Blood Aces Page 23
“I got whacked around pretty good,” Binion said.
The FBI certainly believed it had done its share of the whacking, and wasted little time in crossing Binion off its “Top Hoodlum” list. In the bureau’s Who’s Who of thug-land, he was now a nobody.
• • •
Down in Texas, Lieutenant Butler of the Dallas police still looked for leads into the Noble bombing. He went so far as to persuade several of the original suspects to take shots of Sodium Pentothal—truth serum—and submit to questioning. In one session, Butler asked a doped-up Bob Braggins who paid the generous bounty on Noble. “I don’t know,” Braggins said.
“Do you think it was Binion?”
“You ask me what I know,” Braggins said, “or what I think?”
“What do you think?”
“Binion,” Braggins said.
But Butler got no closer than that to making a solid case. Even under truth serum his suspects dodged, evaded, and lied.
There was another reason the investigation had slowed. W. O. Hodges, the blind Denton County sheriff who had pursued the Noble case with vigor, had taken his new guide dog, named Candy, out for a walk in the early-morning darkness. The sheriff and the dog wandered into the street, and were hit by a car and killed. It was by all indications an accident, but it had the effect of ending Denton County’s role in the probe. Noble’s death went on the books as an unsolved murder, and stayed that way.
As for Wade, the Dallas district attorney basked in triumph for his handling of the Binion pursuit. Soon he would be contemplating a run for Congress. He also gave local reporters a surprising admission: his case against Binion had really not been all that sound. Two of the gamblers who would have provided crucial testimony were dead, and others were unreliable, he said. If Binion had gone to trial, the DA calculated, he would probably have been acquitted.
This meant that Binion had pleaded no contest once and guilty twice in cases where prosecutors doubted they could have convicted him at trial. Although he didn’t know specifically of these admissions, Binion believed he had been swindled in court, and he never lost that suspicion. He had been conned into giving up without a fight, and got next to nothing in return.
Though he would not have used the term, irony attached itself easily to his case. He had paid his taxes but still had to serve time. He had flouted the law for decades; only after he went straight, Vegas-style, did he wind up in chains. He was being punished not for his own spectacular crimes, but to cover the corruption of others. And he—the wiliest of operators—had been catastrophically hoodwinked. “I could’ve beat this damn case if I hadn’t got tricked into pleading guilty,” he said years later. “I got tricked all the way around by the government.”
Binion had faced many hardships and setbacks in life, but this was the harshest so far. Yet it wasn’t long after the Leavenworth cell doors closed behind him that, once he had recovered from his shock, he began to plot his return to Las Vegas and his ultimate redemption. Doing so, he reverted to his lifelong pattern: He had survived a lost childhood by learning the cunning skills of larcenous adults. Then he had grieved the death of his beloved mentor Warren Diamond, but seized the chance to succeed and exceed his criminal father figure. And when he was cast out of Dallas, he had emerged even stronger and richer. Now he had to climb back again. There would be no wistful waiting for fortune to turn his way. That was for suckers. This would happen because he drew upon himself to make it happen.
“There ain’t no such thing as luck,” said the man who had benefited from plenty of it. “It’s unseen talent. I’ve just got talent they don’t know about. Lot of damn ways.” His talent, Binion believed, would propel his resurrection. That, along with some friends in high places, and the continuing string of unfortunates who turned up dead.
PART
THREE
THE RIDE BACK HOME
1954–1989
Binion, his children, and Fred Merrill Jr. (in denim jacket) before his incarceration. Daughter Barbara is to Binion’s left.
19
THE FIREMAN GETS RELIGION
When you quit learning, I think your damn light’s went out.
—BB
Leavenworth, Kansas, did not impress many with its beauty even on the nicest days. The winters could be especially bleak, with a cold prairie landscape of brown stubble and bare trees, and heavy gray skies that never seemed to lift. The prison itself broke the horizon with twin cellblocks that rose seven imposing stories. They adjoined a rotunda topped by a silver-colored dome that towered 150 feet, a complex known as the Castle. “A giant mausoleum,” an inmate wrote of it in 1929, “adrift in a great sea of nothingness.”
