​Silver, Sagebrush, and Sin City:

Ted Binion, the Montana Ranch, and the Making of a Las Vegas Tragedy

The Ranch at Jordan: Roots in Eastern Montana

In the sprawling cattle country of Garfield County, Montana, roughly seventy miles north of Miles City, a large spread of high-plains grassland bore the Binion name for nearly half a century. The patriarch behind that holding was Lester Ben “Benny” Binion, a Dallas-born gambling operator who relocated to Las Vegas in 1946 after his illegal numbers empire in Texas drew the attention of federal tax authorities. Benny Binion opened the Horseshoe Casino in downtown Las Vegas in 1951 and, as his Nevada fortunes grew, he invested heavily in Montana land. According to Bureau of Land Management records cited by the Billings Gazette, the ranch outside Jordan eventually encompassed roughly 90,000 deeded acres with access to several hundred thousand additional acres of state and federal lease land, making it one of the larger private ranches in eastern Montana. The Montana Pioneer reported the final tally at approximately 85,000 acres, a spread of roughly six miles by six miles of mixed-grass prairie and badland breaks typical of Garfield County.

Benny Binion’s attachment to Montana was not purely financial. The Montana Pioneer described his arrival in Jordan as a studied retreat from the neon and pressure of Las Vegas into a world of horses, cattle, and what he considered honest labor. He trailed horses and cattle more than 200 miles overland from Hardin to Jordan in the early 1950s, establishing the ranch’s working character from the start. The ranch supplied beef cattle and, critically for the Horseshoe’s brand identity, the steaks served on the casino floor. The Las Vegas Review-Journal noted that the availability of Montana beef gave the Horseshoe a competitive edge in feeding patrons cheaply and well, reinforcing Benny’s philosophy of treating everyday gamblers like high rollers.

Into this landscape Benny brought his children during the summer months. His son Lonnie Theodore Binion, born November 28, 1943, in Dallas, spent his formative summers working among the ranch hands outside Jordan. The Texas Monthly, in a lengthy profile of the Binion family, described Ted as a younger version of his father in sensibility and appearance: he wore boots and cowboy hats, drove pickup trucks, carried a pistol in his waistband, and read American and Western history with intensity. The ranch was not incidental to Ted Binion’s identity; it was central to it. The Texas Monthly account noted that when Ted’s sister Brenda used her power as executrix of their mother’s estate to sell the ranch property in 1997, Ted was, in the words of those close to him, nearly inconsolable. The sale of that Montana land, coinciding with the revocation of his Nevada gaming license, marked the beginning of a final, accelerating decline.

Ted Binion and the Horseshoe: Three Decades on the Casino Floor

Ted Binion’s adult professional life was inseparable from the Horseshoe. When Benny regained full control of the casino in 1964 after selling a majority share to cover legal costs stemming from his 1953 federal tax conviction, his sons Jack and Ted assumed formal operational roles. Jack became president; Ted, then twenty-one, became casino manager. For thirty years Ted Binion was a fixture on the casino floor during peak evening hours, known to dealers, regulars, and high-stakes players alike. The Las Vegas Review-Journal, surveying the Binion family’s seven decades in Nevada, described Ted as a natural with customers and games, praised by his sister Becky Behnen as instinctively skilled at managing the casino environment.

But the same years that built Ted Binion’s reputation at the Horseshoe also produced a record of drug involvement and association with organized crime that would ultimately destroy his professional standing. By 1986 he had been arrested on drug trafficking charges and had drawn scrutiny from the Nevada Gaming Control Board for his friendship with Herbert “Fat Herbie” Blitzstein, a Chicago-connected organized crime figure. The Nevada Gaming Control Board provisionally banned Binion from any management role at the Horseshoe in 1996 and ordered regular drug testing. After he violated the testing agreement, his gaming license was suspended in May 1997. Ten months later, following disclosure of the depth of his relationship with Blitzstein, the board voted unanimously to revoke his license permanently. The revocation, together with the sale of the Montana ranch, removed the two anchors of Ted Binion’s existence in a span of roughly twelve months.

The Montana Connection: Rick Tabish of Missoula

It was Ted Binion’s emotional attachment to Montana that created the connection most consequential to his death. In early 1998 Binion met Richard “Rick” Tabish at a restaurant bathroom in Las Vegas. The Montana Kaimin, a student publication of the University of Montana, published a detailed account of the encounter: Tabish, a contractor from Missoula, introduced himself and mentioned his Montana origins, which immediately caught Binion’s attention. Binion spoke often and warmly about the Jordan ranch. The two men began a close association in the months that followed.

