Blood Aces Page 4
Someone like Binion—a poorly educated man with country roots and no great aversion to violence—might have been expected to embrace the KKK. But instead, the budding policy-wheel titan distanced himself from the Klan. “I don’t believe,” he explained, “in hanging my customers.”
• • •
The sweet spot for Binion and his policy bagmen was Deep Ellum, a teeming black neighborhood of two- and three-story brick storefronts and narrow sidewalks east of downtown. Offering all manner of temptations, the district had inspired the song “Deep Ellum Blues,” which included the lyrics “Once I knew a preacher, preached the Bible through and through / He went down in Deep Ellum, now his preaching days are through.”
Deep Ellum had the Cotton Club, the Harlem movie house, and the Gypsy Tea Room. Hotel rooms went for 25 cents a night. The Wish-I-Wish Company on Central Avenue sold lucky mojo bags and mystic oils for aid in commerce or love. “Down on ‘Deep Ellum’ in Dallas, where Central Avenue empties into Elm Street is where Ethiopia stretches forth her hands,” J. H. Owens, a columnist for the Dallas Gazette, wrote in the 1930s. “It is the one spot in the city that needs no daylight saving time because there is no bedtime, and working hours have no limits. The only place recorded on earth where business, religion, hoodooism, gambling and stealing goes on at the same time without friction.” That was the African American version. A white writer of the day put it this way: “Under the veneer of civilization and custom there runs in Deep Ellum the undercurrent of jungle law.”
Binion’s operations were headquartered at the Green & White Café, 2400 Elm Street, owned by one of his lieutenants, Ivy Miller. Like Binion, Miller tended to pull his gun at the first sign of trouble. Miller, who was white, once ended a scuffle among black patrons at his café by shooting one of the fighters—a woman—in the stomach, an action for which police declined to charge him. “It’s not his way,” a glowing newspaper account observed, “to allow negroes to pull off scraps on his premises.”
Binion’s second-in-command was Harry Urban, a fellow operative from his bootlegging network. “Urban was at that time generally regarded by the local police department as a pimp, and his wife, Billie Urban, was his prostitute,” a law enforcement report said. They made an odd pair—the perpetually disheveled Binion alongside the habitually dapper Urban, a cosmopolite by Dallas standards who would later in his criminal career own a pair of Cadillacs that had custom-made holsters next to the driver’s seat.
The policy games bore enticing names: Hi-Noon, Grand Prize, Gold Mine, Silver Dollar. From the Green & White, Binion’s captains—white men with monickers like Jelly and Fivecoat—dispatched black runners to find customers, and return with betting slips and bags bulging with coins. The bagmen also sold “dream books” to bettors. If a gambler dreamed of thunderstorms, for example, these guides would tell him which numbers to pick. A dream of zebras meant different numbers. Binion’s runners collected a 25 percent commission on their sales, which was considered generous. But when one bagman tried to pocket some extra cash, Binion dealt with him—and sent a hard message to his other runners—by putting a pencil through the man’s eye.
Here was the paradox that marked Benny Binion, now and for the rest of his years. He was brutal when he had to be and beneficent when the opportunity arose. He also understood that love engendered loyalty, while fear instilled discipline, but together they conveyed a singular power that could elevate and enshrine. Binion’s policy operations fleeced the blacks of Dallas without mercy, and he employed mayhem as he saw fit. Yet years later, a prominent black Dallas physician, Emerson Emory, recalled his father’s work as a runner for the Cowboy with deep affection. “I remember the pride that my father showed whenever he collected his small earnings, the result of miles of walking in the community,” Emory said. “I remember the trucks, laden with apples and oranges that Mr. Binion had parked next to the policy shack behind the old State Theater during the Christmas season. Sometimes the fruit was the only gift the neighborhoods would receive from Santa.”
• • •
Even as his policy business thrived, Binion remained a relatively small player in the hierarchy of Dallas vice. Police regarded him and his peers as little more than second tier, but he aspired to something greater. He wanted to be like Warren Diamond.
