# Kefauver Part 5, Exhibit 49: memorandum on the wire service in Las Vegas (11 December 1950)

Canonical: https://mobfiles.org/items/kefauver-p5-exhibit-49-las-vegas-wire-memo-1950-12-11/

A memorandum by the committee's chief investigator summarizing 1948 Nevada Tax Commission testimony about race-book wire service at the Golden Nugget and the Frontier Club, including a Chicago meeting at which a Continental contact named Connie Hurley as its Las Vegas representative.

Counsel Rudolph Halley offered the memorandum on 18 December 1950 as one "prepared by Mr. H. G. Robinson, chief investigator of the committee," summarizing the record on the Las Vegas wire service "insofar as it refers to the Golden Nugget horse book" (Part 5, p. 863). It is dated December 11, 1950 and printed in the appendix at pp. 1394-1395.

The memorandum summarizes testimony that Roscoe Thomas, a partner in the Golden Nugget and the Frontier Club, gave before the Nevada Tax Commission on October 23, 1948. It says that in 1946 Thomas sought race-wire service from Benjamin Siegel, "who was supposed to be in charge of the service," and that the partnership ended by renting the book to Siegel. After Siegel's killing, it says, the partners sent Thomas to Chicago to see "Mr. Kelley," so spelled. Thomas's quoted testimony has the Chicago contact saying: "I have a gentleman there by the name of Connie Hurley, who represents Continental Service." Thomas went on to say that at a meeting in Las Vegas in July or August 1947 he found that Hurley did not have the authority to make the deal.

The memorandum relays testimony given to a state commission, which is not itself in this record. The staff's Exhibit 40 draws its own conclusions from the same passage; those conclusions are the staff's.

## Sources

- U.S. Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, printed hearings, Part 5: Illinois, via Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/investigationofo05unit
- Full text of the volume (Internet Archive, OCR): https://archive.org/download/investigationofo05unit/investigationofo05unit_djvu.txt