sensational wins made the circuit. And players gossiped like anybody else. Even on the mildest of days, such gossip spun itself into tall tales.
From this realm comes the story of the great Horseshoe battle: Nick “the Greek” Dandalos, international gambler of no small renown, was hanging around Binion’s brand-new joint one day, and mentioned that he wanted to play in a poker game for the highest stakes ever. Binion got on the phone to an old pal from his youth, Johnny Moss, who had developed into one of the greatest players around. “I think you should come out here and have some fun,” Binion supposedly told him.
The finely tailored Dandalos cultivated an air of mysterious aristocracy, and floated about with a beautiful woman on each arm as he dispensed the airy pronouncements of a daredevil patrician. “I would rather fall from a mountaintop than die of boredom on the plain,” he liked to say. Another guy who went by “the Greek,” the oddsmaker Jimmy Snyder, stood in awe of Dandalos’s Continental savoir faire. “He made Omar Sharif look like a truck driver,” Snyder said. This had been both bred and schooled into Dandalos. His godfather back in Greece was said to be a shipping magnate, and he claimed a university degree in philosophy.
To someone like Binion, this was tantamount to hailing from Neptune. “Well, Nick the Greek, he was the strangest character I ever seen,” he remembered. “He was a kinky ol’ guy. He’d put a snake in your pocket and ask you for a match.” When flush, he kept stacks of cash—hundreds of thousands of dollars—in cardboard boxes in his unlocked Las Vegas garage or crammed under his clothes in bureau drawers in his bedroom. “Nobody ever knew where he got that money,” Binion said.
Next to gambling and women, Dandalos loved poetry, and his favorite piece of verse was the finale of Henley’s “Invictus”: “I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.” One starstruck girlfriend said Dandalos won bets by claiming he could “recite by heart any poem in the English language.” She added, “I never saw him fail.”
Moss, it can be safely said, never quoted poetry of any sort, although he was pretty good at conjuring some truncated, existentialist card-table haiku. “What good is money,” he liked to say, “if you can’t gamble with it?” His family had come to North Texas in a covered wagon in 1907, his mother dying en route of a burst appendix. When Moss was four, his father lost a leg after a telephone pole fell on him. Moss had to drop out of school—he managed to complete second grade—and help support the family by selling newspapers on the streets of Dallas. This led to more lucrative pursuits. “I learned how to gamble when I was about nine years old, shooting craps and playing dominoes,” Moss said. “I made a living at dominoes by the time I was 15.”
He received his early poker training at a Dallas dive called the Otters’ Club, where he was hired as a “lookout man” to catch cheaters. After a series of scuffling jobs—in movie theaters, pool halls, oil fields—he finally found his niche as a poker professional. Moss stayed mainly in the Texas-Louisiana-Oklahoma circuit, playing in small-town Elks clubs and smoky motel rooms on two-lane highways. When not deep in the cards, he was hustling golf games or betting on horses, and he made and lost fortunes with barely a blink. In one high-stakes poker game in Dallas, he won $250,000 and instructed his long-suffering wife, Virgie, to go out and look for the nicest house she could find. She located the dream home, but Moss told her, “Sorry, you looked too long.” He had blown all the money at the track.
When Binion called him, the story goes,
Moss—doughy, pasty, expressionless—was wrapping up a three-day, nonstop game in Odessa, Texas. Without delay, he flew to Vegas, grabbed a cab to the Horseshoe, handed his luggage to a porter, and waltzed into the casino ready to play. He and Dandalos shook hands, then sat at a kidney-shaped, felt-topped table on the casino floor and commenced a game of cards that turned into a poker death march.
Back and forth went Moss and the Greek, for days, weeks, like two great armies seizing then ceding territory. They drank gallons of water and coffee as they played, and consumed countless sandwiches from Binion’s restaurant. Spectators crowded six-deep at the rail. Moss never looked up from his cards long enough to see if it was day or night. The two players adjourned for sleep only once or twice a week. After Moss returned from one nap, the Greek greeted him with, “What are you going to do, Johnny? Sleep your life away?”
