It’s a simple red door nestled between a head shop and a pizza joint, but through it have passed poker-playing legends, professional cowboys, pistol-packing robbers and anger-fueled law enforcement agents.
Today the two-story, red brick building houses Elan Make Up Studio and The Girl’s Room, an aerobics studio. But the red steel door, complete with security camera and door buzzer, are remnants of an old poker club that ran games from 1969 until the mid-1980s.
Twenty-five years ago, 1921 ½ Greenville housed the AMVETS Club, a card house that hid behind the name of a charity serving American veterans. The club boasted some of poker’s biggest players, many who went on to win World Series of Poker accolades.
In the 1960s, gamblers traveled the state seeking out action. Bob Hooks, 80, is a lifelong poker player who opened the AMVETS Post No. 4 in 1969 to host a regular Dallas game. The operation was illegal, but operators chartered their club under the AMVETS ruse. The game’s rake — generally 5 to 10 percent of the pot in each poker hand that goes to the house — covered charitable activities and “club expenses”, which were very much open to interpretation, according to Hooks.
Hooks, now living in Edgewood, Texas, ran the Dallas club for a year, but soon set out for Vegas. His friend and fellow Texan, Johnny Moss, who died in 1995, introduced Hooks to Benny Binion, who soon asked Hooks to manage the card room at Binion’s Horseshoe, the birthplace of the World Series of Poker.
After Hooks’ departure, the AMVETS attracted a new owner — Byron “Cowboy” Wolford, a Texas-born gambler and son of an oil roughneck. His flair on the felt and his good-natured personality helped make him a major name in poker throughout the ’70s and ’80s — his tournament career spanned four decades and $737,000 winnings in nine World Series of Poker cashes.
Wolford fixed up the club in the mid ’70s, spending thousands on new carpet, paint, and a bar and kitchen — that’s when the steel door and buzzer were installed for security. The room was like a big meeting hall with three or four tables running: one high-stakes no-limit game and a few lower-limit games.
“It wasn’t long before we had a hell of a no-limit holdem game going,” Wolford wrote in his memoir. “We also had two-limit holdem games going and boy, business was good!”
Poker Hall of Famer T.J. Cloutier was one of Wolford’s players. He won six World Series of Poker bracelets, $4.3 million in World Series of Poker winnings, $9.3 million in tournament winnings, and he finished second in the 1985 Main Event to Bill Smith, another AMVETS alumnus.
“I played there in the late ’70s and early ’80s. I was in Shreveport at the time, and I used to drive up from Shreveport to play in it,” Cloutier says. “All the top players in Texas came to this one. Everyone who drove in or flew into town came there to play. And there were big-time players.”
Wolford’s steel door and security camera did little to dissuade determined robbers, who hit the place one late morning in the 1970s.
“A lot of people came by to have lunch; we’d have it open (during the day). I was the cook there at the time,” says Diane Mason, a former cook and waitress there. “It had a lot of big poker players.”
A table or two was running, and other players were hanging out for lunch when Mason and her husband entered the club about 11 a.m. with the day’s meal.
“You have to come up a flight of stairs to get in,” she says. “You’re downstairs, seen on camera, and then you’re buzzed in. Well, the funny thing that day is we didn’t see anybody buzz us in. But we had all our groceries, and as soon as we came up to the top level, they put a gun right to my husband’s neck.”
Frozen with fear, they surveyed the scene. Three armed men had tied up 30 players and employees and were looking for cash.
“We were tied up about two-and-a-half hours on the floor. Everybody was face down, side by side,” Mason says. “We felt like it was the last day of our lives. We really thought they were going to kill us.”
Because of the club’s sketchy legal status, police weren’t notified. The amount stolen is unknown, but with players carrying thousands in cash, Mason believes it was quite a haul.
But AMVETS couldn’t avoid the law forever.
On July 21, 1980, Charlotte McCullogh recalls washing dishes during her first day on the job when she heard noises and shouting downstairs. Department of Public Safety and Alcoholic Beverage Commission agents were slamming a battering ram into the entrance, shattering glass and knocking the door loose. Seven agents entered with a search warrant and guns drawn. They were led upstairs through an iron-gate and heavy wooden door. Agents confiscated files and scoured through drawers. The raid led to 33 arrests and seizure of $70,000 in cash. No guns or drugs were found, and club members were incensed.
A few years after the shakedown, the club’s best days long past, it closed. Exactly when or why the club shut its doors is debatable. Perhaps it was the effects of the raid or an early ’80s recession and the drying up of high-stakes games. The World Series of Poker and legal games may have lured players to Las Vegas and gambling-friendly states, but the Dallas AMVETS club remains a heavyweight in poker history.
As neighborhood poker aficionados watch the November Nine (those nine out of 6,485 poker players who make it to the World Series of Poker Main Event in Vegas) on ESPN next month, they should feel a little closer to Sin City, knowing some of the game’s old-timers might have earned their poker-playing chops right behind that red door on Greenville Avenue.
