The Outfit (40 page)

In her autobiography, Mooney Giancana’s daughter Antoinette remembered her father “constantly hopping a plane” for Havana in the years before her mother’s death in 1954. As Antoinette recalled: “Sometimes he was with Accardo, or the Fischettis, or Gus Alex, or Johnny Rosselli. Rosselli managed one of the Cuban hotel casinos, the Sans Souci, with the boss of the Florida crime family, Santo Trafficante.”

When Trafficante testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978, he admitted having known Rosselli since at least 1945. That same committee referred to government sources who, like Antoinette Giancana, knew that Rosselli “had a management role” in the Sans Souci. In 1990, the former casino floor manager at the Nacional, Refugio Cruz, said in an interview that he saw Rosselli there several times in the midfifties, dining with Lansky. “It was as if royalty was visiting,” the Cuban recalled. Likewise, an anonymous source told Rosselli’s biographers that he was hired by Rosselli during the same period to oversee publicity for acts appearing in some of Havana’s casino showrooms. The FBI believed that Rosselli, like Dave Yaras, had also coordinated hidden investments for the Outfit in Cuban gambling.

The lack of FBI surveillance in Cuba effectively curtails further investigation into the specifics of the Outfit’s Cuban casino investments. However, the steady growth of the gang’s fascination with gambling in the Nevada desert is well documented.

The Outfit Explores the Green Felt Jungle

When the subject of the Las Vegas casino boom is broached, invariably the first name that comes to mind is that of Meyer Lansky’s partner Ben “Don’t Call Me Bugsy” Siegel, whom many credit with creating the industry when he built his Flamingo Hotel-Casino in 1946. But in financing Siegel’s dream, Lansky’s Commission (which included the Outfit) was acting on the groundwork laid two decades earlier by none other than Curly Humphreys, Johnny Rosselli, and the Big Guy himself, Al Capone. And the Outfit’s interest in the desert oasis demonstrated once again the gang’s uncanny prescience and survival skills, talents that saw them beat the upperworld to still another pot of gold. It is a certainty that, as early as the 1920s, someone in Chicago’s empire of crime was versed in the history of the desert Southwest, a history that made the locale ripe for Outfit expansionism. (See gambling appendix.)

Wide-Open Gambling

In the early twentieth century, the combined effect of the nation’s Depression and the depletion of the southern gold and silver mines sent Nevada officials scurrying to invent ways to revive the state’s flagging economy. While the locals debated remedies, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation was about to break ground on a project that would propel much of the Southwest into an era of prosperity. For over twelve years, federal officials had argued over what to do about the disastrous periodic flooding of the fourteen-hundred-mile-long Colorado River. Finally a bold plan was approved that would, if successful, not only tame the Colorado, but provide water and hydroelectric power throughout the West: The government moved to construct the world’s largest dam thirty miles to the southeast of Las Vegas. Since no city can grow without an adequate water supply, the construction of the massive Hoover Dam, which broke ground in 1931, went a long way toward making the idea of Las Vegas viable. The project had the ancillary benefit of employing more than five thousand workers, many of whom relocated to Nevada from out of state.
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With so many hardworking, hard-partying laborers spending their paychecks in nearby Las Vegas, the predictable vices once again flourished, happily tolerated by officials.

Much as Roosevelt would call for a repeal of Volstead in order to avail the economy of an alcohol-tax windfall, so too did Nevadans start talking of legalizing gambling. One editorial writer for the
Reese River Reveille
summed up what many were thinking: “If we are going to have gambling . . . let’s have it in the open and be honest with ourselves. Regulate the thing and use the revenue for some good purpose.” This was happening at the same time that the Outfit, preparing for the end of prohibition, was casting about for “the new booze.” With their racetrack maven Johnny Patton already operating illegal dog tracks outside Reno, the Chicago bosses, like the Nevada upperworld, concluded that a legalized-gambling mecca would allow them to expand their race operations and construct gambling joints. It now appears that the Outfit dipped into its treasury to persuade any statehouse holdouts of the wisdom of wide-open gambling.

