Blood Aces Page 5

  Browning hid the casino in the basement of the tearoom and proceeded to dress it up. Unlike many joints of the Depression, Top O’Hill had carpeting, brass furnishings, fine china, and a studied sense of opulence. The dealers were attired in formal wear, and the Depression seemed a world away. That atmosphere, combined with the high-stakes gambling, attracted rich Texans, Howard Hughes among them. Hughes liked to wear tennis shoes with his tuxedo. “He’d say, ‘My feet have got to be comfortable,’” recalled one Top O’Hill worker. Movie stars who happened to be passing through Dallas stopped by too. Mae West came, as well as Hedy Lamarr, Gene Autry, and Will Rogers. One evening oilman H. L. Hunt hired a cab at the Adolphus Hotel in downtown Dallas and rode over with a couple of his friends, Buster Keaton and W. C. Fields.

  Dinners, drinks, and entertainment were comped for such customers. Top O’Hill offered one other luxury for the rich and famous: there was little chance for embarrassing arrests. Any lawmen coming in the back way would have to scale a fence, then evade armed guards and attack dogs as they climbed uphill through thick brambles, tangled vines, and assorted spiny underbrush. The only realistic entrance was the main drive, with its heavy gate. If cops managed to breach that barrier, an attendant in the guardhouse pressed a button that set off an alarm in the casino. Sliding doors opened, and gamblers fled through underground tunnels that had been dug by Chinese workers. Employees then folded the roulette, blackjack, and craps tables into hideaways in the wall, like Murphy beds. By the time the raiders made their way up the road and hit the casino, the dealers had gathered in a circle, where they held Bibles and sang hymns, a devout collection of men in black tie.

  Top O’Hill had other attractions. Browning kept his thoroughbred racehorses stabled on the grounds. Next to the swimming pool he erected a boxing ring where champs such as Max Baer and Lew “Sweet Swatter from Sweetwater” Jenkins trained and sparred. And behind the casino was the brothel. The whores were gorgeous, almost as lovely as the movie stars leaning on the roulette tables. Some wore black velvet capes from Neiman Marcus. Nothing but the best at Fred Browning’s place.

  When it came to running a posh gambling spot and flesh palace, Browning excelled at everything except handling money, for he tended to squander his earnings at the horse track. There arose a few occasions when he needed a heavy loan or two, and that’s when his friend Benny Binion—who had met Browning through gambling connections—swept in to bail him out. Binion was increasingly flush with cash from his policy games in Dallas, and he knew a promising operation when he saw one. The Cowboy not only lent Browning money in return for a share of the business, he also provided management assistance by bringing in trusted associates to help run the place—and keep an eye on Browning. Top O’Hill’s revenues over a good weekend were said to exceed a quarter-million dollars, a significant portion of which went to Binion, who ultimately had a 50 percent interest. Some nights he and Browning could be found in the casino’s counting room sorting through jewelry that had been won from gamblers. They set aside some of it to be melted down and reformed into silver ingots. Binion always enjoyed silver ingots.

  • • •

  Now it was time for the seven Texas Rockets to file into the tea garden behind the casino—a lush lawn surrounded by a low brown sandstone wall lined with rose and azalea bushes. A fountain gurgled at its center. Perhaps a hundred people, men and women, were there. Still onstage, in a boxy white suit, stood Fred Lowery, “the Blind Whistler,” direct from the Early Birds radio show at WFAA in downtown Dallas, where his repertoire included the “William Tell Overture.” When the whistling was done—Lowery’s finale was always “Indian Love Call”—four jockeys from the nearby horse track began to wrestle a portable, roll-up, wooden dance floor. The jockeys, wearing their brightly colored racing silks—red, blue, green, and yellow—unrolled it across the rich grass, giving the Rockets a stage. The bandleader raised his baton, and the orchestra hit its notes. The Rockets began to dance: seven girls in cowboy hats and fringed red, white, and blue uniforms, kicking and spinning. The crowd watched and drank, and encouraged the girls with warm applause.

