Message in a Shampoo Bottle

Message in a Shampoo Bottle

By MARY TANNEN
Published: August 18, 2002
I have interviewed many celebrity hairstylists in my day, but this would be my first dead one. I figured it would be challenging but not impossible, since the initial contact had come from him -- or at least, from his products, which had come to me through an intermediary: black packages with red lettering. I held the shampoo like a talisman, noting the cross surmounted by a circle, the Egyptian ankh, sacred symbol of life.
Up until Aug. 9, 1969, the name beneath the ankh had stood for Jay Sebring, the No. 1 haircutter to the stars, the guy who came out of beauty school and invented a whole new way of cutting men's hair. Who went into a white-coated profession dressed in hip-hugger jeans and chambray shirts. Who studied martial arts with Bruce Lee and raced sports cars with Paul Newman. Before Aug. 9, 1969, it was a name known only in select circles; afterward it was known everywhere, as the name of the man who was butchered with Sharon Tate and three others in the notorious Manson murders.
Now, here was the name again, on a bottle of shampoo, where it had been leading a parallel existence for more than 30 years. To look at it, you would not have known that the events of that heinous night had ever occurred. I felt like Jay Sebring was calling me on a mission: to restore the name to the man, to devictimize the victim.
Where to begin?
It didn't take the deductive powers of a Philip Marlowe to call the toll-free number on the side of the package. Right away I got lucky. Nancy Papin, executive vice president of Sebring Products, answered the phone. Her husband, Robert, had been distributing the products for two years before Sebring died. They now own the company. The products go to about 2,500 shops across the United States. Not only that, there is a certified Sebring method that is still being taught and followed. Nancy gave me a number in Houston.
Mike Guessfeld picked up. He had the soft voice of a well-raised Southern boy, and didn't stint on the ''Yes, ma'am'''s and ''No, ma'am'''s. Guided by the phantom hand of Sebring, he has been cutting hair for over 30 years. He learned the Sebring method from the two hottest barbers in New Orleans, who had once sought out Steve McQueen on location, hoping to cut his hair and establish their reputations. But when they saw McQueen, it was clear that he didn't need a haircut. In fact, they were so blown away by how good his hair looked that they went to Los Angeles to meet the man who cut it. They learned the technique and opened a Jay Sebring franchise in the Big Easy.
One of my favorite Web sites -- www.findagrave.com -- listed Jay Sebring, born Oct. 10, 1933, and revealed a simple headstone in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, Southfield, Mich., for Thomas J. Kummer. The accompanying head shot could have been that of a movie star, a three-quarter profile with half the face in shadow. The expression was thoughtful, even moody. The hair was impeccable. The man who had renamed himself after an auto race in Florida, who had scored big in Hollywood, had been carried back to where he started. I was not certain he would be pleased.
It had been years since I'd been to the City of Angels. Because Sebring had driven a Mustang Cobra, I thought I should, too, but Hertz could offer only a Toyota Camry, so I took it and immediately drove to Benedict Canyon, to what had become known as the Sharon Tate house, although she and her husband, Roman Polanski, were renting it at the time she died. The low, rambling ranch house was gone, replaced by one of those mutant behemoths that seem to be spreading across the country. Farther up the canyon, I turned on Easton, looking for Sebring's Tudor, once owned by Jean Harlow. It had the head of John Barrymore carved into the rafters, secret ways to get out of the house in a hurry, sprinklers over the windows to make it look as if it were raining outside.
I gunned the Camry up the steep, narrow road, trying to imagine Sebring and Tate roaring up in the Cobra on their first date. According to Larry Geller, Elvis's memoir-writing hairstylist, who originally worked for Sebring, it was Gene Shacove, then the hottest women's hairstylist in Los Angeles, who first told Sebring about Tate. They were at the Luau, a restaurant next door to Shacove's salon. Geller says: ''Gene was telling us how beautiful this new starlet was, and Jay started pounding the table, saying: 'I'm going to get her. I'm going to get her.'''
Sebring asked Joe Hyams, at that time the West Coast bureau chief and columnist for The New York Herald Tribune, to introduce him. Hyams arranged an interview with Tate at Frascati's, a restaurant on the Sunset Strip. Hyams says: ''As I was finishing the interview, Jay came in and sat down next to Sharon. After a while I left. The next day I called Jay to see how it went, and she answered the phone, so I assumed it went well.''
It was in Sebring's house that Jean Harlow's husband had committed suicide, about two months after they married. Geller remembers that when Sebring bought it, he showed him the bathroom where the body had been found, and said, ''When I go, the whole world's going to know about it.''
Is it the manner of Sebring's death that casts a Gothic shadow over his life, or was it always there? I longed to see the half-timbered house but was foiled once again. I stopped the car and looked up to where the house should have been. The California sun blinded and confused. The vegetation obscured. Frustrated, I turned back to Beverly Hills and the salon of Joe Torrenueva at Camden and Wilshire.
Torrenueva went to work at Sebring's right out of beauty school. He was 18; Sebring was in his mid-20's but already a star with his own shop on Fairfax in West Hollywood. The shop had three doors, one to the main salon, one to the private room where Sebring and Torrenueva worked and one to the office on the second floor. It would be 3:15 p.m. Torrenueva would be finishing with a client and taking the next one. Over in the other chair, waiting since 3 o'clock, would be Henry Fonda, looking at his watch. In the meantime, Torrenueva would have heard the Cobra pulling in at 2:50. At 3:20 Sebring would rush in from the outside with his cutting tools, muttering that it was crazy out there on the set, he couldn't get away...
''I idolized him,'' Torrenueva said. Sebring took him along when he went to Las Vegas every three weeks to cut hair -- Sinatra's, Sammy Davis Jr.'s, the casino owners'. Sebring would fill him in on the clients: ''These guys are from the Purple Gang in Detroit. Just keep quiet and cut. You'll be O.K.''
