IN THE FORMAL DINING ROOM OF A SUBURBAN Dallas home, a solitary figure sits at the table, a small three-sided mirror in front of him. The light overhead is harsh, and stacked neatly beside him arc several decks of cards. Over and over he shuffles and deals to an invisible partner, his warm, friendly eyes never leaving the mirror that reflects his hands. He’s practicing.
With finesse and movements impossible for the naked eye to detect, he deals “seconds,” palms an ace, and pulls a card from the bottom of the deck. He performs the moves again and again, his eyes always focused on the minors, perfecting the methods he has used to cheat fellow players out of a half million dollars annually for the past decade. It’s his job.
Very few people know his real name. By his own admission he’s a member of almost a dozen country clubs located in cities throughout the South, using a different alias on every membership card, earning his handsome living as a poker player. He’s a traveling salesman selling sleight-of-hand.
On a college football Saturday, a man in his late 20s sits in front of a computer in his North Dallas apartment, fielding phone calls that come one after another. It is a half hour before the kickoff of the day’s first game, and there is a sense of urgency in the voice of the caller, who knows to give no name. “This is number 121,” he says. Cradling the phone between chin and shoulder, the man quickly types the number into his computer, and immediately the screen is filled with the caller’s gambling history: bets he has placed throughout the season, how much money he’s won and lost. The caller, the computer advises, has a “dime” ($1,000) limit.
Number 121 complains briefly of the Las Vegas point spreads but quickly places several$ 100 bets. He likes the Aggies, Southern Cal, Penn State, and SMU, which happens to be the bookmaker’s alma mater.
One of an estimated 500 bookies currently operating in the Dallas area, the young man had earned a degree in business administration a few years ago but decided he could chase down financial success more quickly by slaking the thirst of doctors, lawyers, auto mechanics, and college students whose weekend avocation is betting on sports events. Taking bets that range from $25 to $1000 per game, he will handle somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000 before the day’s end. When all is said and done, the average bookie will clear $5,000, give or take a few hundred, for a Saturday’s efforts. Sunday, with the NFL games scheduled, should be equally lucrative.
The young man is not yet one of the “big league” bookmakers in town. But he’s getting there.
He and his poker-playing counterpart are members of a large Dallas social order which only grins and shakes its head at the woe-is-me, what’s-our-world-coming-to attitude of those who fear that morally bankrupt legislators and city officials might one day allow glitzy Vegas-style casinos to mar the landscape; that gambling and all its attending flotsam and jetsam will send Big D to hell in a hand basket. Today’s gambling climate is nothing like it used to be, sites like bestuscasinos.org are giving access to more players than ever and that’s not how it’s always been. In truth, illegal gambling has been a colorful and long-entrenched part of Dallas history.
IT WAS, IN FACT, THE FATAL OUTCOME OF A LONG-AGO CARD game that helped hurry along the incorporation process which officially made Dallas a city in 1856. Back when the future Dallas was little more than a gathering spot where buffalo hunters sold their hides, the son of one of the leading families was shot and killed after he was caught cheating. Outraged citizens agreed that law and order was essential and would be possible only when their community officially became a city with the legal machinery to appoint necessary law enforcement and put a judicial process in motion.
John William Rogers, one of the few Dallas historians to avoid the saccharine approach when writing of the city’s colorful past, notes (in The Lusty Texans of Dallas) that when the city’s first grand jury was finally summoned it returned 61 indictments-51 of them for illegal gambling.
In those raucous days before the turn of the century, downtown Dallas was a magnet to gamblers, who were lured to the saloons and back rooms along Main Street where poker games went on around the clock. There was, for instance, a well-liked local dentist named John Henry Holliday who, legend has it, longed for a lifestyle more exciting than dental surgery had to offer. He would routinely slip from his office to the nearest saloon, refining his skill as a poker player. In time, “Doc” Holliday, who ultimately gained fame as he fought alongside friend and legendary lawman Wyatt Earp at the O.K. Corral, closed down his dental practice and became a professional gambler.
Doc’s success at the Dallas poker tables, however, was shortlived. On New Year’s Day in 1875, Holliday was involved in a shoot-out with a fellow gambler and, while neither he nor his adversary was injured, both were arrested and briefly jailed. A few months later he found himself involved in yet another disagreement over the manner in which cards had been dealt, and a second gunfight resulted. On that occasion, Holliday’s aim was better. Fearing arrest for murder, he left town immediately.
He was, however, not the only infamous figure to sit in on high-stakes games in the Dallas saloons. Cole and John Younger, Frank and Jesse James, Frank Dalton, Sam Bass-all to become outlaw legends of the Old West-were regulars. And, in one of the city’s first instances of female assertiveness, a livery stable operator named Belle Starr, later labeled “The Bandit Queen” by dime novelists, routinely sat in on poker games with the menfolk.
