10 Places in Texas the Mob Used to Control

There's a story people in Galveston still tell about the sheriff. Frank Biaggne ran Galveston County from 1933 to 1957 — twenty-four years — while the most famous illegal casino in Texas operated in plain sight on a pier at the end of his jurisdiction, advertising its floor shows in the newspaper. When a state committee finally asked him under oath why he'd never raided it, he said it was a private club and he wasn't a member. That one sentence tells you almost everything about organized crime in Texas. For forty years, across a dozen towns and two major cities, the syndicates didn't hide. They advertised. They booked Frank Sinatra. And they were protected by the men who were supposed to stop them. And most of it wasn't the Mafia. The Maceo brothers who ran Galveston were Sicilian barbers who got into bootlegging because one case of liquor was worth 150 haircuts. But Benny Binion, who owned half the casinos in downtown Dallas, was a horse trader. Herbert "The Cat" Noble survived a dozen assassination attempts before a mailbox bomb finally got him. The men running Fort Worth were rodeo riders. This was a homegrown business. This video counts down ten places the mob controlled in Texas — from the oil boomtown of Borger, where a district attorney was gunned down in his own driveway and the governor declared martial law, to Top O' Hill Terrace in Arlington, a fortified casino with an escape tunnel that's now a Baptist university campus, to the Balinese Room in Galveston, raided 64 nights in a row without a single arrest because the band kept striking up "The Eyes of Texas." Not one of these places was ever cleaned up from the inside. Every single one needed a force from outside — the Texas Rangers, the National Guard, a state attorney general, or a legislative committee with the cameras rolling. And when it ended, the business didn't stop. Benny Binion drove two suitcases of Dallas money to Las Vegas and founded the Horseshoe. The real end of the Free State of Galveston wasn't the raid. It was Nevada deciding to do the same thing legally. CHAPTERS 0:00 The Sheriff Who Was Not a Member 1:31 Mexia 3:43 Borger 7:32 Jefferson County 9:24 Lake Worth 10:46 Top O' Hill Terrace 14:32 The East Side Club 15:59 Jacksboro Highway 17:51 The Airmen's Club 19:39 Downtown Dallas 22:11 Galveston Island 25:01 The Balinese Room 27:16 What It Was Actually About SOURCES Borger, TX — Handbook of Texas, Texas State Historical Association https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/borger-tx Top O' Hill Terrace — Handbook of Texas, Texas State Historical Association https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/top-o-hill-terrace Top O' Hill Terrace — University of Texas at Arlington https://websites.uta.edu/topohillterrace/ One Last Shot (The Free State of Galveston) — Texas Monthly https://www.texasmonthly.com/true-crime/one-last-shot/ Benny and the Boys — Texas Monthly https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/benny-and-the-boys/ Galveston's Balinese Room — Texas Ranger Dispatch, Texas Ranger Association Foundation https://www.ppolinks.com/texasranger/History-Galvestons-Balinese-Room.pdf Highway to Hell (Jacksboro Highway) — Fort Worth Magazine https://fwtx.com/news/features/highway-hell/ Betting, Booze and Brothels — Visit Port Arthur, Texas https://visitportarthurtx.com/blog/betting-booze-and-brothels/ Beaumont, TX — Handbook of Texas, Texas State Historical Association https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/beaumont-tx