After the killings, the police and the F.B.I. went to see Torrenueva. He got a call from a client in Las Vegas: ''Joe, I know you're worried. Listen, you're a good guy, you never hurt no one. No one's gonna hurt you.''
Torrenueva, half Puerto Rican and half Filipino, showed me his scrapbook with photos of Sebring and the celebrities, many of whom now come to Torrenueva. He's small, with a complexion as clear and fine as a baby's, short dark hair just touched with silver. I felt that if he were cutting my hair and looking into the mirror instead of my eyes, the words would flow; instead they stumbled and halted.
''Sharon Tate was his girlfriend for a long time,'' he said. ''To me he always loved her. There was a mystique about him. He was very shy, except with close friends. He was guarded. He had a lot of things going on that were just ready to click.''
In the pauses and non sequiturs, I sensed the restlessness, the discontent, that haunted Sebring. Torrenueva -- married since 19, a father and grandfather -- seemed to be still puzzling over Sebring's state of mind. The handshake from this soft-spoken man was a surprise but made sense. The power was in his hands.
A block away, on Rodeo Drive, I headed into DBL Realtors. (When pursuing the deceased, it pays to play the hunches.) I described my mission to the young receptionist. Would anyone there know what happened to the Tate house? The receptionist suppressed a smile. There was someone who worked there but was out; she claims she rented the house to Sharon Tate. I left the number of my hotel.
There are still three doors to the shop on Fairfax, and it is still a salon, only now it serves women. A beautician was escorting an elderly client to the door -- red-tinted hair back-combed and lacquered to last two weeks. Blotting the vision from my mind, I tried to recall the stories about the way it had been. Larry Geller: ''One afternoon, I had just graduated from beauty school, and I saw this stained-glass window with an Egyptian ankh on the door. My first thought was that it was a beauty salon, but it was wood-paneled inside. Jay was on a ladder hanging a plant. He said this was something new, hair architecture for men. I started the next day. They shampooed. No one had ever shampooed men before. The problem was how to dry the hair. You couldn't put men under those helmets. Heat lamps were slow. Then someone heard about a hand-held plastic contraption from Europe. They began blow-drying hair, and selling the dryers to clients at cost.'' Geller adds with a laugh, ''We were artistes, not businessmen.''
Hyams once arrived on his motorcycle. While cutting his hair, Sebring asked if Hyams would show him how to ride the bike. So Sebring appeared at Hyams's house off Coldwater Canyon on a Saturday morning. Hyams said, ''He was wearing full-tailored black leather, down to the black helmet and sunglasses.'' Sebring rode up and down the street, and then asked if he could borrow the bike for the weekend. ''I got a call an hour later,'' Hyams continued. ''He had had an accident on the first turn.'' The motorcycle was pretty badly banged up, and Sebring said he couldn't afford to pay to have it fixed; would Hyams take free haircuts in exchange? At the time barbers charged around $1.50 for a haircut, and Sebring's went for $25. ''Henry Fonda would be there when I went in; there'd be starlets shampooing hair. It was the hottest place in Hollywood in the afternoon. There was gossip, coffee, pretty girls and the haircuts were damned good. It was worth the few hundred dollars in damage to get the bike repaired.''
Around the corner from Fairfax is Fred Segal, a fashion mecca then and now. At that time, Fred Segal's big idea was to tailor bluejeans. Sebring, recognizing a fellow visionary, bought the hip-hugger straight-bottom jeans and faded blue chambray shirts, and sent his staff to get them, too. Within six months, all of Hollywood was coming in. As I drifted around, looking at the artistically ripped, dyed and wrinkled street clothes for millionaires, I imagined Sebring coming by for some tight-fitting bell-bottoms to wear out to the many clubs he frequented at night: the Daisy, the Factory, the Candy Store. He was friend and barber to Warren Beatty, and some say he was, with Shacove, the inspiration for the frenetic hairdresser Beatty played in ''Shampoo.''
Back at the hotel there was a message from a realtor, Elaine Young, and three numbers. I called, and she gave me a private number to call her back. She was clearly rattled that I found her by just walking in off the street. ''I was his best friend!'' she exclaimed. She was married to Gig Young and used to go with him when he had his hair cut, to gossip and see the stars.
''Jay was very good-looking. He was crazy about Sharon. The biggest mistake he ever made was not marrying her. She left him and went to Europe and married Roman, who treated her like dirt.''
Polanski never returned to the house in the canyon. The owner of the house moved in and stayed for years. ''He said the house had good vibes.'' It sold not long ago to a developer who tore it down to build an 18,000-square-foot house that just sold for about $8 million.
The week before the murders, Young had been to see Tate. Tate wanted to redecorate a room for the baby she was expecting in a month and asked for Young's advice. ''Jay was half staying there with her,'' Young said. ''Anyone could walk in and out.'' Young was in the car when she heard the news on the radio. ''I was devastated.'' She was still a little shaken at the coincidence of my finding her, but over the years she's come to accept that her real estate karma leads to strange places: ''I sold the O.J. place to O.J.''
Before heading out to the airport, I stopped on Rodeo Drive to check out the clothes at Theodore, just as I did in the summer of '69, when I purchased a string bikini in purple panne velvet. Yes, I was in Los Angeles then, cooling off in turquoise pools high above the city, breathing in the blood-warm air heavy with jasmine, eucalpytus and sweet-smelling herb. I was riding on the Marrakesh Express with Crosby, Stills and Nash,
and although I didn't know Sebring, I was living in a world already altered by him. As Geller says: ''Jay was on top of Mount Everest. I would love to watch him style hair -- what he could do with scissors. Every movie I see from the 60's, that was our work. We created the look of the 60's.''
Until I'd made my journey guided by a ghost, I had known only the name of the victim of the man with the crazy eyes. Now I understood how much of what I had been seeing that summer had been shaped by Sebring's spirit, and how much the name lives on. The bottle of shampoo only begins to tell the story.

