Jay Regas meets Dean.

7/18/21, 7:43 PM Jay Jay Regas During the early 50s I was a street urchin selling newspapers on Reno’s casino row at two in the mornings and one of the joints I would hustle papers was owned by Sam Sarlo. Sam had grown up with and delt craps with Dean Martin in Steubenville, Ohio. Steubenville was a gaming and prostitution Mecca before the War and after the war gambling and bordellos were closed in those communities tolerating vices. Like Forth Worth, Texas; Butte, Montana; Fort Smith, Arkansas; Anchorage, Alaska; Chicago, New York, and Steubenville the gamblers headed to Nevada.

They give credit to Bugsy Siegal for bringing gambling to Las Vegas, but the credit must be given to Willis Carrier the inventor of air conditioning because after the war Las Vegas was a hot dust bowl and the gambling in Nevada was at Reno. Sam had opened a small poker room and bar in an alley behind Harolds Club and took a liking to me hustling papers in his joint. After high school I opened a sign business and Sam who was developing his poker room and bar into a small casino became a customer.

I took a different direction and became a burglar and had a lot of time to play golf. I gained a reputation put out by law enforcement as being the most sophisticated and notorious burglar and safe cracker in eleven western states, Mexico, and Canada and at the time I had never been to Mexico, and I was selling swag to Sam. One May 1969 afternoon my father had a long lunch with the county sheriff who told dad they were going to kill me because they could not catch me. Of course, they could not catch me I was not doing anything in Reno. It scared the hell out of my father, and he asked me to move to Las Vegas and go to work for an uncle who was a major builder. My uncle was developing the International Country Club (today’s Las Vegas Country Club) golf course and the dwellings around the course. I went to work for the interior decorator. We were decorating condominiums, cluster homes, homes, modules on the ground for a high rise and the club house.

I was on the putting green and the pro put me in a threesome with Dean, Don Cherry who was singing in one of the casino lounges and Joe Snow whose dad ran the baccarat game a Cesar’s. At the time I was doing some skimming for some Steubenville operators at Cesar’s taking money off a roulette table. I was in the cart with Joe, and we got separated and Dean picked me up. He seemed like a cold fish, but I told him I had an acquaintance in Reno who says you and he were close in Steubenville. He said snarly: “Who’s that?” I told him Sam Sarlo and his demeanor changed and began to question me about Sam. Asked me if I could get ahold of him. Dean must have been feeling nostalgic. When we got to the club house, we went into the pro’s office and phoned Sam. They talked for an hour or so. After the call he told me they were playing tomorrow, and he asked if I could join them. We played regularly from June to November. One day he asked me if I listened to his music. I told: “Hell no… I listen to Sinatra.” A couple of days later he gave me an embossed, autographed, and numbered album of “A Man and His Music” with a: “Here asshole.” I never saw him drink anything but Iced Tea or V8 Juice even at the floor shows I attended at the Sahara. He was off-the-wall funny.

I was living in the gated community of the International Country Club and one early November day there was a knock on the door. It was the Clark County undersheriff with an open warrant for burglary. Cost me $200 on a $2,000 bond and I was not able to find any specifics. A couple weeks later same thing and a couple weeks later when we were at the booking desk, I asked how long this was going to go on? He reached under the counter and brought up a stack of booking slips and said: “Until I run our of booking slips or you run out of bail money.” I moved back to Reno and never heard or saw Dean again.

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