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  And now this debacle. Not only had they lost Binion, but Cornelius and crew had not thought to record the license number of his Cadillac. They had to wake up the superintendent of the Nevada Highway Patrol, who went to his closed offices in Carson City and pulled the information: Nevada 41-151. At least they had the tag number. All they had to do now was find the car attached to it.

  • • •

  There it was, some thirteen hours later, a baby-blue blur: Gold Dollar topping 100 miles per hour as he neared Grants, New Mexico, on Route 66, at two in the afternoon. They were five hundred miles southeast of Las Vegas, traveling in the general direction of Texas. “Observed in instant car,” an agent wrote, “was a heavy set Negro who was driving.” Binion was lying down in the backseat, probably asleep.

  FBI men in three cars picked up the chase, and this time they managed to stay with the Caddy, all the way into Albuquerque. Binion and Gold Dollar made a brief stop at a downtown boot-and-saddle shop, then paused for twenty-five minutes at the Owl Café, where, the FBI noted, “they apparently had something to eat.” Then they hit the highway again, making their way to Clines Corners, New Mexico, “at a progressively higher rate of speed,” in the FBI’s opinion.

  On they went, through a string of dusty, sun-blasted New Mexico towns: Encino, Vaughn, Fort Sumner—passing the grave of Billy the Kid—and Clovis. They crossed into Texas, blowing through Muleshoe, Sudan, and Littlefield, with the bureau men trailing. It was after nine, the sun finally down, when they made Lubbock. Binion’s first stop there was Willie Lusk’s custom boot store, the shop he had helped bankroll many years before. In the parking lot, Binion stepped from the Cadillac and stretched in the warm night air. FBI agents peered from their cars a half block away as he turned, stared, and began to walk toward them.

  All agents on this chase knew that Binion had been branded in a number of bureau reports as an armed and dangerous hoodlum, a vicious racketeer who had shot and killed at least a couple of men. Now he was coming for them. They could turn and flee, they could step out to confront him, or they could wait in their cars. They waited.

  When he finally reached them, Binion leaned into the window of an FBI Ford and looked the agents over. Smiling, he said, “Aren’t you boys getting tired?”

  He had spotted the FBI tail from the moment he left his house, Binion told them. And that side trip into the desert outside Vegas had been made “just for fun.” Even fun had its limits. Binion felt nothing but contempt for high-ranking bureau officials, but he knew a bunch of beleaguered working stiffs when he saw them. There was plenty of room in the Cadillac, he told the agents. The seats were soft, and a man could stretch out and relax if he wanted. Why didn’t they pile in the back of his car and ride with him all the way to Dallas? Make it easier on everybody.

  “This offer,” a bureau memo later said, “was declined.”

  • • •

  The next stop for Binion and Gold Dollar was Neil’s, “a barbecue place,” the G-men made sure to record. Then they hit the road again, and by sunrise they rolled into Fort Worth with the bureau cars still trailing. Binion checked into the Texas Hotel downtown and stayed in his room for the next twelve hours while the agents sat. That evening Gold Dollar drove him to Dallas, where he laid some flowers on his mother’s grave as agents watched.

  Binion waved one of the bureau men over, and began to talk about how much the city had grown since 1947. Then he disclosed his itinerary: After this cemetery stop, he planned to visit a friend. When that was done, he would go downtown to surrender to authorities. Binion hoped no one would be there to see it, but he predicted otherwise. “My damn attorney is so publicity hungry he probably called the newspapers,” he said.

  The reporters and photographers were indeed waiting when Binion walked into the Dallas County Jail building through a back door, wearing white cowboy boots and smoking a fat cigar. It was nine o’clock on a Saturday night. “I ain’t talking,” he said to their shouted questions. He was, some bystanders noted, paunchier than they remembered, and his hair was a little thinner. A couple of the reporters thought he looked a bit dusty and unbathed, not what they expected from Vegas royalty, and he could have used a shave. They fired more questions. “I said I ain’t talking,” Binion answered.