THE SHAMPOO BOYS
If you have to ask how much it costs to get your hair cut by a celebrity stylist, maybe you should think about going to your local star and using the money you save to buy the celebrity hairstylist's products.

VIDAL SASSOON
He came out of a London ghetto to create the swinging hair that every woman had to have in the 60's. (He did Mia Farrow's hair on the set of ''Rosemary's Baby.'') His extensive product line includes new styling appliances designed by the internationally known industrial designer Marc Newson. Blow-dryer and curling and straightening irons, from $20 to $25 each.

BRAD JOHNS
For Uma Thurman, Natasha Richardson and Talisa Soto,he's the colorist of choice. Johns calls color ''the accessory you never take off'' -- and a valuable accessory it is. Colorsave is his line, with five products to keep that expensive color job looking good, including Intense conditioner, $22, and Postconditioning spray, $18.

FRDRIC FEKKAI
This charmer from Aix-en-Provence focuses on the complete picture. He asks clients to stand while he cuts, so he can see how the hair fits the woman. His spas and accessory shops further extend the Fekkai style. Salons on 57th Street in Manhattan and Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills serve clients like Rene Zellweger, Jennifer Connelly and Kim Basinger. Newest products are his Protein RX line, to repair frayed, beat-up hair cuticles. They smell comfortingly of vanilla frosting with a hint of milk of magnesia. Shampoo, $20. Treatment mask, 5.5-ounce jar, $28.50.

