The millionaire died because of money, but managed to hide treasures: they have been looking for more than 20 years
'24.03.2021'
Source: Lenta.ru
In 1998, gambling tycoon Ted Binion died in Las Vegas. Before his death, he hid tons of silver and other valuables on his ranch. The disappeared millions still do not give rest to treasure hunters - another treasure hunter was arrested in April. "Lenta.ru report“Figured out this tangled story.
When an ambulance arrived at the Ted Binona mansion in Las Vegas, a tear-stained girl was sitting on the threshold. “He is not breathing!” She sobbed. Doctors went inside. The gambling mogul lay in front of the TV in an unnaturally peaceful posture - like in a morgue. Apparently, he died many hours ago. There was an empty sedative pack beside it.
Crying girl name was Sandy Murphy. Three years ago, she went to Las Vegas for a vacation and on the very first day she lost more than 10 thousand dollars to the casino. To earn, Sandy got a job in a strip club. A friend convinced her that Las Vegas was full of rich fools who were littering with money. If you are lucky, you can return the lost in a week and go home.
Sandy was lucky: after a couple of days, Ted Binon spotted her, who had dropped in with his friends at the club. Chubby 52-year-old man, from which the hundred dollar bills were falling, was the heir of the gambling empire Benny Bignon ... His friend also knew everything. Once Herbert Blitzstein, nicknamed Bold Herb, was the right-wing man of Chicago crime authority and was collecting tribute from Las Vegas casinos. There was nothing strange in the friendship between the millionaire and the gangster: the Bignons also had skeletons in the closet.
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Benny Bignon was a legendary person. At the height of Prohibition, he was smuggled and smuggled underground gambling houses in Texas. He was suspected of several murders and twice caught red-handed. Both times he came out unscathed - otmazal familiar prosecutor. After the war, Benny had to move to Las Vegas. He founded the Horseshoe Casino and settled down, but he preferred to deal with his enemies in the old fashioned way. In 1967, he was informed of the impending abduction of his youngest son. The abduction did not take place, and the abducted kidnapper was found in the desert near Las Vegas with bullets in the chest and head. “If someone hurts me, he will have trouble,” Benny explained in an interview with the Houston Chronicle.
Ted Bignon was the father's favorite. He worked as a manager at Horseshoe Casino and knew his business well. By the beginning of 1990's, he owned a stake in the family business, and his fortune was estimated at 50 million dollars. He did not trust banks and kept his wealth in the vaults of a gambling house. In the afternoon, Binion hurt casino visitors who missed the bar while their husbands squandered family money, and in the evenings wandered around the strip clubs with Herbie and paid the girls generous tips.
The millionaire immediately laid eyes on Sandy and tried to hand her 1700 dollars to her. The offended girl threw money in his face and left. Bignon liked this: at least someone in this city does not need his money. The second attempt turned out to be more successful: Sandy found out who she was dealing with and no longer resisted. When Bignon's wife heard about their affair, she took her daughter and went to Texas. She had long been sick of her husband’s bad habits, and his new mistress was the last straw.
The next day, Sandy quit the strip club and moved to Bignon Mansion ... In two weeks in Las Vegas, her life completely changed. Millionaire showered her with expensive gifts and drove to luxurious restaurants, and she traveled around the city to Rolls-Royce, which once belonged to Bignon's father, and without hesitation spent thousands of dollars.
Storage
Good luck does not happen long - in Las Vegas everyone knows about it. In 1998, Binion lost its license to work in the gambling industry due to drug addiction and links to organized crime. He was forbidden to appear even in his own casino. When he was idle, he pressed heroin even harder and often beat his mistress. The girl told her friends that the drugs made Binona impotent. “I just have 26, I need sex,” she complained to the gardener. The gardener was politely silent.
Now Sandy and Binion slept in different rooms. The girl secretly recorded his telephone conversations and spied on him with the help of a directional microphone. Millionaire suspected that she was saving up compromising material in case of a break in relations. Sandy was really worried about the future and convinced Bignon to put her in her will. In the event of his death, she would have departed his mansion along with property worth more than a million dollars, plus 300 thousand dollars in cash to pay inheritance tax.
Bignon had enough of their own worries. When he was left without a license, he had to sell his stake to Horseshoe Casino. Almost all bought Becky - his younger sister, with whom he had not got along for a long time. Casino safes no longer seemed to him a safe place to store fortunes. Bignon had a piece of land in the town of Paramp, located a hundred kilometers from Las Vegas, not far from his ranch. Millionaire decided to hide his savings there.
33-year-old Rick Tabish was involved in the construction of the vault. Bignon met him in a public toilet while standing behind a nearby urinal. The men talked and suddenly became friends. As it turned out, Tabish was imprisoned twice: six months for beatings and nine months for smuggling cocaine. After parole, he tied up with crime and started small business. A new acquaintance willingly carried out orders from Bignon and at his request drove Sandy shopping.
The underground storage was a concrete cube with sides three by three meters in size and with a hatch locking above. On July 4, 1998 of the year was delivered tons of silver bars, mountains of gambling chips, bundles of paper money and more than one hundred thousand rare coins, with a total value from seven to 14 million dollars. Tabish locked the lock on the combination lock and suggested that Bignon change the combination. Millionaire refused: he completely trusted a friend.
