1949 The article, “Las Vegas Gamblers Arming in Control Battle,” ran on the front page of a Los Angeles newspaper in the third week of December, to the chagrin of Nevada gambling regulators, casino owners, officers of the law and other industry representatives. The story reported that in the new iteration of Sin City: •…
1890-1910 The heyday of the Monte Carlo casino resort in Monaco was The Roaring Twenties, but that was due in large part to the solid foundation laid by François Blanc decades earlier, who stepped in after its seven initial, turbulent years. The casino actually began in 1856 as two different gambling houses that later were…
1944-1945 The trial of Andrew Jackson “Jack” Blackman, free on $10,000 bail, began in April 1945, six months after he’d fatally shot James Lannigan in the Bank Club in Reno, Nevada. District Attorney Melvin E. Jepson, in his opening statement, asserted the state would prove the defendant had committed premeditated and deliberate murder. Blackman’s attorney, Harlan L.…
1944-1945 A thug’s confrontation of a casino owner on October 30, 1944 radically altered both of their lives. Andrew Jackson “Jack” Blackman, co-proprietor of the Town House gambling saloon* in Reno, left his business for the night at about 2:30 a.m. and went into the Bank Club** to see his good friend, Walter Parman, the…
1970-1972 Meyer Lansky was the puppeteer behind the scenes of the world’s gambling stage from the 1930s to the 1970s, controlling and manipulating the characters, or National Crime Syndicate members, with aplomb. He capitalized on his brilliant financial acumen to develop and skim from an international casino empire — encompassing various U.S. states, Cuba, England,…
1932 At about 4:30 on a Sunday morning, a drunk Bartley “Bart” J. Smithson was target practicing in the Palace Club, shooting at a spittoon and a silver dollar with a 0.38 Smith & Wesson Special. Bullets were flying, some lodging in the building’s rear wall. Smithson was a well-known resident and the proprietor of…
1911-1912 A San Francisco, California ordinance outlawed bucket shopping in 1911 — no longer was running or visiting such an enterprise legal — and one operator didn’t like it. Henry A. Moss, a bucket shop owner and Nevada citizen, vowed to fight the new law, as it prohibited him from running his four San Francisco branches, which…
1958-1959 Clarence Thayer grew ill with flu-like symptoms on Thanksgiving Day in 1958 while visiting his sister in Oakland, California. He was a well drilling contractor who lived in South Lake Tahoe. He and his wife Norma also owned a dry cleaning business that adjoined their home, which she ran and where he sometimes worked.…
1949 Casino owners balked when the question of going on daylight saving time (DST) arose in Nevada in 1949. Gamblers’ Outcries Charles Mapes, owner of the Mapes hotel-casino in Reno, made a few arguments: • “It’s difficult to put on a floor show at 9 p.m. with the sun just going down. A spotlight can’t…
1931 Twenty-six miles southeast of Las Vegas, the United States government, in 1931, developed Boulder City as the place to house men working on the Hoover Dam (originally Boulder Dam). The Bureau of Reclamation required the town to be a model community that afforded a clean living environment. To achieve this, federal legislators officially designated…