Blood Aces Read online

  Binion’s lawyers appealed his case to the U.S. Supreme Court. His indictment on tax charges, which had come after he had already been sentenced for tax fraud, arose from “a political conspiracy to persecute and oppress” Binion, his lawyers argued. Such treatment was “an abuse of federal process in aid of state court prosecution.” They also alleged that Judge Davidson’s remarks about Herbert and Mildred Noble, not to mention his reference to Al Capone, were absolute proof of prejudice and “willful disregard of the rights of the accused.”

  If Binion’s attorneys thought that was harsh, they should have seen the confidential memo that Lieutenant Butler of the Dallas police wrote for the FBI. The bureau had asked Butler for an up-to-date summation of Binion’s criminal career. His lengthy essay included the usual dead people—Loudermilk, Freiden, the Nobles, et al.—but also offered this tidbit: Binion had “a private cemetary [sic] equipped with a lime pit in which he disposed of bodies,” a boneyard that police had never quite managed to find. Butler also reported that Binion, in partnership with Mickey Cohen, “was very interested in getting a policy operation started in the Los Angeles negro sections.”

  The Dallas investigator, who knew what his audience wanted, went on, page after page, with descriptions of Binion’s wealth and resultant political influence: “For an illiterate Binion has acquired a vast fortune,” he wrote. “He early learned what power money had, and what he couldn’t steal, he bought.” Butler also warned the feds to take special care with their informants. “Some precautions should be taken to protect all important witnesses for the Government,” he said. “It has been proven beyond a doubt that Binion will not hesitate to kill anyone that becomes a threat to himself, his money or his freedom.”

  • • •

  In January 1953, Attorney General McGranery began to worry that Binion would flee Nevada to avoid prosecution. He instructed FBI director Hoover to begin a “discreet” twenty-four-hour surveillance. An assistant to Hoover phoned Arthur Cornelius Jr., the agent in charge in Salt Lake City, and ordered the stakeout. Binion might try to leave the country, the assistant warned Cornelius. He must be watched at all times, and any suspicious movements had to be reported immediately to bureau headquarters. Cornelius asked if he should place a wiretap on Binion’s phones. Just watch the man, he was told.

  FBI agents rented a house across the street from Binion’s residence, and positioned cars at the end of the street. Hoover personally phoned McGranery that afternoon to tell him that the operation had commenced. “The attorney general,” Hoover wrote to his senior staff, “was most appreciative of the work of the Bureau in this regard.”

  That’s because the attorney general had no idea how poorly the operation was proceeding. The AG’s orders aside, this was not a subtle surveillance. Crew-cut G-men sitting idly in plain Ford Fairlanes, pretending to read the newspaper all afternoon, were pretty easy to spot on Bonanza Road. Even the kids were laughing at them. “If we didn’t have anything to do we’d jump in the car and let them follow us,” said Brenda Binion Michael. She was eleven then, and her brother Jack, almost sixteen, would drive the family Buick. “I’d be on my knees looking out the back window,” she remembered. “I’d say, ‘Here they come, Jack.’ As soon as they figured out my Dad wasn’t with us, they’d turn around and go back.”

  Although the stakeout amused his children, it angered and worried Binion, and he was determined to halt it right away. He tried to flag down one FBI car as it drove past his house, but the driver wouldn’t stop. Binion climbed into his baby-blue Cadillac and told Gold Dollar to take him downtown to the county courthouse.

  Later that morning the phone rang in the FBI’s Las Vegas operations: Captain Ralph Lamb of the sheriff’s department calling. He explained that he was at that very moment sitting in the district attorney’s office with Binion. He wanted to know if the FBI had initiated a surveillance. This was no small matter, Lamb said, because hostile racketeers often tailed Binion, and he couldn’t tell the agents from the hoods. “There are people who want to bump him off,” he said. “He’s scared to death.” Lamb proposed an alternative: if the FBI wanted to know where he was, Binion would be happy to keep them fully informed.

