The Best in the West
Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Ettleman had a smooth operation going. It is a puzzle why, with the large sums of money he was collecting from safe burglaries, he singled out a couple of well-to-do gamblers in Las Vegas to rob, but he did. One explanation is that he was bored and he was a thief. It must be hard for a thief not to steal at every given opportunity. Whatever the reason, Ettleman was arrested at Caesar’s Palace for burglarizing a wealthy gambler’s suite in the Dunes Hotel. Arresting officers found on him an Atlantic Richfield credit card under another name. They also discovered a fake driver’s license and social security card bearing the same name as on the credit card. Ettleman, who gave his occupation as “drapery hanger,” could not and would not explain the objects found on him.1
Thanks to his brilliant if expensive lawyers, Ettleman managed to steer clear of long prison sentences, in spite of law enforcement efforts to hold a tight grip on him and limit his activities. A little more than two weeks after his arrest at Caesar’s Palace, he was spotted at the Landmark Hotel eyeing another rich gambler. He was recognized as having been recently arrested by the CCS Burglary Unit for possession of stolen credit cards and someone recalled him being listed in the 1967 Western States Crime Conference Manual as an accomplished torch man. As a result, Ettleman was booked and jailed again. This time it was for vagrancy loitering, even though he was registered as a guest at the hotel. The explanation in the report was that he had “no legitimate business within the hotel and appeared to be casing the various players at the game tables, possibly in connection with a burglary of the victims’ rooms.”2
William Ettleman’s steady source of income remained safecracking and his burglary ring continued to flourish. The steady members of his crew of master safecrackers continued to be Eddie “Italian” DeVaney, Jackson “Nevada” Dillon and Ralph “Indian” Morris.
Born in San Francisco in 1937, Edward DeVaney was the oldest of four children in a conservative Catholic family. His father ran a welding business and, at fourteen years of age, DeVaney dropped out of ninth grade to work full time in his father’s shop, where he learned the art of handling an acetylene torch.
Ralph Morris was half Irish and half Paiute. The Paiutes, before their encounter with Europeans in the early nineteenth century, inhabited the area of Pyramid Lake near Reno and the Moapa Valley, a small Southern segment of Nevada. With his dark good looks and bravado, he easily attracted women. Because of his Native American background, Morris was typically referred to in mob circles as “The Indian.” He was considered one of the best in the West among safecrackers.
Morris learned his “trade” from another super burglar, Sam Bailey, who was once associated with the gang of an all-time infamous burglar, Jimmy Ing. There was a vast difference between Ettleman’s and Ing’s style. As Jackson Dillon describes it, “Ing was an animal and Ettleman was a professional.”
Dillon worked with Jimmy Ing, too. He recalls Ing always carrying a double holster. One time Ing was driving and Dillon was with him, seated in the front passenger seat, when a Nevada motorcycle cop pulled them over for speeding. When the officer walked up to Ing, Ing rolled down his window and asked the policeman, “Do you think your family wants to live?”
“What?” The motorcycle cop looked puzzled.
“I’m Jimmy Ing and I just asked you if your family wants to live.” Ing pushed back his jacket to reveal a holster. Dillon recalls the cop looked suddenly nervous. “All he could say was, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Ing. My mistake. I didn’t realize it was you,’ and he walked away without giving us a ticket.”
Ing was killed in a shootout in 1967 when local law enforcement learned from an inside snitch that Ing was planning to steal valuable artwork from the home of a very wealthy Reno physician. The snitch is said to have been Joe Conforte, owner of the infamous Mustang Ranch, a brothel outside of Reno. Reno police came well prepared, even bringing a coroner with them to the stakeout. When Ing stepped out and appeared to reach for his gun, he was bombarded with bullets. And the coroner was there to pronounce him dead on the spot.
After Ing’s death, Bailey assumed leadership and recruited some of the Ing gang members. Bailey also recruited his wife’s brother who became known as an expert core driller and torch man among his criminal peers. Other members of Ing’s gang formed their own splinter groups. Two of those best known to law enforcement agencies were the Herd Family Gang and the Geary Street Gang.
Sam Bailey was born in Texas in 1934. His first conviction for attempted burglary was at age twenty-four. Over the next fifteen years, this was followed by a series of arrests for burglary, robbery and receipt and transportation of stolen property. In 1972, he received a sentence of three years for a California post office burglary. While Bailey and his men were involved in a variety of criminal activities, which included forgery, arson and even murder, they were best known for their post office burglaries. The Inspection Service’s data of criminal investigations show that in just the year 1978, as much as $663,000 was lost in 1,063 postal burglaries. But as an Inspection Service Bulletin article points out, $407,000 of that sum—almost two-thirds—was stolen by Sam Bailey and his group in just three burglaries.3
While there are no exact figures of the profits organized crime made each year in California, the estimates by the government are mindboggling. It is believed that around $4.8 billion was gained each year from crime-related gambling activities alone. Loan sharking, which is closely linked to gambling operations, brought in $1.3 billion per year. Finally, another five hundred million was lost per year through organized crime-related securities thefts and investment frauds.4
Just as Ettleman used the carpet and decorating business as his “legitimate front,” Bailey ran a roofing company in Idaho. In his early adult years he worked as a sheriff’s deputy and even had the impudence to advertise his roofing company in a law enforcement brochure with the caption under his company’s name, “Let Sam Bailey’s Gang Do The Job.”
Ettleman was far more generous in the shares he allowed his men to keep, unlike Bailey, who took 80 percent of the cut for himself. Bailey lost some of his better safecrackers like Morris and Dillon to Ettleman. But Ettleman and Bailey worked well together and frequently teamed up. They were professionals and there were enough businesses to burglarize for both men.5
But it was not all smooth sailing in Ettleman’s relationship with Bailey’s former protégé, Ralph “Indian” Morris, even though both men liked each other. Ettleman objected at first when Morris, who was twice divorced, became romantically involved with Ettleman’s beautiful seventeen-year-old niece, Luette. On top of that, Morris was seventeen years her senior.
Ettleman was fond of his niece and she of him. Luette’s most vivid recollection of Ettleman is riding in his convertible, the top of which was not properly closed, so that rain was seeping in. But he could not care less, as he sang along loudly with a Lobo hit, Me and You and a Dog Named Boo.
Once Luette and Ralph got married, Ettleman appeared to quickly come to peace with the idea of Ralph Morris being in the family. Even when things got rough later on, he was fine with Morris. And after Morris and Luette got married, Ettleman began hanging out with the newlyweds, taking Luette and Morris to check out future scores. He even involved Luette in some of the jobs they pulled. Luette remembers drying paper money in hotel rooms, laying out the wet bills on a bed and the floor. Sometimes she used a hair dryer to speed up the process. It dumbfounds her today how accepting her attitude was toward her uncle’s and her husband’s livelihood.
Morris and Luette married in Carson City. Luette does not remember much about the day she and Morris wed, except that it was around eighteen months before the birth of their daughter, who inherited the