Originally a pharmacist, Diamond had matured into a felonious patrician, known as a sportsman in polite circles. Binion remembered him as “the first big dice fader I ever knew.” A fader was someone who covered other dice rollers’ bets.
Diamond had begun his gambling business in a wagon yard on Camp Street, near downtown Dallas. It was a primitive setup, with the wagering made among the dirt and the horses. A wooden stockade fence surrounded the yard, keeping the police out until some deputies sneaked in by hiding inside a covered wagon. They shut the operation down and arrested Diamond.
Convicted of “keeping premises for the purpose of gaming,” Diamond got two years in state prison. When released, he upgraded his business, setting up shop in the St. George Hotel, a workingman’s lodging—a single room with a bath was $8.75 a week—near the Dallas County courthouse. Now he had moneyed partners, employed sufficient muscle to keep the peace, and controlled an operation that generated enough cash to make payoffs. Diamond soon owned a mansion in the town’s finest neighborhood.
Binion spent much of his time hanging around the St. George operation, picking up odd jobs, parking cars, and catching a few stray pieces of the action. What he was really doing was watching and learning. “Warren Diamond was as fine a man as I ever knew,” Binion said—a generous patron, always a soft touch for the down-and-out or the sick, especially the sick. “He was a big giver like that,” Binion said.
Diamond also established a policy of taking any bet, no matter how big. “He opened up a Do and Don’t dice game with no limit,” Binion said, speaking of a common craps game. “A fellow came in there and threw an envelope on the line and said, ‘Diamond, I’m going to make you look.’” But Diamond didn’t flinch, and he didn’t look. He just said, “Pass him the dice.”
With all eyes on him, the man rolled. “He shot the dice, and caught a point and missed it,” Binion said. “And they opened the envelope and there’s a hundred and seventy-two one-thousand-dollar bills in it. That was the biggest shot I ever heard of. And I know it to be true because I was in the hotel lobby at the time it happened.”
Binion never forgot this strategy of accepting bets of all sizes. In addition, Diamond—with his style, daring, and business acumen—presented Binion with the closest thing to a father figure he ever knew. “I guess a kid just wants to kind of pattern after some guy like that, you know,” Binion said. “I admired him very much.” That understated the case. “Warren Diamond was Dad’s idol,” said Binion’s daughter Brenda.
By the early 1930s, however, Diamond often absented himself from the games at the St. George. He was fifty-five and had prostate cancer, so he spent much of his time seeking treatment at retreats and at medical clinics. When not in bed, he supervised the construction of his tomb. Diamond had seen a granite, columned mausoleum that he admired in Connecticut; he commissioned one like it for himself back home. With an interior of bronze, brass, and Italian marble, it cost $65,000, far more than most houses.
And soon he was ready for it. Diamond lay in bed at St. Paul’s Sanitarium in Dallas. He had been told he had no hope of recovery, and his pain had become unbearable. He asked the nurse for his clothes and called a cab from his room. Diamond left the hospital, struggled into the taxi, and told the driver to take him home. The ride to 4224 Armstrong Parkway took no more than fifteen minutes.
His wife met him at the door. He walked past her and made a slow climb of the stairs. Then he shuffled into the second-floor bathroom, put an automatic pistol to his head, and shot himself dead.
Binion grieved the loss of his mentor, but he put his sadness away and thought of the opportunity now in fron
t of him. “I don’t miss nothing after I leave it,” he said much later. “Make the best out of every situation.”
• • •
Such resilience marked Binion’s character throughout his life, yet there were some hard breaks from which he couldn’t walk away blithely and unbent.
One of his partners in those days was another young man who had fled the fields of Pilot Grove—his younger brother, Jack. While Benny had his boisterous moments—he liked to blow off steam by stepping into the street and firing his pistol into the air—Jack took the free-spirited approach even higher. Benny liked horses, but Jack preferred motorcycles. “He’d laugh about how his little brother could whip him,” Benny’s daughter Brenda remembered. This didn’t spring from Jack’s brute strength so much as pure wildness.