By the time Nevada governor Fred Balzar signed the law legalizing gambling on March 19, 1931, there were already whispers that some state legislators had been the recipients of graft from gambling entrepreneurs. As A. D. Hopkins wrote in a 1999 article in Las Vegas’
Review Journal:
“It is commonly believed that cash was spread around to lubricate the passage of casino gambling in 1931, but the source of that money has long been the subject of speculation.” Of course, if Chicagoans were involved in such a thing, it was a good bet that Curly Humphreys, the Outfit’s political payoff mastermind, would have been the coordinator. The FBI’s massive file on Humphreys notes his constant travel to grease the skids for Outfit business. In one example, Humphreys traveled to New York State to bribe legislators to repeal the Sullivan Act, which forbade ex-cons from carrying a weapon.
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Irv Owen, a Norman, Oklahoma, native and retired attorney who had known Humphreys’ extended family and friends since 1937, recently made the emphatic statement that he knew exactly how the Wide Open Gambling Bill came to be enacted. “In the 1930s, Humphreys and his protege Johnny Rosselli [whom Curly always called the Hollywood Kid] bribed the Nevada legislature into legalizing gambling,” Owen said. “Las Vegas owes everything to Murray Humphreys.” Regarding Outfit money passing under the table at Carson City, Owen was recently corroborated by John Detra, the son of one of Las Vegas’ earliest gambling-club owners.

John Detra’s father, Frank Detra, had moved from New York to Las Vegas in 1927. A year later, according to his son John, thirty-one-year-old Frank Detra and his family began receiving visits from none other than Chicago’s Al Capone, then twenty-eight years of age. Although John has no knowledge of how the two met, it was clear to him that they were close friends. (It is possible that the friendship goes back to New York, since both men were there at the same time and were of the same age.) The younger Detra still retains a gold pocket watch Capone gave his father, the back of which bears the inscription “Franco Amici Alphonse,” which translates as “Frank and Alphonse are friends.” Detra and Capone were obviously planning a business partnership, says John.

After a brief stint as a dealer in downtown’s Boulder Club, Detra was staked by a still unidentified Eastern entity to build his own club five miles outside the city line, on a section of old Highway 91 (the future Las Vegas Boulevard) that would later be named The Strip. His club, The Pair-O-Dice, would make history as the Strip’s first upscale carpet joint. In the vicinity at the time, there was only The Red Rooster sawdust roadhouse. Although Detra’s club was a speakeasy of sorts (a password was needed to enter), it boasted all the refinements of Vegas lounges that would hold sway three decades later. Open only at night, the Pair-O-Dice featured delicious Italian cuisine, jazz and dance bands, fine wine, and, of course, table games. To keep the operation afloat, the requisite bribes were in force. “The old man went to town every month with envelopes, several of them, and came back without the envelopes,” John says.

When the 1930 debate over gambling legalization was joined, young John began accompanying his father as he made deliveries of cash-stuffed briefcases and envelopes to influential Nevadans across the state. Frank Detra admitted to his son that the money was being spent to ensure the passage of the Wide Open Gambling Bill. John believes the money had to have come from the Capone gang, since Capone was the only major player close to his father. John was aware that some monies were being paid to state legislators, but his father’s role may have been even more critical to the pro-gambling strategy: Frank Detra’s contacts superseded the local power brokers. “They were all federal people, top-drawer people who influenced the state people,” John remembers. On one trip to Reno, John was asked to make the delivery himself. “Dad gave me a little briefcase and said, ’See that house over there? Go ring the bell,’” John recently remembered. “I went over and rang the doorbell, and a man came to the door and said, ’Oh, thank you,’ took the suitcase and closed the door.”

After gambling was legalized in 1931, Frank Detra openly operated the Pair-O-Dice until 1941, when he sold the business to Guy McAfee, who incorporated the club’s structure into his Last Frontier Club. Detra, who died in 1984, went on to operate clubs in Reno and Ely.

