Men Of Action: Benny Binion, The Cowboy Gangster

The newspaper men and photographers fell in love with the wrinkly moon-faced cowboy named Benny Binion, playing host at his Horseshoe Casino, the literal grandfather of a new poker tournament called the World Series of Poker, shaking everyone’s hands.

It was the way he talked and the way he moved. He had credibility as a real Texas operator, a genuine person in a world of fakes and schemers. Although, earlier in his life, the media attention nearly got him killed several times, things have changed so drastically he paid for the media’s airfare to cover his WSOP.

If Nick “the Greek” Dandolos was the Prince of Vegas in those early years (a man who would “put a snake in your pocket and ask for a match”, Binion said), then good old Lester “Benny” Binion was the saloon owner who only pretended to be dumb when, in fact, he was, most often, the smartest man in the city.

And if someone wanted to argue, Binion didn’t keep snakes in his pockets. Just ask the ghosts of Frank Boldin and Ben Frieden, both who lost their lives when Binion pulled a trigger.

Yes, those same hands that welcomed all those news people and the countless number of guests who spilled into the Horseshoe for all those decades with Binion at the helm, put two men into the Texas ground for two different reasons.

A decade later, Binion’s hands buttoned the heavy wool winter shirts issued by Leavenworth prison and carved toothbrushes into shanks just in case, because they don’t allow prisoners the luxury of a .38 snub-nose pistol.

Like Al Capone, he was sent to prison for tax evasion, but unlike Capone, he got out and built an incredible life in Las Vegas, maybe the only city in the world that would allow it. For a man who, in another life, might have been a Cowboy poet with a harmonica in his pocket rather than dangerous metal, it was his true home town.

Dust and Dirt

Born in Pilot Grove, Texas, in 1904 to a father who was a horse trader and stock raiser, Benny suffered chronically with pneumonia. The population of Pilot Grove, located about 60 miles northeast of Dallas, was 193 that year. It was mud and dust and horseshit and muleskinners and gamblers and cheats.

Benny talked about his early years with Mary Ellen Glass in an interview they did for the Nevada Oral History Program in the early ‘70s. Unless otherwise noted, all of Benny’s quotes come from Glass’s Lester Ben “Benny” Binion: Some Recollections of a Texas and Las Vegas Gaming Operator (the full text is available here and is awesome.)

“Oh, I remember I had pneumonia about five times. When I was little, you see, and houses weren’t too good, and this, that, and the other, and I guess — So, finally, my dad told my mother, the way I get it, ‘Well, he’s goin’ to die, anyhow,’ and my dad was kind of a wild man, kind of a drunk, ‘So,’ he says, ‘I’m goin’ to just take him with me.’”

So he took his little boy on a late-fall cattle drive, it seemed, to abandon him to the elements or force him to buck up and survive. But the get-tough-or-die strategy seemed to have worked.

“It was pretty cold. And I remember all the men, gettin’ off , and breakin’ up brush, and everything, and warmin’ their feet. And I stayed on that horse all day, and Dad left. And I doubt if I was over five, six years old. I don’t even remember where we went. And almost from that time on, hell, I just been a-going.”

When improbable things start to happen to people, the improbabilities seem to multiply. Benny Binion didn’t go to school, he traded horses (imagine a 10-year-old cowboy horse trader today) and hustled among the ranchers, trappers and farmers. He noticed they liked to gamble an awful lot.

During World War I, Benny worked for a company dealing mules to the U.S. Army. He was the guy who could tell just about everything there is about a certain mule by looking in their mouths. It’s like he didn’t have a childhood. He literally had to learn how to read animals in order to survive.

After that, and with Prohibition beginning, he turned to bootlegging. He told Glass that bootlegging got him nowhere. Every time he’d get ahead, something disastrous would happen, he said. That included two stints in jail, one sixty-day sentence and one of four months, and that scared him enough to get out of the liquor business.

In 1928, Binion opened his first gambling joint, a lottery operation called a “policy.” It was Binion’s first real step in becoming a gangster. The second step happen three years later, when Binion earned his nickname “The Cowboy.”