Rick Tabish had been born on March 15, 1965, in Missoula, to a family of means. His father Frank Tabish owned and operated a petroleum distribution company and was described by multiple sources, including the Crime Library account compiled by true crime author Gary C. King, as one of Missoula’s wealthier businessmen. Rick Tabish attended Big Sky High School in Missoula and enrolled briefly at the University of Montana before dropping out. His early adult years were marked by arrests for driving under the influence and fighting, and at age twenty he was charged with stealing a seventeenth-century painting from a prominent Missoula attorney, a crime for which he received a suspended sentence after returning the work. In the mid-1990s Tabish relocated to Las Vegas, extending his Montana-based transportation company, MRT Transportation, into Nevada contracting work. He left his wife Mary Jo and their two children in Missoula, intending to establish himself in Nevada and send for them later; the family remained in Montana for the duration of his time in Las Vegas.

When Tabish met Binion, he entered an inner circle already defined by eccentricity and danger. Binion, by 1998, was no longer the casino executive of the Horseshoe. He had been stripped of his gaming license, was using heroin heavily alongside Xanax, and was living in a large home on Palomino Lane with his girlfriend Sandy Murphy, a former California woman he had met at a Las Vegas topless club in 1995. According to the Montana Kaimin’s account drawing on trial testimony, Binion and Tabish shared cowboy stories and talked business; Binion hired Tabish for hauling and construction jobs. The most significant of those jobs was the construction and burial of an underground silver vault in Pahrump, Nevada, in July 1998. Binion had accumulated a large collection of silver bars, rare coins, and bullion – known subsequently as the Binion Hoard – that he had kept partially within the Horseshoe and at his properties. Concerned about security and about the disposition of the silver after his death, he directed Tabish to build a twelve-foot underground vault on land he owned in Pahrump. The Las Vegas Sun reported that Tabish hauled approximately 48,000 pounds of silver from Las Vegas to Pahrump for burial in the vault.

Death and Its Aftermath: A Nevada Case with Montana Threads

On September 17, 1998, Ted Binion was found dead on a small mattress on the floor of his home at 2408 Palomino Lane in Las Vegas. He was fifty-four years old. His stomach contained heroin. The Clark County Coroner initially attributed death to a heroin and Xanax overdose, but the manner of ingestion struck Las Vegas homicide investigators as inconsistent with self-administration. The coroner’s office subsequently reclassified the death a homicide. Law enforcement sources cited evidence that the scene had been staged and pointed to witness statements implicating Murphy and Tabish, who had been conducting a covert affair.

Thirty-four hours after Binion’s body was discovered, authorities in Pahrump caught Tabish and two other men – including David Mattsen, a former manager of the Binion ranch in Montana – in the act of excavating the underground vault in the middle of the night. The Las Vegas Sun, covering the arrest contemporaneously, reported that Tabish told officers he had been instructed by Binion before his death to remove and secure the silver if anything happened to him; investigators believed he was stealing it. Tabish and Murphy were charged with murder, grand larceny, and conspiracy.

The Montana connections did not end with Tabish’s arrest. A key prosecution witness was Kurt Gratzer, an Army veteran from Missoula who had known Tabish since childhood. In a sworn affidavit obtained by the Las Vegas Sun, Clark County Homicide Detective James Buczek recounted that Gratzer told detectives Tabish had solicited him to murder Binion in late August or early September of 1998. Gratzer described Tabish proposing multiple methods of killing Binion, including forcing a lethal mixture of heroin and Xanax down his throat with a tube. Gratzer, who received immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony, told detectives he had informed a Missoula acquaintance, Timothy Boileau, of the murder scheme prior to Binion’s death. Another Texas Monthly account drew on prosecution documents to describe how Tabish had also contacted Gratzer about enlisting a sniper and discussed other disposal methods. These Montana-based witnesses and their testimony became central to the prosecution’s case at trial.

Murphy and Tabish were convicted of murder in 2000. The Nevada Supreme Court granted a new trial, and in November 2004 a second jury acquitted both defendants on the murder charges while convicting them again on the silver theft. The Missoulian, covering Tabish’s eventual parole proceedings, noted that the silver heist alone involved removing approximately 46,000 pounds of silver from the vault, a large-scale undertaking that required significant equipment and coordination. Tabish was released on parole in 2010 and returned to Missoula, where he eventually established a cryptocurrency mining business.

The Ranch After Binion: Dissolution of a Montana Legacy

The Jordan ranch that had shaped Ted Binion’s character and provided the emotional through-line of his relationship with Tabish did not survive the legal and financial wreckage of the family’s final years. According to county recorder records cited in the Wikipedia entry on Ted Binion, Benny had expanded his holdings to 85,000 acres by the 1980s, with the last parcel purchased in 1985. The Binion family sold all of the Jordan parcels to John Hillenbrand in April 1998, months before Ted’s death. The Montana Pioneer reported that the family was compelled to sell in order to satisfy estate tax obligations. The Billings Gazette, writing in the aftermath of a large wildfire complex near Jordan in 2017, noted that the former Binion ranch land had reverted to the Department of the Interior and discussed the possibility of allowing neighboring ranchers to use the CMR National Wildlife Refuge for emergency grazing, underscoring how thoroughly the Binion name had receded from Garfield County’s working landscape.

