The Black Striker Gets Hit
Lee Chagra lived in the border underworld of El Paso, a place where drugs were the game and even the good guys didn’t play by the rules. When you live that way, chances are you’ll die that way too.
(Page 7 of 9)
Firing at Vegas Part II
One weekend after the fiasco in Judge Wood’s courtroom, Lee Chagra did what he always did when he felt the world collapsing around him—he telephoned Clark Hughes and suggested a trip to Las Vegas. Hughes knew these had been hard times for his friend. Chagra and Wood were on a collision course that was bound to end in catastrophe.
Jimmy and his new business partner, Henry Wallace, were in Florida awaiting their first freighterload of Colombian marijuana, and from what Lee had heard, the operation had all the earmarks of a disaster. Lee’s finances were in shambles, but he still had plenty of credit in Las Vegas. No force on earth could stop him. “This is gonna be one they’ll write a book about,” he told Hughes. “I’m gonna take the joint apart.”
Caesar’s Palace dispatched a Learjet, and in less than two hours a limousine deposited them at the casino door. Lee handed out $200 in tips before they got to the suite. He always got excited the moment he felt the clamor and hysteria of Caesar’s but this time he was practically dancing on the walls. “For sheer élan,” Hughes recalled, “I don’t think I’d ever seen him any higher.”
Hughes knew that it would be several hours before Lee worked himself into the proper frenzy. There was a ritual that he always observed before going downstairs to the casino. First, he made at least a dozen telephone calls. Hughes never knew whom he called or why—Lee’s life was like hornet’s nest, with thousands of isolated cells, and no one person, however close, ever saw more than a single cell. But the mere act of talking on the telephone seemed to boost his confidence. After the phone calls, Lee would take a long time—maybe two hours, maybe more—to bathe, groom, and dress himself in the wardrobe that he reserved for these occasions. Standing in front of the mirror, he would snap the pearl buttons of his red cowboy shirt, then climb into the black Western-cut leisure suit. He would attach his belt to the giant solid-gold buckle with the thick crust of diamonds, and draw on his black alligator cowboy boots. Checking himself again in the mirror, he would fuss with the black cowboy hat that had Lee Chagra and Freedom embossed in gold on the inside until he achieved the proper tilt and slope. Finally, he would pose with the ebony cane with the gold satyr’s-head handle, squinting and turning until he was satisfied. It was an incredible sight. Right there before your eyes Lee Chagra became the Black Striker.
Clark Hughes went ahead to the casino “to lose my piddling three or four hundred.” He never knew why Lee liked to bring him along, but he seldom refused. Lee was Clark’s friend, maybe the best friend he’d ever had, but in some strange, almost unthinkable way he felt the friendship slipping away. He had known about Lee’s cocaine habit, but since Clark had been appointed a judge, Lee hadn’t flaunted it. It wasn’t the cocaine so much as the lifestyle it symbolized. It was as if their friendship had come to a fork in the road, and Lee had wandered off in another direction.
It was almost midnight when the Black Striker made his appearance on the casino floor. At this point in his life Lee was bored with the tame pace of the blackjack table. He marched straight to a crap table on one side of the casino and told the pit boss to clear the table. The pit boss snapped his fingers and motioned for the guards to bring the velvet ropes. “Gentlemen,” he told the other players, “this table is now reserved for a private game. Please feel free to use any other table in the casino.” Like so many sheep, the nickel-and-dime players started backing away. At the same time a swell of excitement seemed to rumble from the floor, and people pushed to get a look at the action. As Lee reached for the dice, he recited a spiel that was also part of his ritual. “Look at ‘em,” he grinned at the pit boss. “You ought to pay me fifteen hundred dollars an hour to entertain customers. Where do you get off? Who do you think you are?” The pit boss had heard the spiel many times and smiled patronizingly as he personally counted out the stacks of $500 chips. In the first minutes of Lee’s run, a little old lady burst through the crowd just as Lee released the dice. “Any craps!” she shouted, throwing a $5 chip on the table.
After about an hour Lee had lost $90,000. He didn’t appear particularly disturbed. He and Clark went back to the suite for a while. A short time later there was a knock, and Lee admitted two hookers to the room. It looked as though he was set for the night. Clark excused himself and went to his own room, alone.
