Have yet to see a photo of The Cow Shed, located at 2995 S. Virginia from 1931-1937. This location is now a strip mall but here is some interesting info on its proprietor.

Belle Livingstone, socialite and New York speakeasy owner during Prohibition, had a run-in with the Reno Mob when she opened The Cowshed on Virginia Street without their permission. Then unaware of their existence in town, she hadn’t anticipated any problems. She was wrong. She wrote:

“After all the years I had lived on the Continent, I should have remembered that in any gambling town there is always an underworld that runs everything — a clique that calls the shots in every racket, decides who may and who may not operate and under what terms, even elects public officials. This was as true in the Reno of the Thirties as anywhere else, except that in Reno the underworld was at the same time the uppercrust.”

As for those elite gangsters, she described them this way:

“At the time I was [in Reno], it was reputed that a certain financier, owner of seventeen banks in Nevada, was the real ruler of the little city, although Mayor Roberts sat in the chair; that the said financier and three partners formed a four-headed Octopus which strangled every business that didn’t pay money into their till; that no one could possibly operate without their sanction; and that to them every form of vice — from the dirty, painted girls in the red-light district to the flourishing hophouses — made obeisance.”

Whereas she didn’t name them, obviously the banker was Wingfield. Two of the partners she recalled undoubtedly were James “Jim/Cinch” McKay and William “Bill/Curly” Graham. The third partner might’ve been Justi or someone else.

Like Smith, Livingstone noted that the Mob didn’t verbalize their desires to intruders like her but, rather, sent their henchmen to send their message through violence. She wrote:

“The Octopus, moreover, had its own way of dealing with outsiders who tried to become insiders. This was the silence treatment, which might result in anything from a few days in the hospital to a few appropriate remarks to the mourners.”