Ted Binion’s buried silver (found 1999)

Ted Binion estate case, 1998-1999, fully documented

Ted Binion was the younger son of Benny Binion, who founded Binion's Horseshoe on Fremont Street and made his name by never turning down a bet, however large. Ted ran the casino floor for some thirty years and hosted its poker tournaments, but he was also a long-time heroin user and a friend of mob figures such as Herbert "Fat Herbie" Blitzstein. Nevada gaming regulators suspended his licence in 1997 for breaking his drug-testing agreement and revoked it in 1998. He also owned a fortune in silver bars and bullion coins, the Binion Hoard, hidden in the Horseshoe and on two of his properties, among them a vault buried under a lot he owned in Pahrump, in the desert west of Las Vegas.

On 17 September 1998 he was found dead in his Las Vegas home, and an early autopsy blamed heroin and Xanax. Within about two days, Nye County deputies caught Rick Tabish, a Montana trucking contractor who had built the Pahrump vault on Binion's instructions, digging the silver out of the ground with an earthmover and two associates. Reports put the haul at several million dollars, $6 million in the Guardian's account and $7 million in the Los Angeles Times. His defence said he was doing what Binion would have wanted.

Detectives were suspicious. Binion had long smoked heroin, not swallowed it, and the day before his death he had told his lawyer to cut his girlfriend, Sandy Murphy, out of his will. Murphy and Tabish were lovers, and in June 1999 both were arrested. In May 2000, after a trial that riveted Las Vegas and played on Court TV, a jury convicted them of murder, conspiracy and robbery, accepting the pathologist Michael Baden's view that Binion had been drugged and then smothered. In 2003 the Nevada Supreme Court overturned the murder convictions, and at a retrial in 2004 both were acquitted of murder, though convicted on the burglary and larceny charges tied to the silver.

The story has never quite settled. How Ted Binion died is still argued over, and millions he had hidden in and around his Las Vegas home went missing after his death, rumoured to lie buried on the property. While the first jury deliberated, the Horseshoe a block away was opening the 31st World Championship of Poker, the tournament his father began in 1970.