  Between numbers one of the dancers, a dark-haired beauty named Willie—short for Willetta—scanned the audience. Most of the men wore tuxedos, and the women displayed themselves in long evening gowns. One woman even sported a hat made of colorful birds’ wings. Others held the long white filters of their cigarettes between fingers with polished nails. All in the garden seemed to represent the height of glamour—except for one couple. At the back of the crowd Willie spotted a man and a woman standing together but not mixing. He wore a colorless, drab suit, and she had on a dress that stood out in its plainness. The man glanced around nervously, while the woman tried to smooth wrinkles from her sleeve. “Look how ugly she is,” Willie whispered to another dancer. She was talking about Bonnie Parker, next to Clyde Barrow. “Him too,” Willie said. Bonnie and Clyde, Depression desperadoes, Dust Bowl Robin Hoods. At the peak of their short but notorious run of bank robberies, they were, in some circles, the most celebrated criminals of their day. But at Top O’Hill, Bonnie and Clyde were out of their league.

  The band struck up “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” and the Rockets resumed dancing, smiles on every face. They were working-class teens forced by hard times to drop out of school and perform. Not that they resented it. This was hard but exciting work, seven days a week, two shows a day. Just children, really, but they were making their way in the world of dice-rolling grown-ups.

  Binion knew that life well. He was easy to spot at Top O’Hill—one of the few men not wearing a tuxedo. Rumpled, a little sweaty, but offering the girls a fatherly glance. Willie could tell by his kindly face that he had a family of his own. When the Rockets finished their performance, Binion turned to a man next to him and said, “Pay those girls in cash, and hurry.” Their total fee was $15, and a harsh world prevailed outside the gates of Top O’Hill. “They need the money,” Binion told his man.

  That was pure Benny: if he liked you, you couldn’t have a better ally. Something like that stuck with a performing girl such as Willie. Seven decades later—her dancing days a distant memory, her oxygen coming from a tank—Willetta Stellmacher would recall him with wistful fondness. “We all liked him,” she said.

  • • •

  Bonnie and Clyde perished on a Louisiana back road in 1934. Barrow’s bullet-riddled body—he had been hit dozens of times in a lawmen’s ambush—was buried at Western Heights Cemetery on the Fort Worth highway in Dallas. During the service, an airplane hired by Binion flew in low and dropped a floral wreath in the direction of Barrow’s fresh grave. Though the tribute came too late to warm Clyde’s heart, it made an impression with the local toughs, many of whom were attending the burial. Binion looked like the most appreciative—and grandiose—rackets man in town.

  As an aspiring pasha of vice, Binion knew he needed to assemble an effective collection of associates. He was not one, given his stunted schooling and line of work, to keep paper records. But Binion cataloged people; he ranked them in his head, precisely and strategically. Even as he smiled goofily and delivered country platitudes, he studied the faces of others, their voices, the way they dressed, the way they walked. Binion could close his eyes and tell who was approaching by the sound of their footsteps. He knew who was loyal, who was cutthroat, and who could be trusted to do the dirty work and never say a word about it. Binion was also quick to see who required a payoff and who needed a beating to be kept in line.

  He further realized that to rise above the ordinary scrum of thugs he would have to make a special effort to cultivate authorities. “You’d have to know somebody that is influential, that you could go and ask a favor,” he said. “And I was always able to get some financial help, and political help, and this, that and the other, any time I needed it. And I never did ask nobody to do nothing out of line for me.”

  That’s because Binion forged such powerful and intimate relationships�
�especially at the county courthouse—that he didn’t have to ask.

  The Dallas County sheriff was R. A. “Smoot” Schmid, a six-foot-six “apple-cheeked” bicycle dealer, as one newspaper described him, who had been elected in 1932 despite a complete lack of experience in police work. His previous dealings with criminals involved buying stolen merchandise from them, which he cleaned up and resold at his bicycle shop. “Because he’s a big fellow and likes to eat,” a local reporter noted, “the prisoners in the county jail enjoy good fare.” He was, in other words, largely inconsequential if not buffoonish, and hardly worth Binion’s time.

