Blood Aces Read online

  U.S. attorney general Brownell put the lie to that last part five weeks after the lawyer’s letter. Delivering a speech to the Republican National Convention in August 1956, Brownell reeled off the Justice Department’s recent wins, including tax evasion prosecutions of “well-known racketeers.” They included Frank Costello, the so-called Prime Minister of the Underworld, and Albert Anastasia, reputed head of Murder, Inc., the notorious squad of New York hit men. And, Brownell made sure to mention, the department had buried Binion. A clipping of a newspaper story about Brownell’s remarks went into Binion’s Washington file. Not long after the speech, a parole board member handwrote this note regarding Binion’s case: “Has received nationwide publicity . . . Much pressure on case.” And later, in another memo, he wrote, “Was cited publicly as a racketeer by Atty Gen . . . A hot case.”

  Board members weren’t inclined to buck the top boss on hot cases. So it came as little surprise when they turned down Binion both times for parole.

  • • •

  In November 1956 a man named Samuel Block came to the parole board offices in Washington to make the case for Binion, whom he knew through the oil business in Montana. Block told officials he had recently visited the Binion home on Bonanza Road, and came away troubled. “The family is going to the dogs,” he said. “They need their father.”

  Block lodged his appeal less than a month after a violent but initially unremarkable crime in the tiny Death Valley town of Baker, California, where two young men broke into the home of a highway café operator. They beat the victim—breaking his nose—and wounded him with a gunshot to the back as he tried to run away. Then they grabbed some cash and fled. These two might have been expected to be smarter than the usual strong-arm robbers, for they had met as students at Nevada Southern University in Las Vegas. They were foiled by one of those catastrophes that have destroyed any number of otherwise brilliant holdup schemes—bad wheels. Their getaway car broke down, so the robbers tried to flee by bus. This led to their arrest.

  Such a crime would not ordinarily excite much interest outside the town where it occurred, but after the two suspects began singing to police, this one went nationwide. The Las Vegas Review-Journal ran a banner headline on the top of the front page: “Nab Vegas Girl as Rob Ring Head.” And not just any Vegas girl. A dispatch from its newswire had details: “The gorgeous young daughter of millionaire gambler and tax evader Benny Binion was accused in Las Vegas today of being the ‘brains’ of a two-state robbery gang.”

  She was indeed gorgeous—the papers ran a school yearbook photo of a wavy-haired beauty in a lace collar—as well as deeply troubled from an early age. Barbara Binion Fechser, at the age of twenty-two, was married but separated, and already the mother of three. As the oldest child in the Binion household, she had long fought parental authority, and especially bridled at the financial straits imposed by her father’s imprisonment. Heading a gang of robbers took rebellion a bit further. Police believed she had assembled a criminal cadre of three men. The robbery of the California victim—who was an ex-boyfriend of Barbara’s—served as a trial run. Next, they had planned a string of holdups that targeted the wealthy of Las Vegas. Among the planned victims: former lieutenant governor Cliff Jones and Jake Friedman, one of the owners of the Sands. Jones, sometimes known as Big Juice, was considered one of the most powerful men in the state. Friedman, a Russian immigrant by way of Houston, cut a less than threatening figure. Although he liked to dress as a cowboy, he barely cleared five feet in his western boots, and he liked to douse himself in White Shoulders women’s perfume. Still, he was a confrere of Galveston crime boss Sam Maceo, and he traveled the Strip as Vegas Brahmin.

  Barbara was charged with conspiring to commit robbery and burglary, and Doby Doc posted her bail. After a battle over extradition—shades of her father—she was ultimately put on probation by a California Superior Court judge, although a probation officer had urged that she receive a thirty-day jail term. Her lawyer, Tom Foley, swayed the judge with the argument that Barbara’s three children would have to be in the care of Teddy Jane during her incarceration, and “that is too much to ask of any grandmother.”

