Few people driving on California
Avenue through the historic Newland Heights neighborhood of Old Southwest Reno
give a second glance to the tidy Tudor Revival house sitting on the corner of
California and Gordon avenues.
But the house, now a lawyer’s
office, was the longtime home of William J. Graham, a once prominent Reno
casino owner who, along with his partner, James McKay, were influential power
brokers/gamblers/gangsters in the city during the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.
During their heyday, Graham and
McKay were often referred to as “sportsmen” in the local media, a term often
used to politely describe professional gamblers. Veteran Reno journalist and
historical writer Dennis Myers has written that the two had “their fingers in
many financial pots and were as dangerous as cobras.”
Graham, who was born in San Francisco in 1891, first partnered with McKay, who was born in Virginia City
in 1888, in the mining boomtowns of Tonopah and Goldfield. The two worked in a
variety of enterprises, including running the Big Casino Club in Tonopah,
before relocating to Reno in about 1920.
In 1922, Graham and McKay bought
and operated “The Willows,” an elegant nightclub (on Mayberry Road west of the
city) that became known as the primary gathering place for those seeking a Reno
divorce. Additionally, they established the Bank Club in downtown Reno, which
quickly became the largest casino in the world (at a time when gambling was illegal
in the city).
While in central Nevada, Graham
and McKay also befriended the powerful George Wingfield, a mining and banking
operator who for a time was considered the richest man in the state. Wingfield,
in fact, persuaded the two to move to Reno when he shifted his operations from
the two mining towns to the Biggest Little City in the World.
In addition to their gambling
operations in Reno, Graham and McKay, through their real estate holding company
known as Riverside Securities, owned the land under the city’s notorious “red
light” district, the Stockade.
It’s also been reported that
Graham and McKay had many underworld friends who occasionally would hide out in
Reno while the FBI or other law enforcement officials were looking for them in
other parts of the country.
Among their guests in the late
‘20s and early ‘30s were well-known criminals like John Dillinger, Lester “Baby
Face” Nelson, Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, and Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd.
These “friends” found that for the right price the gambling clubs of Graham and
McKay were useful for laundering money that law enforcement officials might
otherwise be able to trace.
While apparently no evidence ever
directly linked Wingfield’s banks to Graham and McKay’s activities, it has been
pointed out that those banks often served as willing partners in their legal
and illegal enterprises, including loaning money to Graham and McKay.
Graham and McKay’s empire began to
crumble in the mid-1930s. At a time when Wingfield was fighting for his own
financial life as a result of bank failures caused by bad loans, exacerbated by
the national financial crisis of the Great Depression, Graham and McKay found
themselves fighting to stay out of jail.
On January 31, 1934, the two were
indicted on federal charges of mail fraud for their part in an elaborate
“bunco” scam that swindling gullible investors out of an estimated $2.5
million.
In the end, following three trials
(the first two ended with a hung jury), Graham and McKay were convicted of four
counts of mail fraud and conspiracy. The pair was fined $11,000 each and
sentenced to nine years in federal prison (they would serve just under six
years each).
In 1950, at the request of
Nevada’s U.S. Senator Pat McCarran, Graham and McKay received full presidential
pardons from President Harry Truman.
After returning to Reno from
prison, the two resumed operating the Bank Club. In 1952, however, they
dissolved their long partnership in the operation and McKay effectively retired
(he died in 1962 following a lengthy illness).
Graham continued his involvement
in several Reno casinos and hotels until the mid-1950s, when he, too, sold his
interests and quietly dropped out of the limelight. He and his wife, Bertha,
continued to live in the house until his death, in 1965, and her death, in
1968.
The 548 California Avenue house,
listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1983, was designed by
prominent California architect George A Shastey for the Grahams. Completed in
1928, the structure was built of brick with half-timbered stucco gables.
When the home was sold by the
Graham estate in 1969, the new owner discovered escape routes installed by
Graham from different parts of the house and that the original tile-faced lobby
fireplace had never been used and was stuffed with 1929 newspapers.
