Forget the Sopranos. Meet the Binions.
For the most dramatic (and pathetic) tale of a mobster’s family coming apart at the seams, turn off your TV and read on: You won’t believe how the children of a notorious Dallas gambler and racketeer have made a mess of his legacy.
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THE WISEGUYS OF LAS VEGAS ALWAYS thought that Ted would end up running the Horseshoe when Benny’s string ran out—that sober, serious Jack was a great accountant but lacked the panache to run such a flamboyant place. Benny’s eldest daughter, Barbara, had died of a drug overdose in 1983, and the other two didn’t seem suitable for the job. Brenda, the middle girl, lived in Amarillo, far from the action. Becky, the youngest, had operated the Silver Star Casino in the late seventies, but only because the Nevada Gaming Commission balked at issuing a license to her husband, Nick Behnen. Behnen was barred from even entering the Silver Star, but everyone figured that he was the real boss.
Ted was a younger version of Benny, or he tried to be. He dressed like him, in boots and cowboy hat, tucked a pistol in his jeans, and drove a pickup truck with his dog, Princess, riding shotgun. In the summer he worked on the family’s more-than-100,000-acre ranch in Montana. (When Brenda used her power as executrix of their mother’s estate to sell the ranch in 1997, Ted was nearly inconsolable.) Wild and fearless and always ready for fun, he was instantly likable. He was also generous and loyal to a fault. “Ted had a lot of strange friends with bad reputations, but Benny was the same way,” says Claiborne. “If you were his friend, you were his friend.” Ted didn’t care for formal education but read American and Western history with a passion and could recite Civil War battles in minute detail. “He was a Renaissance man,” recalls attorney David Chesnoff, another friend. “A cowboy, but probably the most worldly guy I ever met.” From the time he was a teenager Ted collected antique and limited-edition guns, rare and mint coins, and old casino chips; later, he purchased bars of silver and inherited his mother’s coin collection. Eventually his own collection of coins and silver grew to 24 tons and had to be stored in two vaults at the Horseshoe.
Benny’s kids were aristocrats by Vegas standards, young royals who grew up in a home where luxuries were commonplace and in a town where doors opened on command. Ted practically grew up in the casino, learning the trade as a preteen from his father and from some of the shrewdest players in the country. By the time he was eighteen, he was an old hand. “Benny told me that Ted was the best in the business,” Claiborne recalls. He was also a junkie, having moved from pot to opium and LSD and, finally, to his drug of choice: black tar heroin. “Benny was devastated,” Claiborne says. “He hated drugs more than anything in the world, but there was nothing he could do.” Because Ted hated needles, he didn’t inject the drug; he smoked it. “Chasing the dragon,” he called it. Even zonked out, Ted had more brains and moxie than the others. That made him the obvious candidate to assume command of the Horseshoe—someday.
Benny’s string ran out prematurely, however. His good ol’ boy network was no match for two crusading district attorneys from Dallas. First Will Wilson and then Henry Wade had been after him since the mid-forties. In 1953 Wade finally nailed Benny on income tax evasion and gambling charges dating from his mob days in Dallas and sent him away for 42 months.
Benny got out in 1957 but never again held a gaming license. Until he died, he watched the action from a corner table in the Horseshoe coffee shop while Teddy Jane worked the cashier’s cage and Jack ran the business.
To the surprise of some, Jack was more than up to the task. He retained the policy that a gambler’s first bet was his limit and used as a marketing tool the catch phrase “a fair game and fair odds.” Though Jack’s personality was tamer and far more subdued than Benny’s, he had his father’s eye for an advantage. In 1988 he more than quadrupled the size of the hotel by purchasing the Mint Casino and Hotel next door for $27 million. He also shared Benny’s appreciation for characters and scoundrels: As ever, all customers were to be treated as guests. When he learned that an infamous nickel-and-dime player named Goldie had talked a Horseshoe supervisor into sending a limo to her house to deliver a dozen donuts and a pack of cigarettes, Jack asked himself, “What would Benny do?” and decided to forget it. For nearly thirty years he put the Horseshoe ahead of almost everything else in his life. “He is an ungodly hard worker,” says Tom Stephenson, a Dallas writer who ghosted Jack Binion’s Little Black Book on Gambling. “He’s usually in his office by six, and he’s still there that night at ten. I don’t think he ever took a break in his life.”
TED FIRST GOT HIS GAMBLING LICENSE IN 1964. Despite his heroin habit, he began working the casino floor, much as Benny had done—greeting big shots, dealing with troublemakers, endeavoring to keep everyone happy. The slippery slope that eventually took him to his death began in 1987, when he was convicted of drug possession and his license was suspended.
At that time Ted was married and lived with his wife, Doris, and their daughter, Bonnie, in a fine home on Palomino Lane. He also owned a sixty-acre ranch in Pahrump, a small town 53 miles west of Las Vegas. Ted kept large amounts of cash and other valuables at his home and ranch, and he sometimes buried his treasure—the only sure way to protect it, he believed. Heroin wasn’t his only demon: He also had weaknesses for booze, big-breasted showgirls, and underworld types. Maybe because of Benny’s reputation, Ted felt he had to show he was a tough guy. In 1990 the FBI charged him and seven other Horseshoe employees with beating and robbing players suspected of cheating at blackjack. The charges exposed an ugly side of the family business: Each of the supposed cheats was black. Federal prosecutors mishandled the case, so it never went to trial, but Ted again lost his license temporarily.
He got it back in 1993 but lost it again the following year. This second suspension was for eighteen months, but the Nevada Gaming Commission later continued it indefinitely. The problem was no longer merely drugs, it was Ted’s continued association with mafiosi: The commission uncovered evidence that he had made $100,000 loans to reputed Kansas City mobster Peter Ribaste and to an old Chicago thug named Herbert “Fat Herb” Blitzstein, who had once been the top lieutenant of Tony “the Ant” Spilotro. Blitzstein ran a lucrative segment of Vegas’ street rackets, including loan-sharking and an insurance scam run out of an auto repair shop. On one occasion, even though the gaming commission prohibited Ted from setting foot in the Horseshoe, he cashed $11,000 in auto insurance checks for Fat Herb there. Ted seemed fond of Herb and enjoyed hanging out with the hefty hood at topless bars, where much of his business was conducted. Ted must have known that agents were monitoring his moves, but either he was too reckless to care or he believed the friendship was helping, not hurting, his efforts to regain his license. On the list of public officials that Fat Herb claimed to have bribed was Steve DuCharme, a member of the Gaming Control Board who was formerly a Vegas police sergeant. What neither Fat Herb nor Ted knew was that DuCharme was working undercover at the time he took the bribe. Ted parted ways with Fat Herb in December 1996, when the board added the mobster to its infamous Black Book of undesirables, but the damage was done.
A few weeks later, Fat Herb was assassinated in his home by a hitman hired by L.A. mob bosses as part of their move to take over the rackets. Word on the street was that Ted was also targeted, and sure enough, within a few days someone sprayed his home with bullets. Vegas police officers advised Claiborne to get Ted out of town, but there was a problem: a condition of Ted’s suspension required him to submit to three urine tests a week and be available for other random tests. “This was a very vulnerable period in his life,” Claiborne recalls. “He was practically a prisoner in his own home. The gaming authorities were threatening to take away his license permanently. Plus he and his wife had separated. Doris had lived so many years with his addiction that she was worn out. He was no longer a husband, a lover, or even a companion.”
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