What Happens When you Bring a Gun to a Knife Fight?

Two year suspended sentence.

At least that’s what happened to Benny after he rolled off a log and shot Frank Boldin in the neck. Boldin, a man with a reputation for sticking people, never pulled his knife. Binion accused Boldin of stealing whiskey from one of his joints in 1931 and an argument escalated.

According to Jack Sheehan’s The Players: The Men Who Made Las Vegas, Benny’s son Ted Binion said: “This guy was a real bad man, had a reputation for killing people by stabbing them. He stood up real quick and Dad felt like he was going to stab him, and rolled back off the log, pulled his gun, and shot upward from the ground. Hit him through the neck and killed him.”

Boldin’s terrible reputation calculated into Binion’s suspended sentence.

His policy joint led to a gambling franchise spread throughout the Dallas/Fort Worth area. His operation would rent a suite of hotel rooms and set up card and dice games. The cities were bursting with wealth and the richest not only like to gamble, but liked to gamble high.

Benny maintained control of the illicit gambling industry and stayed out of jail with the help of a sheriff who saw no problem with a vice operation, as long as he was getting a cut. With hundreds of thousands of dollars wagered monthly through Benny and his crew, the graft wasn’t small change.

Binion’s great skill in Dallas was negotiating with men in power. He obviously had a very large dowry in which to pull from, but getting those policymakers on his side required more than cash. And even with the dozens of men he greased, his operations still were busted, mostly for show. He estimated that he paid around $600,000 in fines annually.

Five years after killing Boldin, Binion put another bullet in a man. Again, Ted Binion, from The Players: The Men Who Made Las Vegas, describes Benny’s point of view:

“I was told that Dad was walking down the street and Ben called him over to his car. Dad said Ben was smiling. As Dad come over real close to him Ben upped his gun; he had it hidden behind the door. Dad threw up his arm, I guess instinctively, as if he could stop a bullet and Ben Frieden shot him through the armpit. He grabbed the cylinder of Ben Frieden’s gun so it wouldn’t turn and wouldn’t shoot again.”

He then pulled out his own piece, a .38 Terrier, and ended Ben’s life. The incident was considered self-defense. In less than five years, Binion had killed two men and was operating in one of the riches markets in America. His reputation as The Cowboy raged and people who you don’t want to, started to notice.

He managed to keep on top of gambling business until around 1945, when a number of Binion’s Texas associates and rivals began shooting each other and planting bombs in each other’s cars. And, as if the kitchen wasn’t getting hot enough, the sheriff Binion had in his pocket lost the election.

Suddenly, within a year, he became a sitting duck in a sea of madmen. He never went anywhere unless he was armed for a bear hunt. And if that wasn’t enough, he was also being investigated for evading federal taxes, ala Al Capone.

Considering the circumstances, he packed his stuff, which was mostly piles and piles of money – how much, Benny claims he didn’t know – and headed to Nevada in 1946. The taxman did eventually catch up to Benny and he pleaded guilty to tax evasion in 1953. He reported to Leavenworth prison on Dec. 21, of that year and served a little more than four years. By 1957, he was back in Vegas and about to change the city forever.

Dallas was a bear trap to him. Benny Binion’s political cronies, including the sheriff and deputy sheriff, were voted out of power. A rival accused him of blowing his wife up in a car bomb and was caught loading makeshift bombs onto an airplane. He also had a map with Binion’s house circled. That guy would die years later when a bomb buried in front of his mailbox exploded.

Benny Binion showed up in Las Vegas in 1946 with three kids, a wife named Teddy Jane, a 6’6” black bodyguard named Perry Rose, better known as Gold Dollar, and a suitcase every last one of us has dreamed of owning.

He used some of the cash in that suitcase (some say there was more than one cash-filled suitcase) to buy into the Las Vegas Club with Vegas businessman J. Kell Houssell, Sr.