  In the sheriff’s office, against a backdrop of jail bars, Binion greeted his old friend Bill Decker, who appeared crisp and photo ready in a cream-colored fedora and a neatly knotted silk tie. With a lit cigarette dangling from his half smile, Decker served Binion with warrants for his arrest on state gambling charges. Next, deputies officially photographed, fingerprinted, and weighed Binion, who clocked in at an even two hundred pounds. “It’s awfully hot down here,” he said, pulling at the sweaty white shirt sticking to his skin.

  The whole process didn’t take more than ten minutes, and after posting a $15,000 bond, Binion was free to go. Outside the courthouse, Gold Dollar waited with the Cadillac as FBI agents stood nearby. “They sure gave us a run, those government men,” Gold Dollar told one reporter. “A couple of them followed me out of Las Vegas, but we shook them in a hurry. Another pair caught up with us in New Mexico, and we never could shake them.” The agents chose not to comment.

  From Dallas, Binion and Gold Dollar drove to Austin—observing the posted speed limit all the way, the FBI pursuers noted with gratitude. There, two days after his Dallas booking, Binion appeared in federal court to face tax charges. He was, one newspaper writer observed, “nattily dressed in a coral green suit, pale green tie and fawn-colored mesh cowboy boots with sharply pointed toes.” No dust or grime this time.

  As the charges against him were read, Binion responded “not guilty” to each one. The judge set trial for September. Binion posted a $20,000 bond, climbed into his Cadillac, and rode—without an FBI escort—back to Las Vegas, where he hoped to keep from losing everything.

  Binion on the witness stand in Dallas, pledging to quit the gambling business forever.

  18

  “WHACKED AROUND PRETTY GOOD”

  The damn government’s been getting bad for a good many years. They’d put it on you.

  —BB

  Federal prosecutors, preparing for a courtroom battle, cataloged Binion’s assets and liabilities. Cash and real estate had a market value of $2.4 million. The Montana ranchland and the cattle on it accounted for more than half of that. His ownership of the Horseshoe was valued at $757,087, and the house and property on Bonanza at $67,500. Binion also owned the old family farm in Grayson County, Texas, where he was born. Its worth: $6,500. In addition to calibrating Binion’s property, the government subpoenaed 102 witnesses. Among them were George Wilderspin, who had run Binion’s Fort Worth operations, and Fred Browning, his former partner from the Top O’Hill club. Both of them had presumably seen Binion pocketing fair amounts of unreported—and untaxed—cash over the years. In early September 1953, a federal prosecutor announced the government was ready for trial.

  One day after the feds made a public show of champing at the bit, Binion surprised everyone—from press to prosecutors—by appearing before Judge Ben Rice in San Antonio and pleading guilty to four counts of tax evasion. He and his lawyers provided no public explanation, but they believed a trial would inevitably result in a conviction and years of prison time, while a plea might allow the judge to pass sentence with some leniency. Judge Rice accepted the plea, and gave Binion several months to settle his affairs before imposing punishment.

  As he returned to Las Vegas, Binion now had two tasks before him: he had to raise enough cash to pay his back taxes, and he had to deal with a looming casino license problem. The tax commission had allowed him to run the Horseshoe provisionally. If he brought discredit on himself or the state, his license could be revoked. Pleading guilty to a federal felony was considered a mark of discredit, even in Nevada.

  He found a solution to both of his problems in the form of an old friend, Joe W. Brown, a
gambler from New Orleans with lucrative interests in thoroughbreds and oil fields. Brown was loaded with cash. “He had $200 million,” Binion said, “and I just welcomed any part of it.” Brown also declared himself willing to take over the Horseshoe.

  Binion and Brown publicly announced their deal. For $858,000, Brown would purchase a 97 percent interest in the Horseshoe and run the place. This was, in no small part, a fiction, for Brown’s true stake fell closer to 25 percent. But as Binion liked to say, “Don’t ever tell a lie, unless you have to.” This simple fabrication had one purpose: to fool the state tax commission.