  • • •

  The federal parole board was unpersuaded by the adventures of Binion’s daughter. The board even turned down a special appeal by Binion in which he pleaded to be released for the good of his family. It took the U.S. Supreme Court to spring him from prison. In early 1957, the justices agreed to consider whether Binion’s sentence, and that of top New York mobster Frank Costello, had been excessive. Binion posted bond and walked out of Leavenworth on March 19, 1957, with the $776 that had been in his inmate account. He returned to Las Vegas, a free man at last, although no one could say for how long.

  “I’ll tell you the reason why I’m not a damn bit sorry I went to the penitentiary. I’m absolutely glad of it,” Binion said years later. “When I come out of the penitentiary, my youngest daughter was walking funny, and my family couldn’t see it . . . I got out in March, kept a-hollerin’, ‘This girl don’t walk right.’ So I just kept on, kept on. Finally, in October, my wife took her and had her x-rayed, and she had a cyst inside of her thighbone, right up close to that socket, that was all ready—’most ready to burst. If it’d’ve bursted, it’d shattered that bone and ruined her leg. They’d had to cut her leg off, right at the hip. Well, to have me recognizing this thing makes me absolutely glad I went to the penitentiary. So they say everything happens for the best. Maybe it does. This did, anyhow.”

  Downtown Las Vegas in the 1960s, with the Horseshoe surrounded by the Mint, the Fremont, and the Golden Nugget.

  20

  STRIPPERS AND STOOGES

  It’s not your enemies you have to worry about. It’s your friends.

  —BB

  The relief granted by the Supreme Court didn’t last. Two months after agreeing to hear it, the justices turned down Binion’s appeal. With that settled, the Bureau of Prisons calculated that, including good-time credits, he still had 119 days to serve, and sought to have him returned to Leavenworth. Once again, his powerful friends brought the heat. Senator Malone of Nevada phoned the chairman of the parole board to urge official forgiveness. “If this were a less well-known prisoner,” Malone said, “parole would have been granted before now.” He also wrote to say that Mrs. Binion had been to see him about her husband’s case: “She is herself boardering [sic] on a nervous breakdown. To send an individual back to prison just for a few months . . . might do more harm than good.”

  Binion’s lawyers filed a flurry of motions in which they argued he should not be forced to serve the remainder of his sentence. But the bureau insisted it couldn’t parole someone who was not in custody. Only if Binion returned to prison could he be considered for release. He had entered a bizarre legal purgatory: the only way to secure his freedom would be to give it up. “Binion has suffered fully for his violations of the law,” one of his attorneys, John J. O’Brien Jr., argued. “It would be absurd to return L. B. Binion to prison for such a short period of time . . . A failure to parole [him] would only serve to cause unnecessary and cruel hardship for the innocent members of [his] family and mark the hand of the United States Government as unduly harsh and arbitrarily unmerciful.”

  Such rhetoric went to waste. Bureau officials would not be moved.

  • • •

  All except one. In May 1957, Hubert A. Boyd, the chief U.S. probation officer for the District of Nevada, wrote to the country’s top parole official in Washington, asking that Binion “be given every consideration for immediate parole.” He spent three typewritten, single-spaced pages laying out Binion’s virtues and exigencies. As a free man, Boyd said, Binion could take his children to the Montana ranch. “They would have a chance to enjoy outdoor life of horseback riding, playing and helping with minor chores,” he wrote. “Since the father has been away, the younger children have never enjoyed this type of privilege.” He added that Bin
ion “is one of the best liked individuals I have ever known,” and had been embraced by the local community. “I have never found a person in Nevada who has spoken ill of him.”

  This wasn’t the first such letter the friendly probation officer had penned. Less than a year earlier he had written the parole board relaying the family’s urgent need to have Binion home. “Mrs. Binion is an ideal mother, and devotes her entire life to her children,” he stressed. “She does all her own work and is often ironing the children’s clothing at midnight or later . . . This Father’s guidance is essential for the well-being of the family.”

  It was, for a public official, an extraordinarily impassioned exhortation on behalf of a convicted felon, with expressions of empathy and admiration that far exceeded the typical federal missive. Boyd practically accused the Bureau of Prisons of cruelty to children when he wrote that fifteen-year-old Brenda was already going out on dates and “the Father is greatly needed to assist in guiding this child.”