By the mid-1870s, over 100 professional gamblers called Dallas home, plying their trade along the north side of Main Street. Economists of the day were forced to admit that gambling was, in fact, one of the growing city’s major industries.
Writes Rogers: “Concerted action was also frustrated from the feeling which was abroad that if anything was done to curb gambling and dance hall activities it would be bad for business. Indeed, in October of 1883, when Charles Clint, the district attorney, began an active campaign to drive the gamblers out of town, a delegation of businessmen called upon him to point out how ill-advised such a move was for the prosperity and that Fort Worth with a shrewder policy was offering the gamblers free rent and $3,500 to remove to that city.”
Not only did free-wheeling gambling flourish, from card games to horse racing along the unpaved Dallas streets, but many viewed the gamblers as the true patron saints of the city’s economic advancement.
When an Episcopal missionary named Silas Davenport arrived in Dallas in the 1860s and began speaking out against the evils of gambling from his makeshift pulpit in the parlor of a downtown hotel, a few local soreheads occasionally interrupted his sermons with gunfire. Later, however, a delegation of gamblers approached Davenport to apologize for the actions of some of the less cultured and gifted him with enough money to build his church.
The reverend quickly accepted the benevolent gesture. In time, the gamblers went on about their business while Davenport preached against them from the church they had built.
Such was the gambling atmosphere in Dallas’ early days. Things would change little as the city moved into the 20th century.
WHILE THERE WOULD OCCASIONALLY BE A HIGHLY-PUB-licized effort to clean up gambling and bootlegging activities in the 1920s, the well-chronicled raids by law enforcement officials were generally looked upon as little more than political posturing. In truth, gambling went virtually unchallenged.
As the 1936 Texas Centennial neared, in fact, it was city officials who collectively winked at the law and decreed that gamblers should be allowed to operate without challenge. Business, after all, was business, and gambling activities in the city grossed an estimated $14 million annually. For the next two decades that figure would continue to grow.
In his Big D: Triumphs and Troubles of an American Supercity in the 20th Century, historian Darwin Payne offers a telling example of the atmosphere in which gambling flourished in bygone times:
“Dallas Morning News crime reporter Harry McCormick described in early 1947 his efforts to see how many forms of gambling he could find in a single day. He placed a $2 bet with a bookie on a horse race, put a nickel in a slot machine in a downtown counter, bought two 25-cent chances on a punch board at a cashier’s counter, inserted a nickel in a marble machine that paid oft in cash, and bought a 25-cent ticket on a policy wheel. He declined a dice game in the downtown Southland Hotel (notorious as a gambling hangout) because he was too tired.
While such gambling activities sound decidedly penny-ante in nature, the volume of activity in Dallas was such that it represented enormous potential for profit.”
So much so that Dallas ultimately came to the attention of organized crime leaders in Chicago. And in short order mobsters took control, lending their strong-armed business acumen to cash in on Dallas’ gambling frenzy. It was an era that bred the likes of Herbert Noble, Hollis Delois (Lois) Green, and Benny Binion, men who would battle for the title of gambling czar of the city.
It was a violent, dangerous time.
Green, a natty dresser and chain-smoker, was for a time considered one of the kingpins of Dallas underworld activity, orchestrating a lucrative numbers racket and overseeing a mob of ex-convicts the local media referred to as “The Forty Thieves.” Noble’s home in Oak Cliff was bathed in floodlights at night, and it was his practice upon returning to his neighborhood to drive around the block several times before turning into his driveway. He would honk the horn, and his wife would push a button from inside the house to open the garage door. Green would then drive in, close the doors, turn off the floodlights, and carry a shotgun with him from the garage to the front door. Once inside he would turn the floodlights back on.
On Christmas Eve of 1949, the 31-year-old Green attended a party at the Sky-Vu Club, a well-known gambling establishment on West Commerce. As he left the club, he was shot and killed by a series of shotgun blasts.
Among the first to be questioned by investigators was a rival underworld figure, Herbert Noble, who had waged a heated battle with Green and Binion for control of the Dallas numbers activity. Noble quickly pointed out that there had been numerous attempts on his own life in recent years, most likely ordered by the late Green.
Noble, in fact, earned the nickname “The Cat” by surviving-no fewer than 11 assassination attempts. A man had leaned from a passing car and fired a shot that lodged in Noble’s back, but he managed to get to the hospital, where the -45 slug was removed. On another occasion he reported to the hospital with his right arm badly mangled from a shotgun blast. He made yet another trip to the emergency room with a gunshot wound to the leg. Another attempt was made on his life while he was hospitalized-a sniper stationed on the roof of a nearby building shot at him with a high-powered rifle.