  Not only did Brown have enormous wealth, he arrived scandal free, though he had been placing big bets for decades. “I’m one of the few people who ever made a million dollars gambling who never got his name mentioned in the Kefauver reports,” Brown declared. He could honestly assure regulators that he had no unsavory entanglements, gangster-related or otherwise. “Just me, Mrs. Brown and Christ,” he said. “That’s the only people in my business.” The thought of a New Orleans oilman, his wife, and Jesus running a Glitter Gulch casino appeared to soothe the nerves of the tax commissioners. “He was a very, very straightforward man,” recalled Robbins Cahill. “He had all the money he could ever want, or ever need, and he wasn’t obligated to anybody . . . He had no record of any kind that could be held against him.” Commissioners granted Brown a license with little debate.

  Binion had now installed at the Horseshoe a friend who would be happy to give the reins back to him when the time was right, and he hoped that time would be soon. Next he set about assembling the balance of the cash he would need to pay his taxes and penalties, and he heard the clock ticking. “I’m getting the rest together as fast as I can,” he said to an inquiring reporter. “I been under such a strain I ain’t had time to get everything done. They [federal authorities] got a date set on me, and they don’t trade much.”

  Other friends stepped in, providing ready coin in exchange for their own pieces of Binion’s casino. But these pals weren’t so clean as Brown; they and Binion issued no happy public announcements of new partnerships. Meyer Lansky bought in. So did his mob associate Joseph “Doc” Stacher, a Kefauver committee target who had been a boyhood companion of Lansky’s and was now running the Sands in Vegas. Abner “Longy” Zwillman, known as the Al Capone of New Jersey, managed to hook a percentage. Gerardo “Gerry” Catena also walked away with a slice of the Horseshoe. Catena ultimately rose to be underboss of the murderous Genovese crime family.

  It was, in other words, business as usual in Las Vegas.

  • • •

  When at last Binion had pulled together the necessary bankroll, in early December 1953, his lawyer took a check for $516,541 to the Las Vegas office of the Bureau of Internal Revenue. This—after some adjustments to the government’s original claim—paid the tax liability in full, but Binion still faced sentencing later that month. He retained hope that he would receive probation. If so, he could perhaps regain his casino license, though it might take the usual combination of favors and payoffs, so that he and the Horseshoe could stay in business. As for pending state gambling charges, late news out of Texas provided some grounds for optimism. The conviction of his partner Harry Urban had been reversed by the state court of criminal appeals. The prosecution had erred when it introduced evidence about Urban’s long and colorful history with Binion. Such information, in the court’s opinion, would have prejudiced jury members by causing them to believe not only that Urban was a gambler, but that he was “a very bad man” as well.

  Dallas district attorney Wade said publicly that the court’s ruling would make it difficult to prosecute Urban anew. This gave Binion some belief that he could plead to the state charges and possibly pull probation for that too.

  Such were his designs as he left Las Vegas to face the federal judge for the final time.

  Binion took Teddy Jane and four of their children to San Antonio, Texas, for the sentencing. They booked a suite at the St. Anthony Hotel, across the street from a park named for William B. Travis, a hero of Texas independence who wrote a famous letter from the Alamo pledging “Victory or Death.” If this was to be Binion’s own last stand, it was a contrite one. The night before his court date he received a local newspaper reporter at his hotel room, where he expressed his dilemma in familiar, if defeated, terms. “I gambled and I lost,” he lamented. But this last-gasp attempt to present himself as a chastened man didn’t quite hit the mark. As the newspaper story put it: The “portly, long time gambler . . . was ill at ease in his comfortable hotel suite. He was surrounded by his wife and four children as he talked.” Getting little from his main subject, the reporter turned to Mrs. Binion, but he found Teddy Jane in no mood for conversation. She refused even to give the paper her kids’ names. “The children had nothing to do with this,” she said, bristling.

  The family accompanied Binion the next day to the downtown courtroom, and sat behind him as Judge Rice allowed the defendant one final statement. Binion—freshly barbered and in a dark suit—rose and, between gulps, took the humble route. “I just didn’t intend to cheat the government,” he told the court. “I’m kinda ignorant and I got to gambling around and, well, you know.” He hinted that he might even leave the casino business if he could stay out of prison. “Now, Judge, what I’d like to do is go on to Montana, and raise a fine head of cattle. I’ve got a pretty good-sized family started,” he said. “And, Judge, you know, I’ve paid all the taxes I owe.” This entreaty poured from a man who had previously avoided all manner of serious legal trouble through connection, action, combustion, and intimidation. Now it revealed someone deeply humbled and out of gas.