  These letters omitted one important detail. Even as Boyd was serving as the number one probation officer in Nevada, he had a lucrative second job. He also drew a paycheck as the chief of security at the Horseshoe casino.

  This might have seemed odd in less enlightened precincts, but not here. “This ‘moonlight’ employment is not condemned by the community,” said Albert Wahl, chief probation officer in Northern California. “The judges were aware of it. The law enforcement agents were aware of it and do not particularly criticize the arrangements.” Wahl had investigated the situation for the Bureau of Prisons and concluded that a different—and peculiar—set of legal guidelines held sway in Las Vegas. “These are difficult to understand,” he explained, “for one who is not acquainted with Nevada.”

  • • •

  Now an old nemesis dropped in: even more income tax trouble. The government claimed Binion owed an additional $467,619 for the years 1950–53, an amount that his attorneys disputed—though they lacked much of the means to do so effectively. Binion, his counsel acknowledged, had retained almost no records from the period, and his memory was less than photographic. “He can recall the necessary details of the transactions,” one of his lawyers wrote, “only after repeated questioning, long discussions . . . and constant reference by him to his former employees, business associates and friends.”

  To the escalating alarm of his attorneys and accountants, Binion decided that dealing with taxes and seeking parole did not constitute his most urgent business in the summer of 1957. While he was in Leavenworth, the Montana ranch had endured an extended drought, and dozens of cattle had died. Some of the livestock that survived were stolen—as many as five hundred head, he later came to believe. Others had broken free from their herds and were roaming the empty hills. Now he headed to Montana with daughter Brenda and son Jack. There they passed weeks combing the Missouri Breaks on horseback, rounding up wayward livestock. For a man who had spent more than three years behind a wall, it was—despite the missing cattle—a refreshing return to his most beloved pastime.

  When at last Binion had the ranch in some form of working order, he turned his attention to his tax problems. He needed several hundred thousand dollars. To get that kind of money, and to get it fast, he turned to the typical Las Vegan’s lender of choice: the mob.

  Across the street in Glitter Gulch a grand new hotel was being planned, the Fremont. Built with $4 million from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, it would be even taller than the Riviera. One of its principal developers was Ed Levinson, who came to the aid of his fellow casino man with an offer to buy shares of the Horseshoe. This was no humanitarian gesture. Levinson, a Chicago native who learned the gambling business in Detroit, was “closely associated,” in the FBI’s words, with syndicate lawyer Sidney Korshak, and had another powerful friend in Bobby Baker, the scheming intimate of Lyndon Johnson. Levinson had come to Vegas after working for Meyer Lansky in Havana. In Glitter Gulch, he served as a front man for Lansky, Doc Stacher, and other gangsters who already had a piece of the Horseshoe. Levinson had many attributes, including coolness under pressure and an eye for talent; he gave Wayne Newton his big Vegas break. But his greatest gift may have been his ability to skim from casinos.

  Binion insisted, at least for public consumption, that Levinson was buying out Joe W. Brown, who had tired of running a Vegas club. That was yet another fiction, because Brown had almost no shares to sell. Actually, the money—enough to pay his back taxes—went to Binion. In return, Levinson now had effective control of the Horseshoe, and he wasted no time in putting his stooges in key positions. All of a sudden a local bail bondsman named Harry “Spinach” Coopersmith was running the cashier’s cage, at least until he got caught stealing bagfuls of coins. The new manager of slot machines was Oscar “Daddy Joey” Rubinsky, formerly a pool hall owner out of Minneapolis. And the casino manager’s post now went to Louis “Paddock” Walker, once the Detroit mob’s top gambling man in Toledo. This arrangement had its tensions. On one occasion, an FBI report said, Binion “had a disagreement” with Levinson and “backed Levinson into a corner and threatened to beat his head off.”