  Agent Cornelius called FBI HQ with this news. But when Hoover learned of Binion’s offer to self-report, he was less than grateful: “We want no favors from him.” Cornelius also warned his supervisors about Binion’s close ties to the sheriff’s department, suggesting that Lamb’s officers might disrupt the surveillance in the guise of investigation. For some reason, FBI brass thought they could handle that by letting Lamb know that the men following Binion indeed hailed from the FBI. Cornelius did as ordered, phoning Lamb and confirming the surveillance. This was “strictly confidential information,” he told Lamb. Which meant, don’t tell Binion.

  The FBI might as well have put it on a billboard. The information immediately made its way to Lamb’s good friend and benefactor, and from there it was soon in the hands of Binion’s pal at the Las Vegas Sun, Hank Greenspun.

  Hours after Cornelius’s call to Lamb, as the agents continued their stakeout, a 1948 Pontiac approached one of the FBI sedans from the rear. There was a flash of light—from a camera, not a gun—and the Pontiac sped away. Later that same day, radio station KENO, a Greenspun property, broke the news: Federal agents had put Binion and his family under twenty-four-hour watch. The order for this surveillance, the radio station said, had come from the U.S. attorney general himself.

  The broadcast made for some deeply unhappy FBI officials in Washington. Cornelius got on the phone in a desperate attempt to placate his bosses. The license plates on the surveillance cars had been changed, he told them. Agents were making “every effort” to keep the stakeout discreet, but the bureau’s top brass had to understand that Las Vegas was a small town where such matters proved difficult to hide.

  Hoover seethed at Cornelius’s excuses. “This job is to perform, not constantly grouse about the difficulties,” he wrote at the bottom of one report. “Tell him so when he calls in.”

  The bureau’s situation worsened the next morning, when the Sun gave the story a full front-page ride. A headline screamed, “‘I’m Not Running Away,’ Says Binion as Federal Agents Cover Residence.” The Sun ran two accompanying photos of FBI agents sitting in their cars as they conducted their “not-too-obvious” surveillance. One of the agents had ducked as his picture was taken. “Camera shy,” the newspaper remarked.

  The ridicule traveled fast and well. Hoover sent a memo to Attorney General McGranery that day with details of the Sun’s coverage. Three days later, on the evening of January 19, 1953, McGranery phoned Hoover. This was McGranery’s last full day in office; Dwight Eisenhower would be sworn in as president the next morning.

  Hoover was out, so McGranery spoke to the director’s assistant, L. B. Nichols. The attorney general said he had been giving the Binion case some thought. What do you think, he asked Nichols, of this “rather silly” surveillance of Binion? Nichols dodged, claiming he had been out of the office for the past few days and wasn’t current on developments. The stakeout, the attorney general mused, seemed to serve no further purpose and had become an embarrassment “to the agents.” Perhaps it might be best to call the whole thing off.

  Within hours of McGranery’s caving in, Hoover ordered the agents to leave their posts on Bonanza Road. The FBI’s operation had lasted all of six days.

  • • •

  Binion had deeply embarrassed the U.S. Department of Justice, and it was not in the agency’s nature to shrug off insults from gangsters. A new attorney general had taken office—Herbert Brownell—but the desire to nail Binion endured. As Brownell told his freshly hired staff, high-profile criminal cases represented the department’s best chance to generate good publicity and erase the memories of scandal. Two months after the botched stakeout, Hoover was advised by his agents that a couple of Justice investigators—not from the FBI—had been appo
inted to probe Binion’s affairs. “The original request apparently came from the Attorney General himself,” a memo to Hoover said. “He is placing two undercover officers in the Las Vegas area for the purpose of developing information as to whether Binion carries a firearm on his person.”

  That was like asking whether Binion wore a hat. He had carried handguns in his pocket or his boot since he was a teenager. Now an assistant attorney general, Warren Olney III, believed Binion—a “vicious character,” in his estimation—could be prosecuted for violating the Federal Firearms Act, which prohibited anyone convicted of a violent crime from taking a gun across state lines. This was the same Warren Olney who had warned Texas legislators in 1951 against gangsters’ infiltration of the oil business.

