Pirates to Pyramids: Las Vegas Taxi Tales (11 page)

But on and on he kept fooling them, getting good cards and winning pots. It frustrated the pros that he was a new guy and he was hiding his moves successfully. But what really got their goat and their money was that he had amassed thousands of hours of experience from a computer at home. He stymied them with his gall, skill and confidence and ended up taking home the most money and, the coveted bracelet.

And his best stymie was yet to come and might have saved his life. About a year later, he was rich and famous and he had already given his wife millions for their family trust fund. Then he went back to poker as happy as a clam. He was so happy with his new found situation he began to get carried away with himself.

The way I knew he had crossed the line was evidenced in a news item one night and it wasn't good news. He had been on his way back to his room after a round of poker and he decided to carry one hundred thousand dollars on him. Yes, he went without security guards.

He made it half way down the hallway to his room.

Two guys accosted him, one big guy like him and one little guy with a gun. They insisted he let them into his room. He said no. Later he said he knew if he let them into his room he knew they could easily kill him. So the big guy started to wrestle him and the little guy pointed the gun at him and said,

"Gun."

"Camera," he replied and pointed up to the ceiling.

This remarkable reply was the smartest thing he could have ever done because they ran away without the cash. They separated to help make their escape, but hotel security had watched them all the way and apprehended them at different doors. The trial is now long over and they are split up again, in prison.

In this town with few safe bets, it is still a safe bet that our hero never takes his money back to his room again. Even he couldn't be that lucky twice.

TALES FROM LAS VEGAS PAST

CHARACTERS AND KOOKS

I collect characters. I love them, honor them and encourage them from a distance. A cab driver
is in a unique position to find them, watch them and share them with others, even if some are gone now.

My pantheon of characters starts with Bugsy Siegel. This man first worked for the mob as a leg
breaker and he saw what would happen if a guy stole $1,000 from them. Yet, they say he stole millions when he built the Flamingo Hotel on the old "Los Angeles Highway", now Las Vegas
Boulevard. He had the vision of starting The Strip, one of the most valuable streets in the world, when it was still dirt. He looked into the future and saw Californians and others driving into Las Vegas to get away from it all. Yet, he couldn't see a bullet coming at his head, or three of them?

He built the Flamingo in 1946-1947 and when the mob guys came out to the grand opening they
saw a ranch style motor hotel with a large lobby and large pool in the middle of the dark. They knew he stole their money so they killed him in Los Angeles at his girlfriend's apartment. Later they went to her, Virginia Hill, and told her, you can either join him or join us. They say she coughed up more than a million dollars in 1948 money. What would that be worth today?

Fast forward to the early part of this millennium, 2000, and Flamingo was building new towers and Bugsy's office was still there, right in the way. A contractor said he could remove that old office in two days. It looked like an easy job. Later the local newspaper told us all about the nightmare that ensued.

It turned out the walls were four feet thick and steel re-enforced concrete with gun turret holes. Seven days of wrecking ball and bulldozing, the lot was cleared. You had to ask, what was Bugsy
thinking? You build a perfect fortress, leave it to go to L.A. and then get caught sitting on her couch? He was caught dead.

My guess is he fell in love with an aspiring actress, and they both were in love with the
idea of making movies. The ironic thing is that their lives caused at least three movies, each one about them.

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The next character has to be Howard Hughes. Everyone has heard the stories of how he avoided being served subpoenas for the TWA lawsuit by hiding, even on the top floor of the Desert Inn Hotel. One day the hotel wanted him to leave so they could use the room for a high roller who would actually come to the tables and make big bets.

So, instead, he bought the place. The whole hotel was now his.

"Now, leave me the hell alone," I hope he said.

But fewer people have heard this story:

In his early days in Vegas, Hughes walked around in plain sight. He wore old clothes, a dusty looking cowboy hat and had an unshaven face which allowed him to walk through town into any casino. For awhile he had a nondescript condo next to the fence at McCarran Airport.

Howard could walk out his door only a few yards to a well placed slit in the fence and climb into his private plane. He kept it fueled and ready to fly anywhere. Now you can see why Melvin Dumar still insists he saved Hughes from a burning crash in the desert. I believe Melvin because Howard was a pilot who flew fearlessly and crashed occasionally.

My favorite Howard story is believable when we look at his early love of Vegas and his eye for making money. He saw the opportunity of silver dollars, when he watched the value of silver going above $1 per ounce. Many gamblers were ignoring the market value and continued betting silver dollars, a few at a time, by the millions. Did they not know that each dollar had an ounce of silver?

Howard is said to have had his engineers design a dummy coin to replace the real ones in look and weight but not so close as to be called counterfeit by the U.S. Treasury Dept. We all know that the bashful billionaire bought several hotel casinos but I have been told he made untold millions removing and keeping every silver dollar that came through his places.

That is how Howard developed his own private hedge against inflation, lawsuits or financial ruin.

THEY DON'T MAKE THEM LIKE THEY USED TO

Another of my favorite characters was a guy named Ted Binion. Almost everyone who visits downtown Vegas has been in Binion's Horseshoe Casino. For all its storied past, it has always been a place for a good low cost meal, cheap drinks and big card games. Ted's father, Benny, started the place and made it famous taking any size bet and for being the birthplace of the World Series of Poker. Guys like Amarillo Slim beat sixteen other guys, the best poker players in the world, to win the championship one year. To win the same tournament in 2007, all you had to do was outlast 6814 other players.

