Question of the Day - 01 June 2024

Thanks for the question. We especially appreciate those that we've never answered before and this one definitely qualifies. 

And yes, the story of Fat Irish Green is essentially true. 

Little is known about the man himself. In fact, in extensive searching, we couldn’t even find his real first name. Nor is there any information on what year he was born and died.

We do know that he came from the Lower East Side of Manhattan and was boyhood friends with Benjamin Siegel and Moe Sedway. He was overweight (in later years, he was said to resemble Jackie Gleason) and Irish; how he wound up running the streets with two Jewish kids from the neighborhood has been a matter of speculation. We saw a suggestion that he was a holdover from before the LES became predominantly Jewish.

However it happened, Fat Irish, Bugsy, and Moe came up together as street criminals. Green, known to wear loud green suits with a loud green tie, followed the other two to Las Vegas in the early 1940s. He wasn’t exactly the brains of the organization, more on the chauffeur, gofer, and occasional goon side of things. When Siegel and the boys from back east owned the El Cortez for brief moment in time in the mid-1940s, Fat Irish took a room there, comped. He was also reputed to be juiced into every restaurant within walking distance, being an “associate” of Bugsy’s.

As far as we know, he never married or even had a girlfriend, devoted as he was Siegel, who trusted him with his life. And that’s where the main Fat Irish story gets going.

According to the accounts, Siegel was feeling so much heat over his mismanagement of and suspected skimming from the Flamingo construction that he entrusted a suitcase full of cash to Fat Irish. We’ve seen estimates between $60,000 and $600,000, but no matter; it was a hell of a lot of money for the time.

“I’m leaving this with you for safekeeping,” Siegel told him. “If anything happens to me, turn this suitcase over to Meyer Lansky.” And sure enough, shortly thereafter, Siegel was murdered in Los Angeles.

When Lansky showed up in Vegas, Fat Irish dutifully turned over the suitcase and, reportedly, Meyer was impressed by two things: 1) the amount of money and 2) that Irish didn’t abscond with all the cash that no else even knew about.

As a reward, Lansky promised Irish a comped room at the El Cortez and free meals downtown for the rest of his life. In the 1950s, Lansky’s word was gospel in Las Vegas and if anyone dared question Fat Irish about his room and board charges, he just referred them to good old Meyer.

But in 1963, a 43-year-old Jackie Gaughan bought the El Cortez from J.K. Houssels, who’d bought if from the Mob. Going over the books, he found a foot-high stack of unpaid room charges over a nearly 20-year period for one Fat Irish Green. Jackie scratched his head and called Houssels, who laughed and said, “Oh, didn’t I tell you? That guy comes with the property.”

What could Gaughan do? That was the way things worked in those days.

However, he did notice that Fat Irish ate all of his meals at the Horseshoe. So he went to talk it over with Benny Binion, to see if Benny might comp his room as well.

In more colorful language than we can repeat in this family-friendly feature, Binion told Jackie, “The Horseshoe’s been feeding the so-and-so for free for a coupla decades and the El Cortez been housing him all that time, so let’s just leave the deal the way it is.”

Eventually, Fat Irish died — when and of what we couldn’t say. But the El Cortez wasn’t rid of him even then. Over the years, staff and guests have reported paranormal sightings and activities in the EC vintage wing and some of the descriptions sound like Fat Irish himself, in his green suit and tie, still roaming the halls, protecting the cash, and haunting the joint.