The Rex Club: a gambling-ship name comes to Fremont Street

A new casino inside an older hotel

The Apache Hotel opened in 1932 with lodging, food service, gambling, and basement entertainment space. The later Rex occupied street-level premises commonly identified as 128 Fremont Street, near Second Street.

Other records use 124 Fremont or the broader Apache address for parts of the same property. These differences reflect a building with multiple commercial spaces and should not automatically be read as several separate Rex casinos.

Before the Rex, the building had already housed Apache, Western, and New Western casino phases. That established location gave a new operator access to downtown foot traffic and hotel surroundings without constructing a resort from the ground up.

Why the S.S. Rex name mattered

Tony Cornero had operated the offshore S.S. Rex in Southern California. Bringing its name to Las Vegas linked a new land-based casino with an already familiar gambling identity.

The branding can create a serious historical confusion. The ship’s large gaming inventory, passenger capacity, and chip issues belong to the vessel. They are not evidence for the number of tables, machines, or customers in the much smaller Fremont Street room.

The Nevada Historical Society account places planning and licensing negotiations in late 1944, while the specialist operating chronology dates the S.S. Rex Club opening to March 3, 1945. Those dates concern different steps in establishing the business rather than necessarily contradicting one another.

The city asks who is really in control

The casino was in a building associated with P. O. Silvagni. When his application came before the city commission in 1944, officials questioned who would run the room and initially rejected it by a three-to-two vote, according to the Nevada Historical Society reconstruction.

Two weeks later the application was approved after Silvagni reassured commissioners. The controversy did not end there. Later accusations that he was still cooperating with Cornero placed the license under renewed pressure and helped drive changes in the operating arrangement.

Nevada’s 1945 gaming legislation also required applicants to identify direct and indirect interests in a gambling business. The regulatory concern therefore extended beyond the person publicly named on a license to the financial and operating relationships behind it.

Those disputes do not prove that every person mentioned by suspicious officials held a hidden share. In particular, references to Bugsy Siegel or alleged gunplay should not become an invented ownership percentage or a specific shooting unsupported by the surviving records.

Several operators in little more than a year

The Fuller Index chronology reproduced in specialist research places Cornero and associates in the first S.S. Rex phase from March to June 1945, followed by Silvagni and then Guy McAfee. McAfee’s phase runs from July 1945 into February 1946.

In February 1946 the name appears as Rex Club under Dr. Bernstein, whose first name varies between accounts. By May, Moe Sedway was publicly associated with management, and the Rex name ended around June.

A September 1945 directory advertisement reported in a collectors’ history describes a Frontier Club ownership or management connection and supervision by Ted Shorie. This illustrates the difficulty of treating each public name as a simple, exclusive transfer of the whole property.

The broad sequence is clear even while exact legal interests remain unresolved: this was a rapidly changing casino operating under official scrutiny. The building remained in place as leases, managers, licenses, and signs changed around it.

Matchbooks, payroll, and separate chip issues

A Rex Club matchbook recorded in specialist literature preserves the Bernstein and Sedway associations. Small advertising objects can be especially useful for a casino that existed under a particular name for only a few months.

Collector indexes distinguish a land-based S.S. Rex issue, N0668, from a Rex Club issue, N2051, at the Fremont address. Reported examples of the latter appear in several colors, but those colors do not establish denominations or manufacturers without inspected markings and supporting documentation.

A reproduced May 1945 payroll record identifies Israel Alderman in a pit-man entry at twenty-five dollars a night. The record is evidence of an accounting entry and role; it does not prove every detail of daily attendance or the broader stories later attached to the employee.

The earlier Apache Casino chip order and the offshore S.S. Rex’s chips remain separate material. Sharing a building or a name does not make an object interchangeable with a Rex Club issue.

From Rex to Eldorado and Horseshoe

The short Rex Club phase ended around June 1946. The Eldorado Club followed at the property in 1947, with Clover and Horseshoe/Binion’s phases later continuing the address’s gambling history.

That continuity is physical more than corporate. A visitor may encounter one building frontage while the history behind it contains a succession of owners, tenants, and gaming businesses. The Rex belongs in that sequence as a distinct postwar episode.

Its legacy is the view it provides of an unsettled industry becoming more closely regulated. The famous names attract attention, but the deeper story concerns control: who owned the building, who financed the room, who managed the games, and what the licensing authorities could establish.