The UNLV Special Collections and Archives holds audiovisual footage of the ranch at Jordan from the Production Company Audiovisual Collection (MS-00930), dating to the period roughly between 1965 and 1995, which documents the ranch’s physical structures, horses in corrals, and the working character of the property. This footage, transferred to UNLV by the estate of Thomas “Bob” Patrick, provides one of the few visual records of the Montana operation that shaped both Benny and Ted Binion’s self-presentation.

Conclusion: What Montana Meant

The Montana dimension of Ted Binion’s biography is not a footnote to the Las Vegas murder case that made his name nationally known. It was structural. The Garfield County ranch shaped his identity, his values, and the manner in which he presented himself to the world: the boots, the trucks, the indifference to formal wealth’s trappings, the genuine attachment to horses and open land documented by those who knew him well. It was the shared Montana sensibility, invoked in a restaurant bathroom, that opened the door for Rick Tabish to enter Binion’s life and ultimately to play a central role in the events surrounding his death. The ranch’s sale in 1997, forced by family conflict, removed from Ted Binion the one thing that had remained constant through decades of legal trouble, addiction, and professional ruin. The Montana land was not simply property. For Ted Binion, it appears to have been the organizing principle of a life otherwise defined by disorder, and its loss preceded his death by less than a year.

Works Cited

Binion Ranch (in Garfield County, MT). Montana Hometown Locator, HTL, Inc., https://montana.hometownlocator.com/maps/feature-map,ftc,2,fid,768865,n,binion%20ranch.cfm. Accessed 29 Mar. 2025.

Binion’s Ranch in Jordan, Montana. The Production Company Audiovisual Collection, MS-00930. Special Collections and Archives, University Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. http://n2t.net/ark:/62930/d13r0vb9j. Accessed 29 Mar. 2025.

Buczek, James. Sworn Affidavit, Clark County Homicide Division. Summarized in: “Childhood Friend: Tabish Wanted Him to Kill Binion.” Las Vegas Sun, 25 June 1999, https://lasvegassun.com/news/1999/jun/25/childhood-friend-tabish-wanted-him-to-kill-binion/. Accessed 29 Mar. 2025.

“Binion Family Made Their Mark over 70-Year History in Las Vegas.” Las Vegas Review-Journal, 15 Sept. 2018, https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-las-vegas/binion-family-made-their-mark-over-70-year-history-in-las-vegas/. Accessed 29 Mar. 2025.

“Binion’s Estate Wants to Sell Silver Fortune.” Las Vegas Sun, 14 Dec. 1999, https://lasvegassun.com/news/1999/dec/14/binions-estate-wants-to-sell-silver-fortune/. Accessed 29 Mar. 2025.

“Benny Binion Made Montana His Home.” Montana Pioneer, 13 July 2015, https://montanapioneer.com/benny-binion-made-montana-his-home/. Accessed 29 Mar. 2025.

“Burned Out Montana Ranchers Hope to Graze Their Cattle on Wildlife Refuge.” Billings Gazette, 28 July 2017, https://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/govt-and-politics/burned-out-montana-ranchers-hope-to-graze-their-cattle-on-wildlife-refuge/article_443a1d4f-674c-54b3-9294-dc5bc789c0bc.html. Accessed 29 Mar. 2025.

Davison, Phil. “A Life Lost in Sin City.” Montana Kaimin, University of Montana, 28 Jan. 2011, https://www.montanakaimin.com/features/a-life-lost-in-sin-city/article_f1aafc41-dcb3-575c-b4ee-6c54b94635f6.html. Accessed 29 Mar. 2025.

King, Gary C. “Rick.” The Mysterious Death of Casino Scion Ted Binion. Crime Library / TruTV, https://www.crimelibrary.org/notorious_murders/famous/binion/rick_6.html. Accessed 29 Mar. 2025.

Moreno, Richard. “Rick Tabish Puts Ted Binion Case Behind Him with New Business Deal.” Pahrump Valley Times, 4 Feb. 2022, https://pvtimes.com/news/rick-tabish-from-prison-to-a-1-9b-data-deal-108257/. Accessed 29 Mar. 2025.

Reinhold, Margaret. “Updated: Missoula’s Rick Tabish Wins Parole from Nevada Prison, Wants to Move Back Home.” Missoulian, https://missoulian.com/news/state-and-regional/updated-missoula-s-rick-tabish-wins-parole-from-nevada-prison/article_d1078f8e-0c67-11df-b081-001cc4c03286.html. Accessed 29 Mar. 2025.

Sherrill, Robert. “Forget the Sopranos. Meet the Binions.” Texas Monthly, https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/forget-the-sopranos-meet-the-binions/. Accessed 29 Mar. 2025.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​