Benny Benion, Texas Gambler, part III
Oct 22, 2020 17:28:02 #
And yet in the Cat’s grief-twisted brain a fantastic plot was fomenting. He was planning an air raid on Benny’s home in Las Vegas – kill ‘em all, Benny, his wife, his five kids, his dog, his cat. Noble had bought a stagger-wing Beechcraft with extra wing tanks, a bomb rack, and two large bombs, one an incendiary and the other a high-explosive. He even had an airmen’s map of Las Vegas, pinpointing the Binion home on Bonanza Road. Noble might have pulled it off except that Dallas police lieutenant George Butler, who was on temporary assignment to the Kefauver committee, happened to drive up to the ranch just as Noble was doing his final checkout. Noble made a grab for his carbine, but Butler beat him to the draw. At that point Noble crumpled to the ground, blubbering like a baby and sobbing that Benny got all the breaks, that nobody gave a damn what happened to poor Herbert Noble.
That wasn’t entirely true. Someone still cared. On a hot August day in 1951 a land bomb, planted two feet from the mailbox and directly under the spot where a driver stopping to pick up his mail would sit, blew Herbert Noble into an almost infinite number of pieces. Nobody found or even looked very hard for his killer – though gangland rumor had it that the shock waves of the explosion knocked Jim Clyde Thomas, one of the premier hitters of the time, out of a nearby tree and broke his arm. Dallas Country sheriff Bill Decker, the longtime deputy who had replaced the hapless Steve Guthrie in 1950, summed up his official take on Herbert the Cat this way: “He was folks. He lived here, and it takes all kinds of people to make a city.” Just Sayin…RJS
Noble behind bars after getting his ear blown off.
The good ol’ boy network that Benny Binion helped create in Las Vegas – a cabal of entrepreneurs, lawyers, cops, prosecutors, judges, and politicians – was nearly impregnable. But in the end it was no match for the tenacity of Dallas’ post-war crusaders or their lust for vengeance. Vegas was Benny’s kind of town, businesslike and practical, the way Dallas had been in the thirties, only more direct, less hypocritical. The business of Vegas was gambling, which mean that everyone could be more out-front. Semantic distinctions concerning loans, gifts, and contributions were not the sort of thing that got people confused or caused them to lose sleep. When Benny loaned $30,000 to Clark County sheriff Ralph Lamb, for example, he didn’t expect Lamb to repay the money, but he expected Lamb to be there for him when he needed a favor. And Lamb was, just as Benny was there for Lamb when the sheriff was tried for bribery in 1977. Testimony appeared to establish beyond a doubt that Lamb had taken bribes. Nevertheless, U.S. district judge Roger Foley, Sr., whose son Thomas was one of Benny’s lawyers, dismissed the case. Thomas Foley and his brother Roger Foley, Jr., eventually became judges themselves, as did Benny’s other chief lawyer, Harry Claiborne.
The network was a living thing, as solid as gold. In 1951, even while Benny was fighting extradition to Texas, the governor of Nevada and the Nevada Tax Commission saw no reason to deny the Cowboy a license to operate his new casino, Binion’s Horseshoe. State senator E. L. Nores, who appeared before the commission as a character witness for Binion, claimed that Benny’s only limitation was his unbounded generosity. It was a subject on which the senator was well qualified to speak, Benny having gifted him with a new Hudson Hornet automobile a short time before.
Back in Dallas, Henry Wade had moved into the district attorney’s office when Will Wilson was elected to the state supreme court and was plotting a strategy to get Benny behind bars. Work through the federal courts, Wade reasoned, nail Binion on charges of income tax evasion, then hit him with gambling charges after the feds had returned him to Texas. Wade had plenty of evidence, which he shared with the feds. Documents and records seized from the Harlem Queen policy headquarters on Texas Highway 183 – and from Benny’s safe-deposit box at the Hillcrest State Bank – showed that in 1948 Binion had netted more than $1 million from the rackets in Dallas, hardly any of it reported to the Internal Revenue Service. Juries found Binion and his partner Harry Urban guilty of tax evasion. But while the judge in Dallas sent Urban to prison, Binion’s case was transferred to Nevada jurisdiction, and he got off with probation and a small fine.