Superhuman stamina was a badge of honor for professional players. Dandalos once boasted to a friend of having won a weeklong game despite suffering a “severe” heart attack halfway through. He barely paused long enough to clutch his chest, in his telling, before raking in a pot. At the Horseshoe, he felt little need for rest and found lively activities to fill the breaks. One account has him escorting a visitor, none other than Albert Einstein, on a walking tour of Fremont Street, introducing him as “little Al from Princeton—controls a lot of the action around Jersey.”
At the table, the play brought many moments of high drama as Moss and the Greek engaged in five-card stud, which is considered the classic of poker games. The first card is dealt facedown, with the next four faceup. Bets are made after each round. In one game, the Greek’s reserves had dipped to $250,000, putting his back to the wall. The cards came, and as the players kept betting, the Greek’s bankroll shrank.
Moss had a nine in the hole, with a six, a nine, and a two showing: a pair of nines. The Greek’s up cards were an eight, a six, and a four. Moss figured his opponent was banking on that slimmest of hopes, an inside straight. The dealer gave Moss his last card faceup—a three. The Greek’s final card was a jack. He bet $50,000. Moss believed he was bluffing, and raised the bet. Dandalos, who had only $140,000 left, put it all in the pot.
“I guess I have to call,” the Greek said, “because I have a jack in the hole.”
Moss answered, “If you have a jack in the hole, Greek, you’re going to win one hell of a pot.”
Dandalos flipped his hole card over: jack of diamonds. He reached across the table and with both arms collected a pot of more than $500,000. Though Moss had lost a bundle, his gambler’s intuition told him he would prevail in the end, because the Greek had revealed an excessive fondness for the long shot. “It was just a matter of time,” Moss said.
A lot of time. The epic clash finally ended after five months, when Dandalos is said to have folded his hand, risen from his chair, and resigned with, “Mr. Moss, I have to let you go.”
By some accounts, Moss walked away with as much as $3 million cash. A few versions of the story have him, as he basked in the glow of victory, immediately migrating to the other Horseshoe games and financial catastrophe. “Moss went over to the dice table and dropped most, if not all, of the money he won from the Greek,” said poker player Doyle Brunson. “That illustrated just how cunning Benny Binion could be.”
Did the Moss-Greek war really happen? No definite proof exists, one way or the other. Not a single photograph of it has surfaced, and the local papers didn’t mention it at the time. But it’s a pretty good tale, and it’s still being retold as part of the modern game’s creation myth—the chrysalis stage of professional poker as spectator sport.
If such a contest occurred, and if it stirred no small degree of excitement, with hundreds craning for a glimpse of two legendary gamblers playing cards, then Binion would have remembered that. He would have recalled the buzz, the attendant casino revenue, and the way Vegas was alive for months with talk of the big poker game at the Horseshoe.
That would have been a powerful enough memory to survive Binion’s near destruction, which was—and of this there is no doubt—about to unfold.
Benny, Teddy Jane, and the children, along with some friends, out for a night on the Strip.
16
“NO WAY TO DUCK”
Believe in justice. But spell it “Just Us.”
—BB
Back in Dallas, Henry Wade had been elected district attorney in 1950, succeeding Will Wilson, who had moved on to the Texas Supreme Court. Wade was a short, powerfully built former FBI agent who chewed cigars and enjoyed passing afternoons at the Lakewood Country Club playing dominoes. In the courtroom, he embraced the persona of a drawling avenger—another unforgiving, cagey Texas farm boy—and later in his career persuaded a jury to sentence a pair of kidnappers to 5,005 years in prison, then the longest punishment in the history of American jurisprudence. Wade hired and promoted assistant DAs who followed his merciless, scorched-earth approach to prosecution, and this win-at-all-costs ethos made him a revered figure in the deeply conservative precincts of Dallas.
