Cheats don’t prosper, but they have a big edge.
SYDNEY SUMMERS, 1955
They led the American Ray Ryan up the exquisite staircase, one of architect William Kent’s most applauded achievements, to the Salle Privée which sat off a landing between the first and second floor at 44 Berkeley Square, London.
It was after dinner at the Clermont Club, and by 10.20 p.m. some of the other card players, in dinner jackets and dark lounge suits, had already arrived. Chatter, thick unfiltered cigarette smoke and the clink of iced drinks drifted around the classically elegant room.
Ryan was the tough, laconic ‘founder’ of Palm Springs in California. Once an oil wildcatter, he was now a wealthy man, the friend of movie stars, co-owner (with Oscar-winner William Holden) of the Mount Kenya Safari Club and boyfriend of Princess Alexander Hohenlohe (one-time actress and society playgirl Patricia ‘Honeychile’ Wilder). This particular evening he was extremely relaxed. He was a regular player when in London and was regarded by everybody at the Clermont as an all-round good guy.
Yet the plan that Christmastime in 1963 was not just to lead him up Kent’s architectural wonder of a staircase, but up the garden path; to cheat him of £50,000, the equivalent in 2007 of £1 million.
It was a question, John Aspinall, the owner of the Clermont, told his fellow director and long-time gambling partner John Burke, of ‘needs must’. At that time gambling clubs were allowed to give long-term credit, so, despite the extravagantly affluent appearance of the Clermont, the company’s cash profit was poor.
John Aspinall had borrowed $200,000 from Ryan in May 1963, to cement the Clermont’s reputation as the city’s most exclusive gambling club and support his own position in London society. He had assumed that when Ryan returned to London he would ask for the loan to be repaid. The snag was that Aspinall could not afford to pay Ryan back. Instead he would ‘win’ back his debt, with some interest.
Which was why when Ryan took his seat to the right of the croupier, at number one, at the chemin de fer table in the Salle Privxée, an Italian card sharp called Biondi sat at the croupier’s left, at number nine. The salon had been turned into a private gaming area that evening for the first time.
Around the table, Ryan could see John Aspinall and other players like John Ambler, publisher John ‘Mike’ Ryan, the stockbroker Stephen Raphael and his prote´ge´ Richard John Bingham, the future 7th Earl of Lucan, whom Raphael had taught to play poker at the Hamilton Club in Park Lane. But tonight, 20 December 1963, it was chemmy, the game of choice in the London of the day, the ultimate game of chance when players went one to one. Players can swiftly win – or lose – enormous amounts of money.
The table set-up had been arranged so that Ryan couldn’t make much eye contact with Biondi, who Aspinall had recruited through an international businessman, a questionable golf gambler and shady precious metals dealer who was said to be the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s Bond villain Goldfinger. With his agile imagination Aspinall had introduced Biondi, who looked like a sleek, middle-aged, mild-mannered European businessman, as a friend of the Italian car tycoon Gianni Agnelli.
Biondi had collected the specially patterned, cellophaned Caro playing cards (every casino had its own upmarket ‘brand’ delivered regularly from the company’s headquarters at 252 Boulevard Voltaire, Paris) from his contact at the Clermont on 19 December. He then ‘treated’ the cards so he could ‘read’ them and they were returned, seemingly innocent and untampered with, on the day of the private game.
For Ray Ryan it was meant to be a night of fun. He was an easy-going, colourful character; a seasoned gambler, he’d been around. Aspinall kept up the conversation at the table with typical embellishments. Biondi was a professional, and when he took the bank he stroked the cards out of the shoe with a practised, pink and manicured hand.
The cards turned for around ninety minutes in the private salon while downstairs in the stunning, splendid Grand Salon, other players, overseen by John Burke on this busy evening, chanced their luck at two chemmy tables.
In the Ray Ryan game, luck had nothing to do with it. Every play made by Biondi was dictated by his ability to ‘read’ the cards. He creamed off the winning coups and left the losing ones to his victim. With everyone playing on credit in the small, exclusive casino, Ryan began to call for more credit slip ‘markers’ and only a short time into the game had signed four, each for £5,000. (He had originally staked himself with a £5,000 ‘marker’ for playing chips.)
