Customer Reviews

I'll Do My Own Damn Killin'

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Who needs fictionalized characters when you have real-life crime bosses like Herbert Noble and Benny Binion to write about! We have all read and watched movies about organized crime and it usually involves men with last names ending in vowels living in New York, Chicago, etc. However, there is something to be said when the Italian mafia is sent packing when they tried to get involved in the action in Texas - now we're talking about some rough characters, but you are going to find few rougher than the criminals discussed in this book.

The amount of detail Sleeper explores in this book pulls the veil off of the underpinnings of the Gambling War and organized crime in Texas. But most impressive about this book is not a simple re-hashing of facts, but revealing the story of two men, jocking for position in organized crime in Texas, and so full of hate for each other that it consumes them and almost everyone around them. The amount of violence and factual accounts of murder, conspiracies, political pay-offs, etc., which took place so publicly, were laid out by Sleeper in such a matter-of-fact way, that you can't believe all this took place only about 50 to 60 years ago.

This book is about the ultimate grudge-match between two larger than life characters, who tried to have each other killed so many times and in so many different ways, that you get so caught up in the hunt more so than the result. If this book is not picked up by Hollywood, they are missing out on a chance to depict a true-life story of gambling, hate, violence, and the sad reality of politics and the justice system. As you can tell, I think this is a Damn good book.

Although that fellow on the cover could not read, he was making over a million dollars a year from illegal gambling --in 1940! (That was a lot of dough! Anyone encroaching on his business was killed in "a clear cut case of self-defense." ;^ The title is both a quote and a lie. He is portrayed as a self-made man in a world of treachery.

This is more than a chronology of a gangland war; it is a window on another place and time: Texas in the old days, where you could get your tail kicked just for having a tail. <- Appropriate word considering what rats the "soldiers" were. It was double-cross-o-rama.) Although it has 16 pages of photos, I wanted even more as I read about these formidable characters, some of whom are not pictured, and most of whom succumbed to lead poisoning. In a refreshingly realistic observation, the author points out that they were lousy shots. The book is a fun little romp until it gets to what happened to a 36-year-old Mildred Noble, who really had nothing to do with any of this.

Other notable persons in this story: Jacob Rubenstein (aka Jack Ruby), Clyde Barrow of Bonnie & Clyde fame, Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade (as in "Roe vs. Wade"), and the "Two Tonys," whom I suspect inspired the twins in Mario Puzo's novel Omerta.

This is well-researched, well-written, and it's only got four typos --not bad copy editing by today's crummy standards. Includes a good index. One appendix is an interesting transcript of a bugged conversation. Got to agree with the suggestion that there is the potential for a movie here. [Confidential to Gary Sleeper: put your fishing pole away and write us another one.]

If you have found yourself in Soprano-withdrawal, this book is for you. "I'll Do My Own Damn Killin'" is a raucous gangland tale of a long and bitter feud between two former partners for control of the Dallas gambling scene of the 1930s and 40s.

Most people know Lester Ben Binion as the Las Vegas icon who
owned some of the early casinos there, with the downtown Horseshoe Club being the most famous and longest-lived. But before his Las Vegas days he was known as the Dallas "boss gambler." He had most of Dallas law enforcement "fixed" so he could run his numbers, his policy wheels, and his poker games at the Southland Hotel without fear of arrest. He was temperamental, braggadocios, but also jovial in a sinister sort of way. The title of the book comes from a reply he gave when asked if he had ever hired a hit man.

Herbert Noble ran crap games in downtown Dallas and soon came to resent the 25-percent protection money he had to pay to Binion. He had dreams of being the Dallas gambling kingpin himself, and formed a partnership with a like-minded underworld financier. Soon the gambling wars had begun, with one Noble partner after another turning up dead, and back and forth contracts put out on various hardcases from both sides. Noble himself had no less than thirteen assassination attempts made on him. As the author says, "By the early Fall of 1950, planning to kill Herbert Noble had practically become a cottage industry in Dallas and Fort Worth."

Tragedy finally struck when Noble's 36-year-old wife made the fatal mistake of borrowing her husband's booby-trapped car. The explosion was heard eight miles away and the blast shattered windows for blocks. Her mangled body was laid to rest in a solid copper casket said to be the most expensive one ever sold in Dallas.

