Quick Fact - Tunnel Thief
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…
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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…
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…
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).…
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.…
1961 A Southern Nevada business offered to teach individuals, for a flat fee of $3,000 ($24,000 today), various ways to successfully cheat slot machines. Photo from freeimages.com
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…
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.…
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…
1913-1929 With various state bans on gambling and, later, a nationwide prohibition against liquor, many Americans, particularly wealthy Southern Californians, traveled to casinos in Mexican border cities to play and imbibe. “The great hegira* is in,…
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…
1888 When select games of chance were legal in Nevada, so many youths under age 21 regularly were frequenting the gambling clubs (which was illegal) that the police threatened to make an example of some…
1962-1999 You’ve likely heard of Dumbo, Horton and Babar, but what about Bertha? Real, unlike the others, Bertha is an elephant renowned for having performed in shows at the Nugget hotel-casino, in Sparks, Nevada, for…
Harolds Club, a casino that debuted in Reno, Nevada in 1935, displayed signs on its property that read: “No one can win all the time. Harolds Club advises you to risk only what you can…
1935 Police discovered John S. Parks, a 67 year old, carrying a loaded Colt 45 automatic on a downtown Reno, Nevada street around midnight on a July Monday. With blood streaming from his nose and…
1956 As revelers welcomed the new year at the Sands in Las Vegas, Nevada, management gave every guest (an estimated 18,000 of them) a brand new silver dollar. Additionally, they gifted each of the 700 women…