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  If he protected himself, Binion was confident that this was a war he could win. Bob Minyard’s death meant little to him. Binion had more money, more firepower, and more influence in the county courthouse and at city hall than Noble could dream of possessing. But he had one critical weakness that he didn’t yet understand. He couldn’t control the voters.

  Binion (right) with his new business partner and old family friend, Fred Merrill.

  8

  “LIT OUT RUNNING”

  Hell, you can stub your toe and fall down and kill yourself. You just ain’t very powerful.

  —BB

  Few people paid much attention when, on a cold day in February 1946, a political neophyte named Steve Guthrie walked into the Dallas County courthouse and filed to run for sheriff. The thirty-three-year-old Guthrie, a former army sergeant and traffic cop, had never held political office and could point to no organized support. His candidacy merited but two sentences in the newspaper.

  Smoot Schmid, the thirteen-year incumbent, considered Guthrie little more than a political annoyance, and couldn’t be bothered to put much energy into a campaign. “I have given you law enforcement in the past,” he told a crowd in a typically soporific stump speech. “I ask you to give me the opportunity to continue to give you the same service.” Courthouse insiders nonetheless believed Schmid’s reelection a near certainty. This was, of course, good news for Binion, who had profited handsomely from Schmid’s indifference, and from chief deputy Decker’s friendship.

  Despite his torpor, Schmid nearly won the primary outright. In a three-man race, he collected fifteen thousand more votes than the second-place finisher, Guthrie. Now the two found themselves in a runoff. Schmid—supremely confident and spectacularly lazy—once again refused to mount much of an effort. But the vigorous Guthrie campaigned hard, going door-to-door throughout the county, enlisting hundreds of army veterans to help, and making speeches to any group that would have him. His message: Schmid ran “the biggest political machine at the courthouse,” and Dallas County was infested with organized crime. Some could have read this as a veiled threat to Binion’s gambling operations. At least one person did—Herbert Noble.

  Only about six months had passed since Lois Green and friends tried to gun down Noble in that wild highway chase. Noble, still gimpy from his wounds, couldn’t match Binion’s collection of gunslingers, but he saw in Guthrie a side door to potential advantage. Eliminate Binion’s protection, Noble reasoned, and you might eliminate Binion. Noble gave Guthrie’s campaign $15,000, a huge contribution for a local race. When news of this reached Binion, who was summering in Montana, tending to his ranch, the reaction came hot and fast. He ordered Buddy Malone—who had been in Montana helping with horses—back to Dallas right away. Malone’s trip had only one purpose: to kill Herbert Noble.

  Though he had previously proved his homicidal loyalty to Binion, most notably with his plugging of Ben Freiden, Malone was reluctant to pursue Noble’s death himself. He may have feared prison, or he may have feared Noble. For whatever reason, he engaged a local gambler named Jack Darby to make the hit.

  Around 3:00 a.m. on August 19, 1946, Darby called Noble and told him to come to a Dallas gambling club to pick up $12,000 he was owed. When Noble arrived, Darby pulled a snub-nosed pistol, cursed Noble, and fired several shots into the floor at Noble’s feet. This may have been an attempt to force Noble to draw his own .38, so that Darby could kill him in plausible self-defense. But Noble didn’t take the bait, and eventually talked Darby into putting his gun down. Then Noble picked up his $12,000 and walked out untouched. He had survived murder attempt number two.

  Five days later, even worse news fell on Binion. Dallas County voters elected Guthrie sheriff by nine hundred votes. Binion’s subsequent political analysis was pithy: “My sheriff just sat on his ass and pissed away the election.” Now the Southland Syndicate stood at risk of losing its very foundation.

  Guthrie made his intentions clear in a round of post-victory speeches to earnest civic groups and assorted clubby enclaves of Babbittry. Speaking to the East Dallas Kiwanians, he vowed, “I will wear out the Dallas County Jail” with downtown casino operators. He also promised that as soon as he took office, Bill Decker would be fired.

