Friday, Aug. 3, 2001 | 5:33 a.m.
Editor's note: This is the first in a series of seven excerpts from the new book, "Murder in Sin City: The Death of a Las Vegas Casino Boss." The book was written by Jeff German, the Sun's senior investigative reporter. The series, exclusive to the Sun, will run daily through Friday and conclude on Sunday.
"Murder in Sin City is the inside story of the biggest murder case of all time in Las Vegas, the slaying of former Horseshoe Club executive Ted Binion, the last of a dying breed of colorful casino bosses.
An ultimate Las Vegas insider, Binion met his demise at the hands of two outsiders, his live-in girlfriend Sandy Murphy, a beautiful one-time topless dancer, and her new lover, Rick Tabish, a married Montana contractor.
The book takes the reader into the heart of the well-publicized investigation and details a classic story of love, betrayal, murder and greed.
On May 22, 1997, Ted Binion stood before the five-member Nevada Gaming Commission and made a rare public plea to keep his casino license as co-owner of his family's Horseshoe Club.
"This is my life," he told the stern-faced commissioners in front of a hearing packed with spectators and reporters. "I've got no where else to go."
Binion's plea appeared to be coming from the heart.
He said he felt as if he had been living in "purgatory" during his decade-long fight to hold onto his license. Although his troubles with regulators began in 1987 with his drug arrest, Binion had struggled with a heroin addiction since 1980, the same year of his marriage to longtime companion, Doris, and the birth of his daughter, Bonnie.
This time, however, Binion wasn't in hot water over his drug use. Regulators had charged him with violating a 1994 agreement to stay out of the Horseshoe Club's operations, and he was being accused of hanging around with mob figures while his license was suspended.
Although they listened intently for hours, the commissioners had no sympathy for Binion that day. They voted to keep him under suspension indefinitely so that the Nevada Gaming Control Board could have more time to investigate his underworld ties.
The Control Board had filed a complaint against Binion over his relationship with Herbie Blitzstein, a reputed Chicago mob associate.
Blitzstein was killed gangland style on Jan. 7, 1997, as part of a scheme by the Los Angeles and Buffalo crime families to take over street rackets in Las Vegas. He had been the right-hand man of slain Chicago mob kingpin Anthony Spilotro.
FBI agents once had probed Binion's ties to Spilotro, who was killed outside of Chicago in 1986 following a wave of federal indictments cracking down on the mob's hidden influence at Las Vegas casinos.
Shortly after Blitzstein's slaying, authorities informed Binion of a plot to murder him in similar fashion. Blitzstein's killers, it turned out, had heard rumors that Binion liked to hide millions in cash at his home.
FBI agents learned of the scheme from John Branco, a longtime wise guy they had enlisted to work undercover during a massive racketeering probe of the Los Angeles and Buffalo crime families. Agents passed on the word to Metro Police homicide detectives.
In a Feb. 1, 1997, memo, detective Mike Franks said he had contacted Horseshoe Club security the previous morning to get word to Binion that they needed to talk. Later that day, the detective met with Binion and two of his lawyers, Richard Wright and Harry Claiborne, at Wright's downtown office.
"Inquiries were made into Binion's knowledge of Blitzstein with little information received," Franks wrote. "Binion was then informed of the possible threat to him. He was told to be cautious and very careful in his wanderings."
The casino man then surprised Franks.
"Binion did not seem fazed by the information of a possible death threat," Franks said. "He possibly already had the information."
What Franks didn't know was that Binion's friend, Tony Musso, one of those ultimately arrested in the FBI racketeering investigation, had told Binion of the murder plot.
The subject had come up at a local social club where the underworld figures, including Branco, had been hanging out.
"None of them had the balls to go over there and do it, because Ted, he'd kill everyone of them," Musso later told detectives. "Nobody would have a chance."
Musso described Binion as a sharp-shooter.
"He could hit a fly 100 yards away or so," he said.