Benny tended to pursue his criminal interests with at least some deliberation and planning. When Jack needed money, he grabbed it, with abandon, wherever possible. At one point he and a like-minded criminal stormed an East Dallas house in which they believed four men had a stash of bootlegging proceeds. The two failed to tie down, or shoot, one of the witnesses, who escaped and called the police. Jack and his friend robbed the occupants, ransacked the house, and fled the scene as officers arrived. Police fired a shotgun at their car, hitting Jack in the head. He lived, but he lost an eye. That was the extent of his punishment, for charges against him were later dropped. After all, the men he had robbed were black.
Months later, on a crisp winter afternoon, a single-engine Stinson Detroiter took off from Love Field with three men aboard. The Stinson banked to the southeast and headed toward White Rock Lake, the city’s main reservoir. For several miles the stunting pilot kept the plane no more than twenty feet above the ground, dropping it even lower in clearings, buzzing cars and trucks, then barely clearing rooftops and power lines. A watchman at the White Rock Lake pump station stared in amazement as the plane emerged from between the trees lining the reservoir. Over the open water, it seemed almost to be skimming the sun-dappled surface. No more than a hundred feet from shore, as the pilot executed a series of sharp turns, a wing clipped the water and tore from the fuselage. The rest of the plane tumbled upside down, plunged into the shallow lake, and plowed into the muddy bottom. All three men aboard were killed. One of them was twenty-three-year-old Jack Binion.
He was buried a few days later in the family cemetery in Pilot Grove. The loss consumed his mother, and she would be dead of a stroke in seven months at the age of forty-nine. “She grieved herself to death,” Binion said.
Binion, too, deeply mourned Jack’s death, and then the heartbreak compounded: Jack’s wife was pregnant when he died, but “she decided not to have the baby,” Brenda Binion Michael said. After the abortion, “Dad never spoke to her again.”
He took his brother’s clothes and carefully folded them into a trunk. Binion kept them with his own possessions for the next thirty years. And when his first son was born, Binion named him for his brother.
• • •
As he returned to Dallas from his brother’s funeral, Binion faced a shifting landscape. Diamond’s death had created chances for expansion, and Binion’s head was full of plans. He also had a pressing personal concern, and it arose from the whiskey trade. Hilliard Henderson, who ran a downtown Dallas pharmacy, operated a bootlegging business on the side. Some of his stash had been stolen, and Henderson asked Binion to track down the thieves.
Binion never found them, but he discovered something else: the bootlegging druggist had a beautiful daughter. Teddy Jane Henderson was a tiny ballerina, barely five feet tall, with long brown hair. She was only sixteen, but she and Binion fell in love and talked of marriage. If you marry Benny Binion, Teddy Jane’s mother told her, you’ll spend the rest of your life living in hotels above some kind of gambling game. That didn’t stop her. On October 2, 1933, Teddy Jane hopped in a car with Binion and drove 110 miles north, across the Red River to Ardmore, Oklahoma, where a sixteen-year-old girl could marry a twenty-eight-year-old man with no waiting and few questions asked. Back in Dallas, they settled into an apartment on Cedar Springs Boulevard. Within four months, Teddy Jane was pregnant.
Their daughter Barbara was born on October 23, 1934, and if Binion was not an ever-present father, he proved himself sufficiently protective. Baby Barbara contracted whooping cough, and spent many sleepless nights in endless fits of coughing and crying. The upstairs neighbors complained to the landlord about the noise. When Binion learned of his neighbors’ distress, he told the landlord not to worry, that he would address the problem himself. That evening Binion waited in his apartment until he heard the neighbors’ footfalls upstairs. He pulled his handgun and began firing into the ceiling. When they fled to the next room, he moved under them and fired some more.
By dawn the next day the complaining neighbors had moved out.
• • •
Dallas had a population approaching three hundred thousand by the early 1930s, and was growing every year. It did especially well at attracting two types of people: the rich and the desperate. And Binion was putting himself in a position to exploit both.
Out on the empty plains of West Texas and Oklahoma, hundreds of miles from Dallas, topsoil began to dry up and blow away. It moved across the prairie like a black blizzard that buried houses, livestock, and people. Many caught in these hellish storms—a man could disappear walking from his house to his barn—believed that the end of the world had come, not with flood or fire but with dirt.
