Blood Aces Read online

  One of the Green gang’s biggest heists was a load of narcotics from a Fort Worth pharmaceutical warehouse, a job pulled by two of his henchmen, J. B. “Red” Cavanaugh and Ray Sellers. A safecracker and car thief, Sellers had recently divorced Clyde Barrow’s rather fetching sister, Marie, who was on parole for beating a woman with a table leg. He was a fugitive who had escaped only weeks before from an Oklahoma penitentiary during a prison rodeo. In the warehouse caper, he and Cavanaugh stole boxes of narcotics that, with war shortages, had a street value of $250,000. Green sold some of the drugs, but he used part of the stash for his stable of prostitutes.

  For these and other jobs, Binion functioned as a Stetson-crowned godfather—overseeing the action from a safe remove, sanctioning the players, and most important, extracting his percentage of the proceeds. And he was always looking to up the take. Binion didn’t like the idea of splitting profits from the drug warehouse robbery with half-wit bit players like Sellers and Cavanaugh. He conveyed these misgivings to Green and Grisaffi, who took the two robbers for a ride. Sellers was next seen staggering near Northwest Highway, mortally shot in the chest. More than six years after that, a skeleton believed to be that of Cavanaugh was found in a ravine twenty miles west of Dallas, with a bullet hole in its skull.

  Having long passed the point where he had to do his killing personally, Binion still occasionally found it necessary to deliver detailed instructions. “Shoot the s.o.b. in the guts and bury him alive,” Binion told Green regarding one unfortunate. “It will be a tonic to any of the others who want to be hijackers.” The target of this particular order was one Otto Freyer, an ex-con shortsighted enough to rob Binion’s craps games. With Grisaffi as backup, Green did as told, shooting Freyer in the stomach with a shotgun next to a fresh grave. Then he rolled Freyer into the hole and, as the wounded man begged for mercy, covered him with dirt and quicklime.

  All the surviving parties benefited. “Green and Grisaffi were reportedly loaned a considerable amount of money by Binion to expand their operations in the narcotics racket,” an internal police memo said. And the “tonic,” as described by Binion, had its intended effect. Robberies of his dice games dropped to none.

  What looked to be a rural horse stable was really the business nerve center and countinghouse of Binion’s operations.

  6

  SHOOT-OUTS AND PAYOFFS

  You had to have political help in them days.

  —BB

  There were plenty of hidden homicides—private rubouts that arose from feuds, thefts, turf battles, and disputes over women. Bodies turned up in fields outside town, in the muck of the Trinity River bottoms, or in the trunks of abandoned cars. As long as the gamblers were killing only each other and the general public wasn’t endangered—especially if the news didn’t make the front page—authorities responded with little more than an official shrug. They couldn’t do that, though, if the hoods had a shoot-out on a downtown street in midmorning. When the bullets struck the entrance of a busy ice cream parlor, and when a child was wounded, attention had to be paid. This was something Binion and Ivy Miller failed to grasp as they laid plans to take care of Sam Murray.

  Dallas had grown every year—its metropolitan-area population in 1940 was about 350,000—but for the gamblers it remained a small town. An FBI report on “general crime conditions” in Dallas remarked upon this village-like atmosphere for gangsters: “In view of Dallas being a relatively small city, naturally the criminal element are acquainted with each other.” So everyone in the circle of sportsmen knew that Murray would kill someone if he felt like it.

  Murray already had a police record as a pimp and a bootlegger, and he had been charged but not convicted in 1933 for the shotgun death of a rival whiskey man at a liquor drop masquerading as a sandwich stand near Bachman Lake. Binion was a witness at the trial of Murray’s accomplice. Identifying himself as a horse dealer, he helpfully testified that the lunch counter was “not a nice place.” That same year, Murray spent several months in the federal prison at Leavenworth for bootlegging, and later did another stretch for violating his parole. After his release, Murray built a Dallas gambling enterprise of his own, gaining confidence all along, and eventually muscling in on some of Binion’s operations. Business was good enough that he had bought a ranch and owned two hundred polo ponies. In his ascendance, Murray at thirty-four was cocky and reckless, “a colorful and near-legendary figure in the annals of the local gambling and sporting fraternity,” as one reporter described him. He had been bragging that he would kill both Binion and Miller if they did not stay out of his way.

