Benny Binion pleaded guilty to income tax evasion on Sep. 6, 1952, eight days before he was due to stand trial in his native state. The Texas gambler and Las Vegas casino owner spent three and a half years in Leavenworth, where at last he learned to read.
“I never went to school not even grade school because I was sick a lot as a kid,” explained Binion, who was born in 1904 in the North Texas county of Grayson. On the chance fresh air might cure his chronic lung condition, he was allowed to travel with his horse-trader father. But the elder Binion had no head for business, and at the age of 15 the boy replaced him as the family breadwinner.
Young Benny was as tough as he was smart. His own son Ted once recounted the time his two-fisted sire whipped 14 men with a car bumper. “That got written up in the newspaper, and that’s when he actually got famous.”
Binion became a bootlegger soon after moving to El Paso in the early 1920’s. While spreading gravel on a parking lot, he noticed the attendant was selling booze on the sly. So he imported a load of liquor from Oklahoma and took away the fellow’s customers.
The repeal of Prohibition prompted Binion’s return to North Texas, where he went into the numbers racket, the illegitimate ancestor of the current lottery. During the Texas Centennial in 1936, he hosted high-stakes crap games in Dallas hotels. After the tourists left town, he catered to rich oilmen who, according to Ted, “came because Dad would run a high limit and also because he was known to run honest games.”
Binion was by necessity a walking arsenal in those dangerous days. He packed two .45 automatics and a small .38 revolver with a filed-down hammer. In his golden years, he was content to carry a .22 magnum but always kept a sawed-off shotgun handy.
In 1931 the rough-and-ready gambler got into a heated argument with a bootlegger sitting beside him on a log. “This guy was a real badman with a reputation for killing people by stabbing them,” said Ted. “He stood up real quick and Dad felt like he was going to stab him, so he rolled back off the log, pulled his gun and shot upward from the ground.”
The bullet passed through the antagonist’s neck causing him to bleed to death. Binion claimed self-defense even though the victim had not pulled his knife, an apparent sticking point for the jury which convicted him of first-degree murder. Since the deceased was considered a menace, the judge let the defendant off with a suspended sentence.
Binion was strolling down a Dallas street five years later, when a rival numbers operator called him over to his car. Just as he reached the open driver’s side window, the motorist raised his pistol and fired wounding him in the armpit. Binion grabbed the cylinder of the smoking gun, whipped out his pocket .38 and shot the would-be assassin to death.
That was Binion’s last confirmed kill but not the end of the bloodshed in Big D. With fellow gamblers going down like nine pins in 1946, he headed for Las Vegas with his wife Teddy Jane, their five kids and a tidy nest egg.
Binion claimed late in his colorful life to have forgotten how much money he took to Nevada, but his other son Jack remembered a mysterious piece of luggage entrusted to an older sister. “If the hotel caught fire, she was supposed to get that suitcase out.”
Five years after settling in Las Vegas, Binion opened The Horseshoe on Fremont Street. His partner was a local character called Dobie Doc, whose main qualification was an ability to survive on cat naps. For many years, he presided over the count at the end of the three daily shifts.
To pay the legal fees from his fight against racketeering charges in Dallas and his losing battle with the IRS, Binion sold his controlling interest in the casino. He was denied a gambling license after his stretch in Leavenworth, but that was merely an annoying technicality that did not prevent the family from regaining control of The Horseshoe in 1964.
The Binion Philosophy boiled down to three of his favorite sayings: “If you want to get rich, make little people feel like big people.” “Good food cheap, good whiskey cheap and a good gamble.” “I don’t know what everybody’s got against inflation and corruption. If you got those things, there’s always plenty of money around.”
A friend called on the aged gambler in the hospital shortly before his death from congestive heart failure on Christmas Day 1989. The visitor was aware of the patient’s recent neardeath experience, when he swore he saw Jesus Christ.
“Well, I guess you’ll see him again,” commented the friend.
“From what I’ve been told,” the old Texan drawled, “I’m supposed to go the other way.”
“It doesn’t matter what you’ve done so long as you repent.” “That’s the problem,” the gambler shrugged. “There’s some of it I can’t repent. I’ve tried, and I just can’t!”