Outraged by the light sentence, Wade traveled to Washington, where he consulted with U.S. attorney general James McGrannery and other high officials of the Truman administration. According to one report, orders to get Benny Binion were issued the following summer from the Democratic National Convention. McGrannery sent two attorneys from the Department of Justice to Dallas to supervise a new grand jury, and the FBI and the IRS made the investigation a priority. Wade was so determined to get Binion that he had an assistant DA furnish the FBI with an extensive dossier outlining Benny’s criminal history, real and alleged. The FBI showed the dossier to a federal judge, who, as Wade recalls, read it and was incited to remark, “I’m gonna get that S.O.B. back to Texas.”
In June 1953 Benny had his chauffeur, a large black man who went by the name of Gold Dollar, drive him from Las Vegas to Dallas, where he surrendered to his old friend Bill Decker. The following December, he pleaded guilty to federal charges of income tax evasion and state charges of operating an illegal policy wheel. By previous agreement, the sentences would run concurrently: five years in the federal prison at Leavenworth, a fine of $20,000, and a payment of $776,000 in back taxes, penalties, and interest.
Benny paid his $20,000 fine on the spot, peeling the bills from a much larger roll he had brought along to bribe the judge. Benny apparently was under the misapprehension that U.S. district judge Ben Rice was prepared to give him probation in exchange for a gift of $100,000. “The FBI threatened him and scared him off,” Benny claimed later. Binion did 42 months of hard time and was released in October 1957. Wade warned him to stay out of Texas or face additional prison time, but a few months later the Cowboy was riding in the Fat Stock Show parade in downtown Fort Worth, as sassy as ever.
Never again would Benny Binion be allowed to hold a gambling license in Nevada, not that it really mattered. His wife, Teddy Jane, and his eldest son, Jack, were much better able to handle the daily affairs of the casino and hotel business. Teddy Jane was good, heard-headed woman, not easily influenced by the gamblers and gangsters who took advantage of Benny’s generous nature. As a young woman she had predicted, “If I marry Benny Binion, I’ll spend my life in a room above a two-bit crap game.” She was half right. She spent her life in a room above Binion’s Horseshoe. Teddy Jane ran the casino as though it were a mom-and-pop café, trusting no one but herself to make bank deposits. She was a familiar sight on Fremont Avenue, this scrawny old lady with dyed hair and a cigarette between her nicotine-stained fingers, trudging from the casino to the bank with hundreds of thousands of dollars stuffed in the pockets of her trench coat.
Prison took something out of Benny and maybe put something else in its place. He got religion in Leavenworth from a Catholic priest. “Religion is too strong a mystery to doubt,” he said. Benny was 52 when he got out. His face was gentler and rounder, his blue eyes cloudy and not so hard, his waist and hips going to fat, his voice husky but good-humored. He still loved to talk – God how he loved to talk! – and he held court every afternoon at a corner booth at the Horseshoe, telling old war stories. Hell, yes, he remembered gunning down Ben Frieden in ’36. There had always been a dispute over how many bullets were fired from Benny’s .45. Was it one, as Benny maintained at the time, or three, as Bill Decker told the grand jury? “Weren’t no mystery to it, don’t you see,” Benny would cackle. “I shot once and hit him three times right in the heart.”
And yet there was no question that the Cowboy had mellowed. When a preacher from North Carolina lost $1,000 of his congregation’s money shooting craps at the Horseshoe, Benny gave the money back. “God may forgive you, preacher,” he said, “but your congregation won’t.” Life was a crapshoot, that’s what made it exciting. In 1980 a high roller from Austin walked into the Horseshoe with two suitcases, one full and one empty. He took $777,000 from the full suitcase and slapped it on the “don’t pass” line. Benny nodded: Damn right he’d fade the bet. Three rolls later the man walked out, this time with both suitcases full. Life in the fast lane wasn’t all that different from life anywhere else, was it? Nobody got out alive. Benny’s eldest child, Barbara Binion Fechser, was a drug addict and died from an overdose in 1983, an apparent suicide; and his youngest son, Ted Binion, pleaded guilty to a drug charge in 1987.