  As bad as that sounded, Guthrie was far from Binion’s only problem. Carl Hansson, the police officer whom Binion had mocked for his late-night zoo patrols, had now ascended to chief of the department. The new chief likewise made plenty of threatening speeches in which he announced a crackdown on gamblers. Beyond that, a young, ambitious lawyer named Will Wilson had been elected district attorney—replacing a DA frequently seen sporting with Binion in his casinos. A World War II veteran, Wilson was a member of the junior chamber of commerce who, at the age of thirty-four, still lived with his parents. Shortly after his election, he declared that his office would aggressively prosecute dice game operators. “The gamblers can’t stand that,” he said.

  No one could mistake the newcomers’ message: Benny Binion was a marked man.

  • • •

  This was nothing but good news for Herbert Noble. “Guthrie and Noble,” a police memo observed, “had an extremely close personal relationship, and apparently Noble had agreed upon certain deals with Guthrie to operate gambling interests in the outskirts of the City of Dallas.” Other gamblers, in the form of a rogue patrol of the Chicago syndicate, sensed an opening too. And so it happened that in 1946, Paul Roland Jones came back to town. His previous missions in Dallas hadn’t gone so well, but he knew that this one would work.

  A forger, jewel thief, and habitual liar, Jones had done prison time for murder in Kansas. He then bought his way into the egg dehydration business, one of a string of bad investments—a long list that ultimately included uranium mines, a shrimp brokerage, and a quack cancer clinic—that left him broke. Around 1941, he made his initial visit to Dallas, and was soon convicted of counterfeiting sugar coupons during the rationing days of World War II, for which he paid a $750 fine.

  Jones claimed he had been sent to Texas the first time by Nick DeJohn, a ranking Chicago racketeer. He later told the FBI, according to an agent’s memo, that DeJohn wanted him to “survey this area as to the possibility of taking over gambling, slot machines, bookees [sic] and the numbers racket.” Jones determined that Binion and his gang had too tight a grip on Dallas, the FBI report said, “and that it was his opinion that they should not try to take over gambling in this area.”

  The slot machine and jukebox business looked to have some room to maneuver. Jones and Marcus Lipsky, an associate of what had been the Capone syndicate in Chicago, purchased a number of “music companies”—fronts for slot operations—in Louisiana and Texas. More than $500,000 in loans for these ventures, Jones later said, came from a bulwark of the Dallas commercial establishment, the Mercantile National Bank. Lipsky, a heavy-lidded thug right out of the organized-crime catalog, planned an expansion of activities: he vowed to kill Binion, Ivy Miller, and Buddy Malone, and leave their bodies outside the Dallas police station in a stolen car. Lipsky reasoned that this would announce a new power in town. Jones—realizing that such a move would only bring intense police heat on their operations—managed to talk Lipsky and the Chicago bosses out of it.

  Soon more Windy City operatives were turning up in Dallas, and Deputy Sheriff Decker had seen enough. He and some deputies rounded up four of the principals, Jones among them. Decker charged them with vagrancy, jailed them briefly, drove them to the county line, and instructed them to keep going.

  This ended, for a while at least, any infiltration by the Chicago machine. Ever the publicity-savvy lawman, Decker had thought to have a newspaper photographer standing by when one of his deputies loaded the four—“grimy and heavy-bearded from two days in jail,” one reporter observed—into the car. The Chicago men were “topwater hoods,” a Dallas columnist proclaimed, adding that “their suitcases had a lot of money.” Decker t
old reporters the men amounted to “as hard a crew as we have ever had in the jail here.”

  The expulsion added to Decker’s legend as a fearless frontier lawman, the type of deputy sheriff who could face down big-city toughs and order them out of town by sundown. “They were told to ‘get out and stay out,’” the ever-obliging Morning News reported. Left unmentioned was its chief effect: to protect, temporarily, Binion’s gambling monopoly in Dallas.

  Years later, Binion was asked about outside mobsters trying to take over his operations, and in a classic example of chicken-fried dissembling, he refused to implicate his friend the deputy sheriff. “Well,” Binion said of Dallas, “they just didn’t come there.”

  “Why not?” he was asked.

  “Well, I just don’t know.”

  “The Mafia was into every other place, trying to be,” his questioner said.