Convict laborers from the nearby military stockade built this, the first federal penitentiary, out of limestone from a nearby quarry. Starting in 1897, they worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, in conditions harsh enough to provoke the occasional riot. Misbehaving inmates were forced to haul a twenty-five-pound ball and chain as they labored, which they called “carrying the baby.” In the early years, prisoners who were caught stealing were branded on the face with a T. Those who tried to escape got a D brand, for deserter. As one of the first wardens put it, “Leavenworth is hell.” Few who attempted to flee actually succeeded in breaking out. A brick wall, also built by inmates, surrounded the prison yard and outbuildings; it stood forty feet high, to thwart climbers, and extended forty feet belowground, to block tunnelers. The only escape for most came via parole, transfer, or death. Though conditions had improved markedly—the prison now had furniture plants and shoe factories with modern equipment, an array of educational classes, and musical performances by inmates—Leavenworth still meant hard time, and carried a reputation as the toughest of federal pens.
When Binion arrived, his hair was dirty and uncombed, his gaze had gone blank, and his jowly face showed the weary sag of a man who had gambled away his last shred of hope. Like every inmate, he underwent physical and mental exams during his first few weeks of confinement. The prison doctor reported that he had flat feet, four missing teeth, and “moderate obesity,” but was otherwise in good health and “suitable for regular duty.” Binion cautioned that such duty shouldn’t be too rigorous. “He says he is unable to do hard work,” the doctor said, “because he is not used to it.” Deprived for the first time in decades of custom-made cowboy boots, Binion also complained that the prison shoes were too tight.
His performance on drills of mental acuity reflected the skills of someone who had forsaken a backcountry school in the second grade. “He has very limited ability in reading and writing and claims not even to know his multiplication tables,” wrote one interviewer. An intelligence test pegged Binion’s IQ at 89, or low average. Regarding his emotional state, exams showed he had rallied from his initial despair. There were, however, lingering financial worries. “The inmate claims that he is worth about $800,000, but that he is in debt in the amount of $600,000,” an examiner noted. “The wife has informed us that she plans to sell the home and operate a ranch, that she will receive approximately $175 a month while he is incarcerated.”
Even in prison, Binion summoned his remarkable skill of bounce. He adjusted well to con life within a few weeks. “The inmate seems to have a satisfactory attitude toward his sentence and confinement,” an associate warden observed. “He keeps himself clean and his quarters orderly.” Though he asked to be assigned to Leavenworth’s Honor Farm, officials conferred and decided otherwise. The former big boss of gambling would now work in the prison fire department as a maintenance man.
• • •
Back in Las Vegas, mob money kept building resorts and importing Hollywood stars. The nine-floor Riviera opened in 1955, the first high-rise on the Strip. Liberace performed for $50,000 a week as its headline act—though he had not yet taken to wearing capes of ermine and rhinestones—and former Phoenix mobster Gus Greenbaum ran the place. At
the Sands, gamblers could combine sunbathing with dice: the pool had a floating craps table. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis could be found playing blackjack in the hotel’s casino, and Frank Sinatra cavorted with Doris Day and Lauren Bacall.
With such material, all the chamber of commerce needed was a public relations apparatus to position Vegas as a desert Xanadu. Enter the Las Vegas News Bureau, which circulated the pictures of the stars, the swim-up craps table, and the showgirls worldwide. If some heartland burgher opened his hometown newspaper to find a photo of three beauties in bathing suits straddling a phallic fake rocket in a Strip parking lot, Vegas businessmen had the news bureau to thank.