GARREN
Man of 1,000 magazine covers, who ministers to the likes of Madonna, Gwyneth and Oprah, Garren can also do you in his Henri Bendel atelier. While you're saving up your pennies, why not invest in his Designing Spray Tonic, $26, which adds volume and shine before an attack of the blow-dryer. You also might consider his new Hair Fragrance. Smell like Sheer Fig, for $35.

CHARLES WORTHINGTON
The sun never sets on this British stylist's product empire. Beginning with his first salon in London, opened in 1986, he has reached out to women around the world, offering products to solve every hair dilemma. His latest group is called Dream Hair, with ingredients to strengthen, moisturize and protect from the sun. Perfect Reflection texturizer can turn hair crises into opportunities. A little dab, and wayward locks are suddenly brilliant, $12.

JOHN SAHAG
Like Michelangelo cutting into marble, Sahag snips the shape ''demanding to be born.'' Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Lopez, Sarah Jessica Parker and Winona Ryder are a few of his name clientele, who swear by Air Lift, a fast-drying styling lotion that gives them volume at the roots and lift at the crown, $13.50. Wavy and curly types are devoted to Zero Weight, $13.50 for shiny, separated bends. And everyone goes for Revitalizing Drops, for sheen and to take away frizz, $22.50. -- Mary Tannen

Mary Tannen is the beauty editor of The New York Times Magazine.

Detroit's Infamous Purple Gang

By Paul R. Kavieff / Special to The News
 

    Detroit's lower east side was a breeding ground for poverty, crime, and violence during the early part of the century. It was in the chaotic streets of this ethnic melting pot that the Purple Gang was born in the years just preceding World War I.


    With the advent of Prohibition in Michigan on May 1, 1918, the young delinquents quickly graduated from nuisance types of street crime to armed robbery, hijacking, extortion, and other strong arm work. They became notorious for their high profile manner of operation and their savagery in dealing with enemies. 

    The four Bernstein brothers, Abe, Joe, Raymond, and Isadore (Izzy), soon became the recognized leaders of the mob. The Purple Gang was never a tightly organized criminal syndicate but a loose confederation of predominantly Jewish gangsters. By the early twenties, the Purples had developed an unsavory reputation as hijackers, stealing liquor loads from older and more established gangs of rumrunners. The Purple Gang always preferred hijacking to rumrunning and their methods were brutal. Anyone landing liquor along the Detroit waterfront had to be armed and prepared to fight to the death as it was common practice for the Purples to take a load of liquor and shoot whoever was with it. In the early years, the Purple Gang preyed exclusively on other underworld operators, insulating them from the police.

    The young Purple Gangsters came under the tutelage of two older and established Detroit mobsters in the early twenties named Charles Leiter and Henry Shorr. These two men operated a legitimate corn sugar outlet on Oakland Avenue known as the "Oakland Sugar House." Leiter and Shorr became the mentors of the Purples using the younger men for strong arm work, extortion of local businesses, and to muscle in on the alley brewers to whom they sold bootleg supplies. As a result, the Oakland Sugar House Gang was born, in reality only an early phase of the Purple Gang's evolution.

    With their numbers swelled by the influx of mobsters from other cities who came to Detroit to cash in on the golden harvest of Prohibition, the Purple Gang prospered. The mob soon branched out into other rackets. During a period of strife in the Detroit area cleaning industry, the Purple Gang was used as terrorists by corrupt labor leaders to keep union members in line and to harass non-union independents. This conflict became known as the Cleaners and Dyers War. Bombings, thefts, beatings, and murder were all methods employed by the Purples to enforce union policy. They were paid handsomely for their services. The labor war ended with the Purple Gang Trial of 1928 in which all of the Purple Gangster defendants were eventually acquitted. The gang emerged from the trial unscathed and became the dominant power in the Detroit underworld. The Purples ruled the Detroit underworld for approximately five years from 1927 to 1932.

In September 1928, Purple Gang defendants were found not guilty of extortion in the "cleaners and dyers war." This photo shows the prosecutors, defense lawyers and defendants during the trial before Judge Charles Bowles. 

    The gang rose to underworld prominence rapidly after a machine gun massacre at the Milaflores Apartments in March of 1927. Three imported gunmen suspected of killing a Purple Gang liquor distributor were butchered in the ambush. Fred "Killer" Burke, famous for his role in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago in 1929, was hired by the Purples as the machine gunner. Two other notorious Purple Gang gunmen also participated.

