Rereading The Biggest Game in Town: Playing Jimmy Chagra (4 of 6)

Amid discussing the seeming disregard for money exhibited by most high-stakes poker players in chapter 3 of The Biggest Game in Town, Al Alvarez briefly relates a few details of the story of Jimmy Chagra, the notorious drug trafficker who spent his last months of freedom gambling it up in Las Vegas in 1979.

I’ve mentioned Chagra here at least a couple of times before. After returning from covering the 2008 WSOP, I wrote a post about the coverage of the 1979 World Series of Poker in Gambling Times magazine. There I shared details of John Hill’s feature story on that year’s Series, including his reference to Chagra winning millions playing blackjack and craps during that spring’s WSOP.

Shortly after that post appeared, the author Hill came around to comment, noting that “Chagra was affable and friendly” in his recollection, “but one it would be best to put large distances between.” Hill notes how it wasn’t long after that year’s Series that Chagra would be arrested for the murder of the judge presiding over his impending trial for drug trafficking.

During the 1970s Chagra had built up a dope-dealing empire based primarily in Las Vegas and El Paso, Texas. He was finally arrested in 1978, then indicted in February 1979 on federal charges, with U.S. District Court Judge John H. Wood, Jr. of San Antonio scheduled to preside over his trial. Nicknamed “Maximum John,” Wood was known as a judge who tended to give the maximum for drug-related crimes, which for Chagra meant a possible life sentence.

On May 29, 1979 -- the day Chagra’s trial was to begin, I believe -- Wood was shot and killed outside of his home. Later it would be discovered that Chagra had hired a hit man, Charles Harrelson, to kill Wood. (Harrelson, incidentally, was the actor Woody Harrelson’s father, although he abandoned the family when Woody was still a child.)

A couple of months later Chagra would be convicted of the drug-related crimes. He’d remain a fugitive for a few months before being tracked down and imprisoned. Chagra would end up confessing to another conspiracy charge, a failed attempt to assassinate a U.S. attorney. He served until 2003 when he was freed on parole and entered the witness protection program. He died in Arizona during the summer of 2008 (coincidentally just a day after my post about the 1979 WSOP).

Chagra would actually be acquitted of the conspiracy charges to kill Wood in a trial during which Oscar Goodman, currently mayor of Las Vegas, represented Chagra as his attorney. Meanwhile Harrelson and Chagra’s brother and wife were all convicted. (Later Chagra would admit to his involvement in the conspiracy in order to try to lessen punishment for his wife.)

Obviously there’s a lot more to Chagra’s story. Author Jack Sheehan interviewed Chagra just before his death in 2008 and is working on a book while also shopping around a screenplay in Hollywood. (More on that here.)

Starting around the mid-1970s, Chagra became very well known among the high-stakes players in Vegas as a “whale” with tons of cash who loved to gamble. Indeed, in his autobiography, The Godfather of Poker, Doyle Brunson refers to Chagra as “Moby Dick.” While only an average player, he always insisted on playing for the highest stakes possible, thereby attracting the attention of Brunson and the other players who it appears even developed a kind of cautious friendship with Chagra.

During those last months in 1979, then, one imagines that Chagra was especially eager to gamble it up with the millions’ worth of criminally-derived profit he’d accrued, knowing that his days of freedom were likely numbered. Alvarez calls it his “final fling,” characterizing Chagra as viewed from the perspective of Brunson and the others as “a Platonic ideal incarnate, a high roller with no tomorrow, backed by the virtually unlimited and untaxed resources of the narcotics business.”

Arriving in Vegas a couple of years later, Alvarez asks around about how Chagra’s money got divided up among the high-stakes crowd. Unsurprisingly, no one gives up much in the way of specifics.

“‘The cash got distributed pretty good’” is all he can get out of most, with Jack “Treetop” Straus adding “‘It was like that TV program Fantasy Island. I kept waiting for Tattoo to come up and say it was all a dream: “Look boss! The plane! The plane!”’”

One part of the story I’d forgotten about and found most interesting on rereading this time was how after he’d been sent away to the U.S. Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Chagra still functioned as a “whale” of sorts from within the prison walls. Alvarez talks to someone who had a friend named Travis who was also serving time in Leavenworth and who happened to be an expert gin rummy player. This fellow would stake Travis to play against Chagra, also staked from without.

“‘While everyone was reminiscing about the good old days when Jimmy was in town, I was actually playing him,’” the man explains to Alvarez. Travis won a lot initially, and payments from Chagra’s connections arrived without fail. The story ends abruptly, however, when Travis dies of a heart attack, an ending that perhaps seems more sinister than Alvarez makes it out to be thanks to the dangerous Chagra’s involvement.