The stigma of being a convicted felon made Benny uncomfortable, and obtaining a presidential pardon became his final obsession. He almost got it in 1978 when his friend Robert Strauss, then the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, brought Benny’s plight to the attention of the Carter administration. By now his application for pardon had been denied four times, but Benny proposed a deal. He claimed he could deliver a vote in the U.S. Senate on the Panama Canal treaties in return for three presidential favors. One was a federal judgeship for Benny’s friend and lawyer Harry Claiborne, the second was an exemption from interstate trucking regulations for a business acquaintance in Oklahoma, and the third was a pardon for himself.
It might have come off too, except Benny couldn’t keep his famous mouth shut. The Senate ratified the treaties; Benny never made public which vote he delivered. Claiborne got his judgeship and was later impeached for income tax evasion. Trucking regulations became irrelevant when Benny’s friend went broke. And just as the Justice Department was ready to move on his application for pardon, word of a Binion wisecrack reached Washington. Mafia hitman Jimmy “the Weasel” Fratianno had testified that Benny had hired him to kill a gambler named Russian Louie Strauss, which the FBI knew was not true. But rather than issue a simple denial, Benny replied that, “Tell them FBIs that…I’m able to do my own killing without that sorry son of a bitch!” So much for pardon application number five.
During Ronald Reagan’s first term, Nevada senator Paul Laxalt suggested to Benny that a contribution to Reagan’s campaign treasury might help. Benny sent $15,000, and two days later his pardon was denied. In the old days such a perceived betrayal might have tempted the Cowboy to call Lois Green. But a mellower, more mature Benny was content to buy a newspaper ad calling Laxalt a welsher. Benny said that he intended to live long enough to piss on Reagan’s grave, but he finally crapped out.
The jail doors open for hit man Lois Green.
What made Binion’s Horseshoe such a success – at least in Benny’s opinion – was adherence to two bedrock rules. First, the casino catered to hard-eyed, no-nonsense gamblers. No limits, no entertainment, no gurgling fountains or fancy décor. Until recently, the dealers wore jeans. The specialty of the house was (and still is) generous drinks and Benny’s greasy, fiery chili, made not from Chill Will’s recipe as advertised, but from Smoot Schmid’s old Dallas jailhouse recipe.
Second was Benny’s promise that cheaters and thieves would be escorted to the alley, where their arms and legs would be broken by security guards highly qualified for the assignment. Frank Sutton, a detective sergeant with the Las Vegas metropolitan police department, says, “The Horseshoe was the only casino in town that didn’t believe in calling the police. They took care of trouble their own way.”
The wild West motif worked in Las Vegas for many years, just as it had in Dallas, but again times were changing. By the mid-eighties, Las Vegas was trying to recast its image as a sort of adult Disneyland, and the Horseshoe’s vigilante tactics were an embarrassment. After the Cowboy suffered two major heart attacks and surrendered even a pretense of control, the rough stuff got out of hand. A casino employee chased down a drunk who had thrown a brick through a window, calmly shot him to death on a street a few blocks from the police station, then strolled back to the Horseshoe as though nothing had happened. Two men assumed to be cheating at blackjack were hauled into the security office, beaten, and robbed.
In January 1988, Benny’s grandson, 33-year-old Steve Binion Fechser, and two security guards were convicted of assaulting the two blackjack players. But instead of passing sentence, district judge Thomas Foley took it on himself to overturn the jury verdict, an action within the power of a Nevada judge.
That didn’t end it, however. In April 1990, Fescher, his uncle Ted Binion, and six guards were indicted on federal charges of conspiring to kidnap, beat, and rob customers of the Horseshoe – particularly blacks and other people considered undesirable by the Binions. The case will be tried starting October 8 in the court of U.S. district judge Philip M. Pro.
Teddy Jane Binion will no doubt be among the spectators, as she was at her grandson’s trial three years ago. During a break in the trial, she approached chief deputy attorney general John Redlein, who was prosecuting the case.
“Haven’t I seen you in the hotel?” she asked.
“I used to have lunch over at the Horseshoe fairly often, he replied, “but I guess I won’t be welcome after this, heh?” “Not at all, honey,” she told him. “This is just business.”
