Blood Aces: The Wild Ride of Benny Binion, the Texas Gangster Who Created Vegas Poker by Swanson Doug J

Author:Swanson, Doug J. [Swanson, Doug J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Biography, Crime
ISBN: 9780698163508
Amazon: B00G3L6NT2
Goodreads: 23005505
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2014-08-14T07:00:00+00:00

Benny, Teddy Jane, and the children, along with some friends, out for a night on the Strip.

16

“NO WAY TO DUCK”

Believe in justice. But spell it “Just Us.”

—BB

Back in Dallas, Henry Wade had been elected district attorney in 1950, succeeding Will Wilson, who had moved on to the Texas Supreme Court. Wade was a short, powerfully built former FBI agent who chewed cigars and enjoyed passing afternoons at the Lakewood Country Club playing dominoes. In the courtroom, he embraced the persona of a drawling avenger—another unforgiving, cagey Texas farm boy—and later in his career persuaded a jury to sentence a pair of kidnappers to 5,005 years in prison, then the longest punishment in the history of American jurisprudence. Wade hired and promoted assistant DAs who followed his merciless, scorched-earth approach to prosecution, and this win-at-all-costs ethos made him a revered figure in the deeply conservative precincts of Dallas.

Now, in early 1952, Wade found himself disturbed by an old, unresolved, and frustrating case, so he made straight for one of his newly hired assistants, Bill Alexander. Tall and rail thin, Alexander had been a decorated infantry captain in World War II, and wore the perpetual look of someone searching for something to shoot. On this morning he sat at his gray metal desk in the DA’s offices on the sixth floor of the county criminal courts building, puffing an unfiltered Camel. Black rotary-dial phones rang and secretaries’ manual typewriters clattered. Alexander glanced up to see Wade approaching across the linoleum with a cigar in his mouth and a thick stack of papers in his hands. One peek at the stack and he knew what he had inherited: Benny Binion’s criminal file. Wade dropped the papers on Alexander’s desk and said only, “Get him.”

Authorities in Nevada had justified their refusal to extradite Binion with the rationale that gambling was legal in that state. Murder, however, was not. If Alexander could reinvestigate Binion’s Dallas years and develop a plausible homicide case against him, Nevada’s argument would be moot. After studying the file—it contained years’ worth of reports, witness statements, and police investigative memos—Alexander hit the streets. For days he haunted the old hotels where Binion’s gambling halls had operated and the shabby bars that had hosted his policy games. Although Binion had been gone for more than five years, Alexander had no trouble finding people who remembered him, and who retained deep knowledge of his assorted, alleged misdeeds. “The only problem was, nobody would talk,” Alexander recalled. “Binion had more friends than Wade did.”

Eyewitnesses to Binion’s Dallas mayhem combined their clear memories with a strong aversion to sworn statements. “They’d say, ‘Mr. Bill, I was there, but I’m not going to testify against Mr. Binion,’” Alexander said. Like many in his line of work, Binion had kept most of his bloodshed within the outlaw family. “He may have been tough,” Alexander said. “He may have been criminal. But he didn’t bother anybody.”

In general, those who had known Binion still liked and respected him. And they still feared him.

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