But Ryan was no easy ‘mark’. He’d been involved in the early days of gambling in Las Vegas when most of the desert town was controlled by the Mob. He’d grown up in the toughest gambling schools and had played with sharks before. Biondi just wasn’t a good enough mechanic to fool and steal £50,000 from this man who had won, and lost, massive sums of money at gaming tables around the world. Less than two hours had gone by when Ryan sensed something was wrong. Or maybe he spotted a wrong movement. Perhaps it was simply his gambler’s antennae warning him that all was not as it should be. He put down his cards and with his hands flat on the table raised himself from his chair. His grey eyes narrowed and he looked over at John Aspinall, who still wore his shameless, engaging smile. Quietly, he said: ‘Can I have a word, John?’
The two men left the private salon. Ryan took Aspinall downstairs and into a little room at the back of the caisse, the cashier’s office. In a quiet voice he told Aspinall that he knew what was going on. Aspinall said nothing, made no attempt to deny it.
Then Ryan asked for his ‘markers’. There was a lot going on around the caisse. Aspinall called to John Burke and asked him to retrieve them from the caissier, the cashier Jim Gore, who had just returned from a tea break. Nearby was a watchful, helpful man who lent the cashier a hand on busy nights like this, allowing Gore to take short breaks.
The part-time cashier was not a man to whom John Aspinall or John Burke paid much attention, although he was very useful. To them, to Aspinall especially, he had the status of a well-connected concierge. Certainly this night Aspinall, as he was confronted by Ray Ryan, did not notice him in the background, his eyes constantly frisking the casino. Neither did John Burke, who was busily explaining to the concerned Jim Gore – who didn’t just dish out signed papers to anybody and was nervous because he had to keep exact books – that Aspinall would take responsibility.
Aspinall, still silent, handed the markers to Ryan, who tore them up and put them in his pocket. A careful man, he didn’t like the idea of having his signature even on torn pieces of paper in the Clermont. Aspinall remained quiet. What could he say?
Ryan looked at him and said, ‘John, steal whatever you want, but don’t rob the man who saved your life.’
With that Ryan walked out into the cold night air. He made no fuss. If he had done so it could have been the end of the Clermont, then arguably Europe’s most glamorous gambling club, and of Aspinall’s social and financial ambitions: Ryan, had he wanted, could have brought down the whole house of cards.
‘He was an amazing man,’ said John Burke. ‘He could have caused a major scandal but he just shrugged it off; he had been around and expected people to try and cheat him in casinos, but John Aspinall he considered a friend. That annoyed him but he never once raised his voice. His attitude was one of disappointment, of being let down. He had a remarkable philosophy.’
As did Aspinall. He was a tough guy. Although badly shaken by what had happened, his first concern was that the show must go on. There was still a game to play upstairs, where there were two empty seats. Biondi, fearful that he was going to be caught up in a scandal, had vanished. The Clermont’s star ‘house’ player, Peter West, was recruited to take his place at the table, and Aspinall rejoined the game and played on as if nothing at all had happened.
Biondi took with him £7,550 worth of Clermont chips that he had ‘won’. He returned to the Clermont on 23 December and attempted to cash in. A furious Aspinall – Biondi had failed in his mission – instructed the cashiers to refuse to pay.
A week later the Secretary of the Clermont Club received a solicitor’s letter, from Summer and Co., 25 Dover Street, Piccadilly, demanding payment of the £7,550. It was ignored. Another letter was delivered by hand on 10 January 1964. It, too, was ignored, but behind the scenes a £1,000 payoff was made to Biondi in return for his ‘chips’.
The settlement was engineered by a gambler called Leslie Price but known to Aspinall and Burke and everyone else in the gambling world as the Vicar. Price had his own reason for enjoying Aspinall’s discomfort and it was he who had introduced Biondi to the West End legal firm. When that got no result he made a phone call to the Clermont:
‘Aspers, I hear you’re in a spot of bother.’
‘What would that be, Vicar?’
‘Difficult chaps, these Italians.’
‘What can you do about it, Vicar?’
‘I can fix that for a couple of grand. That’ll get your chips back and you’ll never be bothered about it again.’
‘Five hundred pounds.’
‘Let’s call it a grand and be friends.’
‘A thousand pounds it is.’
Biondi accepted this. He also, somewhat reluctantly, accepted some advice to leave the country and never return to England again. It was, in the circumstances, astute of him. The man who had told him to get out of town was the quietly intimidating Billy Hill, the controller of London’s underworld and one of the most powerful gangsters in Europe.