Shortly after noon the next day, Lee telephoned and said: “Ninety thousand is nothing for a stepper. Let’s go downstairs and give them one they can write home about.” Clark said he would dress and meet Lee in the casino.
The casino was almost deserted. It was that strange hour when the golfers are still on their morning rounds and the drunks are still asleep, that time when they clean the sand in the ashtrays and empty the slots and put fresh ice in the urinals. By the time Clark arrived, Lee had already lost another $80,000 and was yelling at the floor manager because he was threatening to cut off his credit. “How come when I’m winning you let me do anything I goddam please, but when I lose you won’t let me out of the trap?” he shouted in a voice that could be heard in the coffee shop on the opposite side of the casino.
That night as he was dressing, Lee announced intentions to change his luck. He was going to play baccarat instead of craps. Clark was painfully aware that all serious gamblers harbored deep and irrational superstitions: once he’d seen Lee go berserk because a Chinaman approached the table. “I though maybe I was the Jonah,” he said. “I decided to disappear over to the Hilton for a while.” When Clark Hughes returned to Caesar’s about nine that evening, Lee had almost exhausted his credit limit. In the 24 hours since their arrival, he had signed markers totaling $240,000.
They checked out of the hotel that same night and moved to the Aladdin, where Lee had a $250,000 line of credit. Once again, Lee went first to his suite and carried out the ritual. When he appeared several hours later in his Black Striker ensemble, a woman asked Clark Hughes if his friend was a movie star. The pit boss shooed the sheep away from table that Lee selected for his private performance. Unlike many casinos, the Aladdin allowed a player to lay double odds; thus it was possible to win or lose twice as fast. In less than fifteen minutes, he won $90,000. Clark assumed that he would go straight back to Caesar’s and claim some of his markers, but that wasn’t Lee’s plan. He did quit for the night, though. Some people though Lee Chagra didn’t know how to quit, but that wasn’t quite true. He knew how to quit while he was winning. Clark was dog tired and went straight to bed.
The following afternoon at the Aladdin, Lee took the worst beating Clark had ever seen him take. In a single short sitting he lost almost $190,000. He still had $150,000 credit, but that night he went through another $70,000.
They were scheduled to fly back to El Paso Monday morning. When Clark arrived downstairs with his luggage, he saw Lee at one of the blackjack tables, arguing with a Teamster guy who was apparently in charge of credit for the casino. Lee had seated himself at a table and ordered $5000 in chips, but the dealer refused. “Lee,” the man was saying, “I’m not gonna say this again…no more credit!”
Lee didn’t protest as Clark led him out of the casino to the waiting limousine. He looked as though he hadn’t slept for three nights. The silence was monumental. Lee stared out the limo window at the blur of cold neon. His cowboy hat was pushed forward until the brim almost touched his nose, and shaggy locks of graying hair spilled over his collar. Though neither knew it, this was the last time the two old friends would ever go to Vegas together.
After a while Clark said, “You must have dropped close to half a million back there. You sonuvabitch, how are you gonna pay off those markers?”
“I don’t know,” Lee said.
He took a deep draw on his cigarette and pressed Clark’s shoulder. “It’s like Teddy Roosevelt always said,” Lee told him, and now his smile was back in place. “It’s better to try. It’s better to bust your ass trying and get kicked all over tomorrow than live all your life like those little gray bastards out there.”
A few weeks after the Vegas trip, Lee was hospitalized for a long overdue hemorrhoidectomy. He was not very good at suffering alone, and friends and family visited him almost constantly. One day while Vivian was there, they delivered a dozen red roses to the room. Lee read the card and laughed. “It’s from some friends in Vegas,” he said, handing Vivian the card. The card read, “I hope your ass feels like what you did to us.”
Dying by Inches
For the most part, 1978 turned out to be just a continuation of the long slide that had begun in 1977. Except for a few faithful clients like Jack Stricklin, Lee’s practice was at rock bottom. Jimmy’s Florida operation, far from being an immediate disaster, disbanded after successfully offloading fifty tons of grass from a Colombian freighter in March. But as usual, Jimmy’s success only threw Lee into a funk.
My Library