Alvarez sums up the prison game as exemplifying “the imaginative coup of scoring in impossible circumstances.” Kind of punctuates the larger-than-life, mythical status Chagra possessed amid this already unreal-seeming world Alvarez was visiting.

Much like Moby Dick, Chagra was a complicated symbol -- an “inexplicable natural phenomenon” (as Alvarez characterizes Jack Binion’s references to him) -- perhaps indicating something significant about poker and gambling and how those pursuits provide a context for human ambition. As well as other, less estimable traits.

Podcast Plug: The Gamblers Book Club Podcast

Here’s a podcast recommendation for you. Go check out the 12/12/08 episode of the Gamblers Book Club podcast featuring a couple of great interviews with Las Vegas-based journalists, Jack Sheehan and Norm Clarke. Actually, go check out all of the episodes, if you haven’t been listening to Howard Schwartz’s show. Definitely one of my faves at the moment.

Schwartz, the proprietor of the Gamblers Book Shop in Las Vegas, is a living, breathing encyclopedia of all things Vegas and gambling. He generally interviews authors and other folks from the gambling industry for his show (new episodes come out every two weeks). They record the show right there in the shop. I’ve been listening since I first found out about the show about a year ago, and I can’t remember a single episode that hasn’t been informative & entertaining.

Have to say I especially enjoyed the Jack Sheehan interview from that 12/12 show. To be honest, I wasn’t that familiar with Sheehan before hearing the interview. I was aware of one book that he edited titled The Players: The Men Who Made Vegas (1996), a book I recall leafing through, in fact, in the Gamblers Book Shop. (Now that I think about it, I believe Schwartz actually recommended it to me, which is probably why I remember it.)

I see from Sheehan’s website and hunting around elsewhere online that he’s authored about a dozen books, including a couple about golf that he co-authored with PGA pro Peter Jacobsen. He’s also written a few more Vegas-related books, including Skin City: Behind the Scenes of the Las Vegas Sex Industry (2005).

On the show, Schwartz introduced Sheehan as an important historian of Vegas, and again recommended The Players as “one of the most important references ever written” about some of the city’s most important figures. Schwartz also referred to his guest as a “humorist,” and over the course of the 35-40 minute interview, Sheehan showed that he’s indeed earned that appellation, as he had me cracking up on a few occasions.

They spent most of the first part of the interview discussing Jimmy Chagra, the infamous drug-trafficker who often played in the biggest poker games in Vegas during the 1970s. Chagra was the one who hired Woody Harrelson’s father to kill the federal judge who presided over Chagra’s 1978 drug trial. Chagra ended up spending a lot of time in prison, then was out as part of the federal witness protection program when he died in Arizona last summer.

Sheehan tells about the fascinating interview he did with Chagra in 2006. He is working on a book about Chagra and is also currently shopping a screenplay around Hollywood (called Do a Nickel) about him.

He and Schwartz also talk about Sheehan’s many other ongoing projects, touching on numerous Vegas luminaries and other behind-the-scenes stuff along the way. Sheehan also offers some interesting observations about the tribulations of freelance writing (a subject of particular interest to yr humble gumshoe).

The Clarke interview is good, too. He and Schwartz discuss his new book, Norm Clarke’s Vegas Confidential, which is drawn from his regular celebrity gossip column that appears in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. But for poker/gambling folks, the Sheehan one is particularly fun and interesting.

There’s a newer episode of the podcast up, too, featuring an interview with Gentleman Jack Newton, a long-time gambler who has a new book out titled Confessions of a Crossroad Gambler.

Haven’t heard that one yet (dated 1/9/09). But if the first 30-plus episodes are any indication, I’m guessing I’ll probably enjoy it.

Reporting on the 1979 WSOP

When in Vegas this summer, I made a point of stopping by the Gamblers Book Shop. I’d been there before when I had met the shop’s friendly and knowledgeable proprietor, Howard Schwartz. I enjoyed chatting with him again this time. By the way, let me once again recommend Howard’s podcast which he records right there in the bookstore. Lots of terrific interviews among the two dozen or so shows he’s done thus far. If you haven’t heard the show already, the three-part episode he did during the WSOP is a great place to start.

While there I picked up a couple of books as well as some back issues of Gambling Times from the late 70s and early 80s. The issues I chose all included coverage of the World Series of Poker. As I was there covering the WSOP myself, I was curious to look back on how the Series had been reported on back in its relative infancy, before the “boom.”

The first issue of Gambling Times was produced back in 1977. In these early issues, only a handful of the 100 or so pages would concern poker, with much more attention being given to sports betting, blackjack, backgammon, gambling theory, and other features. To give you an idea of how the WSOP was covered, let me summarize the six-page article in the October 1979 issue by John Hill titled “Highlights of the World Series of Poker.”