Now, in early 1952, Wade found himself disturbed by an old, unresolved, and frustrating case, so he made straight for one of his newly hired assistants, Bill Alexander. Tall and rail thin, Alexander had been a decorated infantry captain in World War II, and wore the perpetual look of someone searching for something to shoot. On this morning he sat at his gray metal desk in the DA’s offices on the sixth floor of the county criminal courts building, puffing an unfiltered Camel. Black rotary-dial phones rang and secretaries’ manual typewriters clattered. Alexander glanced up to see Wade approaching across the linoleum with a cigar in his mouth and a thick stack of papers in his hands. One peek at the stack and he knew what he had inherited: Benny Binion’s criminal file. Wade dropped the papers on Alexander’s desk and said only, “Get him.”
Authorities in Nevada had justified their refusal to extradite Binion with the rationale that gambling was legal in that state. Murder, however, was not. If Alexander could reinvestigate Binion’s Dallas years and develop a plausible homicide case against him, Nevada’s argument would be moot. After studying the file—it contained years’ worth of reports, witness statements, and police investigative memos—Alexander hit the streets. For days he haunted the old hotels where Binion’s gambling halls had operated and the shabby bars that had hosted his policy games. Although Binion had been gone for more than five years, Alexander had no trouble finding people who remembered him, and who retained deep knowledge of his assorted, alleged misdeeds. “The only problem was, nobody would talk,” Alexander recalled. “Binion had more friends than Wade did.”
Eyewitnesses to Binion’s Dallas mayhem combined their clear memories with a strong aversion to sworn statements. “They’d say, ‘Mr. Bill, I was there, but I’m not going to testify against Mr. Binion,’” Alexander said. Like many in his line of work, Binion had kept most of his bloodshed within the outlaw family. “He may have been tough,” Alexander said. “He may have been criminal. But he didn’t bother anybody.”
In general, those who had known Binion still liked and respected him. And they still feared him. More than once, Alexander said, potential witnesses recalled vividly that “people who screwed with Binion’s business developed problems.”
Alexander was not one to coddle criminals. Some years later, as a prosecutor, he told the mother of a murder defendant who begged him for mercy on her son, “Lady, I’ll step on your boy like he was a cockroach.” But now he was forced to admit that the new Binion investigation had no muscle. Though Alexander’s lack of success disappointed Wade, the district attorney was determined to keep pushing. When he wrote an angry letter, it all turned.
• • •
More than two years after Will Wilson had instigated it, the federal tax investigation of Binion remained alive but close to dormant. The file had passed from agency to department, functionary to bureaucrat, until early 1952, when the Da
llas office of Internal Revenue referred it to the local U.S. attorney’s office, attaching the label “racketeer case.” Frank Potter, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, didn’t believe he had enough to convict Binion—he privately characterized the evidence as “rather slim and doubtful”—but he knew that dismissing the case would set off a political storm in Dallas.
Potter convened a federal grand jury and presented evidence from Binion’s 1949 tax returns, despite the prosecutor’s own serious misgivings. The case against Binion was “very weak,” Potter again acknowledged. “A great deal of our case was based upon testimony of gamblers . . . who were certainly not very credible witnesses.”
Grand jurors nonetheless indicted Binion for tax evasion, which Potter attributed to the Cowboy’s notoriety. If the case had been brought against “any ordinary defendant,” he said, “we could not have secured an indictment.” The government’s chances of succeeding at trial were about 50 percent, he calculated, and only 25 percent in appellate court. Because of that, and the potential cost of a lengthy trial, Potter reached an agreement with Binion’s lawyers to have him plead no contest in Nevada. In return Binion agreed to pay a $15,000 fine and $20,000 in back taxes.
This represented, for Binion, a most desirable outcome—a penalty that amounted to pocket change, required no prison time, and forced no return to Texas. All he had to do was enter a plea and turn over a cashier’s check, and he would be free of this legal matter that had dogged him for years. Likewise, the U.S. attorney reasoned that because Binion had been cited and punished, all parties would now be satisfied. Potter, in fact, believed he would be congratulated for a job well done under difficult circumstances.