The Nevada Tax Commission members agreed by unanimous vote to allow reporters to sit in and report on its voting sessions, meetings in which they made key decisions. Previously, voting had been done behind closed doors during “executive sessions,” or as journalists called them, “secret sessions.” Exceptions to the new policy included times when confidential…
1952 “Someone very dear to you is being held and will be killed if you don’t give me the money.” This was the content of the note, a bluff, Frederick Charles Will, handed to the manager of the American Trust Company branch in San Francisco on July 28. Walter Blomberg, whose wife was at home…
1952 “One of the members of the Journal news staff stopped in at a [Reno, Nevada] casino one night last week, put a nickel in a slot machine and hit the jackpot. The attendant came with $7.50 and gave him another nickel to take the machine off pay. He did it — you guessed…
1952 When Ernest J. Primm owned the Monterey Club, a poker house in Gardena, California (a Los Angeles suburb), he claimed on his state income taxes the losses of his shills, up to $500 ($4,500 today) a month, as expenses or losses — illegitimate deductions. Seven years later, it caught up with him. The state’s Franchise Tax…