1946-1947 On the third Tuesday of April 1946, after work at the Southern Pacific Shop in Sparks, Nevada, Sam Lemel took the bus to Reno and went to Harolds Club where he played craps. He began by betting two half-dollars, which he lost. He left the casino and returned a bit later, only to lose…
1924-1932 The story of the estate of a long-ago Nevada gambler after his passing is strange and unfortunate. John Quinn was a man who’d lost and made large fortunes in gambling and mining stock deals throughout The Silver State and other parts of the West. He’d opened the first saloon-gambling house in the mining town…
1911-1912 A San Francisco, California ordinance outlawed bucket shopping in 1911 — no longer was running or visiting such an enterprise legal — and one operator didn’t like it. Henry A. Moss, a bucket shop owner and Nevada citizen, vowed to fight the new law, as it prohibited him from running his four San Francisco branches, which…
1970-1973 When federal agents arrested Elliot Paul Price, 51, during a massive multi-city raid in 1970 and charged him with illegally transmitting race wire information across state lines via telephone, two dominos fell: • He lost his job as a casino host at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. • The Clark County Sheriff’s Office pulled his…
1957 After Robert Van Santen and Cecil Lynch’s business partnership in the Las Vegas, Nevada Fortune Club went sour (Lynch broke off to open his own gambling club at the Golden Slot site), the two fought over use of that name for their respective casinos. The dispute led to Van Santen suing Lynch for $100,000…
1958-1959 (Part I ran last week. If you missed it, it’s available here.) The Nevada Tax Commission withdrew the gambling license of the New Star operators — Brent Mackie and Kenneth Henton — in July 1958 after investigators allegedly witnessed 21 dealers cheating customers in eight different ways at the Winnemucca, Nevada casino. Later that month,…
1956-1959 A thief absconded with $2,000 (about $17,500 today) from the Club Primadonna casino in Reno, Nevada on the first Friday of May 1956. The missing 10,000 dimes, 2,000 quarters and 1,000 half-dollars, the reserve fund for the club’s slot machines, were taken from a wooden cabinet in the basement. Only two employees had keys…
1975 In the spring, Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder, a Las Vegas oddsmaker and bookie, allegedly punched, knocked down and kicked casino magnate, Nathan “Nate” S. Jacobson, in a Caesars Palace hallway in a confrontation over a debt he claimed Jacobson owed him, so alleged Jacobson in his battery lawsuit against Snyder. A witness told police…
1948-1950 Tragedy struck when the wife of famed American novelist, John Steinbeck, was in Reno, Nevada for a quickie divorce from him after 5½ years of marriage. In 1948, while establishing residency in The Biggest Little City, Gwyndolyn “Gwyn” Conger Steinbeck developed a relationship with Leonard Wolff, a wealthy, former U.S. Army Air Forces bombardier…
1956 The Fremont in Las Vegas commissioned a large oil painting that depicted a “lady of chance” to grace a wall in its casino. The hotel-casino’s press agent, Shelly Davis, asked aspiring actress Sandra Giles to pose for the piece for renowned artist, Philip Paval. During the hotel’s grand opening, the piece of art was…