LAS VEGAS — As he grew up in the Cincinnati area, Kevin P. Braig often heard chatter about Newport, the small Kentucky town across the Ohio River that once sported a titanic reputation.
“The kind of thing talked about as scuttle-butt around Cincinnati,” he said, “that Newport used to be Vegas, used to be this great gambling town.
“I didn’t know, though, that it involved all this networked bookmaking till I started working on the book.”
The Judge of the Logan County Court of Common Pleas in Bellefontaine, Ohio, Braig next year will publish “Bookmakers vs. Ball Owners: The Untold Stories of the Birth, Death and Resurrection of Sports Gambling in America.”
He discovered “Sleepout Louis” Levinson, a Chicago native and underworld figure, did business in Newport. Gil “the Brain” Beckley, the mob’s arch bookmaker, joined Sleepout.
“I knew this to be incredibly important when I realized Beckley is who Robert F. Kennedy was targeting,” Braig said. “My gosh. Now I get it!”
Newport occupies one of his 20 chapters. During its rambunctious 1937-61 run, it served as the Layoff Capital of the Nation. Bookies from New York to Los Angeles rang to lay off lopsided fight, horse and game wagers.
Braig, 56, compared culling those nuggets to a popular “Seinfeld” episode in which George ultimately tells Jerry, “That’s like discovering plutonium by accident.”
The judge laughed:
“Discovering that Newport was the center of all that was like discovering plutonium by accident. Sleepout and those guys were all connected; couldn’t have done it otherwise.
“But this little town across the river becomes super important in bookmaking, and Beckley was RFK’s great white whale.”
THE NEW SHARPS
An ambitious gambling enterprise first took root in Loveland, Ohio, less than three miles from Braig’s boyhood home.
“The odds of a casino operating there,” he said, “or a spaceship landing on Cincinnati’s Fountain Square — and little green men getting out and saying, ‘Take me to your leader’ — would be about the same.”
When the Arrowhead Inn struggled in the late 1920s, Sammy Shrader of the Cleveland Syndicate arrived with cash and installed blackjack tables, craps pits, roulette wheels, poker tables and slot machines.
A new Clermont County prosecuting attorney smashed the operations in 1937, so the outfit scrambled to Newport.
The emergence of the point spread ended the split-line, which gave bookies “obscene middle opportunities,” Braig said by phone from Ohio.
“Guys like Jimmy ‘the Greek’ Snyder, in Ohio, and Sidney ‘Shoebox’ Brodson, in Milwaukee — the new sharps — wouldn’t bet anything except Charles McNeil’s point spread.”
Bookies held an 11-to-10 edge, the vigorish bettors pay to make a wager, to keep making it enviable to be the house.
Sleepout Louis, so nicknamed for his cat-nap penchant between poker hands, and brothers Ed and Mike had honed their mob skills in Detroit under Meyer Lansky.
All wound up in Newport, as did Moe Dalitz’s mafia tentacles. Club 633, the Tropicana, the Flamingo, the Beverly Hills Country Club, Glenn Rendezvous and other clubs all thrived in the beehive of vice.
An extensive Louisville Courier-Journal investigation, on March 12, 1961, was headlined, “It’s Really True What They Say About Newport.”
THE POSTER BOY
Mob brothers Benjamin “Big Porky” and Robert “Little Porky” Lassoff would assist the Levinsons and Beckley with the phones in the Bobben Realty offices.
A U.S. attorney who’d eventually prosecute Beckley claimed he had links to 120 cities. Every week, he’d move or take $500,000 from a single sports-betting source, in any particular city.
In 1950 and ’51, Beckley’s group would have to counter Sen. Estes Kefauver’s hearings on interstate bookmaking, which coerced the local phone company to remove Bobben’s phones.
An employee of Southern Bell in New Orleans then provided free and untraceable long-distance coverage in Beckley’s new Glenn Hotel headquarters.
“It was superior long-distance capability, not superior bookmaking ability,” Braig wrote, “that made Newport the National Layoff Center instead of Chicago, New York or Minneapolis.”
In Beckley’s personal directory, investigators would find pro football owners Carroll Rosenbloom (Baltimore Colts), Clint Murchison (Dallas Cowboys), Art Modell (Cleveland Browns) and Barron Hilton (Los Angeles Chargers).
A Federal Wire Act was being concocted, which a relentless RFK pressed with Congress when he became U.S. attorney general. It became law in 1961, by which time Beckley — all but singled out by RFK — had moseyed off to Miami.
(Little Porky Lassoff, at the Dunes, fled to Vegas, as did many Newport workers.)
“Beckley was the [Wire Act’s] poster boy,” Braig said. “For crying out loud, that is who the Kennedys targeted, and RFK never actually got him.”
Beckley vanished in 1970.
“He was supposed to appear in municipal court in Atlanta; he’d been convicted and was appealing a 10-year prison sentence, but he didn’t show up for his bond. The belief is that he got whacked.”
PURE AND COOL
Braig had youthful aspirations of becoming a sportswriter, but a legal career proved to be the far wiser path.
He recalled weekend nights down on 2nd Street in Cincinnati, or before or after Reds games near the old Riverfront Stadium, when he and pals quenched their thirsts in a bar called Sleepout Louis.
His law practice would immerse him into the betting world and introduce him to elite sports journalists in the run-up to the U.S. Supreme Court deciding, in May 2018, to let states choose their own sports-gambling futures.
Former Sports Illustrated scribe Steve Wulf said, “Kevin is uniquely suited to comment on the rebirth of honorable bookmaking in the United States.”
Braig kept digging, subscribing to newspapers.com and investigating every lead, tangent and rabbit hole, making connections. The starting point in his book is the inception of the Reds’ organization in 1869.
“When I get into something, I pretty much have to get to the bottom of it before I’m satisfied,” he said.
The danger might have been producing something academic, dry. Braig, though, passes muster. His own view of the sporting fourth estate, influenced by reading SI for decades, offers a glimpse of his style.
“My passion for sportswriting completely drove this book,” he said. “Great sportswriting is found at the bottom of the well of truth, where the water is pure, cool and exceptionally refreshing.”
NEWPORT, THE MOVIE?
For decades, despite being illegal, wagering aspects were as integral to the sports section as key plays and scores.
“Mainstream media covered it like they covered the games,” Braig said. “It wasn’t taboo, just part of sports.”
On Sept. 7, Kentucky became the 35th state, with the District of Columbia, to legalize sports wagering.
About a mile south of East 4th and York streets, the country’s onetime epicenter for national layoffs, the Newport Racing and Gaming sportsbook opened in the Newport Shopping Center.
“Kentucky should hold some kind of ceremony,” Braig said that day, “to commemorate the resurrection of bookmaking in Newport.”
Braig believes Beckley should be better known:
“But they didn’t make a movie about him like they did [in “Casino,” from the namesake book] with Lefty Rosenthal.”
With Braig’s forthcoming tome, perhaps that will change.
