The Daily Inter Lake
Two strangers walked into Whitefish’s Cowboy Cabin late on the morning of Jan. 31, 2007.
“Cowboy Ron” Turner stood behind the big brown wood counter, which looks like the bar in a Wild West saloon. The Cowboy Cabin is actually an upscale Old West antique shop. Turner, dressed in his Western gear, wore a big cowboy hat and had a full snow-white beard. He looks like Western actor Keenan Wynn, but doesn’t sound like him.
“Howdy, partners. Welcome to the Wild Wild West. Nice to have you here,” Turner told the strangers.
They didn’t answer, just walked past him and spied out the 4,000 sq. ft. shop filled with Old West history. Ron went after them and repeated himself, “Welcome!”
“We’ll see if you can still say that after you see who we are,” Turner quoted one agent saying.
That is when the strangers flashed their badges into the face of Cowboy Ron, 3 inches from his eyes, and said, “We are the law in Montana. We are with the Department of Justice’s Gambling Investigation Division, to be exact, and you have broken the law.”
The agents said it is against the law to have gambling devices, and they were going to confiscate all he had.
Cowboy Ron remembered thinking, do these guys know that these items are genuine historical Old West antiques? So he politely stated that they should realize these items are antiques from the Old West period.
To which one of them replied, “I don’t care if they are from the days of Jesus Christ, they are illegal and you are going to go to jail for 10 years for each of the 10 items we see right here.”
Ron remembered thinking, am I really in Montana or Soviet Russia?
They repeated that he would also be fined $50,000 for each of the 10 items.
“I couldn’t believe what was happening,” Ron said, and even considered that it was some kind of joke.
Until they began to pick up several Old West gambling items from the floor of Cowboy Cabin, laughing and saying, “This is illegal as hell.”
They took two 19th century roulette wheels, two early 20th century punchboards, and a chuck-a-luck. A chuck-a-luck is a small hourglass-shaped cage that spins with three dice inside. One roulette wheel and its table dates to the 1880s. It was used in the saloon on the CBS television series “Gunsmoke.”
One of the old punchboards was framed behind glass just for display in someone’s recreation room. If you ever were lucky at winning on a punchboard, the owner of the business would give a prize like 5 cents, a candy bar, or one cigarette.
The agents marked as evidence and left a huge craps table, a blackjack table, a roulette table, and a smallish craps tabletop, all 19th century items, to be picked up later. The blackjack table is a half-circle table with green felt on top and no markings, which the Turners thought eventually would be bought as a bar for a recreation room.
All the remaining gambling gear has been moved into storage in the back, except for the huge, almost unmovable craps table. The agents ordered Ron and his wife, Eila, to cover the big craps table with furs.
The Turners recently moved from San Juan Capistrano, Calif., to Whitefish to be with their daughter and son-in-law, Alisha and Clint Walker. The Turners are longtime Old West antique dealers who owned their Western antique store for 18 years before opening the Cowboy Cabin just a few days before Christmas / December in the old closed-down Dire Wolf Restaurant / bar in northern Whitefish.
We, the reporters, were told that the two state agents were just routinely checking up on businesses and decided to see what had gone into the old tavern, said Gene Huntington, administrator of the state’s Gambling Investigation Division.
However, the Turners said the agents immediately walked to the back of the store’s display area where the gambling tables and equipment were located. A third agent showed up 45 minutes later.
The agents told the Turners that having unlicensed gambling equipment is against the law in Montana and that the stuff would be confiscated.
Ron Turner said, “Some of these things are over 140 years old. These are not gambling devices. These are historical Old West antiques. There are Old West gambling collectors who search these type of high-end items. It’s a historical collection. Our shop is not a gambling operation. It never has been nor would ever be a gambling enterprise.”
Gambling equipment, about 10 items in all, appeared to make up a tiny fraction of the Cowboy Cabin’s rustic-looking inventory. It has hundreds of Old West cavalry and Indians items. There are oil paintings, saddles, Colts and Winchesters, lots of guns and holsters and log furniture, a huge number of Western movie posters, old-time photos, and a huge 19th century bar with a painting of a reclining woman, of likely easy virtue, hanging behind the bar.
Arguments flew back and forth: historical antiques versus illegal gambling equipment. Ron Turner contended that the equipment is too old, battered, and expensive to be used viably for gambling.
As they argued, Eila Turner began to cry.
“I was in a state of shock,” she said.
Ron phoned his son-in-law, Clint Walker, for advice. Walker called the Whitefish police to ask that officers check up on the state agents to make sure they were genuine and not con artists.
Two Whitefish officers showed up at the Cowboy Cabin, asking the agents to verify their identities. One agent got mad and yelled at the police officers, who remained calm, Turner said.
Whitefish Assistant Police Chief Mike Ferda verified that one state agent was rude and “went a little over the top to our officers.”
After checking the state agents’ identities, the Whitefish officers had to back off.
The Turners said they did not realize, nor had they ever heard of such a thing anywhere they had set up at antique Western shows in just about every western state there is, that just possessing certain gambling equipment, according to the agents, was illegal in Montana.
Ron said, “We have had a shop for 18 years with numerous law enforcement, even chiefs of police departments everywhere, who are our customers, and no one has ever even for a minute said anything we did or sold was illegal.”
The state agents told them that ignorance of the law is not a defense.
Ron said he thought to himself, how come there are no charges, no paperwork, nothing, just taking $100,000 worth of antiques out the door without even a warrant to come into our shop and scare all the customers out the door?
They said when Ron asked, “It doesn’t seem right that you can do this without any warrant or anything,” one agent sarcastically said, “Welcome to Montana.”
The agents did note that a rifle rack, two spurs nailed to a backboard painted to look like a roulette table, might also be confiscated, the Turners said.