  “Well, to tell you the honest truth about the Mafia, I think it’s a overestimated thing,” Binion said. “I actually never knew anything about the Mafia. I’ve knew people that they [police and newspapers] said was in it, knew ’em personally, but they never did tell me they’s in it, so I just don’t know.”

  But there were rumors, his questioner persisted, about the mob trying to move into Dallas and being thwarted. “I just wondered how you managed that,” the researcher said.

  “Well,” Binion said, “I wouldn’t want to go into that.”

  • • •

  Paul Jones was outraged by the exodus of the Chicago crew, whom he defended as loyal “Masons and Shriners,” not criminals. Complaining that he and his innocent friends had been the victims of nothing more than a political publicity stunt, Jones retreated to Mexico, where he attempted to run a mob-controlled casino. Mexican authorities quickly arrested him and turned him over to American tax agents, who shipped him back to Dallas. When the Bureau of Internal Revenue, as it was then known, determined it couldn’t make a case against him, it kicked him to Decker, who brought Jones in for interrogation one late summer afternoon in 1946. At Decker’s invitation, two agents from the local office of the FBI were there too.

  A small man with a thin mustache, Jones, thirty-seven, dropped the innocence act and boasted that many U.S. law enforcement agencies had questioned him, and each one had accused him of being the top counterfeiter, drug dealer, and gang leader in the United States. Maybe so, but the heaviest criminal charge that Decker could lay on Jones was a theft scheme involving electric motors for vibrating “weight-reducing” machines of the sort found in beauty salons. Jones posted $2,000 bond and left for Chicago two days later on Braniff Airways. Less than two months after that, he was back in Dallas with a new criminal blueprint. He had never really lost his ambition to take over gambling in North Texas. Now, with a fresh administration about to assume office—and Decker on the way out—Jones plotted to move on a weakened Binion.

  • • •

  His first bit of business was to get the sheriff-elect on his side. Jones contacted Guthrie and claimed to have retained his direct connection to the current incarnation of the Capone syndicate in Chicago. What’s more, he could make Guthrie rich. Although Guthrie appeared wary, he agreed to talk further with Jones. They first met on November 1, 1946, at Guthrie’s house—a rather sparsely furnished place that lacked a certain homey touch—with Lieutenant George Butler of the Dallas police also present.

  After talk of dogs and housing prices, Jones offered some helpful advice on covering up homicides. He told Guthrie he carried a .45-caliber Colt automatic with a clip that retained spent cartridges. That clip was important, he said, because if you ever had to kill someone on a rainy night, you didn’t want to be on your hands and knees in the mud, looking for ejected shells that could be used as evidence against you.

  Eventually they discussed the gambling business in Dallas. “I don’t have to tell you who Benny Binion is, who Ivy Miller is,” Guthrie said to Jones. “Binion takes one million flat dollars a year, one flat million. On policy alone.” This was accomplished through the protection afforded by bribes. “We all know that Bill Decker is a pay-off man with Benny Binion,” Guthrie said. “Everybody knows the city, the mayor, I guess, the sheriff’s office—I guess they are paid off. We know they are paid off.”

  Jones wasn’t worried. “I’ll tell you how we can control Binion,” he said. “We won’t have to shoot nobody, and you won’t have to shoot nobody.” Jones proposed that the Chicago mob open a Dallas gambling club. It would be modeled, he said, on the famous Top O’Hill casino, and its likely location would be the current home of the Chicken Bar, a joint at the corner of Commerce Street and Industrial Boulevard. Local people would run the place with only one secret Chicago operative inside to watch the money. “He looks like a preacher,” Jones said. “He is not a dago, he is not a Jew . . . He protects the game.” Lavish bribes would be spread through the Dallas power structure, Jones promised, and in return, the Chicago-owned casino would thrive unmolested while competitors—that is to say Binion—could be run out of business.

  As for Guthrie’s slice, “you should have $40,000 a month,” Jones told him.

  Guthrie spotted an immediate problem. “See, my salary is $7,700 a year,” he said. “I could take $40,000 a month, but where in the hell would I put it?”

