A crook would be about as much at home in Bradley’s as an icicle would be in the crater of Mt. Vesuvius.
All things considered, it is probably the only gambling house in the United States whose closing would be a calamity to the community.
Bradley’s is a club. In order to be made a member, one must be introduced by a member. It is one of the few existing clubs which has no initiation fees and no dues; but for all that, the members usually spend all they have in their clothes every time they go in for an evening of good fellowship and club life; so it isn’t as inexpensive as it sounds.
Anybody in Palm Beach, from the wheel-chair boys to the policemen, can supply the inquirer with all the standard Beach Club stories, usually starting with the one about the man who lost six thousand dollars in one evening and left Palm Beach hurriedly the next morning. A few hours later, one of the Bradley brothers was visited by a young woman who was obviously in great distress. Her eyes were red and swollen and she was sobbing convulsively. She explained that her husband had lost six thousand dollars the night before, that the money didn’t belong to him and that unless she could get the money back for him, he would have to go to prison. So Bradley gave back the six thousand dollars after telling the young woman to tell her husband never again to set foot in the Beach Club. A few days afterward the same man turned up in the Beach Club and began to play. Bradley summoned him to his office and asked him how he dared to do such a thing after his losses had been returned to his wife. “What do you mean?” asked the man, “I’m not married.”
“Then you didn’t leave town because you were ruined?” asked Bradley.
“You bet I didn’t!” said the man. “I went down to Long Key fishing with my business partner, who came down here with me.”
A woman in an adjoining room had heard the two men talking before their departure, and had cashed in on the conversation.
Then there is the story about the wife who used to extract uncashed chips from her husband’s clothes whenever he played at Bradley’s, and who cashed them in for twenty-five thousand dollars without her husband knowing that he had lost anything. And the one about the gentleman who cleaned up seventy thousand dollars in one week.
It is not at all unusual to see one of the big steel men or oil men placing five hundred dollars in chips on the board at each turn of the wheel, and dropping fifteen or twenty thousand dollars in half an hour.