Blood Aces Page 6
Ultimately, Whitaker decided to divest himself of the gambling business. The word among the wagering class was that he had made too much money in thoroughbreds and the oil patch to mess with dice rooms. A confidential police report took a different view: “Whitaker foresaw the violence in these men, particularly Benny Binion, and therefore wanted no part in it.”
Now Binion was poised to move in, but Bill Decker, despite their friendship, blocked it. (The Top O’Hill was in Tarrant County and therefore outside Decker’s jurisdiction.) Once Whitaker yielded the turf, Decker insisted that gambler Fred Merrill control the Dallas dice business. Decker trusted the handsome and impeccably tailored Merrill to run a tight operation whose problems didn’t spill into the public eye. Merrill didn’t go around shooting business rivals on busy streets in broad daylight.
It represented a bitter setback for Binion, but the reproach had only temporary effect. Soon he got his greatest stroke of luck to date, and it came from a source nobody could have predicted: the proper men who controlled government and big business in the city of Dallas.
The year 1936 marked the hundredth anniversary of Texas’s independence from Mexico. The state’s leaders decided to celebrate its centennial in a characteristic way: big and flashy, with an exposition calculated to draw the attention, if not the envy, of the world. First they had to decide where to hold it.
The Texas legislature established a commission to award the franchise to the proper city. San Antonio made a bid; with the Alamo, it was to many a logical choice. Houston also showed strong interest, and could point to its status as the birthplace of the Texas republic, because that was where Sam Houston’s revolutionaries defeated the Mexican army of General Santa Anna. And then there was Dallas, which offered no plausible historic reason to host the centennial. It had been the site of no major battles or other momentous events. But Dallas had cash, lots of it, thanks to a fund-raising campaign by R. L. Thornton, president of the Mercantile National Bank and future mayor. By pledging to spend far more than its competitors, Dallas bought the centennial.
At Fair Park, the city built a sprawling and grand exposition complex at a cost of $25 million, and it served as an instant factory of bluster. One booster promised “a world’s exposition Texanic in proportions and Texanic in its revealments.” Thornton, a plainspoken man born of the cotton patch, expressed an even grander assessment in fewer words. “The greatest world fair in history,” he proclaimed.
The self-consciously earnest city of Dallas planned to draw crowds with an epic pageant called the Cavalcade of Texas, a sanitized historical play, heavy on the Lone Star romance. For those whose appetite for adventure remained yet unsated, the Dallas centennial featured a Hall of Religion, a Hall of Natural History, and a Hall of Horticulture. Also the Centennial Frog Farm, as well as the venue where little people lived and performed, known as Midget Village. Across the way, in the Cotton Bowl stadium, a female conjoined twin was married in front of 4,500 people, the first such nuptials in Texas history. Alas, the bride, who performed a nightclub act with her sister, filed for an annulment seven weeks later.
Frog farms and conjoined twins aside, the centennial developed a problem: it was considered a bit stuffy. Thirty-five miles west of Dallas, the rival civic leaders of Fort Worth plotted to steal the Dallas centennial’s thunder, and they did it by supplementing historical pageants with some real fun. Broadway showman Billy Rose signed on to produce their Frontier Centennial Exposition. Among its spectacles was Sally Rand’s Nude Ranch, which boasted an assortment of lovely cowgirls who wore hats but no shirts. Finally, something really was Texanic in its revealments. Organizers commissioned highway billboards that said “Go to Dallas for Education, Come to Fort Worth for Entertainment.” The strategy seemed to work. Traffic engineers determined that more cars were in fact heading to Fort Worth than to Dallas.
When they saw that boredom was costing them money, Dallas leaders convened an off-the-record emergency meeting of the city council. Dr. J. W. Bass, the city’s health director, said he was told, “We’ve got to open up the town. Mr. Thornton is in a hole for a lot of money and going in deeper all the time.” Some of them may have regretted that they quashed early plans for a Centennial Nudist Colony.
