The question on the million dollars at Binion’s made me wonder. Not sure if I remember correctly but I think it was in the early 90’s that Binions was shut down because of taxes? My question is what happened to the display of Benny Binion’s guns? If memory serves me correctly I believe one of them had originally belonged to Wyatt Earp?
Sometime between the ownership of Binion's Gambling Hall by Becky Behnen and Harrah's Entertainment, Benny Binion's gun collection quietly disappeared.
It wasn’t put on the market or transferred to another casino owner, to the best of our knowledge. In fact, your question raises a mystery that baffles some of the best minds in Las Vegas.
Mob Museum curator Geoff Schumacher, for example, is stumped, although he’d sure like one of those shootin’ irons for the museum’s collection.
Veteran trenchcoat-clad investigative reporter George Knapp suggested contacting the Behrens, though he added, "I haven't communicated with any of them over the last six-seven years. He tells us that Becky “and her brother Jack [Binion] were the principal managers of the Binion estate. Nick Behnen, Becky's husband, had his hands in there too.
“There was one gun in particular that I was trying to track down,” Knapp continues. “It was a rifle that used to hang on the wall over one of the bars at the Horseshoe. Before he died, Sheriff Ralph Lamb told me some hair-raising stories about what that particular rifle had been used for, but I was unable to get any info on what became of it.”
Vital Vegas author Scott Roeben has also gone in search of the missing guns and come up empty. “I have to believe they were sold off as part of the estate,” he theorizes.
Stiffs & Georges contributor Jeff Leatherock has a different hypothesis. “I have no direct knowledge of the collection,” he writes, “but I'm 90 percent sure it was split amongst Benny's children, then sold off piecemeal. People from this part of the country, and of Benny's generation, were always big on a fair division of their ‘stuff’ upon their death. Special attention being paid to the ‘collection’ as a whole is a more recent phenomenon. I think there have been recent stories of some particular gun sales that have mentioned Benny in their publicity buildup that have brought some attention to the collection in a more modern context.”
Whatever the (display) case, we’re highly unlikely to see all those firearms in one place ever again.
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Dave
Dec-15-2020
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hawks242424
Dec-15-2020
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