    During the late twenties, the Purple Gang reigned supreme over the Detroit underworld, controlling the city's vice, gambling, liquor, and drug trade. They also controlled the local wire service which provided horse racing information to all of the Detroit horse betting parlors and handbooks. The gang even became the suppliers of Canadian whiskey to the Capone organization in Chicago. This arrangement was made after Capone was told by the Detroit underworld to keep his operation out of the city. Capone thought it more prudent to make the Purples his liquor agents rather than go to war with the gang.

    For several years the Purples enjoyed almost complete immunity from police interference as witnesses to crimes were terrified of testifying against any criminal identified as a Purple Gangster. Jealousies, egos, and inter-gang quarrels would eventually cause the Purple Gang to self-destruct.  The "Collingwood Manor Massacre" in 1931 took the lives of Hymie Paul, Isadore Sutker and Joe Lebowitz. This illustration from the old Detroit Times shows how the bodies were found in the apartment. 

    In 1931 an inter-gang dispute ended in the murder of three Purples by members of their own gang. The three men had violated underworld code by operating outside the territory allotted to them by the Purple Gang leadership. Three members of the "Little Jewish Navy," a group of Purples who owned several boats and participated in rumrunning as well as hijacking, decided they would break away from the gang and become an underworld power themselves. The three men, Hymie Paul, Isadore Sutker aka Joe Sutker, and Joe Lebowitz, were lured to an apartment on Collingwood Avenue on September 16, 1931. They believed they were going to a peace conference with Purple Gang leaders. In reality, they were only going to their deaths. After a brief discussion, the three unarmed Purples were shot to death by the Purple Gangsters they had gone to meet. A bookie named Sol Levine, who had transported the three men to the fatal rendezvous, was arrested soon afterwards and was quickly frightened into becoming a State's witness. Levine had been allowed to live because he was a friend of Ray Bernstein. The State had a live witness to the murders and Levine's testimony was devastating. Three of the four Purples involved in the incident which became known as the Collingwood Manor Massacre were quickly arrested. Irving Milberg, Harry Keywell, and Raymond Bernstein, three high ranking Purples, were convicted of first degree murder in the Collingwood Manor Massacre and sent to prison for life.

    Although the Purples remained a power in the Detroit underworld until 1935, long prison sentences and inter-gang sniping eventually destroyed the gang's manpower. The predecessors of Detroit's modern day Mafia family simply stepped in and filled the void once the Purple Gang self-destructed.

I wonder whose hair of the Purple Gang Jay cut?

http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/purpgang.htm


The FBI FOIA files on the Purple Gang.

It is a kind of weird statement, indeed.
The Purple Gangs history is interesting along with what is known about the TLB case. Crazy, the six degrees of seperation.

Interesting with what was going on with Leno and his coins, and Joel Rostau and the Kennedy Airport..


Coin dealer finds treasure in warehouse

Ed Vogel 

By ED VOGEL

REVIEW-JOURNAL CAPITAL BUREAU

CARSON CITY -- When Santa Barbara, Calif., coin dealer Ronald J. Gillio gazed in the musty warehouse on the outskirts of Reno last year he could not believe his eyes: Inside were boxes and boxes of commemorative casino spoons, matches, key chains and coasters -- gaming junk accumulated over decades.

But locked in safes in the warehouse was what he really was after -- bags and bags of silver dollars, more than 100,000 in all. There were also thousands of casino chips in denominations from $1 to $100, old casino counting machines, a Seeburg jukebox and three vintage roulette wheels, including one with a rare single zero slot.

Gillio bought it all -- junk and treasure -- for an undisclosed price. The property had been accumulated by the late Lincoln Fitzgerald, who at one time owned the Nevada Club in downtown Reno, the Nevada Lodge at Lake Tahoe and Fitzgeralds in Reno. Gillio dubbed the find "the Fitzgerald's hoard."

"It makes you wonder just how many other hidden treasures are still sitting in other Nevada warehouses," he said.

Fitzgerald died in 1981 at age 88. His wife, Meta, died in March at age 92. Gillio purchased the cache from their heirs.