  His new idea found an advocate in Al Rosen, one of Hoover’s top-ranking assistants. “If he [Binion] went into Montana,” Rosen advised Hoover, “we could arrange with local cooperative police to make an appropriate check of his person on some subterfuge.” Or if Binion happened to drive across the Hoover Dam into Arizona, “we could have the national park rangers shake him down.”

  This seemed a bit much, even to the FBI director. “No,” he wrote. “While I would like to bring Binion to justice, we do not have jurisdiction in this matter. It is a straight Treasury responsibility.”

  The bureau already had its own campaign against Binion. For a while the FBI believed he had hired someone to kill Dallas DA Wade. “You are instructed to give this investigation urgent priority,” Hoover cabled to agents in Dallas, Los Angeles, and Salt Lake City. That business died after some research revealed the source of the allegation: a sad-sack mob pretender who had first gone to the police to complain that he had been the victim of a theft—$16 by an Amarillo prostitute. He had thrown in the Binion story as a bonus. “A quote screwball end quote,” one subsequent bureau report explained. “Apparently likes to be considered a quote big shot unquote.”

  The FBI was also sweating Binion’s political connections. Hoover sent a memo to Attorney General Brownell noting a “report that Senator McCarran of Nevada had assured an associate of Binion that he would not be returned to Texas.” In another memo to the AG, Hoover warned that an informant “has advised that it is Binion’s desire to get political control of Las Vegas and the entire state of Nevada . . . He also has advised that such action is dependent upon whether Binion is successful in defeating the prosecution pending against him.” That investigation fizzled too.

  A separate FBI “radiogram” said that according to an informant, Binion’s Las Vegas employees had undergone special firearms training for undisclosed purposes. It added that Binion “had been responsible either directly or indirectly for a number of murders and that he [the informant] had now received some information indicating that Binion had allegedly spent $300,000 in an effort to have his case with the Internal Revenue Bureau fixed.” Another bureau memo to Hoover reported that Binion was “very worried” about whether he had reported income from his gambling operations at the Top O’Hill Terrace. Once again, the FBI demonstrated a tenuous grasp of Binion-related matters. The memo placed the notorious casino in a city on the Texas coast, about 320 miles south of its actual location.

  Hoover and his subordinates need not have worried so much, because on April 13, 1953, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Binion’s appeal. And one month later, the justices rejected his motion to rehear the case. Aside from some minor courtroom maneuverings, Binion had exhausted his legal remedies. He was headed to Texas to stand trial.

  • • •

  Binion had been ordered to appear in Texas on June 8, 1953, for arraignment on federal charges. Imaginative lawyers in the U.S. attorney general’s office began to fear once more that he had nefarious plans. On June 4, an assistant attorney general stopped by the office of assistant FBI director Nichols and said he was worried that Binion might try to leave the country. He requested that the bureau put Binion under a twenty-four-hour surveillance until he actually walked into the federal courthouse in Texas. Nichols recalled that the last Vegas stakeout had not gone well. As he diplomatically described it, “There was some aura of embarrassment to our agents out there.” But after initial hesitation, Director Hoover came to agree with the attorney general’s office. “I think we should do it,” he wrote.

  Under the supervision of Special Agent in Charge Cornelius—again—FBI men began watching Binion around the clock. That wasn’t all: They set up checkpoints along all highways leading out of Las Vegas—south to Phoenix, west to Los Angeles, east to Amarillo, and north to nothing but desert. Agents patrolled the downtown train station, and the bureau ordered all four airlines that serviced Vegas to notify it if Binion boarded a commercial flight. Should Binion try to leave on a private charter or a friend’s aircraft, the agents had that covered too. “Arrangements were made,” the local office reported to FBI headquarters, “for a privately owned airplane and pilot to be constantly available for use of the surveilling agents for pursuit purposes if needed.”

  Determined not to botch it this time, Cornelius believed his men had blanketed every possible way out of town. “Agents are to survaill [sic] him wherever he goes,” he assured Hoover in a telex.

  The mission was working perfectly—until it actually had to work.