“Kell was about the biggest landowner and operator out here at the time,” said son Jack, in Jack Sheenan’s great The Players: The Men Who Made Las Vegas. “He was a dead serious guy, just opposite of Dad, but he liked Kell all his life.”

Despite his manslaughter conviction and suspended sentence and his reputation as a Dallas mobster, he was given a casino license. Binion described his first Vegas property with mild disgust, and considering he wasn’t involved with it very long and also butted-heads with management, it’s no surprise he lasted only a year.

“This Las Vegas Club wasn’t the most beautiful place you ever seen; it was an old, run down kind of place,” he told UNLV’s Marry Ellen Glass in 1973.

But then again, Las Vegas wasn’t exactly the most beautiful place. In 1947, when the Las Vegas Club opened, about 18,000 people lived there. The casinos were low-ceiling sawdust joints. Plane service was sketchy and even Binion claimed he failed to see the potential of the place, despite his instant success.

“So I kept thinkin’ I’d leave, you know. I didn’t think this town was ever goin’ to be anything like it is. I just couldn’t believe that. I just thought—bein’ that I’d been where they close up, and do this, that, and the other all the time, I thought this just had to go. But it didn’t. Thank God for that,” Binion told Glass.

During this time, Binion bought a ranch in Montana where he and Gold Dollar would show up in a Cadillac with steer horns across the front. It also had bullet-proof windows. Binion had made enemies in Dallas and his paranoia wasn’t unfounded.

“There’s been a lot of ’em wanted to kill me, but they missed,” Binion told Glass.

Mysterious circumstances surrounded the deaths of several his rivals, but Binion nor his associates were ever indicted. Of course, he denied any involvement. Even the self-defense ruling of Ben Frieden’s death was questioned by some. People claim Binion shot his own armpit after he ambushed him, then claimed self-defense. Benny did know an awful lot of judges.

He would soon make even more enemies when he opened the Horseshoe in 1951 and raised betting limits as high as he pleased.

The Horseshoe

Binion bought the Apache and the El Dorado and built his Horseshoe, complete with carpeting, comps for all players, and betting limits that made some of the diamond-hard casino mobsters want to walk across Freemont and put a bullet in Benny’s chubby behind.

Until Binion showed up, casinos had no reason to compete with each other by offering better odds or higher limits. The owners saw no reason to allow players to gamble high, and they hated the idea of letting players let it ride at the craps table.

Higher the limits, as the theory goes, the more volatile business becomes. Benny disagreed. Binion’s Horseshoe opened with craps limits at $500 while the city’s standard was $50. The serious gamblers flocked to the Horseshoe.

“Up until that time, gambling around here had been more of a taking business,” said Jack Binion, according to Sheenan’s The Players: The Men Who Made Las Vegas. Sheenan also quotes son Ted.

“But Daddy had been used to dealing high. At his better places, even back in the ‘30s and ‘40s, he was dealing $200 and $400. And a lot of his best customers came to him for that.”

The limits would eventually be set as the player’s first bet, no matter how high they wanted to wager. Binion may not have any type of formal schooling, but he knew math and he had balls of steel. The money would come back. It always does in his chosen industry.

Other Vegas standards that are attributed to Benny include carpet on the floors (a carpet installer lost $18,000 at the Horseshoe, so Benny let him pay it off with carpeting), giving comps to low-stakes players (“If you want to get rich, make little people feel like big people,” he said), picking high-stakes players up in limos at the airport, and tournament poker.

But just as soon as the Horseshoe was picking up speed, Binion pled guilty to four counts of tax evasion for the years 1947 and 1948, ironically after he was out of Dallas (but still collecting from some craps operations).

In December of 1953, Gold Dollar drove Benny to Dallas for sentencing. He paid the $20,000 fine off a roll of cash he thought would be used to bribe the judge. The deal apparently fell through and Binion was given a five-year sentence. He served three-and-a-half years. It took him until 1964 to regain complete control of the Horseshoe after selling a percentage to pay for legal fees.

