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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Not to her, at least. By then Ted had a new companion, a topless dancer half his age named Sandy Murphy, a.k.a. the Irish Venus. The daughter of a repo man, Sandy had been a teen pageant princess in the small Los Angeles suburb of Bellflower but had dropped out of high school when she discovered the lucrative possibilities of a career in adult entertainment and fast talk. Ted met her in 1995 at a Vegas topless joint called Cheetah’s Lounge. At the end of the evening he slipped her a couple thousand bucks, but she threw it back in his face. “She’s not like the others,” he cooed to his friends. He was right, though not in the way he supposed. Shortly after Doris moved out of the Palomino Lane house, Sandy moved in—and into a lifestyle of high-limit credit cards (her monthly bill averaged $5,100), expensive jewelry, and European vacations, all paid for by Ted. Sandy had so much cosmetic surgery done that Becky once cracked, “She must be getting made over for her next boyfriend.” Sandy and Ted both loved to party all night and sleep all day. Before long, she was taking over his life. First she remodeled his house, replacing Doris’ bedroom furniture with a handmade set she ordered from Italy and ripping out the carpet and replacing it with marble; then she began handling his banking transactions, monitoring his phone calls, and nagging him to put her in his will. Sandy was famous for her big mouth: She called Ted “old” and “ugly” and openly admitted that she was just sticking around for the money. Ted slapped her around regularly, which she appeared to accept as part of the deal—she referred to the beatings as “my punishment”—but he always made it up to her. For one particularly expensive reconciliation, he bought her a $97,000 Mercedes.
As Ted was to discover, Sandy “chipped around” often with Rick Tabish, a 33-year-old hustler who had come to Vegas in 1997 looking for some easy money, leaving a wife, two children, and some large debts back home in Missoula, Montana. Though his father was a wealthy businessman, he was a blue-collar loser who had failed at every legitimate venture he’d ever attempted. His assets were his good looks and his smooth line, which he used to work his way into Ted’s inner circle. He soon was confiding to friends that he was “laying the pipe to Binion’s girlfriend” and using her to advance his plan to steal the bulk of Ted’s fortune, including the tons of silver and rare coins stored in the vaults at the Horseshoe.
According to an arrest warrant affidavit issued by the office of the Clark County district attorney, Rick had a lot of big ideas. With a $200,000 loan from a Nevada bank, he set up a corporation, MRT Transportation of Nevada, and muscled his way into a lucrative sandpit operation by torturing and threatening to kill one of the partners. By the spring of 1998, the affidavit says, the blue-collar loser had hired his own airplane and pilot and was talking to a broker in Beverly Hills about selling Ted’s treasure. At Rick’s urging, the broker flew to Las Vegas to inventory and appraise the silver while he and Sandy watched. The broker estimated its value at between $5 million and $7 million.
A SHOWDOWN WAS CLEARLY COMING one involving not just Ted’s messy romantic life but the entire Binion family business. Flare-ups had escalated on the Horseshoe’s board of directors, which at the time consisted of Jack, Brenda, and Becky (because of his suspension, Ted couldn’t serve on the board or vote his 20 percent ownership stake). The issue that initially divided the siblings was Jack’s proposal that they expand their casino holdings to other states. Becky and Brenda felt cut out of the decision-making and said no. Though Jack owned 42.2 percent of the stock versus his sisters’ combined 9.6 percent, Brenda controlled another 27.5 percent as executrix of their mother’s estate. Jack found his own investors, however, and opened casinos in Mississippi and Louisiana, using the Binion’s Horseshoe logo. As court documents make clear, Becky and Brenda became convinced that Jack was skimming assets from the Horseshoe to finance his other casinos. They also suspected that he was plotting to stack the board with “more-compliant” outsiders and feared that he was recklessly endangering the business by continuing the casino’s no-limits policy.