  Worse, it didn’t work. Judge Rice had before him Binion’s presentence report, written by a probation officer, which depicted the defendant as a longtime, large-scale, fully cognizant tax evader who had refused to cooperate with investigators. “Investigation has disclosed that defendant kept large amounts of currency which he did not run through his bank account,” the probation officer wrote. In addition, the report said, Binion was a killer with a “lengthy prior criminal record all of which has grown out of his activities in the bootlegging days and in his gambling.”

  This left the judge with little inclination toward mercy. “I am sorry I cannot grant your plea,” Rice said. He delivered this declaration, the San Antonio Express observed, “with all the dignity that becomes a federal court official.” Looking down at Binion from the bench, Rice pronounced sentence: five years in prison and a $20,000 fine. Binion was remanded to the custody of the marshals, and a sharp rap from the gavel brought the proceedings to a close.

  The severity of the sentence stunned the defendant, his lawyers, and his family. “He thought he was going to get out of it,” daughter Brenda recalled. He was a forty-nine-year-old husband with five children to raise and a business to run, and now a man with a government badge was placing him in handcuffs. Before authorities escorted Binion from the courtroom, the marshal in charge allowed him a few minutes in an adjoining office to say good-bye to Teddy Jane and the children. “All of us were crying,” Brenda remembered. She mistakenly believed her father had been sentenced to forty years. “I thought, my god, I’ll never see him again.” He hugged them all—at least as well as he could while cuffed—and then was taken away.

  Reporters and photographers waited in bright afternoon sunshine on the sidewalk outside the courthouse, hoping to catch a shot and a few words. Binion approached, flanked by two U.S. marshals who were taking him to the county jail. The crime boss had regained his composure. With his cowboy hat cocked at a jaunty angle and his wrists shackled in front of him, Binion gave the men with the cameras a confident smile. “Get a good one, boys,” he told them as the shutters clicked. “From now on you’re going to have to find a new subject.”

  The marshals drove Binion 275 miles north to Dallas for another court appearance a few days later, this one on state gambling charg
es. By then, his lawyers had reached a deal with District Attorney Wade: if Binion would plea guilty, the sentence—four years—would run concurrent with the federal prison time. The courtroom was packed, with spectators squeezing into every bit of space on the shiny wooden benches, but this was an anticlimactic affair, finished in less than half an hour. Perhaps the only bit of news emerged when a woeful-looking Binion was asked what he would do after he served his time. “I don’t intend to go back into the gambling business,” he said. It was a prudent answer. Another gambling indictment in Texas, Wade noted, would allow prosecutors to charge Binion as a habitual criminal and make him eligible for a life sentence.

  When it was done, all traces of swagger had vanished. Later that week, marshals reported, Binion suffered “some type of minor heart attack” while in custody. It was, more likely, an episode of debilitating anxiety.

  Just before Christmas, on a bitter-cold night with howling wind and blowing snow, Binion entered the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas. “He will find prison life far different from his past experiences,” a United Press reporter advised readers. There were other federal prisons to which Binion could have been sent, including some much closer to Las Vegas. But U.S. Attorney General Brownell had ordered that he go to Leavenworth, which had already seen its share of famous criminals—Machine Gun Kelly and Capone enforcer Frank Nitti among them. The warden announced to the press that Binion would be treated like any other inmate. “Prison Doors Clank Shut on Benny Binion,” said a front-page headline in the Nevada State Journal. “Interesting Career Interrupted by Uncle Sam.” This proved that somewhere in Reno a copy editor had the gift of understatement. The labyrinthine kingdom of riches that Binion had built over the decades—through brutality, guile, loyalty, and skill—wasn’t merely on pause. It now teetered on the edge of collapse, and the only person who could save it wouldn’t be eligible for parole for two and a half years.