One of his senior henchmen drove former boxer and ‘minder’ Bobby Warren to call on Biondi at the flat he was staying at in Chelsea Reach with some travel hints. Biondi didn’t require any more encouragement to find his passport.
‘Perhaps Biondi wasn’t much of a card cheat,’ said John Burke, ‘but he wasn’t a total fool. Better to get out than end up in the Thames.’
Hill, who looked as sleek as Humphrey Bogart in his gangster movie heyday, was quietly spoken but could be so chilling it was said he peed iced water. Like the screen idol, he almost always had a cigarette, a Capstan Full Strength, in his hand or in the corner of his mouth. He was 14 when he committed his first stabbing, and since then he had bullied and battered and cut his way to the top of London’s gangland; had carved his place in crime history, often using his shiv to place a V for Victory on his victim’s face. He specialized in protection rackets earning from West End nightclubs, drinking dens, bookmakers and illegal gambling joints known as spielers. He had powerful connections with the French and American Mafia.
Now, at the age of fifty-three, he was supposedly ‘retired’. The reality was that from his home in Moscow Road, Bayswater, he was simply more careful and corporate in his dealings; he was London crime’s chief executive officer, who would advise and finance robberies and other enterprises but found even richer pickings available from Britain’s growing casino culture.
Which is why Biondi had to be thrown out of the country. What if there had been a scandal at the Clermont? It would just have drawn unwanted attention to Hill’s own endeavours at other gambling clubs in London and Glasgow. The Italian had to go, before he messed up on the doorstep again.
The Ray Ryan debacle had seriously annoyed Billy Hill, something sensible people did not do, because he himself had always wanted to operate within the Clermont. Previously, he had asked his number two, , to contact his friend and fellow Irishman John Burke. Hill also knew Aspinall’s confidante from drinking with him at the Star Tavern in Belgravia where spivs, questionable toffs and Scotland Yard officers mingled most evenings with the pub’s rich and respectable clientele.
‘I told Bill that John Burke would never go for it, that he was six-and-eight, straight,’ said . ‘Bill accepted that and we pursued our business elsewhere. He didn’t put it out of his mind though.’
Hill knew all about the Ray Ryan affair because he had a man inside the Clermont Club who monitored everything, as he had everywhere there was profit to be made. This was the part-time cashier, a clever shadow of a player, whose motivation was never compromized. It was always financial. He changed name according to country, and had so many different ones that they just called him Mr Money. That was his business: making money, moving money. Mr Money connected those who inherited wealth, those who got lucky with it and even some who earned it, with those who would casually take it away from them.
A refugee from Hitler’s regime, with almost perfect English, he was a currency operator and jewellery fence. Aspinall was one of his better customers for stolen items, bought for the ‘fence’ price but insured for the full price against a rainy day.
Mr Money had first established his financial credentials in London, making his first big stake though a simple con. His girlfriend worked as maid to the wife of a shipping tycoon who liked to gamble in Monte Carlo. There was strict currency control at the time, and it was a serious criminal offence to break the rules. Yet, for a fee, Mr Money could do just that. His girlfriend introduced the tycoon to her ‘Swiss banker’, who was given £25,000 – a vast sum in the 1950s – to transfer to the South of France. When Mr Money and the cash vanished the victim could not go to the police. He was an accessory to a crime, and was not the kind of person to employ gangsters to retrieve his cash from the con man, so he had to accept what had happened.
Although a stocky figure, Mr Money was clever at remaining in the background, an unpretentious chameleon; working both sides of the street, as it were, he was on Billy Hill’s weekly payroll as well as the Clermont’s. Neither Aspinall nor John Burke was aware of his underworld connection.
Mr Money lived only a short walk from Moscow Road. He would visit Billy Hill regularly – Hill often didn’t leave his flat for weeks at a time – to offer information and to be rewarded with two or three hundred pounds: the amount always depended on Hill’s mood rather than on the information itself. Still, on the morning of 21 December as he rushed over to Moscow Road, Mr Money anticipated much profit in the news he had to share about the previous evening’s entertainment at the Clermont. He knew that, although the Clermont was smaller than other London casinos, the enormous amounts of money gambled there every evening made it the ultimate prize.
Hill was enjoying a pot of tea when his breathless informant arrived. The gangster called for another cup as Mr Money hurriedly made him aware of Aspinall’s attempt to rob Ryan and his desperation for cash.
Over that midmorning pot of tea, the wily Billy Hill sensed an opportunity.