Just Sayin….RJS
That wasn’t entirely true. Someone still cared. On a hot August day in 1951 a land bomb, planted two feet from the mailbox and directly under the spot where a driver stopping to pick up his mail would sit, blew Herbert Noble into an almost infinite number of pieces. Nobody found or even looked very hard for his killer – though gangland rumor had it that the shock waves of the explosion knocked Jim Clyde Thomas, one of the premier hitters of the time, out of a nearby tree and broke his arm. Dallas Country sheriff Bill Decker, the longtime deputy who had replaced the hapless Steve Guthrie in 1950, summed up his official take on Herbert the Cat this way: “He was folks. He lived here, and it takes all kinds of people to make a city.” Just Sayin…RJS
Noble behind bars after getting his ear blown off.
The good ol’ boy network that Benny Binion helped create in Las Vegas – a cabal of entrepreneurs, lawyers, cops, prosecutors, judges, and politicians – was nearly impregnable. But in the end it was no match for the tenacity of Dallas’ post-war crusaders or their lust for vengeance. Vegas was Benny’s kind of town, businesslike and practical, the way Dallas had been in the thirties, only more direct, less hypocritical. The business of Vegas was gambling, which mean that everyone could be more out-front. Semantic distinctions concerning loans, gifts, and contributions were not the sort of thing that got people confused or caused them to lose sleep. When Benny loaned $30,000 to Clark County sheriff Ralph Lamb, for example, he didn’t expect Lamb to repay the money, but he expected Lamb to be there for him when he needed a favor. And Lamb was, just as Benny was there for Lamb when the sheriff was tried for bribery in 1977. Testimony appeared to establish beyond a doubt that Lamb had taken bribes. Nevertheless, U.S. district judge Roger Foley, Sr., whose son Thomas was one of Benny’s lawyers, dismissed the case. Thomas Foley and his brother Roger Foley, Jr., eventually became judges themselves, as did Benny’s other chief lawyer, Harry Claiborne.
The network was a living thing, as solid as gold. In 1951, even while Benny was fighting extradition to Texas, the governor of Nevada and the Nevada Tax Commission saw no reason to deny the Cowboy a license to operate his new casino, Binion’s Horseshoe. State senator E. L. Nores, who appeared before the commission as a character witness for Binion, claimed that Benny’s only limitation was his unbounded generosity. It was a subject on which the senator was well qualified to speak, Benny having gifted him with a new Hudson Hornet automobile a short time before.
Back in Dallas, Henry Wade had moved into the district attorney’s office when Will Wilson was elected to the state supreme court and was plotting a strategy to get Benny behind bars. Work through the federal courts, Wade reasoned, nail Binion on charges of income tax evasion, then hit him with gambling charges after the feds had returned him to Texas. Wade had plenty of evidence, which he shared with the feds. Documents and records seized from the Harlem Queen policy headquarters on Texas Highway 183 – and from Benny’s safe-deposit box at the Hillcrest State Bank – showed that in 1948 Binion had netted more than $1 million from the rackets in Dallas, hardly any of it reported to the Internal Revenue Service. Juries found Binion and his partner Harry Urban guilty of tax evasion. But while the judge in Dallas sent Urban to prison, Binion’s case was transferred to Nevada jurisdiction, and he got off with probation and a small fine.
Outraged by the light sentence, Wade traveled to Washington, where he consulted with U.S. attorney general James McGrannery and other high officials of the Truman administration. According to one report, orders to get Benny Binion were issued the following summer from the Democratic National Convention. McGrannery sent two attorneys from the Department of Justice to Dallas to supervise a new grand jury, and the FBI and the IRS made the investigation a priority. Wade was so determined to get Binion that he had an assistant DA furnish the FBI with an extensive dossier outlining Benny’s criminal history, real and alleged. The FBI showed the dossier to a federal judge, who, as Wade recalls, read it and was incited to remark, “I’m gonna get that S.O.B. back to Texas.”
In June 1953 Benny had his chauffeur, a large black man who went by the name of Gold Dollar, drive him from Las Vegas to Dallas, where he surrendered to his old friend Bill Decker. The following December, he pleaded guilty to federal charges of income tax evasion and state charges of operating an illegal policy wheel. By previous agreement, the sentences would run concurrently: five years in the federal prison at Leavenworth, a fine of $20,000, and a payment of $776,000 in back taxes, penalties, and interest.
