Benny Binion

I'm sure you have unique insight.

We talked to tough heat him in and he was talking about, there was pins when y'all were trying to get it moved to Vegas, uh, Benny Binion putting a, I'll add a million dollars or something, all of that stuff of getting it over to Vegas from your perspective, talk about the head transition, why it was good for rodeo.

And I'm sure you have some cool stories about it.

You know,

And I will go downtown.

I'm an old guy, so I like to go down to Benny Binion's.

Yeah, that's where

my dad always liked going.

Did you? Yeah.

I knew I liked your dad because Binion's, of course, Benny Binion was from Fort Worth, kind of a scoundrel, but- Yeah, isn't he buried in the desert? They think he is, yeah.

And he probably buried some people in the desert, too.

Yeah, my dad loved the steak they had at Binion's.

... and I think people need to understand.

Um, I, I always Benny Binion's saying, it's well attributed to him, "Just trust everybody but always cut the cards," I think.

[laughs]

People don't understand that.

Meanwhile, Becky's brother, Jack, who'd left Vegas and built his own casinos in other states, sold that company to Harrah's the same year for one point four five billion dollars.

Benny Binion opened that place in nineteen fifty-one.

It was padlocked fifty-three years later, and his family didn't own a piece of it.

The last thing the Binions still owned was the question of how Ted died.

Uh, everything else, reputations, habits, gets handed down, too, but, well, nobody ever signs for it.

Ted Binion got all of that from his father.

He got a casino on Fremont Street, a last name that opened every door in Las Vegas, and a talent for business that everybody agreed was the real gift.

Ted took over that casino floor at 21 years old and ran it for the next 30 years.

But he couldn't hold onto it.

By the summer of 1998, Ted had lost the license and the casino, so that July, he acted on another habit he got from his father, the idea that the only safe place for money is somewhere you can put your hands on it.

Ted hauled 24 tons of silver bars and coins out to a vacant lot in the desert and buried them 12 feet down.

He never got the chance to dig them back up.

And I remember getting a postcard from my dad.

He was out in Montana at a pretty legendary rancher's ranch, this guy named Benny Binion, who's kind of a notorious outlaw.

And, and he sent me a postcard that had a Charlie Russell picture on the cover that was painted right on Benny's ranch, you know, or very nearby in this area called the Missouri Breaks, and Benny had a pasture that ran in the Missour- Missouri Breaks.

And my dad said, "Hey, this guy said he'll give you a job as a cowboy." And when he came home, he said, "Hey, look, I told Benny you were 13." I was 12.

Mm-hmm.

So yeah, I-

Can you share a little bit about Benny Binion? Because when you were talking about him on the, the Colt Wranglers show, I mean, I was blown away.

I did not know anything about his background and I was learning a ton.