When detectives asked Musso about Binion's reaction to being told of the death threat, he said he replied: "F... 'em. Let them try to come over."
"Did he take any other precautions? Was he starting to carry more guns?"the detectives asked.
"Oh, Ted always had a gun," Musso responded. "He carried a gun to the bathroom, for God's sake. So it was like this is nothing new. He slept with a shotgun by his bed ... It was never uncommon to see Ted with one of those .45s with a little rawhide strap on his shoulder and another one on his belt."
Musso said Binion always answered his door with weapons strapped to his body, even when Blitzstein came over.
Binion and Blitzstein, who traveled the adult nightclub scene together, had become so close that Blitzstein once helped the embattled casino boss arrange an abortion for his girlfriend, Sandy Murphy.
"Teddy had a lot of superficial friends who always wanted something from him," said attorney John Momot, a longtime Binion friend and Blitzstein lawyer. "I think he was a lonely guy. That's why he developed a friendship with Herbie, who was a very charismatic type of guy."
"Their relationship developed absolutely against my advice. I told them it wasn't wise to associate with each other because this was a TNT mixture. It was definitely going to cause Teddy problems with gaming regulators. But neither one of them listened to me. They were both bull-headed. They were going to do what they wanted to do.
"Teddy was a man's man type of guy, a cowboy, gambler," Momot added. "He was a great guy to be around. He was what Las Vegas was all about. And Herbie, he was a gambler, a product of Chicago. He knew all the wise guys. The relationship was headed for disaster."
As gaming agents stepped up their efforts in 1997 to nail down Binion's mob ties, rumors were circulating within the casino industry that Binion had become a street informant for the FBI. The rumors never were confirmed. But some wondered how the FBI's racketeering investigation at the Horseshoe Club, which focused heavily on Binion, quietly had disappeared a few years earlier.
Binion's links to the mob, it turned out, were even deeper than what gaming agents suspected.
Transcripts of secret FBI surveillance during the racketeering investigation of the Los Angeles mob later revealed that Branco had befriended Binion and Murphy while Branco was working undercover for the bureau.
A Feb. 2, 1997, transcript showed that Branco had talked about getting money from Binion to buy Club Paradise, a popular topless nightclub. Branco and one of the targets of the racketeering probe, Peter Caruso, were to get a piece of the club after Binion had bought it.
And during an April 14, 1997, conversation secretly recorded by Branco, the undercover informant discussed a plan with a ranking Los Angeles mob member to get people in key positions at the Horseshoe Club to wield hidden influence there.
Then on July 14, 1997, FBI agents Charles Maurer and Michael Howey, who were investigating Blitzstein's slaying, paid a jailhouse visit to Ron Mortensen, a disgraced Las Vegas police officer convicted of killing a 21-year-old Hispanic man in a drive-by shooting.
Mortensen turned over 23 pages of handwritten notes he had surreptitiously taken from jailhouse conversations with Antone Davi, one of the men later convicted of shooting Blitzstein. Davi and Mortensen were cell mates for several weeks.
Davi had been insisting that Alfred Mauriello, a reputed underworld associate who had hired Davi to kill Blitzstein, also was arranging a hit on Binion. Davi and another man later convicted of shooting Blitzstein, Richard Friedman, had drawn the assignment of taking out Binion.
Months later, after pleading guilty to killing Blitzstein and agreeing to cooperate with the government, Davi told FBI agents that Friedman had come up with a plan to use a stun gun on Binion at his home and then overdose him with heroin.
By March 1998, gaming agents had accumulated enough evidence of Binion's ties to the slain Blitzstein to revoke his license at the Horseshoe Club.
"It's not the end of the world," a smiling Binion told reporters after losing his license.
Six months later, on Sept. 17,1998, he was dead.
"Murder in Sin City" by Jeff German is available for $6.99 at all major bookstores in the greater Las Vegas area and around the country. It is published by Avon Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers in New York. MONDAY:
The homicide investigation into Ted Binion's death gets off to a slow start.
archive