  Schmid’s chief deputy, James Eric “Bill” Decker, served as the heart and brains of the sheriff’s office. The one-eyed Decker was a high school dropout who had begun his courthouse career as an elevator operator. He seemed to know everyone, from the most upright Baptist deacon to the lowest small-time grifter. “Every living human in Dallas knew Bill Decker even when he was a youngster,” Binion remembered. “His daddy had a saloon on Griffin Street. He tended bar standing on a box.” As a deputy sheriff, Decker prided himself on his professional rapport with the county’s criminals. If he needed to question someone, he simply put the word on the street. Soon the suspect would be in Decker’s office, talking. He was, to many, the epitome of the straight shooter, a latter-day version of the dime-novel western lawman, though one who favored a fedora over a cowboy hat.

  Decker also happened to be one of Binion’s closest buddies. “He liked me,” Binion said. “Me and him was just goddamn good friends.” Binion insisted that no money was required to cement this bond between an ambitious gangster and the county’s most influential law enforcement official. “I never give him a dollar, not one dollar,” Binion said. “Never bought him a hat, never give him nothing.” The relationship nonetheless paid off for Binion, who went about his business with no interference whatsoever from Decker. “Bill Decker,” Binion said, “had never bothered me in my operations no way, shape or form.”

  • • •

  It wasn’t enough to have connections. He also had to handle the competition. Binion’s general habit was to issue a warning to those who were stealing pieces of his pie. If that caution was ignored, the guns came out.

  On a Saturday afternoon in September 1936, Binion rode in his new Cadillac with an employee of his, an undercard heavy named Harlis E. “Buddy” Malone. The Caddy’s engine purred as they cruised Allen Street in the Freedman’s Town section of Dallas. Like the adjacent district of Deep Ellum, Freedman’s Town served as a busy mercantile and entertainment district for Dallas’s black community. The streets were alive this time of day with shoppers, errand runners, and ambling opportunists in search of easy misdemeanors. Binion and Malone had come to check on commerce. They motored past the two-story redbrick building that housed the Pride of Dallas Café, and saw that the café was packed. Inside, there was music, smoke, laughter, shouts, the smell of beer. A mist of grease rose from the griddle. People spilled out the door and onto the narrow sidewalk. The Pride of Dallas had always been a hot spot for Binion’s numbers trade, and Saturday was the busiest day of all as the runners hunted for players who might have a fresh week’s pay folded in their pockets. Binion and Malone took the street with a slow roll; this was their turf.

  Then one of them spotted Ben Freiden’s car at the curb. A black man leaned in through the window and handed Freiden a paper bag—money and policy slips. That was all Binion needed to see. He yelled for Malone to stop the car. His Cadillac came to a halt inches from Freiden’s Pontiac. Binion and Malone got out. Both carried guns.

  Freiden, forty-six, was by outward appearances a solid citizen with a wife and a fourteen-year-old son, Ben Jr. He owned a nice brick house in an affluent neighborhood and carried life insurance. He had come to Dallas from California, and claimed to be in the produce business. If so, he had soon realized he could make more money selling numbers than cantaloupes, and he operated several policy wheels of his own, the Topnotch among them. The competition was not well received in Dallas, and Binion personally had warned him to stop. Six months earlier Freiden had been shot in the hand by an unseen assailant as he emerged from his car in his darkened driveway. Police made no arrests but suspected the shooter worked for Binion.

  Now, outside the Pride of Dallas, Freiden sat in the passenger seat of his new sedan, wearing a short-sleeved shirt and slacks with $100 in his pocket. A fan on the dashboard stirred warm air in the black car. All the windows were down. Freiden’s chauffeur, George Parker, sat behind the wheel.

  Binion and Malone approached. Malone carried a .45-caliber pistol, while Binion had a .38 and a nasty head of steam. He knew Freiden probably had a gun too, but he didn’t care. Binion reached into the car and slapped Freiden’s face. “You son of a bitch,” Binion yelled at him. “You’re a sucker in the business.”

  Then the shots began, with Binion firing from the passenger’s side and Malone from the driver’s. The crowd on the sidewalk scattered. Freiden’s terrified chauffeur pressed himself against his seat and covered his head with his arms.