Even Noël Coward, the sophisticated British playwright and performer, signed up for a monthlong gig at the Desert Inn in 1955. “This is a fabulous, extraordinary madhouse,” he wrote in his diary. “The gangsters who run the places are all urbane and charming . . . Their morals are bizarre in the extreme. They are generous, mother-worshippers, sentimental and capable of much kindness. They are also ruthless, cruel, violent and devoid of scruples.” He noted the presence of many beautiful women, but added, “Every instinct and desire is concentrated on money.” Coward, by the way, had a great run in Vegas. “It has all been,” he wrote as he left, “a triumphant adventure.”
Not everyone departed in victory. A fading Hollywood star named Ronald Reagan, seeking fast cash and a career turnaround, launched a two-week run at the Last Frontier. For $30,000 he emceed a show full of silly costumes, slapstick humor, and sentimental pieties. Critics savaged the show, and Reagan’s contract was not renewed. He left Las Vegas contemplating a career in politics. But the Gipper was an exception. For most, Las Vegas offered unlimited opportunity.
Binion’s former establishment now had a longer name: Joe W. Brown’s Horseshoe Club. Brown put his name on much of the casino kitsch, such as ashtrays and matchbooks, and scratched Binion’s name off the chips. The place featured a new attraction, which had been envisioned by Binion but executed by Brown: a big plastic horseshoe displaying $1 million in $10,000 bills. Tourists lined up to have their photos taken next to it. And night after night, the casino seemed to bulge with gamblers. With the real proprietor gone, the mobsters who had been allowed into the Horseshoe’s ownership structure wasted little time in figuring out how much of this handle they could steal. The answer: millions.
• • •
The mood had darkened on Bonanza Road. For the Binion family, the adjustment to life without a wealthy and powerful patriarch proved to be a series of financial and legal obstacles. Teddy Jane canceled any plans she might have had—however slight—to sell the Las Vegas house. This created cash-flow problems. Gold Dollar soon left for another job, and the Binions’ cook—so famous for her fried chicken—was discharged. Other employees drifted away, and Teddy Jane began cutting the lawn herself, operating a power mower while wearing a large diamond ring and Spring-o-lator high heels.
The family tried to visit Leavenworth several times a year, but they often made the fourteen-hundred-mile trip by bus only to see Binion for an hour in the prison visiting room. “They’d frisk him in front of us,” daughter Brenda said. “Jack would say before we’d go in there, ‘Brenda, don’t you cry, because it upsets Daddy.’ Of course I’d start crying, and so would Daddy.”
After Thanksgiving 1954, eleven months into his sentence, Binion took a pad of lined paper, like something a schoolboy would use, and composed a letter to his daughter. He wrote with a fountain pen, in blue ink. “Dear Brenda,” he began, “my favorte [sic] cowgirl.”
Binion had long claimed to his gambling associates that he was illiterate—he found advantage to being underestimated—but he had limited abilities to read and write. His missive to Brenda was full of misspellings, grammatical crimes, and run-on sentences, but he could say what he needed to. “I Know you all had a nice Thanksgiving I had a nice dinner and enjoyed It very much good turkey,” he wrote.
Mainly he wanted to tell his children that he missed them. “You Kid’s are growing to fast I just cant get usto Knot having any baby Becky will be a big girl before long,” he wrote. “I Have been Fortunant for fifty year’s to have a fine famley as I have you all are the best and I love you all More eatch day and I thank God for being so Good to me.”
Binion also announced he had been losing weight. “I am not so fat Know I am 180 pound’s Mother called me slim I liked that.” He asked Brenda to say hello to his friends Doby Doc and Gold Dollar, and to tell Teddy Jane he would write soon. “Just Keep Being good and we will all Pray and we will Be happy toghter agan.”
He ended it with “cowgirl your dadie loves you.” Then he signed it L. B. Binion, adding his inmate number, 70732.
More than a year into his sentence, Binion had done about as well as could be expected in prison. As he noted in his letter, he had lost twenty or thirty pounds. He looked lean, healthy, groomed, and sharp-eyed now. He slept in a bunk in the fire department dormitory, a far better berth than the oppressive cellblocks that housed most prisoners, and he had been promoted to assistant lead fireman. This assignment carried some responsibility—he spent part of his time monitoring the prison factories for fire safety—and little in the way of actual labor. The job had other advantages: he sometimes used an empty fire extinguisher to sneak hard-boiled eggs out of the prison kitchen for use as barter.