Ted Binion ran the casino with sister, Becky, after Daddy died and his brother Jack sold his share. Ted had been schooled well by the father and one mythic story showed it. Legend has it a mob member went to see Ted in his private office where he is said to have threatened Ted’s life if he didn't sell half the casino to him. The story is Ted cut him off mid-sentence, grabbed a phone, dialed and spoke carefully.

"This is Ted Binion. Can you hear me? Good. I have a job for you. Write down this name.

He gave the man's name sitting in front of him. I am putting $100,000 into your account. You can check it later. After the job is done you get another $100,000.

"Listen very closely.
If anything bad happens to me or my family including disappearance or freak accident of any kind, you are to kill his wife, his kids, his parents, his brothers and sisters. Then kill him. Do you completely understand everything I said? Good."

Ted hung up, turned to the man and reportedly said, "Now get the f__ out of my office."

Ted was schooled early and dramatically by a rough and tumble father, a man who was reputed
to have killed a man in Texas from where he came. It is documented by Vegas police and local newspapers that his Dad once fired a shotgun at some enemies from the balcony of their family home. This all occurred at the house which still stands on Bonanza Street in North Las Vegas.

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So with this amazing history in gaming it came as quite a shock to Ted when he was suspended from the family owned casino by the Gaming Control Board. He was caught enjoying cocaine and a blood test confirmed it. Suspension from a casino means no access, no off campus managing and no revenues, especially under the table, upon threat of permanent suspension.

This made Ted crazier than normal since he was as spoiled as a Vegas casino owner's son could possibly be. The suspension left his sister to run the casino which made him even madder than ever because being female, she had been excluded by Dad in the family casino business. Outsiders were left to assume she didn't know the casino business.

Imagine what megaton explosion went off in poor Ted's mind when he reappeared in front of the
Nevada Gaming Control Board. The Board was to examine 12 months of successful urine tests from an approved testing lab, give him a stern warning, and then give him back his casino. Only it didn't go that way.

The Board ignored the urine tests and went instead to a new question," Do you know and did you loan money to a Mr. Blank-Blank?”

Ted said, "Yes I know him. I loaned him $100,000. He used it to open a used car lot. It was just a business deal. What is wrong with that?"

"What is wrong with that, Mr. Binion, is that Mr. Blank-Blank is a man with felony convictions and known mob connections." According to the Gaming Commission rules concerning casino ownership your association with a known mobster permanently disqualifies you as a casino owner. A hearing date was set but his attorney's objections were ignored.

Ted left the room and apparently "lost his mind." Within weeks he was back in the news for bringing a shotgun to a gas station to "teach the punk behind the counter some respect." Charges were later quietly dropped. It’s nice to be one of the good old boys of Vegas. Don't ever try that in your home town.

"Ted Binion Found Dead," read the headline a few months later.

No surprise to us, really, for a guy who lost his casino and all the profits, there from, first temporarily and then permanently. That is quite a fall. His girlfriend was interviewed in tears telling everyone especially the police that he had been taking drugs recklessly. The autopsy revealed heroin and Xanax together and in deadly quantities.

But within two days of Ted's death his bodyguard was arrested at 2:00 A.M. on Ted's ranch in Pahrump, the town where the famous Chicken Ranch moved. Ted’s former (two days ago) bodyguard was sitting on a backhoe looking into the hole he just dug to get Ted's secret buried safe.

This was the safe Ted Binion took out of his office at the casino when he got booted out. It contained millions of dollars in silver coins, gold coins, cash and other valuables we don't get to know about but the bodyguard did.

Next the police took a warrant to the bodyguard's apartment to search for more incriminating evidence. This didn't take long. Opening the door was Ted's former (two days ago) girlfriend wearing little more than a man's long sleeve shirt.

TV watchers can guess the rest. The family hired their own coroner to double check the first coroner, who said "drug overdose." The new coroner, of course, found petechial hemorrhage in the eyeballs. CSI fans know this means oxygen starvation from strangulation. Now we had a full blown murder trial. Court TV fans have not had this much fun since the OJ trial, so you might already know the rest.
 

The trial was sensational. They both were found guilty and off to prisons they go. The appeal
trial started two years later. The movie-of-the-week was interesting and at the re-trial they both got off. Two coroners contradicting each other’s report made reasonable doubt almost automatic.

She got out after only two years served but he had to serve time until 2010 for the attempted grand theft of the safe.

FRANK, DEAN, SAMMY AND ELVIS
 

A big part of Vegas' attraction as an adult playground started thanks to Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. Their spirits and their pictures occupy the hallways, and you can still feel their mark all over town. After WWII, Bugsy Siegel built the Flamingo and over the next ten years other mobs built hotels. We owe the mobs because back then no banks or insurance companies would ever confront the puritan ethic of America long enough to build them. Big name stars brought their shows and attracted many war veterans and others to relax and have fun in the desert sun.

Originally black entertainers could not stay in the same Las Vegas hotels in which they performed. This segregation finally came to an end, largely because of Frank Sinatra. He was appalled and personally confronted the hotels. He said if his friends were sent away he would never again appear in their showrooms. That put a stop to segregation in the hotels of Vegas.

Young Shirley MacLaine said Dean Martin was like a big brother to her and kept an eye on her when she entertained here back then. She claims he never drank much liquor like his stage persona pretended and often went to his room early. Unlike Dean, Frank Sinatra liked his drinks
and famous for his partying was famous. This ended badly one night at his beloved Desert Inn casino.