  Freiden never had a chance. “I hit him three times, right in the heart,” Binion said later. Yet the bullets kept flying. “Buddy shot him after I done shot him,” Binion said. “Old Buddy just shot the piss out of him.”

  • • •

  With Freiden dead and pissless on the spot—he had seven bullet holes in him—Binion and Old Buddy drove away before the police arrived. Investigators who picked apart the crime scene discovered a loaded pistol in the dead man’s lap. One of its bullets had been fired. On the seat next to him was the brown bag full of policy slips and cash. The chauffeur, unhurt but still in fear, gave them little information.

  Binion surrendered later that afternoon, accompanied by his lawyer, Eddie Roark, attorney to some of Dallas’s leading racketeers. (Roark was more than two years away from being shot dead by a gambler client who came home one day and found his attorney in bed with his wife.) Binion did not go to the city police; instead, he gave himself up to his good friend Bill Decker at the county courthouse. “Look at this,” Binion said, and showed Decker a minor wound—a “bullet scratch” was the best that even the hyperbolic Roark could summon—under his right armpit. He also removed a spent bullet from inside his shirt. This allowed Binion to claim that he had shot Freiden in self-defense. “I’m lucky to be here,” he insisted. When reporters pushed him for additional comment, Binion laughed and fed the press boys some country logic. “I couldn’t talk when I came into this world,” he said, “and I don’t believe now is the time for me to do a lot of talking.”

  The next day, newsboys on street corners held up copies of the Daily Times Herald with the screaming front-page headline “One Killed in Gangland War,” over a story that began, “Gangland’s guns blazed on Allen Street.” There followed references to a “hail of lead” and “two barking automatic pistols.” The more sober Morning News judged that Freiden’s death had been accomplished “in the style of Chicago gang executions.”

  Malone turned himself in the day after the shoot-out, strolling into the detectives’ bureau at the Dallas Police Department and casually announcing, “Well, here I am.” His arrival had been delayed, he said, because he had been “taking care of Mr. Binion’s cattle.” Over the next few days, police tried to piece together evidence. It was not an easy task. Many of the witnesses to the shooting—those who were on the nearby sidewalk when the gunfire began—were now claiming to have seen nothing. “Frightened Negroes,” the Morning News explained.

  Freiden was buried the following Tuesday. Before the funeral, his widow gave a brief, sobbing interview to reporters at her East Dallas home. “If talking would bring my husband back to me and my son, I would be more than willing to say anything,” she said. “But as it is, what is the use?” Mrs. Freiden acknowledged that her husband had been described as a bookmaker and gambling impresario, yet, “I cannot help but feel the sympathies of
the law and the public are in my husband’s favor, and surely in mine.” To this, one newspaper account added that “both she and her orphaned son” believed Freiden’s killers would “surely be punished to the fullest measures of the law.”

  Perhaps in some other place and time. Binion and Malone were indeed indicted for murder, on the theory that Binion had shot himself in the arm and had planted the gun found next to Freiden. But three months later, District Attorney Robert Hurt quietly announced he had dismissed the case against them for lack of evidence.

  Once again, Binion had killed a man and walked free. He was asked many years later if he had given money to the district attorney who dropped the charges. “Well, I don’t know,” he answered. “Maybe I had.”

  The Southland Hotel, downtown Dallas, headquarters for Binion’s Southland Syndicate.

  5

  THE THUG CLUB

  I ain’t never killed a man who didn’t deserve it.

  —BB

  Ever since Warren Diamond’s death, Binion had designs on the dice business, the white man’s side of gambling, where the stakes were higher and the customers richer. To run one of those operations would be a step up in racketeering class.

  But Binion was blocked by Diamond’s number two man, Ben Whitaker, who had seized control of the operations after Diamond’s suicide. Whitaker, a businessman with a portfolio that extended far beyond dice, lived in the penthouse of the Hotel Whitmore. He had a lawn on the roof of the hotel, and invited families of his associates there to watch downtown parades. His partner, Bennie Bickers, stayed one floor below him, so that anyone wanting to kill Whitaker had to get through Bickers first, and nobody ever made it past Bickers, who was considered the best shot in Dallas.