  • • •

  On a warm, sunny June morning in 1940, Murray decided to make a trip to downtown Dallas. He had banking business, and his wife, Sue, wanted to do some shopping. Normally, he traveled with his bodyguard, a criminally ambitious young man named Herbert Noble. But on this day, he came without protection, save for the snub-nosed .38-caliber revolver in the breast pocket of his coat.

  His wife dropped him on Commerce Street, and Murray went into the Dallas National Bank. Around 10:30 a.m. he walked out of the bank’s ornate lobby, stepped onto the sidewalk, and turned toward a nearby liquor store. Commerce Street was thick with cars and trucks, horns honking. Dozens of pedestrians moved along the sidewalk, and Cabell’s Ice Cream and Dairy Shop had a steady stream of customers.

  The roly-poly Murray was only a few steps from the bank’s door when he found himself face to porcine face with a large man wearing a blue blazer, slacks, and a crisply knotted tie. It was Ivy Miller, ever the well-dressed assassin—a man, in a newspaper’s description, who “had a part in maintaining some of the swankiest air-conditioned gaming rooms in Dallas.” On Miller’s bulbous head rested a stylish straw boater, and in his right hand he held a .38-caliber automatic pistol.

  Without a word, Miller began shooting, the automatic firing so rapidly that some witnesses thought they heard a machine gun. Pedestrians shouted and scattered. Most of the shots hit Murray, but one went wild and struck a sixteen-year-old boy in the leg, shattering his femur. The boy staggered to the curb and fell into the street between two parked cars. As Murray crumpled, he managed to pull his gun and get off one shot. It ricocheted off the marble doorframe of the ice cream shop.

  Murray had been hit at least six times—four in the midsection, one in the back, one in the leg. As the wounded man lay dying on the sidewalk, Miller fled into the bank. A plainclothes police officer, gun drawn, pursued him into the lobby and shouted, “Don’t move or I’ll shoot.” Miller turned, hesitated, then said, “I’m ready. I’m not going anywhere.”

  The officer cuffed Miller, escorted him from the bank, and put him in a patrol car. On the six-block ride to the police station Miller sat in the backseat, blinking hard but saying little more than “Sam threatened me and my family.” Later that day Miller’s lawyer, Maury Hughes, told reporters that—contrary to their wild speculations—this shoot-out did not mean a gangsters’ war had erupted. The two men, Hughes explained, simply “had differences regarding livestock.”

  Blazing headlines followed, pushing the war news in Europe to the bottom of the front page for a day. The Daily Times Herald ran a large photograph of the prostrate Murray being treated by an ambulance attendant dressed all in white, hat to shoes, like the Good Humor man. Another photo showed hundreds of curiosity seekers thronging the scene. “Crowds Swarm Around Victims After Downtown Killing,” the headline said. The pool of Murray’s blood, covering several feet of sidewalk, drew spectators all day long. “Women and men alike gazed without show of emotion at this blood,” the Times Herald reported, “as it thickened and darkened in the hot sun.”

  Authorities moved swiftly to manufacture concern. By noon the next day, witnesses to the shooting were brought before a county grand jury, which was also allowed to see Murray’s bloody clothes. A quick murder indictment followed. From politicians came cries of outrage and vows of crackdowns. Yet Binion an
d his friends quietly continued their gambling operations uninterrupted—now with the comfort of knowing another competitor had been dispatched.

  Even more than before, the money flowed. Operators of the Southland Syndicate believed they had little reason to worry, and events soon confirmed that. Six months after Murray’s death, District Attorney Andrew Patton—on the last day of his term in office and with no fanfare—announced that he was dropping all charges against Miller. The reason for the dismissal, the DA explained, was lack of evidence. This for a shooting that had been witnessed by dozens of people, “in broad daylight in the heart of the city,” the Morning News noted, “where witnesses were so plentiful they almost were breathing on the necks of the principals.” As for the accidental wounding of the teenager, that matter was cleared with a $750 cash payment from Miller to the boy’s family.