Noble’s worst ordeal, however, would come on November 19, 1949. On that day he had an appointment in Fort Worth and told his wife, Mildred, chat he would take the Cadillac since he liked driving it on the highway. His Mercury, the car that he generally drove, was parked at the curb in front of their house and would be available to her. Leaving for a shopping trip later in the day, Mildred Noble got into the Mercury and stepped on the starter. The car exploded, literally disintegrating.
Herbert Noble buried his wife in the most expensive casket ever sold in Dallas. It cost $15,000.
In August of 1951 Noble’s luck ran out. Checking the mail at his Grapevine ranch home, he was killed by an explosive charge set at the base of his mailbox.
With Green out of the picture, Noble had insisted that the numerous attempts on his life had been ordered by Benny Binion, who had grown into a $1 million-a-year numbers racketeer. Binion, who ultimately moved to Las Vegas, where he opened and operated a successful casino, insisted until his death in 1989 that he had nothing to do with Noble’s death.
The crime was never solved.
Such was the angry climate of Dallas gambling in the ’40s and ’50s. A newly elected district attorney named Henry Wade had campaigned on the promise of driving organized crime out of Dallas County. In short order, gambling establishments like Binion’s University Club, Noble’s Airmen’s Club, the Sky-Vu, the King’s Club, and dozens of lesser known gambling dens closed their doors.
Saner times would prevail as organized crime retreated back to the East, but the gambling czars left a sizable and eager gambling population behind. And, though much of the activity is conducted in the shadows, it continues full steam ahead even today. Floating crap games, high-stakes poker played in posh hotels and apartment complexes, casino nights in townhouses, big-time bookmaking operated out of bedrooms, car lot offices, and greasy spoon eateries. Cherokee Nation bingo, office pools, golf course wagers, and trips to the race tracks simply don’t satisfy the gambling thirst of a sizable portion of Dallas’ population.
And the zany lore has continued to grow:
●A highly successful poker player had a well-earned reputation as a consistent winner. But on a reported 40 occasions during his lengthy career, he was robbed soon after scoring a big win. One evening, a hijacker jumped from the bushes, pointed a gun at him, and demanded his winnings. As the gambler reached for his newly won bankroll, a second hijacker emerged from behind a tree on the opposite side of the yard, shot the other robber, and fled with the gambler’s cash.
●Another poker player, who enjoyed great success at the game of “hold ’em,” had just returned from a night’s work with a reported $20,000 in winnings when the phone rang. The caller was a Dallas thug with a reputation as a hired killer. “Look,” he told the gambler, “1 know you won big tonight. And you know I’m going to steal it from you. So let’s make it easy. I’ll drive by in 10 minutes and you meet me in the driveway with $ 10,000 and nobody gets hurt.”
For those with an interest in such historical trivia, it is believed to be the first and only time that anyone in Dallas was ever robbed by telephone.
●Legend has it that the Dallas gambling community first knew the identity of the man who shot and killed federal judge John Wood in San Antonio in the spring of 1979. Charles Harrelson, a regular at the poker tables, was suddenly conspicuous by his absence in the wake of the headline-making event. “The day after it happened,” says a long-time Dallas gambler, “we were playing at the Am Vets Club, and someone mentioned that Charles had murdered the judge.”
Harrelson, who had a penchant for stoking his own reputation as a hit man for hire, was among those playing in a game that was hijacked late one evening. The robbers, entering the room with guns drawn, demanded that everyone present disrobe and lie on the floor while the money was gathered from the table. Harrelson was the only one to refuse.
“Do you assholes know who I am?” he demanded. “You got any idea who you’re messing with?” As he ranted, the thieves collected thousands of dollars from the table. “I’d advise you guys to check me out,” Harrelson is said to have warned as they made their getaway, “and get my money back to me.”
The following day, a delivery man hired by the robbers, who had apparently done some questioning, located Harrelson and returned his losses with apologies.
DALLAS POLICE DEPARTMENT vice detectives J.D. Collett and Joe Thompson have made careers of tracking down bookmakers, busting up illegal casino operations, and raiding poker games. And while they’ve seen changes in the gambling habits of Dallasites in recent years, they know that gambling is still big business here.
“Until about three years ago,” Det. Collett says, “the illegal casinos were a big thing. On any given night, there would be a dozen or more operating in apartment complexes around town. They would have the whole Las Vegas style set-up: chips, blackjack tables, crap tables, waitresses serving drinks, a cook, free cigarettes for the players.”
