1904 An industrious individual tunneled beneath the Tonopah Club in Tonopah, Nevada, cut a hole through the casino floor and stole $1,000 in gold and silver from the box under the faro table – all while a game was in progress! Photo from Wikimedia Commons
1905-1941 Imagine in the early 1900s, a block about the length of a football field, in the Mojave Desert in Nevada where gambling, drinking and prostitution prevailed free from law enforcement’s intrusion, and where fights erupted often and killings were common. And because the days were so hot, it came alive at night when locals…
1967 New York publisher, Lyle Stuart, applied to the Nevada Gaming Commission for a gambling license to purchase 1 percent of the Aladdin Resort & Casino on the Las Vegas Strip for $25,000 ($178,000 today). Regulators, though, denied him one due to his “unsuitable background” because a subsidiary of his company sold books that contained…
1920 It was 3 a.m. on a Monday. About 15 men were gambling in the Desert Club. One who’d been there all night, sitting alone, watching and waiting to make his move was George Strickland. In his mid-30s and a self-named Wobbly, he’d arrived in Tonopah, Nevada, a few days earlier. Suddenly, he stood, brandished…
1955 When Nevada legislators legalized gambling in 1931, they didn’t consider one significant caveat. The omission came to light in January 1955 when an industrious Las Vegas casino patron was arrested for using Mexican 10 centavo coins in 25 cent slot machines — an act called slot slugging. Apparently, the coins fit perfectly. The judge…
1955 When presumed-to-be-wealthy mobster, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, was slain at age 41, the estate he left was worth $35,609 (about $314,550 today). Before his murder, Siegel co-financed and oversaw completion of the Flamingo hotel-casino in Las Vegas, Nevada but ran up its development costs by several million and began bouncing checks. In his earlier days,…
1908 Two deputy sheriffs in the mining camp of Rawhide, Nevada,* were on the take. For a regularly paid fee, they allowed establishments to operate legal games without a license and/or run banned ones as well. Sometimes they allowed gambling houses that paid heavy license fees on some games to conduct others without paying for a…
1931 Even after wide-open gambling became legal in Nevada, many of the exclusive clubs continued to vet the people who wanted entry. Someone inside the establishment would look through the peephole in the door and if he spotted a familiar face in the group, he’d allow them in. Photo from freeimages.com: The Man Who Spies…
1967 Nevada legislators proposed a bill that would disallow any future installation of slot machines in grocery and drug stores. It died, though, in the Senate Taxation Committee.
1960 A cheap, spiral notebook held great power in Nevada’s gambling world for decades. It contained known U.S. mobsters whose underworld statuses and histories were such that the state gambling authorities didn’t want them anywhere near The Silver State’s casinos. This was a problem as these undesirables frequented major gambling operations in the state. Nevada…