  • • •

  On June 5, one hour after midnight, Binion and his son Jack walked from his house and climbed into the backseat of his 1952 Cadillac. The car—an Imperial sedan—was a deco luxury masterpiece with a curvilinear body and a grand, aerodynamic sweep. The front bumper, a muscular brace of gleaming chrome, led the way with twin nose cones, known as Dagmars, in honor of an amply proportioned female television personality. The cabin, with room for eight, felt as spacious as a Pullman sleeper. All of it rolled on wide tires whose broad whitewalls were evocative of a rich man wearing spats. And it went fast—a machine that could hit 125 miles per hour on the open highway without breaking a mechanical sweat. It was, in fact, the most powerful mass-produced car built in America.

  Now Gold Dollar drove as the car shot through Binion’s gate, turned onto Bonanza Road, and headed west. FBI agents in three separate sedans followed. Once on the highway, going toward Tonapah, the Cadillac cruised at 85 miles per hour. One of the FBI men stopped to call his office. The other two agents, driving in six-cylinder Fords, struggled to keep pace with the V-8 Caddy. Binion said something to Gold Dollar, who braked hard and made a sharp turn onto a dirt road that led into the desert.

  The two agents went that way too, their cars bouncing over the washboard road, but they were blinded by the cloud of dust in the Caddy’s wake. This continued for five miles, the agents pursuing the cloud and doing their best not to veer off the road and into the scrub. “Agents were driving at risk of their lives,” a bureau report said. Then the dust vanished, the air clear again, as the agents came to an intersection with a paved road. The two FBI cars idled in the deep desert night as the bureau men scanned the horizon: nothing in all directions except to the south, where the lights of Las Vegas faded the blackness. To their dismay, there was no sign of Binion’s car. They had no choice now but to split up. The first agent drove left on the paved road, and the second went right—“at top speed,” the FBI noted—but neither one caught sight of the Cadillac again. One of them stopped to call Cornelius with the dread news: ten minutes into the tail, their man had escaped.

  For the next five hours, Cornelius and his agents combed Las Vegas in a frenzy, searching for Binion, or at least his car. They checked his house, and they checked the Horseshoe. The airport and the train station too. Cornelius also contacted his men at the highway checkpoints. Agents phoned confidential informants who had spied on Binion in the past, hoping for a shred of a clue to his whereabouts. All of it came up empty.

  Finally, at ten thirty that morning, Washington time—a full six hours after the operation fell apart—Cornelius called bureau headquarters and talked to assistant director Rosen. T
hey had lost Binion, Cornelius admitted. Even worse, they had no idea where they should look now. As was customary, Rosen immediately typed up a memo, and attempted to obscure the depth of the calamity. “Cornelius called to advise that Binion is presently not under surveillance,” he wrote.

  The director of the FBI was in no mood for mincing words. Only minutes before Cornelius’s call, Hoover had notified the attorney general’s office that the surveillance was proceeding perfectly. Now he would have to phone the AG back and admit disaster, something he did not do well. “This is atrocious,” he wrote to his assistants. “Get facts promptly.”

  Cornelius again tried to defend the actions of his men and himself. The surveillance had been assembled on “very short notice,” he said. The agents were working on little food and no sleep. And that chauffeur of Binion’s could drive really fast. This failed to mollify Hoover, in part because Cornelius had already seen his share of professional difficulties. In July 1952, when he was in charge of the bureau’s Philadelphia office, his supervisors put him on probation for his “failure to develop a satisfactory criminal informant program.” The probation continued when, three months later, managers found “delinquencies” during an office inspection. Cornelius was transferred to the Salt Lake City office, the FBI’s Siberia, where he had presided over the first catastrophic surveillance of Binion.

  Cornelius had rallied briefly in February 1953, when he happily announced, via a press release, the arrest of a high-profile suspect named Charley Finn. As one half of a notorious duo known as the Flying Finn Twins, Charley Finn was wanted for stealing an airplane. Unfortunately for Cornelius, he had arrested the wrong Finn twin—he mistakenly nabbed the identical George—and the mix-up caused the bureau no small shame. The special agent’s probation continued, and when another office inspection the next month found more procedural violations, it was extended once again.