Outfit associates not only moved quickly to open the first legal upscale nightclubs like the Pair-O-Dice, but also established Nevada’s first casino-hotel. After gambling legalization, Las Vegas city commissioners issued only seven gambling licenses for downtown clubs, most of which had maintained illegal gambling operations for years. Among the license recipients were the Boulder Club, where Frank Detra had briefly worked as a dealer, and the Las Vegas Club.
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Club owners with Outfit affiliations were among the first to cash in on the Las Vegas gambling rush. On May 2, 1931, Johnny Rosselli’s bootlegging partner from Los Angeles, Tony “The Hat” Cornero, opened Las Vegas’ first legal hotel-casino, The Meadows, just east of the city. Unlike the small, sawdust-coated downtown casinos on Fremont Street, Cornero’s place was a Lansky-like “carpet joint,” but combined with well-appointed hotel accommodations. The May 3
Las Vegas Age
newspaper described the Meadows: “Potent in its charm, mysterious in its fascination, the Meadows, America’s most luxurious casino, will open its doors tonight and formally embark upon a career which all liberal-minded persons in the West will watch closely.”

Although visionary, The Meadows was a huge gamble for the Depression era. In southern Nevada especially, there were not yet enough well-to-do patrons to sustain the business. In just a couple years, The Meadows closed, only to reopen as a high-class bordello. Cornero would resurface in the 1950s to open another Vegas hotel-casino, the Stardust, which was quickly appropriated by the Outfit.

The Outfit’s fingerprints can be seen in other parts of the state in the immediate aftermath of legalization. In downtown Reno, a large crew of laborers began tearing out the walls of adjacent buildings on Center Street even before the bill was signed. The gambling parlor that would occupy the space in a matter of days was John Drew and Bill Graham’s Bank Club. According to Chicago FBI agent Bill Roemer, Joe Accardo had given Drew his start at Joe’s Owl Club in Calumet City, Illinois, before dispatching Drew to Reno to manage the Bank Club. Bryn Armstrong, former chair of the Nevada State Parole Board, revealed in a recent interview that none other than Johnny Rosselli, a good friend of Graham’s, represented “hidden financial interests” (read “the Outfit”) in the Bank Club. Graham was likely critical for the legalization push in the first place, since, according to Rosselli’s autobiographers, “he knew every politician in the state and could obtain licenses and government concessions when other men could not.”

Despite their best efforts and visionary concepts, Outfit liaisons such as Detra, Cornero, and Drew were ultimately the victims of bad timing. The nation’s depressed economy kept the number of available affluent high rollers to a minimum. Economic conditions around Las Vegas were even worse, since after the Hoover Dam was completed in 1935, the area saw the exodus of the five-thousand-man workforce and their families. The situation thus remained in stasis as Vegas once again became synonymous with low-rent dude ranches, cowboy casinos (with gamblers’ horses harnessed out front), and sawdust-floored gambling roadhouses. Out-of-towners were dispossessed of a bit more cash by state legislators, who passed no-fault quickie-divorce codes. But roadhouse gambling and quickie divorces were not panaceas for a flat state economy. However, redemption would come soon after World War II in the form of a handsome New York hoodlum who had been peddling the Outfit’s Trans-America wire service to the downtown gambling joints. The movie-star-handsome thug came up with the best scam idea of his life: He decided that the time was right for Las Vegas (and the Commission) to revisit the hotel-casino notion pioneered by Tony Cornero in 1931 with The Meadows. With the Chicago-New York Commission’s financial backing, Ben Siegel gave new life to Nevada while ironically sacrificing his own. In doing so, the fortunes of Nevada, and particularly Las Vegas, would forever improve.

The Bugsy One

He is best remembered as Meyer Lansky’s childhood pal and crime partner. Together with Meyer, Brooklyn-born Benjamin Siegel graduated from terrorizing pushcart vendors for chump change to organizing the infamous murder-for-hire racket known as Murder, Inc. By the age of twenty-one, Siegel was said to have perpetrated every crime in the book, including white slavery, bootlegging, hijacking, robbery, rape, extortion, narcotics running, and numerous contract murders. Ben Siegel’s hooligan thoroughness was equally matched by his borderline pathological outbursts, which earned him the nickname Bugsy, a moniker no one dared use in his presence. Until the end of his life, Siegel was known to pistol-whip those who committed the transgression, regardless of whether the faux pas occurred in private or by a crowded Las Vegas poolside. Lansky once said of his childhood friend, “When we were in a fight, Benny would never hesitate. He was even quicker to take action than those hot-blooded Sicilians, the first to start punching and shooting. Nobody reacted faster than Benny.”