Leavenworth officials happily noted that Binion had completed a religious education course, and had been baptized a Catholic. Since then, an entry in his file said, “he has been most faithful in receiving the sacraments regularly.” For the first time in his life, Binion attended services every Sunday. “My family’s all religious,” he explained years later, “and I didn’t have nothing else to do.” He also tried something else new—reading a spiritual tract. “A book wrote by a monk in 1500 and something. Old priest give it to me,” Binion recalled. “And it’s just little sayings that he thought of every day that he wrote down. They’s one there, he says, ‘Don’t censure no man for his shortcomings.’ Says, ‘We’re frail creatures.’”
This awakening of the soul also delivered an earthly reward. A priest smuggled steaks, which he brought into the prison in his briefcase, to Binion. When Teddy Jane visited Leavenworth, she carried cash to pay back the clergyman.
• • •
These adventures in contraband went undetected, and the great racketeer experienced only one run-in with prison authorities. Guards conducting a routine search found four extra pairs of socks in his laundry bag. Binion was merely reprimanded for this offense, an associate warden wrote, because “it is felt that control has been somewhat lax with regard to the issue of socks.” Beyond that, he had behaved—as far as prison officials were concerned—as the model inmate. “His conduct,” wrote Warden C. H. Looney, “is outstanding.”
Unfortunately for Binion, his hope to see more of his family rested not with Warden Looney, but with the Bureau of Prisons officials in Washington, who showed him little sympathy. In 1955, he requested a transfer to the Terminal Island federal pen, near Los Angeles, which would put him more than a thousand miles closer to his wife and children. Leavenworth’s warden backed the transfer with no hesitation, writing: “Binion is a cooperative and pleasant individual . . . and should have no difficulty adjusting at Terminal Island . . . He exerts whatever influence he has for the benefit of inmate morale.” Because of Binion’s long separation from his family, the warden added, “this man is beginning to show signs of depression.”
But the director of the Bureau of Prisons, James V. Bennett, turned the request down flat. The decision was based in no small part on what prison records called “the notoriety angle.”
Over the course of fifteen months, beginning in 1955, Binion came up for parole twice. Given his nonviolent offense and his good prison record, he and his counsel believed he enjoyed a good chance at release, and they called in favors to put some not-so-subtle pressure on the parole board in Washin
gton. They persuaded the U.S. attorney who had prosecuted him, Charles F. Herring, to inform the board that he did not object to setting Binion free. “Were I in a position to make a decision,” Herring wrote, “I would grant the parole as requested.” Ben Rice, the federal judge who had passed sentence, agreed. “I have no problem whatever to parole being granted to Mr. Binion,” he said in a letter.
A Nevada state senator, meeting a parole board member at a Washington reception, happened to mention that everything that Binion had done in his state “was legal at the time it was being done.” The state’s lone congressman, Cliff Young, reminded the board in a letter that Binion had “achieved a widespread and well-deserved reputation for participation in civic activities” in Las Vegas. One of the U.S. senators from Nevada, George W. Malone, called to say that Binion’s record in the state was good and he had a “fine family.” Several letter writers informed the board that Binion’s official parole adviser, who would make sure that all rules were followed, was to be none other than the lieutenant governor of Nevada—and cowboy movie star—Rex Bell.
Binion’s lawyer, Emmanuel M. Stern, also wrote and called repeatedly, praising his client as a man of good habits, including a fierce devotion to his wife and children. “He has never drank to excess,” Stern said. “He has never kept company with women other than his wife, since his marriage.” And, he insisted, Binion no longer held any public relations value for a federal government that wanted to show off its crime-busting ways. “This case,” he wrote, “long ago lost all of its publicity feature.”