Late 1970s, 2000s Fay and Jessica were young, capuchin monkeys living on the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) campus, where two professors in the department of psychology intended to teach them how to gamble, in the late 1970s. (The female primates were named after actresses Fay Wray and Jessica Lange, who’d starred in the…
1851 Roving gambler William “Lucky Bill” B. Thorington’s stint in Hangtown (today Placerville, California) was brief because he literally thimblerigged a prominent local out of $1,500 to $2,000 (more than $39,000 to $52,000 today) and that angered the men in the camp. Despite a potential lynch mob after him and his companion card sharp Sidney…
Late 1840s-1858 A list of Western United States’ gamblers would be incomplete without William “Lucky Bill” B. Thorington.* A thimblerig master, he plied his craft in the Western mining camps and towns from Sacramento to Ragtown, Hangtown to Salt Lake City, during the late 1840s and ’50s. Thimblerig, also known as the shell game and…
1963-1970s With assorted help from Mobsters starting in 1963, a small Chicago, Illinois-based pinball game maker, which had begun as Lion Manufacturing Co. in the 1920s, grew into the world’s largest slot machine developer, Bally Manufacturing Corp., by the 1970s. And those underworld relationships later would damage its image and jeopardize some of its existing…
1968, 1969 Bally Manufacturing Corp. got its name from Ballyhoo, the first coin-operated pinball machine (a penny got you seven plays) created in 1931 by Raymond Moloney, owner of Chicago, Illinois-based Lion Manufacturing Co. Lion became Bally in January 1932. The company also made slot machines, video poker machines, video games and state lottery games…
1971 Actress Jane Fonda and renowned activists led about 900 people down the Las Vegas Strip on March 6, 1971, a Saturday, in protest of welfare cutbacks. “Today we launched a spring offensive and a national campaign against repression,” said participating civil rights leader Rev. Ralph Abernathy (Reno Evening Gazette, March 8, 1971). Starting…
1950-1956 A novel, animated gambling device began to appear in Nevada casinos in 1950. It debuted in the lobby of Reno’s Mapes hotel-casino in the fall and “got a big play from visiting Shriners,” reported the Nevada State Journal (Nov. 12, 1950). They were one-armed bandits, or life-sized outlaws whose torso was a slot machine…
1938 Gambler Tony Cornero Stralla offered to donate a day’s worth of revenue from his Southern California casino boat, the Rex, to Zoo Park at 3800 Mission Road in Los Angeles. The attraction, then owned/operated by the California Zoological Society and formerly the Selig Zoo, was teetering on bankruptcy and its animals were facing starvation.…
1938 During a preliminary hearing on the felony charge of using a cheating device while playing cards at a Las Vegas gambling house, Walter Eccles of Los Angeles explained that he’d used a holdout worn on his arm for “protection against a crooked gambling game” (Nevada State Journal, April 24, 1938).
1963-1964 Mobsters Marshall Caifano (aka Johnny Marshall) and Charles Delmonico were arrested in Las Vegas on a federal warrant in July 1963 for conspiracy to commit extortion and engaging in interstate transportation in the aid of racketeering. The latter charge was because the two supposedly schemed in California to commit the crime and then tried…