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Benny Binion Gambling and the Policy Racket D espite periodic reform efforts, prostitution and gambling had persisted in Dallas since its days as a frontier town. In 1876 Mayor Ben Long’s attempts to enforce the law spurred the gambling-den proprietors to gather in the second story of a downtown building and defy Long and his deputies for three days and nights—until a truce was reached. In October 1883, when District Attorney Charles Clint mounted a campaign to drive gamblers out of town, a delegation of businessmen urged him to desist. They pointed out that Fort Worth was offering gamblers free rent and $3,500 cash to move. This attitude of unofficial tolerance persisted until after World War II. In the 1920s gambling in Dallas was controlled by a man with the appropriate name of Warren Diamond. His headquarters was in the Southland Hotel on Commerce Street, where high-stakes card and dice games were played. “The biggest crap game in town was there,” said Johnny Moss, who was born in 1906 and grew up in Dallas. “The biggest poker game in town was at the Southland.” Moss became a childhood friend of Benny Binion, the city’s future gambling boss, and learned to cheat at cards from a local gambler named Blackie Williams. “It was a bad town, Dallas,” Moss said of the place when he was a young man. “That was Clyde Barrow days, you know.”1 Binion, who got his start working for Diamond, was investigated in seven killings but was convicted of only one, the 1931 killing of a black liquor runner named Frank Bolding. Binion received a two-year suspended sentence. The killing earned him his nickname, “Cowboy,” for the way he rolled off a box and came up shooting when Bolding pulled a knife. Binion went into business for himself in the late twenties. For a few years he had to deal with competition from Diamond and with occasional police raids. By the mid-1930s he had gained a virtual monopoly on gambling in Dallas. C h A p t e r 13 193 Benny Binion After Diamond committed suicide in 1933, the city, anxious to boost revenues and to promote attendance at the State Fair of Texas, established a wide-open atmosphere—though the laws remained on the books. The administration of Mayor Woodall Rodgers devised what amounted to a system of taxing and licensing gambling. Police vice officers counted heads in the casinos, and these places paid a weekly “fine” of $10 per patron. Will Wilson, who put an end to this practice as Dallas’s district attorney in the late forties, recalled that these fines netted the city about $250,000 annually. In addition to the casinos, which numbered as many as twentyseven in downtown Dallas, there were open bookie joints downtown. Many businesses and country clubs featured slot machines. People could gamble on horse races at Fair Park and at Arlington Downs in Arlington, halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth. The flavor of the time is captured in an anecdote from Harmon Howze, who remembered a big win at the track as a young man in Dallas. After a day’s work at Dallas Power and Light Company, he often went to the horse races at Fair Park. His brother-in-law manned the back gate, and Howze got to know the men who worked at the track. One day one of the track employees told him, “Hey, I got us a deal today!” There was a horse in the seventh race, a little speckled filly named Thistle-Lucy, that was going to win. He asked Howze how much he could bet. Howze, who was making about $14 a week, said he could bet no more than $5; he had to keep some money to eat on till he got paid on Friday. His friend offered to lend him $5 if he lost. “Anyway,” Howze said, this little old horse comes in and paid $42 on a $2 ticket! You could figure that one out. I had ninety-something dollars. I was really rich! I went downtown that night—got on a streetcar and went downtown. The Palace Theater had a little shop called National Shirt Shop, [where] you could buy a shirt for a dollar. And then just across the street, there was a shoe outfit where you could buy a pair of shoes for $4.50. And I bought five shirts and I bought a new...

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