So a desperate Dallas—despite its longing to be admired as an ascendant and sophisticated metropolis—turned to a couple of old favorites to salvage its expensive exposition: painted ladies and games of chance. The health department issued 2,400 permits to prostitutes, and police were instructed to “keep the whores as safe as possible.”
And gambling, the leaders decided, would now be allowed as well. It was even permitted on the grounds of the centennial. This, a police report said, “brought in quite a substantial sum of money.”
With that, the city gave Binion everything he could have wanted. Gambling was not merely tolerated, it was practically legal. No longer could police decide whom they would allow to operate. The business had been deregulated. “They just let the town go wide open,” Binion said. At the age of thirty-two, with big plans and a killer’s reputation, he stood on the brink of an empire.
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The Southland Hotel, 1200 Main Street at Murphy in downtown Dallas, had two hundred rooms, of which seventy were air-conditioned. Rates started at $1.50 a night. When it opened in 1907, it was billed as the second hotel in the world to have rooms with “running ice water.” That same year an East Texas lawman walked into the lobby, pulled his pistol, and shot out every light, just because he felt like it. By 1937 the Southland couldn’t be called the best hotel in Dallas—the Adolphus held that title—but it served as suitable enough lodging for traveling salesmen and the like. Rising eight architecturally uninspiring stories, the boxy Southland had a brown-brick exterior and a lattice of fire escapes clinging to its front. Off the lobby were a coffee shop, a barbershop, and a drugstore. County deed records didn’t reflect it, but police suspected that New Orleans racketeer Carlos Marcello secretly owned the building via the mobbed-up Maceo family of Galveston. The Southland’s bellhops could get you a hooker if you wanted, or some dope, and there was always a dice game going. Benny Binion’s dice game.
Binion wasted no time in setting up operations in the Southland once the city of Dallas ceased enforcing gambling laws. He located many of his dice rooms in downtown hotels, because downtown Dallas was a thriving, crowded place, day and night.
Movie theaters lined Elm Street: the Rialto, the Capitol, the Majestic, the Melba, and more. Every block had a greasy spoon or two, and taverns were once again—with the repeal of Prohibition—open and busy.
A gambler en route to the Southland dice room would stroll down Main Street, past the Ideal Laundry, the Oriental Café, and a fedora store called the Hatitorium, and enter through the hotel’s glass doors. He would cross the lobby, maybe pausing at the cigarette stand for a pack of Old Golds—“Not a Cough in a Carload”—and a newspaper, and would climb stairs to the mezzanine. At room 226 he pressed a button next to a door marked Private. One of Binion’s men slid open a speakeasy-style vent, eyed the potential entrant, and decided whether he would be allowed inside. The room was low-ceilinged and rectangular, thick with cigarette smoke. No bands played, and no Texas Rockets danced. On a normal night the place filled with perhaps fifty men in suits drinking, laughing, and throwing dice. They played with chips stamped with Binion’s new trademark, a horseshoe logo. “We’d just have a big suite of rooms, have the tables in there, have a bar,” said Binion, who kept an office in a side room. “We’d send out to different restaurants and get the food. Everybody knew about it.”
Binion’s expanding operation quickly became known as the Southland Syndicate. In addition to the Southland Hotel, he and his partners operated or controlled gambling at the Bluebonnet Hotel, the Maurice Hotel, and at least ten other spots in town. The Savoy, the Troxy, the Birdwell, and the Jefferson—all were his. Scattered across the city were dozens of others that he di
dn’t own but that paid him a 25 percent rake, the price of peace.
Binion and Harry Urban also ran a slot machine company that serviced each of the gambling parlors. Bookies operated out of many of these same hotels, and Binion controlled them too. One of them was Schuyler Marshall Jr., and like a lot of Binion’s associates, he had a past. A former sheriff of Dallas County, Marshall took up a criminal career upon leaving office. After kidnapping, robbery, and bank burglary charges against him were dropped, he decided to back away from the more violent felonies.