Benny paid his $20,000 fine on the spot, peeling the bills from a much larger roll he had brought along to bribe the judge. Benny apparently was under the misapprehension that U.S. district judge Ben Rice was prepared to give him probation in exchange for a gift of $100,000. “The FBI threatened him and scared him off,” Benny claimed later. Binion did 42 months of hard time and was released in October 1957. Wade warned him to stay out of Texas or face additional prison time, but a few months later the Cowboy was riding in the Fat Stock Show parade in downtown Fort Worth, as sassy as ever.
Never again would Benny Binion be allowed to hold a gambling license in Nevada, not that it really mattered. His wife, Teddy Jane, and his eldest son, Jack, were much better able to handle the daily affairs of the casino and hotel business. Teddy Jane was good, heard-headed woman, not easily influenced by the gamblers and gangsters who took advantage of Benny’s generous nature. As a young woman she had predicted, “If I marry Benny Binion, I’ll spend my life in a room above a two-bit crap game.” She was half right. She spent her life in a room above Binion’s Horseshoe. Teddy Jane ran the casino as though it were a mom-and-pop café, trusting no one but herself to make bank deposits. She was a familiar sight on Fremont Avenue, this scrawny old lady with dyed hair and a cigarette between her nicotine-stained fingers, trudging from the casino to the bank with hundreds of thousands of dollars stuffed in the pockets of her trench coat.
Prison took something out of Benny and maybe put something else in its place. He got religion in Leavenworth from a Catholic priest. “Religion is too strong a mystery to doubt,” he said. Benny was 52 when he got out. His face was gentler and rounder, his blue eyes cloudy and not so hard, his waist and hips going to fat, his voice husky but good-humored. He still loved to talk – God how he loved to talk! – and he held court every afternoon at a corner booth at the Horseshoe, telling old war stories. Hell, yes, he remembered gunning down Ben Frieden in ’36. There had always been a dispute over how many bullets were fired from Benny’s .45. Was it one, as Benny maintained at the time, or three, as Bill Decker told the grand jury? “Weren’t no mystery to it, don’t you see,” Benny would cackle. “I shot once and hit him three times right in the heart.”
And yet there was no question that the Cowboy had mellowed. When a preacher from North Carolina lost $1,000 of his congregation’s money shooting craps at the Horseshoe, Benny gave the money back. “God may forgive you, preacher,” he said, “but your congregation won’t.” Life was a crapshoot, that’s what made it exciting. In 1980 a high roller from Austin walked into the Horseshoe with two suitcases, one full and one empty. He took $777,000 from the full suitcase and slapped it on the “don’t pass” line. Benny nodded: Damn right he’d fade the bet. Three rolls later the man walked out, this time with both suitcases full. Life in the fast lane wasn’t all that different from life anywhere else, was it? Nobody got out alive. Benny’s eldest child, Barbara Binion Fechser, was a drug addict and died from an overdose in 1983, an apparent suicide; and his youngest son, Ted Binion, pleaded guilty to a drug charge in 1987.
The stigma of being a convicted felon made Benny uncomfortable, and obtaining a presidential pardon became his final obsession. He almost got it in 1978 when his friend Robert Strauss, then the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, brought Benny’s plight to the attention of the Carter administration. By now his application for pardon had been denied four times, but Benny proposed a deal. He claimed he could deliver a vote in the U.S. Senate on the Panama Canal treaties in return for three presidential favors. One was a federal judgeship for Benny’s friend and lawyer Harry Claiborne, the second was an exemption from interstate trucking regulations for a business acquaintance in Oklahoma, and the third was a pardon for himself.
It might have come off too, except Benny couldn’t keep his famous mouth shut. The Senate ratified the treaties; Benny never made public which vote he delivered. Claiborne got his judgeship and was later impeached for income tax evasion. Trucking regulations became irrelevant when Benny’s friend went broke. And just as the Justice Department was ready to move on his application for pardon, word of a Binion wisecrack reached Washington. Mafia hitman Jimmy “the Weasel” Fratianno had testified that Benny had hired him to kill a gambler named Russian Louie Strauss, which the FBI knew was not true. But rather than issue a simple denial, Benny replied that, “Tell them FBIs that…I’m able to do my own killing without that sorry son of a bitch!” So much for pardon application number five.
During Ronald Reagan’s first term, Nevada senator Paul Laxalt suggested to Benny that a contribution to Reagan’s campaign treasury might help. Benny sent $15,000, and two days later his pardon was denied. In the old days such a perceived betrayal might have tempted the Cowboy to call Lois Green. But a mellower, more mature Benny was content to buy a newspaper ad calling Laxalt a welsher. Benny said that he intended to live long enough to piss on Reagan’s grave, but he finally crapped out.