  The Chicago boys would handle that, Jones answered. “We are going to worry about you more than you worry about yourself.”

  Several other conferences followed, with Jones accompanied by a couple of compatriots, among them a strong-arm named Jack Nappi. Guthrie brought the discussion back to Binion. “But here’s what I really had on my mind, is the local gambling syndicate,” Guthrie said. “Binion, Miller and those fellows. They make a lot of big cash, you see, and they might not want to take this lying down. They might want to fight, you see?”

  Jones remained unworried by any threat Binion might pose. “We’re going to cut off a lot of his stuff,” he said. Later he sought to assure Guthrie that the new sheriff was dealing now with a higher class of criminal. “We are honest,” Jones declared. “People can’t understand that. We are very, very honest.” And, he added, “we are armed.”

  The meetings lasted for more than ten hours total, with Jones making promises by the dozen. What he didn’t know was that this home in which they were sitting wasn’t really Guthrie’s. It served, in essence, as a stage set for a sting: a house rented and furnished by the authorities. Guthrie and Butler, with the help of the Texas Rangers, had constructed a perfect trap for Jones. Hidden directly below them, in a dugout space under the house, Ranger Dub Naylor was hunched over a gramophone, recording everything Guthrie and Jones said. One microphone was concealed in a telephone next to Guthrie, and another in a radio. From a house across the street another Ranger filmed the mobsters as they arrived and departed from the fake Guthrie residence.

  To his great surprise, Jones was cuffed, jailed, and charged. Later his lawyer tried an unusual legal defense: because Guthrie had not actually been sworn in as sheriff at the time Jones made his offer, it wasn’t officially a bribe. The strategy didn’t work. Jones was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison. Before he could serve that term, he had to do eight years in a federal pen for smuggling opium into Texas from Mexico.

  Meanwhile, Dallas had a new crime-busting star. So compelling were the condensed transcripts of the Guthrie-Jones encounter that the Mutual radio network produced a dramatized account that was broadcast nationwide on Christmas Eve.

  • • •

  As 1946 drew to a close, no one in Binion’s circle could quite figure Guthrie out. Was he a crusading straight arrow, as the Jones sting indicated? Or was he simply the good friend—and secretly the business partner—of Herbert Noble? Either one meant big problems for Binion and his previously cozy courthouse setup. “This arrangement,” Binion recalled, “had done played out.”

  Still, the enormity of the situation seemed to elude Binion, at least un
til Decker called the gambler Fred Merrill, whom Decker had anointed years before as the king of the Dallas gambling business. Since then, Merrill had stayed on good terms with Binion. They shared some business ventures, and their children played together almost every day. Decker’s message to him was blunt: Tell Binion if he doesn’t get out of town, he’ll either be dead or in prison.

  The empire that he had built over the course of a decade had collapsed in a couple of months. Yet once again, Binion had the benefit of lucky timing. Merrill had recently hit a hot streak rolling dice at the Frontier Club in Reno, Nevada, and had walked away—after a twelve-hour session—with $188,500 in winnings. What’s more, Merrill had connections in Nevada, and he could use them to help Binion buy into a Las Vegas casino.

  Many years afterward, Binion summed up his professional options. “I depend on the dice to make a living,” he said. “And I can go anywhere in the United States, almost, and make a living with the dice, if I had to, ’cause I could hustle up some players, and get in a room, and play with ’em. All you got to have is some square dice and a big bankroll, and some men that can deal.” With Decker’s dire warning and Merrill’s business opportunity, Binion made his decision: relocate the dice game to a place where it was welcome and legal. He broke the news to Teddy Jane and the family that they would have to leave the house on Northwest Highway and move to Las Vegas. The decision deeply displeased his wife, but with his enemy ascendant and his life in jeopardy, Binion had no choice.

  He planned to make his initial trip to Nevada, in December 1946, without his family. But there were twelve hundred miles of lonely highway between Dallas and Las Vegas, and with as much as $1 million cash in the trunk of his Cadillac, Binion needed someone to ride shotgun. He recruited two of the best: R. D. Matthews and Al Meadows.