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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In the days just before Ted’s death, according to the affidavit, Rick and Sandy each spread the word that Ted’s drug habit was worse and said that one of these days he would kill himself with an overdose. Sandy was drinking a lot, behaving as if she were high on cocaine and talking a blue streak. Several employees at the Neiman Marcus beauty salon overheard her rambling on about getting $3 million and the house when Ted died of an overdose of heroin, which she predicted would be very soon. Three days before Ted’s death, Sandy and Rick again shacked up in Beverly Hills.
Even so, Ted seemed upbeat. He talked to attorneys about trying to get back his gambling license and to a real estate broker about buying several properties for potential casinos. He talked to a journalist about writing a book and a movie script based on the life of his famous father. He wrote a $1 million check to open a new investment account and donated $40,000 to Las Vegas mayor Jan Jones’s campaign for governor. By this point Ted had guessed that Sandy was having an affair with Rick. He told friends that he was planning to “get rid of the bitch” and unloaded his guns, explaining to his maid that he was afraid Sandy might shoot him. On September 16, one day before his death, Ted called his lawyer and instructed him to “take Sandy out of the will, if she doesn’t kill me tonight.” Later that day, speaking to a ranch hand who was visiting his home, Ted pointed to Sandy and Rick seated in the next room and said, “They got me the best shit that I’ve had in a long time.” The ranch hand assumed that his boss meant heroin. Late that evening Ted’s regular dealer delivered twelve balloons of black tar heroin, and Ted tipped him with thirty tablets from the Xanax bottle he had just had refilled.
The following morning Sandy telephoned the maid and told her, “Ted isn’t feeling well. Don’t come to work today.” About noon, Ted’s real estate broker phoned and was informed by Sandy that he was still asleep and couldn’t be bothered. Police officers now believe that by noon Ted was already dead and that Sandy was busy cleaning up the mess and staging the scene. At 3:47 p.m. Rick telephoned Sandy, and seven minutes later she dialed 911 and reported in a hysterical voice, “My husband has stopped breathing!” The authorities found Ted’s body on a mattress on the floor of his den, partly covered with a sleeping bag. Beside him was an empty bottle of Xanax, and in the bathroom were some narcotics paraphernalia, including a knife and some pieces of foil like those Ted used when he smoked heroin. Police reports at the time indicated “absolutely no evidence…to suggest foul play.”
Nobody who knew Ted bought the cops’ theory. “Ted loved life way too much to kill himself,” said Tony Cook, a former casino manager at the Horseshoe who had known him since high school. “He had such a knowledge of drugs and was such an active drug user, Ted wouldn’t accidentally overdose,” Becky said. Moreover, the scene itself was too pat, too sterile. “As soon as I saw the scene,” Claiborne recalls, “I told them it had been staged.” In fact, several things seemed suspicious, starting with the fact that nobody had ever known Ted to sleep on the floor, much less on a sleeping bag. The bruises and cuts and the position of the body suggested that it had moved after death. Though there were traces of heroin on the knife blade, there was no trace of the drug on the pieces of foil. An autopsy revealed no heroin in Ted’s lungs but high concentrations of both heroin and Xanax in his stomach. This alone should have suggested foul play: Nobody eats black tar heroin.
Prosecutors believe that Rick restrained Ted with handcuffs or thumbcuffs while Sandy mixed up the fatal cocktail in a wineglass. According to this theory, Ted was forced to drink the cocktail and then smothered. The wineglass disappeared, but prosecutors have a videotape filmed the following day that shows Sandy removing a wineglass from a kitchen counter and dropping it in her handbag. A subsequent inventory of the house revealed that a large amount of cash and jewelry were missing, as was a $300,000 collection of rare coins and currency that Ted had kept in his den.
In the early morning hours of Saturday, September 19—three days before they buried Ted—sheriff’s deputies in Pahrump spotted Rick and two others using a backhoe to break into the vault. All of the silver except a single silver dollar had already been loaded into a tractor-trailer. Rick tried to convince the deputies that he was merely following Ted’s instructions: to sell the silver and set up a trust fund for Ted’s daughter, Bonnie, in case of his sudden demise. When that didn’t fly, he made a crude attempt at bribery, claiming that Ted’s will bequeathed $250,000 to the sheriff. The deputies took the three to jail and charged them with theft. Two days later Sandy bailed her lover out, pledging her Mercedes Benz 500 SL convertible and five pieces of jewelry as collateral.