Many of Binion’s managers were veterans of his bootlegging network, or were ex-cowboys too old and busted up to compete in rodeos anymore. The Mecca Hotel, 1001 Main Street, presented a typical setup. The Southland Syndicate owned the games, which were managed by an old liquor business crony of Binion’s named Dewey Dorough. An ex-con, Dorough made his bones in 1936 when he engaged in a Dodge City–style, late-night shoot-out on a downtown Dallas corner with Ted Meyer, reputed to be a former Chicago bodyguard for Al Capone. Both men, attempting to settle a lingering dice game dispute, pulled handguns and blazed away at each other on the sidewalk. Meyer’s aim was hampered by his drunkenness, and Dorough felled him with a shot to the chest.
In neighboring Fort Worth, Binion recruited George Wilderspin, a rodeo rider he had known since his horse-trading days. Wilderspin ran the East Side Club in partnership with Binion. The East Side functioned as a full-service operation; also on the grounds were a barbershop, a tourist court, a gas station, and a drugstore. Wilderspin brought along a companion from the rodeo circuit to run some of their smaller Tarrant County enterprises, a former trick rider named Louis Tindall, the sort of gent who would pistol-whip his own mother-in-law, then break her arm by beating her with a Bible.
Binion believed in the situational loyalty of these men, and trusted them to take the necessary action—without having to call the law—when matters turned rough. Such was the case when, during a game at the Southland, some of Binion’s cronies found themselves in an argument with a player named Eddie Gilliland. One of them hit Gilliland in the throat, killing him on the spot. Then the crew loaded the body into a car, took it to the next county, and dumped it on the side of the road. Nobody talked about it, and few cared. “There will be,” an internal police report noted, “no solution to this murder.”
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Some of the same high-rolling customers who frequented Top O’Hill became regulars at Binion’s downtown Dallas games as well. Howard Hughes, though one of the richest men in America, kept his losses at the table relatively small. “He wasn’t a high player,” Binion remembered. “I didn’t pay no attention to him . . . I know he never lost $10,000. Might have lost $7,500 some time. It didn’t mean nothing to him.” H. L. Hunt, then amassing his fortune in the East Texas oil fields, had an office within walking distance of the Southland, and would wander over at the end of the day. “When he wasn’t tired, he’d probably stay there and shoot craps all night. Daylight come and he’d go home,” Binion said. Actor Don Ameche—he played Alexander Graham Bell in the 1939 biographical movie—was a repeat client. “He shot the craps when he come to Dallas,” Binion said. “A crap-shooting son of a bitch, he was.” Local politicians showed up too. “They’d come in them places. They didn’t give a shit much.” At least one Dallas County district attorney was among the regulars, personally escorted to the tables by Binion.
Not all of Binion’s customers were powerful officials or famous millionaires. Many came from a healthy subculture of professional gamblers. Dallas was boiling with them, their pockets stuffed with rolls of cash when they were winning, their heads full of schemes when they weren’t. Some of them plotted a dual income stream: either win money at the tables or steal it in a holdup on the street, often robbing other gamblers. When not serving prison time, these people were Binion’s bread and butter. One man who worked for Binion on and off for years said his boss made it a point to exclude working stiffs—naive wagering amateurs looking for that one big score—from his games. “Benny didn’t want truck drivers coming up there and losing all their family’s money,” he said.
The practice was part empathy—Binion never forgot the hard times of his youth—and part image control. He didn’t wish to be seen as someone running a fleece joint. Binion was, after all, a respectable businessman who counted among his friends the heads of some of the city’s biggest banks. “There was a group of bankers there, they were the most liberal, smartest bankers in the world,” he recalled. “There was never a smarter set of guys than them. They kept Dallas on top.” And many of them were more than happy to quietly accept Binion’s gambling proceeds in deposits. Millions of his dollars went into the Hillcrest State Bank, one of Dallas’s premier financial institutions.
The bankers also served as launderers for Binion’s political payoffs. Binion gave them money and they passed it to politicians, a law enforcement report said. “It is believed that all of the banks operating in the city lend them [Binion and associates] their silent support.”
