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Tough
TIMES make tough people," Benny Binion would say if you
asked about the jail sentence for nonpayment of taxes lurking
deep in his eighty- three -year past. By the end of his long
life Binion was a figure of such power and venerability in Las
Vegas that he had been immortalized with an equestrian statue
outside the casino that bears his name, and a loyal campaign
was mounted to win a presidential pardon for his youthful sins.
With Benny's health long in decline, his friends and admirers
wanted him to depart this world with the slate wiped clean.
At a time when he was otherwise dishing out pardons like confetti,
however, President Reagan remained unmoved. "I'll see him
out," said Benny when he heard of the presidential thumbs-down,
"and I'll dance on his grave."
For once, Benny called it wrong. When Binion died on Christmas
Day, 1989, Reagan was barely a year into the tenth of his nine
lives. Maybe he was the one who had lived right. It was in 1946-"the
year," he used to say, "that my sheriff got beat in
the election"-that Benny Binion felt obliged to leave his
native Dallas, where his police record included theft, possession
of illegal weapons, bootlegging, and gambling. He had also killed
two men, but his plea of self-defense was accepted by the authorities.
The son of a dirt-poor stockman, Benny had made his first pile
as a "hip-pocket" bootlegger, selling illicit liquor
pint by pint. In the mid-1930s, after the repeal of Prohibition,
he went on to become "kinda the king of gambling down there."
But gambling was also kinda illegal in Dallas, then as now.
When 1946 saw Binion leave town in a hurry, he naturally headed
for Nevada, then the only state where gambling had been legalized.
He bought the run-down Eldorado Hotel and Casino, renamed it
Binion's Horseshoe, and put up a sign offering THE WORLD'S HIGHEST
LIMITS. The punters headed straight downtown in droves, and
have stayed there ever since.
Three years later, in 1949, a legendary gambler by the name
of Nick "the Greek" Dandalos wandered into town in
search of a game of poker. Not just any old game. As befitted
his reputation, the Greek wanted to play "heads-up,"
with just one opponent; he wanted to play "freeze-out,"
or winner-take-all; and he wanted to play no-limit. In short,
he told Binion, he wanted "the biggest game that this world
can offer." It was a time when most poker played in Vegas-in
public, anyway-was strictly "limit," with fixed levels
of betting, the highest being some sixty dollars a round. So
it was hardly surprising that the Greek found no one prepared
to sit down with him on his terms.
Benny Binion, however, knew just the man. He offered to stage
the game, and to lay on an opponent worthy of the Greek-if he
would agree to play in public, at the Horseshoe. Nick nodded,
and Binion hit the phone to Dallas, to his friend since childhood,
Johnny Moss. Though he had then never been to Vegas, and was
already weary from a nonstop, four-day game, Moss agreed to
set off right away. On arriving at the Horseshoe, after the
long, slow drive from Dallas, he shook hands with the Greek
and sat straight down to business.
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