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Death
17 September 1998, Binon was found dead. On autopsy, an increased concentration of morphine, heroin, codeine and sedative was found in his stomach. The pathologist did not rule out that after the death the body of the millionaire was moved: judging by the distribution of blood, it lay on its side for several hours, and minor injuries could appear when it was dragged along the floor. This could explain why there were no traces of vomiting and convulsions occurring during poisoning.
Sandy told investigators that after the revocation of the license, the millionaire was thinking about suicide. On the last night he came to her and asked to look after him. There were no good reasons to suspect her of fraud. The police tended to the version that an accident occurred, and the cause of death of the millionaire was an overdose of sedatives or drugs.
Relatives and acquaintances of Binona believed otherwise. “I talked to him all week,” Becky claimed. “Ted would never lay hands on himself.”
“Ted loved life too much to kill himself,” said casino manager Tony Cook, who knew Bignon from school. “Besides, he knew drugs so well and took them so actively that an accidental overdose is ruled out.”
Becky suspected Sandy might be involved in her brother’s death. She had been arguing with Bignon all week. He suspected her of infidelity, and only a week ago took her credit card from her, effectively depriving her of her allowance. James Brown, an old friend and lawyer of Bignon, said that on the eve of a millionaire called him and said: “Remove Sandy from the will if she does not kill me today. If I die, you know what happened. "
The private attorney Becky hired found out that Sandy had secretly met with Tabish. On September 11, under the guise of spouses, they rented a hotel room in Beverly Hills, and borrowed money from a date from Bignon. And this meeting was not the only one. She told her friends that Bignon would soon die from an overdose, and the employees of the beauty salon remembered how she chatted that she was waiting for a big legacy.
Tabish
Two days after the death of Binona, the police received a message about suspicious activity on the site of a millionaire in Parampa. Despite the deep night, people worked there and construction equipment roared. The sheriff’s assistant went to check the signal and found Rick Tabish, managing Dave Mattsen’s ranch, a working excavator and a dump truck sagging under a heavy load at the scene of the incident. He looked under the tarp: silver and coins.
Tabish assured that everything is legal. According to him, silver ordered Bignon to get it himself in order to sell it and transfer money to his daughter’s account. The explanations did not help. After the arrival of Sheriff Tabish, Mattsen and the excavator were arrested. They found a newspaper for collectors of coins, a note with a combination of a combination lock and a love letter from Sandy. Two days later, Tabish was released on bail. Sandy paid the money, laying the Mercedes and jewelry presented by Bignon.
In the case of the death of a millionaire, a new suspect appeared - Tabish. His old friend confessed that he twice offered to kill Bignon: first with a sniper rifle, then with the help of ancient weapons from the millionaire collection. He refused both from the other.
In July, 1999, Sandy Murphy and Rick Tabisha were charged with murder, conspiracy, robbery, theft and burglary. According to the investigation, the suspects tied up Binona and forced him to swallow 90 pills with sedatives and 12 doses of heroin. Then they strangled him and laid him in front of the TV. The trial lasted several months and ended with a conviction. Both waited for life imprisonment.
In 2003, the Supreme Court of Nevada returned the case for review. After re-examining the evidence, Murphy and Tabish were acquitted. The jury found that they did not kill Binona, but only used his death to steal valuables. “Their defenders had a plan,” the district attorney David Roag later explained. “They patched up vulnerabilities that didn't work the first time.” Their medical experts disputed our testimony and raised doubts in the minds of the jury. ”
By that time, Sandy had spent more than three years in prison. After her release, she returned to California and married a gallery owner. Tabish remained behind bars for another six years on charges related to burglary storage and theft of silver. He was released in 2010 year.
hidden treasures
Much of the silver that Tabish dug up was given to Bignon's daughter. A huge collection of valuable coins, which cost at least 300 thousand dollars, was never found, and, according to rumors, not only her. Millions worth of valuables disappeared without a trace. In Parampus, it was said that they were still buried somewhere on the ranch.
Dave Mattsen told the Pahrump Valley Times newspaper that gold dollars worth at least 20 million dollars are hidden on the ranch. The only question is where exactly. “You can walk there with metal detectors until the end of the century and find nothing,” he added.
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During the trial, the former county sheriff confirmed that two weeks before his death, Bignon had told him that he had hidden valuables under the trees near the irrigation system. According to Bignon’s secretary, a few days after his death, Sandy told her that the millionaire’s wealth was buried in his ranch under a tree. The police found a map of the ranch with a cross at the place of the treasure near Tabisha. He was checked, but there was nothing there.
In September, 1999, someone snuck on a ranch and dug several shallow pits. A former sheriff told reporters that treasure hunters seemed to have left empty-handed. “It is rumored that Binion buried money there, then to dig it out and spend it,” he explained. A year later, a former employee of Bignon told the police that he knew where diamonds and gold coins were buried. The specified place was also checked - empty. A couple of years later, unknown people unearthed a house for games, which Bignon once built his daughter, and it seems, too, in vain.
In 2010, TV journalists who filmed a documentary about the death of a gambling magnate checked the ranch with a GPR - to no avail. But this will not take treasure hunters. Attempts to find the lost riches of Binona do not stop 20 years. “If you don’t know what you are looking for, you can dig there forever,” said millionaire former lawyer James Brown.
In April, in Parampo caught another treasure hunter. The security camera recorded three men with shovels that had penetrated the site that had once belonged to Bignon and set to work. One of them managed to catch, the other two disappeared. 56-year-old Richard Cleaves lives next door and claims to have learned about Bignon from the Internet. He is accused of burglary, vandalism and conspiracy to steal. Now look for the treasure will have someone else.