The jail doors open for hit man Lois Green.
What made Binion’s Horseshoe such a success – at least in Benny’s opinion – was adherence to two bedrock rules. First, the casino catered to hard-eyed, no-nonsense gamblers. No limits, no entertainment, no gurgling fountains or fancy décor. Until recently, the dealers wore jeans. The specialty of the house was (and still is) generous drinks and Benny’s greasy, fiery chili, made not from Chill Will’s recipe as advertised, but from Smoot Schmid’s old Dallas jailhouse recipe.
Second was Benny’s promise that cheaters and thieves would be escorted to the alley, where their arms and legs would be broken by security guards highly qualified for the assignment. Frank Sutton, a detective sergeant with the Las Vegas metropolitan police department, says, “The Horseshoe was the only casino in town that didn’t believe in calling the police. They took care of trouble their own way.”
The wild West motif worked in Las Vegas for many years, just as it had in Dallas, but again times were changing. By the mid-eighties, Las Vegas was trying to recast its image as a sort of adult Disneyland, and the Horseshoe’s vigilante tactics were an embarrassment. After the Cowboy suffered two major heart attacks and surrendered even a pretense of control, the rough stuff got out of hand. A casino employee chased down a drunk who had thrown a brick through a window, calmly shot him to death on a street a few blocks from the police station, then strolled back to the Horseshoe as though nothing had happened. Two men assumed to be cheating at blackjack were hauled into the security office, beaten, and robbed.
In January 1988, Benny’s grandson, 33-year-old Steve Binion Fechser, and two security guards were convicted of assaulting the two blackjack players. But instead of passing sentence, district judge Thomas Foley took it on himself to overturn the jury verdict, an action within the power of a Nevada judge.
That didn’t end it, however. In April 1990, Fescher, his uncle Ted Binion, and six guards were indicted on federal charges of conspiring to kidnap, beat, and rob customers of the Horseshoe – particularly blacks and other people considered undesirable by the Binions. The case will be tried starting October 8 in the court of U.S. district judge Philip M. Pro.
Teddy Jane Binion will no doubt be among the spectators, as she was at her grandson’s trial three years ago. During a break in the trial, she approached chief deputy attorney general John Redlein, who was prosecuting the case.
“Haven’t I seen you in the hotel?” she asked.
“I used to have lunch over at the Horseshoe fairly often, he replied, “but I guess I won’t be welcome after this, heh?” “Not at all, honey,” she told him. “This is just business.”
Just Sayin….RJS
Oct 24, 2020 09:01:43 #
Oct 24, 2020 19:09:24 #
GSMJr
Loc: SoCal> Pflugerville (Austin), TX
Happy Saturday Bob,
Good interesting story, I’m glad that you posted it in 3 segments for readability.
I never spent much time in Binions casino when we were younger, glad that we didn’t.
I’m working my way thru your book. Not enough time to read it in large segments and I’m retired.
My how fly funs when you are having time ?!?
Garry
Good interesting story, I’m glad that you posted it in 3 segments for readability.
I never spent much time in Binions casino when we were younger, glad that we didn’t.
I’m working my way thru your book. Not enough time to read it in large segments and I’m retired.
My how fly funs when you are having time ?!?
Garry
Oct 24, 2020 19:21:01 #
Garry: Glad I've provided some amusement and diversion in what I've written. Yes, Those gangsters were in the news regularly when I was in high school. I believe Life Magazine wrote a lengthy essay on Noble before he was blown up. I try to guage my readership's interest by what responses I get and the number of readers that hit each article.
For instance Galveston had several layers of history: I have only covered the 1950's, 1960's and the Civil War. There's the Pirate Jean Lefitte's period and before that Carankawa Indians ( who by some reports were canabilistic. Just Sayin...RJS
For instance Galveston had several layers of history: I have only covered the 1950's, 1960's and the Civil War. There's the Pirate Jean Lefitte's period and before that Carankawa Indians ( who by some reports were canabilistic. Just Sayin...RJS
If you want to reply, then register here. Registration is free and your account is created instantly, so you can post right away.