10 Places In Texas The Mob Used To Control

Ten places in Texas the mob used to control, from an oil boomtown the army had to take back to the island people called the Free State of Galveston. There was a song a dance band on the Texas coast played only when the Rangers walked in. The Eyes of Texas, struck up not as a salute but as an alarm, while the lawmen walked six hundred feet of pier and every card, chip, and die in the back room disappeared. For most of the last century, gambling was illegal in every county in Texas. Yet in town after town, the men who ran the dice, the liquor, and the houses did it in plain sight. They ran the sheriff, the mayor, and sometimes the whole courthouse, because the law was written in Austin but enforced at home. This countdown builds from the boomtowns toward the island. An oil town so lawless the governor sent in the National Guard. A Panhandle city where the syndicate moved into city hall on opening day, and a district attorney was shot dead the night before he went to the grand jury. The oldest and best-organized vice operation in the state, exposed on live television. A border syndicate behind the first assassination of a federal judge in the twentieth century. A Houston mansion casino whose profits helped open the Sands in Las Vegas. A tearoom turned casino with an escape tunnel that is still there. The highway out of the city they called Little Chicago. And a Dallas gambling war that ended with a mine buried under a mailbox. All of it ends on the island where the mob did not just run the gambling. For thirty years it ran the sheriff, the economy, and the affection of the very people it was taking from. Real names, real dates, from the public record. 0:00 The song that warned the gamblers 2:08 #10 Mexia 4:36 #9 Borger 6:44 #8 Beaumont 9:10 #7 El Paso 11:42 #6 Houston 13:54 #5 Kemah 15:38 #4 Arlington 17:52 #3 Fort Worth 20:22 #2 Dallas 24:06 #1 Galveston Subscribe: @ Which of these towns does your own family remember? Tell me below. Historical documentary. Names, dates, and cases are drawn from the public record and published reporting. Some footage is illustrative. #Texas #TexasHistory #Mafia