Dallas vice

The first grand jury in Dallas County convened in 1846, five years after the town’s founding, and handed down 51 indictments for gambling. The offenses ranged from poker to betting on badger and rat fights at the local saloon. The number of grand jury indictments didn’t leave enough unindicted men (women were a long way from even being able to vote) to serve as jurors for 51 trials. 

But there were enough jurors for one trial, so they held that trial and found the first defendant guilty. He then went from the witness stand to the jury, where he helped convict another gambler. In the end, all the gamblers fined themselves $10 a piece and went back to what they were doing before being called upon to do their civic duty. 

That’s pretty much how Dallas handled vice for better part of the next 100 years. The city went out of its way to portray itself as a conservative, law-abiding and God-fearing community. But amid the banks and mansions was a portion of town called Frogtown where, by city ordinance, prostitution was legal. The cops made sure the brothels had window covers in order to protect people on the street from seeing what was going on behind closed doors.  

Dallas took a similar wink-and-nod approach to Prohibition in the 1920s. A writer for Collier’s magazine heard how ridiculously easy it was to find a drink in Dallas at that time and decided to visit the city and see for himself if the stories were true. They were. 

“Regardless of its registered attitude in favor of strict enforcement of dry laws, I know of no town more bold in its violation of them,” the magazine writer reported, though he was probably drunk at the time. 

The national publicity spurred sheriff  Hal Hood, with much attendant publicity, to order a series of raids on the city’s illegal drinking establishments. Everybody knew where to find the booze. The lawmen confiscated many barrels of hooch and hauled them to the courthouse, where they made a great show of tapping the barrels and emptying their contents in the gutter. 

As the crowd cheered in righteous celebration, the officers, or maybe a city official, struck a match and tossed it into the gutter. Maybe they should have prepared that whiskey with water instead of straight up. The whiskey river caught fire in a big way and burned for several blocks until the fire department brought it under control and got another big ovation from the teetotalers. 

However, there was plenty more whiskey where that came from, which was mostly from moonshine stills located in the Trinity River bottoms. The drinking establishments were back in business within days, if not hours, of the great whiskey fire. 

The end of Prohibition was not an end to vice in Dallas. Men like gangster Benny Binion set up shop in downtown Dallas, providing a market for anything the law said you were supposed to do without. By the 1930s, Binion had worked his way up the shaky ladder of the Dallas underworld, controlling the action with some degree of compassion, it’s true, but also with an iron fist that might hold a gun that might be used to take care of somebody who broke the rules— Binion’s rules. 

“I never killed a man who didn’t deserve it,” Binion said, joining John Wesley Hardin and any number of other psychopaths who said the exact same thing. 

Binion and his cohorts operated with a minimum of menace though the 30s and 40s. The powers that be still made great shows of shutting down the gambling joints, but the gangsters and the city had an understanding. The gambling joints could operate as long as they paid fines to the city on a semi-regular basis. The gangsters understood it as a cost of doing business and the city filled its coffers with several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of revenue. 

This state of affairs lasted until just after World War II, when a new sheriff declared that the old ways of doing business were gone. And so was Benny Binion, who took his act on the road, to Las Vegas, where he became a legend.