Question of the Day - 11 September 2021

Not much is known about Jacob (a.k.a. Jackie, Jake, and Jakie) Freedman; little was written about him that survives. But here's what we found.

Freedman was born in Odessa, Russia, in 1891 and immigrated with his family to Galveston Island, Texas. His first money-making enterprise was selling bananas on a street corner to tourists. For serving in the U.S. Army during the First World War, he earned his citizenship; he also learned to play craps and shortly after returning from Europe, he started running back-alley dice games. From there, he teamed up with several mobsters (Dutch Voight, Ollie Quinn, and Sam and Rose Maceo) and moved indoors to rooms behind cigar and liquor stores. He was also a partner in the Hollywood Dinner Club, a renowned gambling hall in Galveston.

Before long, Freedman went out on his own and relocated to the mainland, opening and operating a number of card clubs in the unincorporated areas between Galveston and Houston. His mansion on South Main in Houston, Domain Privee, was also a mecca for gamblers, including a 20-year-old Howard Hughes (he grew up nearby), who drew attention to the house and himself by lodging a formal complaint after losing $40,000 playing craps there.  

Meanwhile, Freedman invested his winnings in oil wells and most of the short bios we found about him refer to him as “the Texas oil tycoon.” Apparently, he had a good-sized bankroll when, like fellow Texan Benny Binion before him, he gravitated to Las Vegas in the early 1950s after state and local authorities began rolling back the permissive culture around gambling in the Lone Star State.  

Apparently, Jakie first purchased property on the incipient Strip from the LaRue Restaurant, then turned the building into a 200-room hotel-casino. Even though he'd originally intended to name the joint Holiday Inn after the 1942 Bing Crosby musical of the same title, all the sand on the site led to the eventual name: the Sands. 

It's reported that Freedman got some financial backing from the likes of Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, and Doc Stracher, though since he was (relatively) clean as far as the authorities were concerned, he became the public face of the Sands, using the title “principal owner.” Jakie took to the role like he was born into it. That might offer a clue about Freedman "putting Las Vegas on the map," though we'd never heard that before.  

In addition, though he stood barely five-foot-five in his cowboy boots, Freedman cut quite a figure in his ubiquitous five- and ten-gallon hats, western shirts, bolo ties and silver-turquoise tie slides, garish sports coats, and usually a cigarette between his fingers. Though he had a long-term marriage to his wife Sadie (neé Simon), whom he married in 1918 when they were both 27, he was often photographed with Hollywood starlets on his arm. We also found an anecdote about Freedman scurrying around the casino tossing $100 bills on the blackjack and roulette tables for the patrons to use; he knew the Benjamins would just whet their appetites for further gambling.

Freedman remained a (somewhat degenerate) gambler himself during his few years in Vegas and it’s reported that in a marathon crap game with Joe W. Brown, another Texan who “owned” the Horseshoe in a “kind of a deal” with Benny Binion when Binion went to prison for tax evasion, Freedman at one point was down a half-million dollars before struggling back to owe Brown only $50,000. He also invested in the Dunes and apparently lost a fair amount of money before selling out his piece of that partnership. 

He’s credited for introducing the first system of cameras surveilling the Sands casino from the eye in the sky in 1954, though it’s possible that story is apocryphal. In fact, so little information is available about him that it's possible many of these stories are promulgations.

We do know from his obituary that Jakie Freedman died in Los Angeles in January 1958 at the age of 66 during heart surgery. He’s buried at Beth Israel Cemetery in Houston, the oldest Jewish graveyard in Texas.