For a game that involves no more than rolling a pair of dice, and whose basic object is to guess whether a certain number will come up before a seven is rolled, craps is wrapped in layers of complexity. It can be baffling to the novice, maddening to the journeyman, and a bankroll destroyer even to the experts. The player who throws the dice and the gamblers betting on his roll enjoy dozens of possible bets with varying odds. Complexity aside, craps operations don’t require much in the way of capital investment—felt tables, chips, and dice—or labor costs. The average house edge on each roll runs anywhere from less than 1 percent to more than 16 percent, depending on the type of bet. With such math on his side, with the breadth of his operation, and with his ancillary commercial activities, tens of thousands of dollars a week flowed into Binion’s pocket. “Business was real good,” he remembered.
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In later and more quiescent years Binion liked to depict the prime days of Dallas gambling as something that might have been designed by Disney and operated by Quakers. “We all got along good together,” he said of his rivals. That was true to a point; Binion had no problem getting along with dead people. As for the living, Binion showed little patience with those he believed were taking money out of his pocket.
He still had Ivy Miller helping him, along with Earl Dalton, a dice game deputy who had been around for years. Those two, an internal police report said, “played an important part in holding Binion down,” which was necessary because he was “the type that wanted to kill all opposition ‘so they won’t bother us any more.’”
To supplement Dalton and Miller, Binion assembled a talented collection of toughs to guard his games, keep rivals under control, and mete out strategic homicides. Jim Clyde Thomas rode a reputation as a professional hit man who had murdered a West Texas doctor and his wife; the woman was beaten to death, the man shot through both eyes. Johnny “Brazil” Grisaffi was a gambler and gunman who also ran the café at the Bluebonnet Hotel. When police pulled his phone records, they found numerous long-distance calls to mobster Carlos Marcello’s brother in New Orleans. Grisaffi explained that he was merely buying fish for his restaurant.
Topping the list of Binion’s enforcers was Hollis DeLois Green, known as Lois. The son of a prostitute, he grew up in a Dallas brothel and began breaking the law—stealing bicycles and cars—before his teens. After a stretch in a Texas prison for auto theft, Green sought opportunity in New York City, where he emerged as a suspect in the death of a police officer. He was not convicted of that, but did time in jail there for vagrancy. It seasoned the young man, and when he returned to Dallas, Green no longer appeared the callow petty thief. Now he was dashing, in an unlettered career-criminal sort of way, and was newly convinced of the value of a diversified criminal organization. From a West Dallas hangout called the Trap, Green dispatched a gang that, by some estimates, operated in dozens of states. Lois Green’s Boys, the police called them, or the
Forty Thieves, and they stole just about anything—cash, government bonds, even a load of cigars from a freight-train boxcar. “They proudly boasted that they could blow any safe in the country in thirty minutes with a sledge hammer, a drill pin and a chunk of nitroglycerine grease,” a newspaper account explained, adding that grand theft was merely one division of Green’s company. “They would take over prostitution in many towns of the state. They would control the flow of narcotics. They would begin large-scale safe-cracking operations all over the country. They would be killers-for-hire.”
Despite his profitable network, Green personally stayed in the action, a player-coach of felonies. Home invasions were a specialty; he liked to kick in the door, tie up the terrified residents at gunpoint, and make off with the goods. His usual plunder was gold and diamond jewelry, with a pistol-whipping sometimes thrown in at the conclusion of the evening. “I’ll show you how tough this Green thinks he is,” a Dallas sheriff once said. “He gets on the front of the street car track, and the street car man rings his bell for him to get off . . . So Lois stopped his car right on the track, got out, pulled his gun out, and went and broke the window and said, ‘If you ring that bell again, I’ll blow your head off.’”
The blond, nicely tailored Green cut a hard-to-miss figure around town. He wore two-tone shoes and traveled stylishly in a late-model black Cadillac equipped with a radiotelephone, which he used to call his bail bondsman and lawyer whenever arrest appeared imminent. This ensured that his bond would be posted, or a writ filed, by the time Green reached the jailhouse. He typically spent only a few minutes behind bars. When he wasn’t robbing or pimping, he enjoyed relaxing like any other local man of commerce, by playing golf.
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