  Such encounters aside, Levinson was now the president of the Horseshoe. This represented, in the tight world of Vegas casinos, a major shift, but it wasn’t the only one on Fremont Street in 1958. As Binion sold out to Lansky’s lackeys—in essence providing a new source of cash to a worldwide criminal enterprise—he again exercised his astounding skill at working both sides of the fence.

  • • •

  On June 5, 1958, yet another memo from the Las Vegas office, with Benny Binion in the subject line, arrived on J. Edgar Hoover’s desk. Once more, Binion’s history as a “ruthless racketeer and hoodlum” got the detailed treatment. But Special Agent Leo Kuykendall added that Binion had been behaving himself since his release from Leavenworth. “Investigation up to the present time does not indicate that he has resumed his former type of racketeering tactics,” he wrote. “He has become well respected and liked by many prominent people in Nevada.” Not only that, but Binion had “made numerous disparaging remarks regarding convicts who were in . . . Leavenworth during the time he was there.” Here came the FBI’s version of the new Benny Binion, an anti-outlaw with the zeal of the convert: “He . . . has stated that persons who committed crimes will eventually find out there is no way they can possibly derive anything from their criminal operations.”

  As laughable as it might be to anyone who knew Binion’s past, this was the public image that he had been trying to present—reformed, respected, perhaps even revered. And ready to do business with the feds. On the second page of the memo came this stunner from Kuykendall: “Bureau authority has been requested to develop Binion as a potential criminal informant.”

  Binion had persuaded his friends and associates that he loathed the FBI, all while he and Kuykendall discussed his becoming a secret bureau pigeon. “He has stated to Agents that the FBI is the only law enforcement agency that anyone can trust or have faith in anymore,” Kuykendall wrote, and “he was very friendly.” Binion, he insisted, could be developed into a “valuable informant.”

  He was already providing some information to agents. On the morning of February 18, Binion had called Kuykendall at his office to advise that Harold “Happy” Meltzer, a ranking member of Meyer Lansky’s international narcotics cartel, had hit town. Binion spotted Meltzer half a block from the Horseshoe, visiting a chum at the Bird Cage Casino.

  Hoover was intrigued. This notion of flipping Binion might help the bureau map the network of mobsters moving money in and out of Las Vegas. “You might consider developing Binion’s front in order to identify others participating in the activity,” he wrote to Kuykendall. “Afford this matter continuous and preferred attention.”

  • • •

  While Binion was being courted as a government snitch, Las Vegas embarked on a brief flurry of moral indignation. The Nevada Gaming Commission came to lea
rn in 1959 that the New Frontier Hotel employed a female impersonator as a lounge act. Thomas “T.C.” Jones, a married man and U.S. Navy veteran, specialized in wigged and gowned renditions of Judy Garland, Tallulah Bankhead, and Edith Piaf. By all accounts, the act drew appreciative crowds. But the gaming commission, a law enforcement memo said, “felt that such a type of entertainment attracted an undesirable element.” Under threat of license revocation, casino management hastily dropped Jones from its lineup.

  At the El Rancho Vegas, these same commissioners expressed alarm over the newest headliner, exotic dancer Juanita Phillips, aka Candy Barr. A former Dallas prostitute, she was for a while engaged to marry Los Angeles mobster Mickey Cohen. Onstage she wore a skimpy fringe-and-boots costume, with cap guns in holsters, and she made $2,000 a week slowly removing this getup for paying customers. “The Commission indicated it was not proper for the morals of the community to permit Candy Barr to perform,” the memo said, “and it was especially a poor example for the youth and general reputation of the community.” Like the female impersonator, Barr found herself quickly out of work.

  Las Vegas had now been made safe from the scourge of Edith Piaf impersonators and cowgirl strippers. Meanwhile, mobsters were skimming millions from casinos with little worry about interference from authorities. Down in Glitter Gulch, Levinson and his crew bragged that they were raking $700,000 a year off the top at the Horseshoe alone. When their skim from the Sands, the Flamingo, and the Fremont was added to that, they were taking—and this was a conservative estimate—between $3 million and $4 million tax-free annually.