Claiborne contacted all of Benny’s children, offering to mediate the dispute. “I warned them,” he says, “that if they took this to the courthouse, it would be the ruin not only of the Binion family but of Binion’s Horseshoe as well.” Claiborne says that Jack and Brenda agreed to meet with him but Becky never responded. In January 1996 Becky filed suit against Jack, asking the court to remove him as president. A judge ruled that Becky and Jack should act as temporary co-presidents and ordered that major decisions be unanimous, effectively deadlocking the operation. For the next year and a half the bitterness escalated and became public. In papers filed with the court, Becky alleged that Horseshoe profits had slipped dramatically since her brother began focusing his attention on his other casinos and that for the fiscal year ending in June 1997 the Horseshoe suffered “unprecedented” losses of $20 million. Jack responded that the reason for the losses was the deadlock that Becky had created. Becky also charged that Jack was flouting gaming regulations, mismanaging baccarat and slot machine operations, and concealing crucial financial information. She said he had posted a $2 million bond for a Mexican high roller jailed on tax evasion charges, then loaned him another $4 million to gamble at other casinos—a loan that was never repaid. She also said he got a high-interest, $2.5 million personal loan from Indonesian high rollers while permitting them to gamble large sums at the Horseshoe.
In April 1998 the Nevada Gaming Commission permanently revoked Ted’s license, ordering him to sell his 20 percent stake in the Horseshoe. Becky had said that the Horseshoe didn’t even have enough cash on hand to buy Ted’s interest, but the order forced a quick resolution of the lawsuit. In a flurry of transactions Jack bought out Brenda and Ted, then sold their interests and his own to Becky, who got complete control of the Horseshoe for the bargain price of $20 million, to be paid over two years. By some estimates, the Horseshoe’s true worth was $80 million.
His ties to the casino forever severed, Ted had to move his collection of coins and ingots from the casino vaults. Sandy, Rick, and some drivers from MRT volunteered to help, and the stash was temporarily stored in Ted’s garage. Ted then contracted with Rick to build a permanent storage site for his treasure, a ten-foot-square concrete vault on a lot he owned in Pahrump. On July 4, 1998, Rick and his crew moved the treasure from Ted’s garage and sealed it in the vault. By Ted’s design, the vault was in plain sight, between a Burger King and Terrible’s Town Casino, on the main highway connecting Pahrump to Las Vegas, where intruders were certain to be spotted.
Just days after the treasure was sealed, Ted revised his will. Though the bulk of his approximately $30 million estate was still to go to his daughter, he deleted the names of a number of old friends and bequeathed to Sandy $300,000, his home, and all of its contents. To make sure the new will was valid, Sandy had her own lawyer look it over. According to the arrest affidavit, she informed friends that she was also the beneficiary of Ted’s $1 million insurance policy. Curiously, the flame of love was exhausted by the time Ted made this change. He and Sandy slept in separate bedrooms, and she admitted to several people—including Ted’s gardener, Tom Loveday—that his drug habit made him unable to perform in the bedroom. “I’m twenty-six and I need sex,” she confessed to Loveday. Sandy barely bothered hiding her affair with Rick. Records seized by prosecutors show that she bought him expensive gifts at Neiman Marcus using Ted’s credit card and flew with him to Los Angeles, where they registered as husband and wife at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
By August Rick was in serious financial trouble. Checks issued by his company were bouncing all over town, an equipment-leasing company had sent a default notice of $67,000, the IRS was demanding back payments of $337,000, his company in Montana had defaulted on a $75,000 loan, and a $200,000 Nevada bank loan was coming due. According to several prosecution witnesses, Rick confided that he planned to kill Ted and steal the treasure and began to recruit co-conspirators, including the foreman of Ted’s ranch. He also contacted a longtime friend in Montana, a former Army Ranger named Kurt Gratzer, and told him of his plan to kill Ted and steal the money, jewelry, and silver in his home and the treasure buried in the vault. Gratzer later told the authorities that Rick promised to give him part of the insurance money and a new car if he would make the hit. Rick advanced several plans. First, he suggested that Gratzer use a sniper rifle. An alternate scheme had him doing it with one of Ted’s antique guns, then rolling the body in a carpet and disposing of it in a rock crusher. When Gratzer nixed these schemes, Rick suggested that they force him to swallow a lethal combination of heroin and Xanax, a prescription drug that Ted took to help break his heroin habit. Gratzer telephoned another friend, a Montana pharmacist, and asked him to research the amount of Xanax needed for such an overdose. Like Gratzer, the pharmacist later told his story to Clark County prosecutors.
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