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3 | The Mafia Race Track W herever Meyer Lansky was, dead bodies turned up—a grand total of forty-­ three, according to one of his associates .1 Lansky was an East Coast gangster, a New York Mafia mogul and Bugsy Siegel’s pal. Sowhat was hedoing in 1941 on the streets of the Omaha–Council Bluffs metropolitan area? Lansky, unwittingly, was about to build Beauchamp’s “home track” and the biggest stock car venue between Chicago and Denver. Because the nationally known Ak-­ sar-­ ben (Nebraska spelled backwards) track had stopped horse racing during World War II, Lansky decided there was an opening for dog racing. Diminutive and easily mistaken for a businessman , Lansky settled in at the swankiest Omaha hotel, the Fontenelle, and signed a five-­year lease for property on the Iowa side of the Missouri River. From the $50,000 track and grandstand that Lansky constructed in Council Bluffs, Iowa, spectators could see the river and the city of Omaha. The Kennel Club, Lansky’s name for his track, circumvented the Iowa law against gambling because fans bet on “options” to buy dogs. If the dog won, the option was sold back for a profit. Some 4,000 people packed the grandstand on July 11, 1941, for the first race. Dog racing boomed in Council Bluffs. In 1943 the eighty-­ six-­ night season netted the city $140,000 of tax revenue. Although Lansky himself was a model citizen, the problem was that the races attracted criminals and gambling clubs. The Stork Club and the Riviera Club popped up on the less-­ traveled South Omaha Bridge River Road. The gambling was rough, wide open, and professional enough that participants knew how to avoid getting caught. When the police raided one night, all they found was 150 people quietly watching a floor show. In 1944 Council Bluffs elected a reform mayor who shut down Lansky’s operation. When a different mayor was elected two years later, the dog races again seemed possible, but the state government squelched them by closing legal loopholes.2 Yet even today, signs of Meyer Lansky linger. A restaurant—Lanskys—adopted the notorious gangster’s name even 8 | Chapter 3 though its owners were no relation to the famous gangster, and it still operates in the Council Bluffs–Omaha area. After the demise of dog racing, the old Kennel Club track and grandstand was managed in 1947 by the Council Bluffs government, which held a variety of activities at the venue. Then, however, the city was offered a proposal it could not refuse. The brothers Abe and Louis Slusky, operators of a concession stand in Omaha’s Krug Park and an amusement park and race track in Houston, Texas, bought fourteen acres on the Iowa side near the approach to the Ak-­ sar-­ ben Bridge and leased the track and grandstand area from the city of Council Bluffs. The reported cost for the entire enterprise was $250,000, and the result was a huge, contiguous parcel.3 Louis Slusky operated their Houston site. Abe Slusky opened Playland, an amusement park, on May 30, 1948.4 He experimented with different events at the track and grandstand. Omahan Jerome Givens recalls entering a vehicle in an antique auto race at the Playland track, but the owners of these cars quickly realized they were risking a precious possession in a frivolous moment of fun. The antique car races were short-­lived.5 Motorcycle races also failed to draw big crowds, but the Sluskys found partial success with midget competition, which by this time had been organized into a circuit traveling to Missouri, Nebraska, and Iowa. In the decade before World War II, midget racing had become popular in California and quickly spread across the United States. The cars were built from scratch; they were not modifications of mass-­ market automobiles. The wheel base (the distance from the front to rear wheel) typically was 76 inches or less, the width was approximately 65 inches, and the weight about 900 pounds. By comparison, a 1939 Ford coupe, a vehicle frequently raced in the 1950s, weighed approximately 2,700 pounds and had a wheel base of 112 inches. A carefully crafted racing machine, the midget car had open wheels without fenders for protection. The slightest tire contact with another car on the track could send a vehicle out of control.6 Midget racing required more careful driving than stock car competition. One Harlan pilot, Bobby Parker, located a midget car driven...

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