After her initial hysteria, Sandy calmed herself and went methodically about the task of grabbing what she believed was coming to her. In addition to the $300,000 in cash, the house, its contents, the $1 million insurance policy, and $3 million in savings, she expected a fat check for the literary rights to her story. Things didn’t work out that neatly, however. Ted had indeed obtained forms making her the beneficiary of the policy, but he died before signing them. A probate judge awarded Sandy the items stipulated in the will—Ted’s call to his lawyer was too late—but lawyers for the estate appealed, and Becky filed a separate suit, claiming many of Ted’s personal items. When lawyers at the probate hearing began asking embarrassing questions about Ted’s death and the thousands of dollars in cash and valuables missing from his home, Sandy and Rick both took the Fifth.
While the police did little or nothing, the estate hired a private investigator, former Las Vegas homicide detective Tom Dillard, who turned up a trail of cellular phone conversations and secret meetings between Rick and Sandy, as well as evidence that they had told people about their plot to kill Ted. In December, three months after Ted’s death, the chief deputy district attorney for Clark County, David Rogers, impaneled a grand jury as a tool to continue the investigation that Dillard had started. Over the next three months Rogers called dozens of witness and gathered volumes of information. In March of this year the Las Vegas coroner changed his finding to homicide. In June, the same day Sandy expected an appeals court to validate her take from Ted’s will, she and Rick were arrested and charged with murder and conspiracy to commit murder and/or robbery.
THE STRUGGLE FOR CONTROL OF BINION’S Horseshoe won’t be officially settled until July 2000, when the $20 million note signed by Becky comes due. The wiseguys are betting that she will default and that Jack will emerge triumphant. Jack’s casinos in Mississippi and Louisiana appear wildly successful, attracting millions of dollars from Texas gamblers.
In the meantime, there are other issues to be resolved. When the Nevada Gaming Commission approved the sale of Ted’s stake to Becky and awarded her a license, it issued explicit instructions that her husband, Nick, had to keep his hands off the business, as it had in 1978 when Becky was running the Silver Star. Many of Benny’s old friends believe that Nick calls the shots at the Horseshoe and refuse to patronize it. So do many Vegas residents who used to be regulars. One of them, a high-stakes gambler named Bob Stupak, sued the Horseshoe because it refused to cash $250,000 in $5,000 chips, including one that he had donated to his church. Though Nick is not an officer of the corporation, Stupak named him as a defendant and charged that he “has done irreparable harm to the Horseshoe.” Nobody is sure how many unredeemed Horseshoe chips are floating around. In January the casino redeemed $10 million in $5,000 chips but refused to cash another $1 million. Another $3 million in chips were discovered in the toolroom of Ted’s ranch. Apparently, he took the chips along with the silver, though nobody knows why.
Benny’s name may glitter in gold, but his soul has gone south. You can get a bowl of Horseshoe Chili for $2.75 at either of the two snack bars on the casino floor, and the late-night steak is still a bargain at $2.99, but Benny would be appalled to discover that somebody has added a Chinese restaurant. The players have lost the wild-eyed, foaming-at-the-mouth intensity that used to make every roll of the dice a life-altering experience. They look haggard and listless, as though they were killing time at a bus station—women with piles of orange hair and tight pants, guys in gimme caps and jeans soiled with the drudge of the oil patch. They look bored or maybe dead. What’s missing is the no-holds-barred élan of the Wild West: dudes with suitcases of cash ready to play the bundle on one hand of Texas Kickass and the delicious possibility that Benny might suddenly appear to air-cool a bottom dealer. The nearest thing these days is a mounted collection of guns once owned by Cowboy and his pals. A Smith and Wesson .38 Special is identified as a piece “owned and carried by Benny Binion during the depression era in Dallas, Texas.” But even that appears suspect. According to old police reports, Benny always used a .45.
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