The first third of the article gives a quick rundown of how the “soft-spoken amateur Hal Fowler” managed to upset all expectations to become the first non-professional to win the WSOP Main Event. Fowler took the 10th annual WSOP title after defeating Bobby Hoff in a five-hour heads-up battle.

The article picks up the action with five players remaining, and describes in a cursory fashion the hands with which Fowler managed to knock out Johnny Moss (in 5th), Sam Moon (in 4th), and George Huber (in 3rd). We then get a four-paragraph overview of the heads-up battle, which includes descriptions of exactly two hands. The first is one in which Fowler bluffs Hoff off of a medium-sized pot and shows deuce-six offsuit. The second is the final hand in which Fowler cracks Hoff’s aces after turning a gutshot straight, thereby claiming the bracelet.

Hill then shares some reactions to Fowler’s victory, including an interesting one from Junior Whited: “That’s going to prove to people that anyone can come in here and win half a million dollars. It’s not all Texas anymore.” Indeed, while the “Fowler Effect” wasn’t nearly as wide-reaching as what we’d see in 2003, there was a tremendous symbolic significance to the amateur having broken through.

The rest of the article relates various other happenings of note from the four-week-long Series. There’s the story of a Social Security administrator named J.J. Whalen who had won an entry into the Main Event after having been one of 300 who’d ordered an advance copy of Doyle Brunson’s How I Won A Million Dollars Playing Poker (later renamed Super/System). For those who had bought advance copies, a drawing was held, and Whalen had won an all-expense paid trip to Las Vegas and an ME entry. His wife, Elsie, is quoted saying she didn’t know her husband had spent $100 on the book. “I don’t think I would have stood for it if I had known,” she said. Whalen was knocked out of the tourney on the first day.

There’s a discussion of the side games, including a reference to Jimmy Chagra (pictured at left) winnning approximately $4 million playing blackjack and craps during the WSOP. Chagra, a large-scale drug trafficker, has a place in poker history as a frequent donator to the big games during the 70s. (EDIT [added 7/28/08]: The morning after this post, Chagra succumbed to his battle with cancer. He was 63.)

Of course, Hill doesn’t mention any of Chagra’s other, nefarious activities in the article. Nor does he say anything about the drug-taking of Bobby Hoff and Hal Fowler during the WSOP Main Event, recounted in detail in Des Wilson’s Ghosts at the Table. (One wonders if there were an early version of Dr. Pauly hanging out at Binion’s that spring taking notes on such matters.)

There’s an interesting, brief reference to Stu Ungar being there and not being able to get anyone to play gin rummy with him. (Ungar, of course, would win the WSOP Main Event the next two years running.) It is curious to see how Ungar’s presence -- and prowess -- was already being openly acknowledged in 1979. As Nolan Dalla and Peter Alson write about in One of a Kind, Ungar had only come out west the year before

There’s also discussion of CBS’s coverage of the event. This was the period in WSOP history when CBS was filming the Main Event for its CBS Sports Spectacular. According to Hill, there had been “several incidents… the year before between newsmen and the CBS crew jockeying for position in the cramped space of the tournament area.” Even though the Main Event had only started with 54 entrants (just six tables), every inch of space there in Binion’s was taken up with the crew and their equipment, “hordes of spectators, relatives of players, well-wishers, and newspersons.” Apparently the year before “one overzealous camera assistant incurred the wrath of virtually all the newsmen and relatives of players sitting inside the ropes by bodily shoving people out of the vicinity of the camera he was tending.” According to Jerry Adler, producer of the 1979 coverage, measures had been taken to avoid such unpleasantness this time around.

That passage certainly made me think of this year’s Series, where we PokerNews folks and others covering the action were often sharing space with the ESPN guys, especially as play wound down to the last few tables of the Main Event. Unlike what happened thirty years before, in 2008 those of us covering the WSOP all seemed to coexist quite amicably. (In fact, toward the end one of the ESPN guys made a point to come over and compliment the PokerNews crew on how smoothly the entire operation had run.)

The article winds up with some references to various celebrities who made appearances at the 1979 WSOP. Gabe Kaplan played his second Main Event. Lily Tomlin stopped by. And Kenny Rogers came around to sing his new hit song, “The Gambler.”

An interesting article. Also interesting to contrast not only how huge the WSOP has become since the late 1970s, but how the nature and scope of its coverage has changed, too. Would be very cool to go back in time and see full-fledged, wall-to-wall reporting of these old WSOP Main Events. Further details of that Fowler-Hoff heads up battle would be fascinating to read through as well.

Then again, having all of those details would probably demythologize the WSOP’s history in detrimental ways. And frankly, even in today’s world of (relatively) comprehensive WSOP coverage, there’s always going to be much, much more that is left untold.