After this incident, the hatred that consumed Noble escalated the war and led to a hellish confusion of such grisly murders and maiming that it's hard to believe that this actually happened in Texas and not in some 12-hour Francis Ford Coppola trilogy. Notorious people move in and out of the pages, people like Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, Bugsy Siegal, Meyer Lansky, Estes Kefauver, and even one Jacob Rubenstein, aka Jack Ruby.

Finally by the end of the book, the good guys have arrived on the scene, the Texas Rangers, who put a stop to the violence. Thus ended the bloodiest two decades in Dallas history. The appendix contains testimonies, transcripts of recorded conversations, and progress reports on some of the still-unsolved murders from this shocking, full-scale gangland war that happened in Texas.

This is a great book. I knew Benny Binion. My new novel, Texas Poker Wisdom, has several stories about Benny, including the day I met him in 1960. When Binion moved to Vegas, he took a giant step down being a casino owner considering the many things he controlled in Dallas and Ft. Worth and elsewhere. The gambling wars in Dallas and Ft. Worth are hard to believe. Mr. Sleeper has written a book any Texan, gambler, or curious reader will love. I loved this book.
Johnny HughesTexas Poker Wisdom

I'll Do My Own Damn Killin'GREAT BOOK! MOST FUN I HAVE EVER HAD READING A BOOK.

Great drill down research and story telling on a really rich, colorful period in Dallas/Fort Worth area history that has largely gone unheralded, where the "cowboy mob" in large part held off the vaunted Mafia from encroaching for a long time. Sort of one of the biggest "untold" gangster periods in America, and what a great Cohen brothers movie it would make, sort of Blood Simple on steroids. My Dad "knew people who knew people" at the time including an area undertaker and I used to hear the stories about Herbert Noble and the Jackboro Highway strip as a kid in the '60's. Would love to see Sleeper do a similar drill down into the interaction of LBJ, Sam Rayburn, John Connelly, Clint Murchison, Sid Richardson, HL Hunt, and other Texas bigwigs of the time with the underworld characters that populate this book. LBJ was always rumored as a real party animal and supposed to have secretly flown into Carswell AFB in Fort Worth while President to go hit a speakeasy-like running poker game with girls in a big ranch house on the west side were IH 30 and 20 meet today.

I go through 10-20 books a year, and this was easily the best read of my 2010.

Received item quickly and in condition as stated. Grew up in Ft Worth, lived in and around it for 60 yrs and have friends who knew the people in this book. Very interesting.

THIS STORY IS SO WELL WRITTEN AND SO INTERESTING THAT NICK CASSAVETES, MOVIE PRODUCER AND POKER PLAYER, HAS PURCHASED THE RIGHTS TO MAKE IT INTO A MOVIE. WHILE KICKING THIS AROUND A POKER GAME THE OTHER DAY THE PLAYERS AND I AGREED JOSH BROLIN SHOULD PLAY THE YOUNG BENNY BINION.

I expected to be somewhat entertained and learn a small bit about the history of Dallas gambling. I didn't expect to be so thoroughly consumed with the stories, the history and the characters. Excellent!

It's a story as big as Texas and one only a Texan could tell and get it down right. Which Gary Sleeper does marvelously in this fantastically exciting account of Benny Binion, Herbert "The Cat" Noble, and a long and strange gang war that could only have happened in Texas but easily rivals anything on the battlefields of New York and Chicago. The days of wide-open gambling and vice in Dallas and Fort Worth are vividly recalled, along with the bombings and shootings in all their gory detail of innocent and not-so-innocent victims alike, the sleazy and frightening hitmen like Tincy Eggleston and Lois Green, the background political maneuverings and law enforcement alliances that deflected reformers for a time and even thwarted a would-be invasion by the Chicago Syndicate. Most of all the colorful protagonists: Herbert "The Cat" with his mebbe-not-so-but-damn-close-to-it "nine lives" finally ending up splattered all over the place, and "Cowboy Benny" who went from colorful and murderous Dallas crime boss to flamboyant Vegas entrepreneur before dying with his boots off in respectable old age. It's a damn classic of true crime and the not-so-Old West!