The farmers fled as the land turned against them. Thousands loaded their ragged possessions onto rickety trucks and scattered west to the paradise of California. But others came to Dallas, which had little room within its boundaries for impoverished rural outlanders. Dust Bowl refugees settled where many of the poor and dispossessed had gone before them: West Dallas. On the unincorporated, flat, and low side of the Trinity River, West Dallas was given to floods and disease. Many residents lived in tents or under trees. The lucky ones rented shanties. Sewage ran in shallow ditches and in crooked, fetid creeks. The editorialists and preachers called it the city’s shame, but their railing moved few to action. Yet where some saw failure, others spotted opportunity. Like slums everywhere, the district proved a breeding ground for outlaws, and a number of Binion’s most loyal and effective foot soldiers would be recruited off the unpaved streets of West Dallas.
While the Dust Bowl sent forth waves of misery, East Texas spewed riches. The Daisy Bradford No. 3 well in Rusk County started an oil boom that lasted for twenty years—millions of dollars, pouring from holes in the ground. Dallas, only 130 miles away, was the closest major city. This didn’t insulate Dallas from the Depression, but it softened the blow, as dozens, then hundreds, of oil-related companies set up headquarters there. The banks filled with their deposits, and well-paid executives and oil-field workers rolled into town. “All them oil men had money,” Binion said, and many of them wanted to gamble with it.
As Binion approached thirty, most of the boyishness had faded from his face. He knew the players in town—where they were the strongest and where the weakest—and he moved with growing confidence. In the spring of 1934, the Majestic Theater in downtown Dallas was showing the movie Viva Villa! It starred Wallace Beery and Fay Wray, and presented the highly romanticized version of Pancho Villa transforming himself from mere bandit to heralded leader of the Mexican Revolution. Binion loved the movie—the story of a petty outlaw who treasures horses, robs people, and goes on to greatness—and it remained a favorite for the rest of his life.
Like Villa, he had grander plans. The brave new underworld offered no end of possibilities.
Binion (right) and Bill Decker, his best friend at the Dallas County courthouse.
4
GOOD FRIENDS AND A DEAD RIVAL
I had a lot of high, influential friends in Texas, and it wasn’t no money thing. It was friends.
—BB
Binion often looked at a man—from an angle, with a squint—as if he were sizing up his price per pound. He calculated odds on nearly everyone he met. As soon as Binion saw Fred Browning, he knew he held aces.
On a gentle North Texas afternoon, a car carrying seven girls sped past the Arlington Downs horse track and the Baghdad Supper Club, with the last bits of the city dropping away as they traveled west. They were bound for the finest casino in the Southwest and one of the most elegant in the country. Known as Top O’Hill Terrace, it was Fred Browning’s place.
Soon they turned into an unmarked, paved driveway and stopped at a massive black iron gate. A man carrying a rifle emerged from a stone, turret-like guardhouse. He looked into the car, saw the girls, smiled, and waved his hand. Another armed guard swung the gate open, and the car passed into the compound. A winding road led three hundred yards uphill, under a canopy of oak trees, until it reached the parking lot, which was full of Cadillacs, new Pierce-Arrows, and top-dollar roadsters—two-seaters with whitewalled tires and long, sweeping fenders, the shiny transports of rich people. The girls could hear a band playing as they spilled from their car, ready to go to work. Mary Helen, Hazel, Joan, Gwendolyn, Mildred, Margaret, and Willetta: Ruth Laird’s Texas Rockets, back for their daily dancing gig.
Set on a heavily wooded rise in Arlington, Texas—between Dallas and Fort Worth—Top O’Hill had started in the 1920s as a tearoom and bridge parlor, a place for affluent matrons to pass satisfied afternoons. Then it caught the attention of Browning, for whom the delights of the plumbing business no longer sufficed. He bought the building in 1926, and ultimately the forty-six acres surrounding it, and turned Top O’Hill into a gambling den.