  • • •

  The Texas Centennial celebration had come and gone, but the city still failed to enforce gambling laws, as long as the proper bribes were paid. Authorities did conduct the occasional show raid. Binion described one of them: “Well, one time, I had a crap game and the sheriff and two or three deputies came and raided us. And there was eighteen or nineteen people in there, and me.” But then the sheriff received a report of a murder elsewhere, and had to leave. He told Binion to take all the gamblers to his office. “So we all got in the cars, and everybody went down there,” Binion recalled. “And when he [the sheriff] came in, he said, ‘Well, you all got here . . . I’m going to turn you loose.’”

  From time to time, an isolated city official expressed public hope that authorities would go back to enforcing the law, and these people were generally ignored. As Dallas city manager V. R. Smitham lamented, the enforcers were also customers. “The problem would be simple if only hoodlums participated,” Smitham said. “But every time we make a raid on a dice game we find friends.” At least as important was the matter of municipal receipts: Dallas couldn’t afford to shut the dice and policy rooms down. The city government had become addicted to gambling.

  This could be seen in a ritual repeated dozens of times over the course of a typical month. On one such occasion, a muggy night in August, dozens of black men and women packed a second-floor dance hall at 3115 State Street in Freedman’s Town. There was smoke and sweat, laughter and swearing, under bare lightbulbs as gamblers pressed toward the front of the room, bills clutched in their hands, to place bets on a policy wheel. Winning numbers were chalked on a blackboard behind the wheel.

  From one of the windows, a lookout surveyed State Street. He watched a black Ford pull to the curb beneath a streetlight. After a moment two men got out. One was pudgy, with a hawk nose and a hat a couple of sizes too small. The other was tall and thin. Anybody who so much as glanced at them could see they were plainclothes Dallas police. And any doubt about that was removed when a newspaper photographer, loaded down with cameras, was spotted trailing behind them.

  The lookout signaled someone next to the policy wheel, and all gambling came to a sudden halt. Word flashed through the crowd that a raid was coming, and gamblers dropped their tickets on the floor and scattered. Some jumped out second-floor windows. Others took the stairs down and poured onto the sidewalk.

  The two cops stood and watched it all unfold before they crossed the street and entered the front door in no particular hurry. Up the stairs they went on heavy feet, and into the ballroom. Three white men waited for them there, the same as always.

  The police arrested the trio and took them downtown to be charged with misdemeanors. One of the brass held a small post-bust press conference, and described the arrested men as “small fry” in the employ of Benny Binion. The raid was presented as proof that the police had finally decided to crack down—even if they didn’t net the big man—on the operations of the Southland Syndicate.

  Within an hour or so, a lawyer also working for Binion arrived to post bond for the three men. They walked free, and the policy game was back in business by the next day. It was simply another episode in an elaborate and regular charade. Dice games were treated the same way: the bonds would be forfeited, the money absorbed by the city and county, the paperwork lost, and the games quickly resumed.

  For Binion, it was literally the price of doing business, a de facto tax on gambling. “They had a real good city administration,” Binion said. “So they just come in and raid us, and wouldn’t tear up nothing, or do nothing, and we’d pay big fines. And I think we paid something like, oh, $600,000 a year for fines, for a few years there.” It was all worked out in advance as an unofficially budgeted supplement for a municipality that had come up a bit short. “The town got in a bad financial condition,” he said. “We made a deal to pay so many fines a week, so much a week.”

  Binion considered it his duty. And, as usual, he depicted the matter as a bit of innocent circumstance. “There wasn’t no graft,” he insisted. “We helped the city out.”

  This setup was hardly secret. An FBI Crime Survey from the time noted, “All gambling establishments, horse books and policy establishments pay a weekly fine to the city of Dallas.” After many of the raids, various politicians kept the theater going with vows to clean up the festering city. “I want everything closed down,” police chief J. M. Welch declared after officers turned out the lights on Binion’s Southland Hotel casino. Then Ivy Miller paid a $50 fine, and the dice were rolling again within hours.