By the time he got out, his wife, Teddy Jane, had the Horseshoe running like a well-oiled mechanical bull. From a profile on Benny by Texas Monthly’s Gary Cartwright, he describes Teddy Jane:

“She was a familiar sight on Fremont Avenue, this scrawny old lady with dyed hair and a cigarette between her nicotine-stained fingers, trudging from the casino to the bank with hundreds of thousands of dollars stuffed in the pockets of her trench coat.”

Son Jack would get involved as soon as he was working-age in the late 50s and became casino president at the age of 26 in 1963.

Now 52, Benny would never be given another casino license again, but he never really cared about such formalities. Just ask those who were busted cheating at Binion’s Horseshoe during the 60s and 70s, when the security guards preferred to leave the police out of it.

World Series of Poker

The WSOP wasn’t just born. It’s an event that evolved since the 70s to the spectacle that it is now. Jack Binion and a handful of others have more to do with its ongoing success more than Benny.

The first WSOP took place in 1970, a year after Benny attended a poker party called the Texas Gamblers Reunion in Reno. He had such a good time, he invited the players to his casino in 1970, where they played a few days of mixed cash games and voted for the best player. Johnny Moss won.

Binion’s didn’t even have a poker room.

Here’s how Benny told it to Glass:

“Well, there was a fellow by the name of Tom Moore started it in Reno, invited us all up there one year. Holiday Hotel. So we enjoyed it very much, everybody enjoyed it so; good get-together too, you know. So Tom Moore sold out, so I says, “Well, we’ll just put it on.” And Jack took a hold of it, went to puttin’ it on. So we’ve really improved it over what it did. We improve it every year.

And this was the most thrilling game — I’ve seen lot of poker games; this one this time was the most thrilling game I’ve ever seen. Pug (Pearson) was down to $30,000 once — there’s $130,000 in the game—and when it got down to two men, Pug was down to $30,000 once, Johnny Moss was down to $30,000 once. Johnny Moss come back, put Pug down to $30,000, and then Johnny bluffed his money off Pug. Johnny’s a big bluffer anyhow, you know.”

The next year, the freeze out format was implemented, and six players put up $5,000 to play the “main event.” Four events took place. Jack and Benny Binion, seeing the potential of the WSOP, hired Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder’s public relations company, and like a knobby-head Johnny Appleseed, Snyder planted the idea of poker as sport in the minds of reporters across the country.

Two years later, Snyder filmed the WSOP for the first time and it aired as a special on CBS. It was a good start.

In a Sports Illustrated article written by Edwin Shrake in 1971, he claims a heads-up mixed poker match was played between longtime Binion friend Johnny Moss and famous gambler Nick “the Greek” Dandolos for half a year in 1951. Moss said it took place in 1949, but he could be mistaken. The Horseshoe didn’t even exist then. There is no written record of the match despite that fact that Binion was friends with newspaperman and powerful Vegas operator Hank Greenspun and Dandolos was already famous. Benny didn’t mention it in his interview with Glass.

Either a romantic poker story or a legitimate event, this match is supposedly the zygote that led to the first WSOP in 1970, so is most definitely worth mentioning. The real importance of it will forever be debated.

There’s no debate how much influence Benny’s son Jack had on tournament poker. Without Jack’s impressive managerial skills, foresight and passion, tournament poker would have had a steeper climb to sport legitimacy.

Benny turned 70 in 1974, and he spent the next decade trying to grease Senators and Presidents to pardon him for his crimes. It didn’t work, and he would die a convicted felon on Christmas Day in 1989.

A statue of him riding a horse was erected on the corner of Casino Center Boulevard and Ogden in the late 70’s. It was relocated to South Point Casino’s equestrian center, where the National Finals Rodeo takes place annually. Binion helped move the finals to Vegas in 1985. For it, he’s in the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame.

The Binion family would lose the Horseshoe in 2004. It was sold to Harrah’s, who bought it specifically for the WSOP brand. Harrah’s sold it to MTR Gaming a year later. TLC Casino Enterprises bought it in 2008.

Binion’s name is still on the marque in neon.