Why Fitzgerald hoarded old coins and knickknacks in a warehouse is a mystery to Gillio. He stored supplies for his casinos there. After his death, his family got out of the gaming business, and the treasures in the warehouse remained a secret known only to them. Coins were locked in safes, but other items could have been carted off by burglars.

Some of the more interesting items will be on display in Las Vegas on Friday and Saturday at the antique arms and coin show at Mandalay Bay. Coins and chips will be graded and certified by the Numismatic Guaranty Corp. and sold to collectors. Gillio figures the face value of the coins and chips is around $500,000.

"It is amazing what some people keep," he said. "Things other people would throw away, Fitzgerald kept. I guess he had a sentimental attachment to them. It took us 60 days to clear out the warehouse."

For Gillio, finding rare coins is a way of life. The late Ted Binion called on him to appraise his collection of silver dollars back when they were still stored in the Horseshoe Club.

He has conducted more than 75 auctions of multimillion-dollar coin collections and been the official coin appraiser for the state of California. Gillio says his company sells more than $20 million worth of coins to collectors a year. He also is a longtime contributor to Guide of United States Coins, the so-called "Red Book," or bible for coin collectors.

Gillio has a special fondness for coins from the Carson City Mint, which operated only from 1870 to 1893. As a boy in the early 1960s, he began collecting Carson City coins.

Coin World Editor Beth Deisher said the Fitzgerald's find is the lead story in this week's issue of her publication.

"We don't know yet the specific dates and mint marks and whether they are rare varieties," she said. "But the Morgan (silver) dollar is among the most widely collected U.S. coins. When coins have been unavailable to collectors for this long of time, it creates a sensation in the marketplace."

After hauling away valuable items in the biggest Brink's semitruck he could rent, Gillio called friends and let them cart away place mats, key chains and other trinkets.

"There are only so many little spoons saying Nevada Club on them you want to keep," he said. "What could I do with 10,000 key chains? I kept a couple boxes and let them have the rest."

Many of the items were wrapped in old newspapers. Gillio figures much of the material was placed in the warehouse in the mid-1960s.

"1964 was the last year the United States Mint made silver coinage for circulation, and people started to keep the old silver coins they won at the gaming tables," he said. "So the casinos began putting away their silver coins in the mid-1960s, and there they were 40 years later in the warehouse."

Scott Travers, the former vice president of the American Numismatic Association and the author of "One-Minute Coin Expert," said Gillio is "legendary in numismatics for finding hoards of rare and interesting coins."

Deisher added Nevada has a reputation as the place where large amounts of coins are secreted away.

Besides the Binion and Fitzgerald collections, Reno real estate investor Lavere Ridgefield died in 1974 and left a stash of 400,000 silver coins to his family. His family has given land south of Reno for the expansion of the University of Nevada, Reno campus.

What Gillio did not find was slot machines. The Fitzgerald family previously sold off the Nevada Club's antique slot machine collection.

In the Fitzgerald stash, he found empty bags from the Carson City Mint dating to the 1880s. While not particularly valuable, Gillio figures the bags and other gaming memorabilia have historical significance for Nevada.

He plans to donate some items to the Nevada Historical Society in Reno and the Nevada State Museum in Carson City. The museum is in the same building that housed the mint.

Though not in the same league as Bugsy Siegel, Fitzgerald was an infamous figure. As a young man, he was reportedly a bookkeeper for Detroit's "Purple Gang," a mob organization that specialized in bringing in liquor from Canada during Prohibition.

He moved to Northern Nevada, bought into the Nevada Club in 1946, purchased the Tahoe Biltmore in 1957, renaming it the Nevada Lodge, and opened Fitzgerald's-Reno in 1976.

Three years after opening the Nevada Club, Fitzgerald was shot as he opened his garage door. Police speculated it was an attempted mob hit. Fitzgerald was hospitalized for nearly six months and had a limp for the remainder of his life.

Dwayne Kling, a Reno writer who worked 40 years for the gaming industry, said there was talk that the Purple Gang ordered Fitzgerald killed. A few months earlier, he had been convicted of illegal gambling and fined $52,000 in Detroit.

Fitzgerald clearly knew he was a target. After coming out of the hospital, he moved into the Nevada Club permanently. He rarely left and employed bodyguards. Fitzgerald was so afraid of another attack that he never allowed his picture to be taken. Even today, the Nevada Historical Society has no photos of Fitzgerald in its extensive photo archives.

"That's the story I was told," said Peter Bandurrago, director of the Historical Society. "Fitzgerald hid away."