  Dallas’s reputation as a sin haven reached the state capitol in Austin, where the director of the state Department of Public Safety ordered a crackdown. It didn’t go well. “The Texas Rangers made approximately one raid on a gambling establishment and thereafter made no more raids,” the FBI noted. That one raid had been conducted by showboating Ranger Manuel “Lone Wolf” Gonzaullas, who sometimes carried gold-plated revolvers, but who was perhaps not used to dealing with a city where the police and sheriff’s departments were riddled with paid informants. By the time Gonzaullas arrived at the dice den he planned on raiding, the gamblers and all their equipment were gone, although a phone remained. When it rang, Gonzaullas answered. The caller said, “They’re on their way right now.” The Ranger responded, “We’re already here.”

  Only one government entity executed any sort of effective measures against the Binion syndicate: the U.S. military. The army’s Eighth Service Command headquarters was directly across the street from the Southland Hotel. Officers noted the large number of prostitutes coming and going from the place, and the resultant mini-epidemic of gonorrhea among their soldiers. After a sting operation, in which a Southland bellhop readily procured a woman for a plainclothes military policeman, the command declared the hotel off-limits to its personnel.

  Other local officials remained content to look the other way. Not only was the city cleaning up on fines, but the politicians collected nice side incomes from bribes. “Gambling is presently operated in Dallas on such a large scale that the small fines do not appear to balance the tremendous scale of gambling,” the local FBI office said in a report to headquarters. “Therefore, there could be and possibly is some large pay-off to high officials in the political administration of the city of Dallas.” The bureau believed that Binion’s lawyer, Maury Hughes, “handles all the pay-offs and collections.”

  Everybody was making money, the perfect arrangement for all concerned.

  • • •

  The next racketeer to face violent dispatch in public was Raymond James Loudermilk, a longtime lieutenant in Binion’s operations who had strayed. In the Southland Syndicate, Loudermilk emerged as a valued enforcer and organizer, a man prized for both muscle and brains. His specialty was keeping the numbers runners in line, the games under control, and the money secure, and he rose as high in the syndicate as number three behind Binion and Harry Urban.

  But Loudermilk began to make plans for games of his own. This did not please Binion, which in turn infuriated Loudermilk. One police report offered an additional reason
for friction: “Loudermilk had developed an antagonism for Binion and felt he could operate with Binion’s permission inasmuch as Binion and Loudermilk’s wife were known to be cohabiting together.”

  However faulty the logic of that and questionable the truth—Binion generally spent far more time riding horses than chasing women—Loudermilk found himself a new wife and a new frontier. He married Sam Murray’s widow, Sue, and the two left for a trip to California. When they returned to Dallas, they brought with them a scheme to set up extensive policy game operations of their own. Binion initially took the news with annoyed acceptance. What he didn’t know was that Loudermilk had found a financial backer in Sam Murray’s absent bodyguard, Herbert Noble. In the nearly three years since Ivy Miller ambushed Murray on Commerce Street, Noble had moved into the void left by his late employer and entered the dice-room business himself, with some success. He still had to pay 25 percent of his take to Binion, but with an eye to expansion, he bankrolled Loudermilk. When Binion learned of this, his displeasure curdled to rage. And rage within Binion usually resulted in someone shooting someone else.

  On March 19, 1943, Loudermilk sat in his car on South Ervay Street, outside the Ambassador Hotel, a tired six-story rooming house south of downtown Dallas. At thirty-six, Loudermilk was not enjoying the best of times. Policy game revenues had apparently not met expectations, so he had taken a job at an aviation plant. The blissful life he once enjoyed with Sam Murray’s widow had soured, probably because he had threatened to kill her. Earlier that month she had sued Loudermilk for divorce. And now, on this cool spring evening, he had to have a talk with a punk like Bob Minyard.

  About 9:00 p.m., young Minyard walked through the lobby of the Ambassador—over the worn rug, past threadbare couches, and out the front doors to Ervay Street—and into the night. In the pocket of his cheap suit was a .45 pistol. Minyard, twenty-nine, lived in a furnished room at the Ambassador. For several years he had been a bit player in Binion’s syndicate, an errand boy and game-room scut worker. Even his police record displayed a short list of unimpressive misdemeanors: vagrancy and disturbing the peace. But now his moment had arrived. He gripped his gun and approached Loudermilk’s car.