Activities sponsored by local organizers, who earn a percentage of the money wagered, would get underway in the early afternoon and run as late as 2 a.m. It was not uncommon, Collect notes, to find as much as $100,000 in the house’s “bank” during a raid. Ever wary of police as well as robbers, the casino sponsors were inventive in hiding their cash. “But after a while,” says Thompson, “we learned where to look.” He and Collect have found thousands of dollars stashed in a Wheaties box, inside vacuum cleaner bags, and in the bottom of kitchen garbage cans.
And while the detectives still hear of the occasional casino operation in Dallas, they no longer flourish as they once did. While an aggressive attempt to shut them down on the part of law enforcement was a factor in their demise, so, too, was the increasing danger of hijackers.
“It’s pretty easy for a thief to spot one of the casinos,” says Collect. “You see a bunch of well-dressed guys going into an apartment every Tuesday and Thursday and staying for several hours; you know they’re not there to make drug deals. So, after you stake it out for a few weeks, you bust in and rob the place.”
Not all hijackers, however, are highly trained professionals. On one occasion, a lone gunman entered a townhouse where casino gambling was in full swing, jumped up on the blackjack table, and fired a round from his double-barreled shotgun into the ceiling. After the silence that followed the blast, he nervously demanded that everyone lie face-down on the floor. When several of the patrons were slow to react, he fired off his second shot. No sooner had he done so than a stunned look crossed the hijacker’s face.
“He realized that he’d used his last shell,” says Collett, “so he took off for the door, feeling pretty stupid, I’m sure.”
On other occasions, however, things have gotten ugly. A few-years ago, two thieves held up a Dallas casino operation and, unable to locate the cash, tortured the promoter with a cattle prod in an effort to make him talk.
“I think,” says Collect, “a lot of people finally decided it was safer to go out of state where they can play the tables legally and not worry about getting hurt.”
Austin-based Lloyd Criss, a spokesman for the Texas Association for Casino Entertainment, estimates that $1.5 billion-much of it from the Dallas area–flows out of Texas annually to legal gambling establishments in Las Vegas and Nevada; an additional billion goes to Louisiana and Mississippi.
Which is not to say gambling has slowed noticeahly on the home front. Poker games continue in apartments and hotel rooms, dice games float from one South Dallas location to another, and bookmaking has grown into a multimillion dollar industry”A gambler,” says 58-year-old Bob Gold-blatt, “is going to find a place to gamble.”
In 1959, Goldblatt made the move to Dallai because, he says, the climate tor gambling was more to his liking. A salesman by trade, he hustled pool games and played high-stakes poker, but his real passion was sports betting. “1 could find a bookie in a ghost town,” he says.
A gambler since age nine, he can recall those days when winning a $100 bet on a football game made him ecstatic. That was before gambling became an addiction and he finally turned to Gamblers Anonymous for help in the fall of 1981.
“It’s difficult for someone who has never gambled seriously to understand,” Goldblatt says, “but there came a time when there was no longer ally pleasure in winning. I’d have a good weekend and find myself angry that I hadn’t bet more. It became hard to distinguish between the feeling of winning and losing,”
Yet for years he continued to routinely phone his bookie and place bets-often when he could not afford them. “1 remember calling my bank one afternoon to find out that I had a balance of $13 in my account. 1 was down $900 to my bookie. And that evening I bet $500 on a ball game.”
Denial, he says, comes easy to the compulsive gambler. “We don’t wake up m our own vomit like an alcoholic or get physically ill like a drug addict. Our problem doesn’t show. Our breath doesn’t smell bad, we don’t have the shakes or dry heaves.” But, he says, the addiction is just as devastating.
Which is why he is among several hundred Dallasites who attend meetings of the local chapter of Gamblers Anonymous and stay in touch with officials at the Texas Council on Problem and Compulsive Gambling. “For a long time,” he says, “I made it through each day hour by hour, fighting the urge to pick up the phone.”
Yet, for every gambler who is trying to quit, says TCPCG director Sue Cox, thousands continue to scoff at the idea that they might have a problem.
“I’ll tell you what chose Gamblers; Anonymous meetings are good for,” says a veteran Dallas poker player. “They’re a great place to find people when you’re look-ins: to get up a game. 1 know this guy named Charlie-he’s run high stakes games around here for years-who gets a helluva lot of his players out of those meetings.”
With such zealous dedication on the part of the gambler, why do the J.D. Colletts and Joe Thompsons of the world bother? Their task, they admit, is not unlike digging a hole in the sand. And the legal system is little help. Last September, a change in the penal code reduced illegal activities such as book-making and gaming promotion from a felony offense to a Class A misdemeanor. The maximum punishment a promoter of casinos or poker games or a bookie now faces is a year in county jail and up to $4,000 in fines. Almost without exception, those convicted receive a year’s probation, a $3 ,000 fine- and more often than not, get right back to business.
