casino in Vegas and Renothe New Frontier, the Sands, the Silver Slipper, the Landmark, the Castaways. Within a few years his acquisitions were providing 17 percent of Nevada's gambling tax revenues.
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The motive for Hughes's Las Vegas fever was ascribed to various reasons, everything from wanting to get back into a form of show business, to a personal belief that he could make the casinos more profitable, to the simple desire just to have a state all his own. Perhaps more to the point was the fact that his move into Nevada gambling was a vital multimillion-dollar dodge to avoid the undistributed profits tax. It was a matter of either spending the money or giving it to the government. Hughes inadvertently decided it was better to give the money to the underworld for something tangible in return.
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Unfortunately the record shows Hughes didn't get much of anything. His investment in Vegas turned into a disaster. He gullibly kept many mob employees in their casino positions. It's no wonder a large undercover owner in the Desert Inn, Johnny Roselli, bragged to informer Jimmy Fratianno: ''Right now we've got the D.I. in good hands." Hughes fully expected to up the 20 percent legally admitted profit most casinos earned on investment, but at best he never made more than 6 percent. By 1970 Hughes was millions of dollars in the hole. It was all too bruising to Hughes's ego and probably put him to bed far more than his travails with Clifford Irving's bogus biography.
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Finally Hughes bowed out of Vegas and slowly the mob's influence returned. The full measure could not be gauged, however, because the money the criminals took from Hughes undoubtedly went to a new army of fronts who became the owners of record of some of the casinos.
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Humphreys, Murray Llewellyn "the Camel" (18991965): Chicago mob's Mr. Fixit
By underworld standards, Al Capone's opinion of Murray Llewellyn Humphreys was sterling: "Anybody can use a gun. The Hump uses his head. He can shoot if he has to, but he likes to negotiate with cash when he can. I like that in a man."
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Throughout his criminal career Humphreys lived up to Capone's opinion. A Welshman (sometimes called "the only Welshman in the Mafia"), he was noted as the mob's Mr. Fixit, providing the underworld with strong ties to public officials, judges, police, businessmen and labor leaders. Together with Gus Alex, he succeeded Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik in the top fixer position after Jake's demise in 1956.
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Dapper, with loads of class (he adopted his middle name because he figured that gave him more tone), he was nicknamed Murray the Camel because of his fondness for camel hair coats. To be sure, it was his sophisticationsartorial and intellectualthat made him so valuable to the mob. A rarity among the Capone gangsters, Murray was a high school graduate, a fact that even impressed Capone. As such an obvious brain, his aphorisms made deep impressions on his fellow mobsters. Some of his enlightened contributions to criminal knowledge were:
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 | | The difference between guilt and innocence in any court is who gets to the judge first with the most
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| | Go out of your way to make a friend instead of an enemy
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| | If you ever have to cock a gun in a man's face, kill him. If you walk away without killing him after doing that, he'll kill you the next day
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| | No good citizen will ever testify to anything if he is absolutely convinced that to do so will result in his quick and certain death
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Humphreys demonstrated considerable originality in his capers. He is the only Mafia associate who ever paid federal taxes on ransom money received in a kidnapping. The ransom$50,000was paid for the release of Robert G. Fitchie, president of the Milk Wagon Drivers Union, who was grabbed from his home in December 1931. After his release, Fitchie would not identify the men who snatched him, but Steve Sumner, the union secretary, later informed Internal Revenue agents that Murray the Camel had collected the money in person. It wasn't until 1952, 21 years later, that the IRS got around to forcing Humphreys to pay taxes of $25,000.
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Within the mob the Camel got primary credit for neatly incapacitating gang leader Roger Touhy, who had for years resisted Capone's takeover in Chicago. At the very same time the Camel was able to do a favor for a good friend, John "Jake the Barber" Factor, an international stock swindler who at the time was fighting extradition to England where he was wanted for a $7 million fraud. Factor conveniently disappeared from sight and Touhy, framed on a Factor kidnapping charge, was sent to prison for 99 years. Naturally, because he had been vital to the legal case against Touhy, Jake the Barber remained in this country, and afterward the English matter cooled off.
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Touhy remained imprisoned for a quarter of a century until freed when a federal court reviewed the case and found him innocent, ruling there had never been any kidnapping of Factor at all. Touhy lived less than a month. He was murdered in 1959; the story was that Murray the Camel declared no one was more entitled to the $40,000 contract on Touhy than he himself. After
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