A wild ride: Pulitzer nominee Doug Swanson joins Pitt’s faculty

Infamous Vegas mobster Benny Binion was the kind of criminal you only see in the movies — two murders, gambling rings, fatal feuds with rivals.

But until new Pitt English professor Doug Swanson came along, the mobster’s story went largely untold. Swanson published the story of the “doughy rural-route cherub” in 2014, describing Binion as an angel, “at least until he decided he wanted somebody dead, which had happened with some frequency.” “Blood Aces: The Wild Ride of Benny Binion, the Texas Gangster Who Created Vegas Poker” does what all good journalism should: differentiates fact from fiction and rumor from reality while documenting the life of a man largely shrouded in mystery.

It was this came intensity in writing — digging for truth, characterizing the nature of crime — that garnered a Pulitzer Prize nomination for Swanson in 1981, years before he would begin writing about Binion.

Swanson received a nomination for his work covering local crime for the Dallas Times Herald in the early ‘80s but lost the Pulitzer twice in the same year. The initial winner of the 1981 Pulitzer was The Washington Post’s Janet Cooke. But Cooke had to return the prize for fabricating a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict, so the Village Voice’s Teresa Carpenter won for her local crime coverage.

“I like to tell people I’m a two-time Pulitzer loser,” Swanson joked.

Despite not having a journalism program — opting instead for the more creatively inclined “non-fiction writing” track — Swanson joins a growing number of writing professors at Pitt with journalistic bylines in major publications. Recently, Pitt’s welcomed Michael Meyer, who’s been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Time. The University has also recruited Jeanne Marie Laskas, who’s written for The Washington Post Magazine and GQ and reported the story featured in the award winning 2015 movie “Concussion.”

Like several professors who have moved to Pittsburgh from places as far as China, the city is a new beast to Swanson — even if teaching isn’t. Swanson taught for three years at the University of North Texas in Denton and completed a one-year teaching partnership at the University of Texas at Austin. Before working as a professor, he wrote for the Dallas Times Herald until it closed, then moved to the Dallas Morning News, where he worked as an investigative reporter for 35 years. His stories ranged from profiles of open carry practitioners in Texas to investigations into juvenile detention abuse.

After his 1981 Pulitzer nomination, Swanson picked up a new side job: novel writing. “Big Town,” the story of a disenfranchised lawyer, came out in 1994. Though he was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best New Novel, the work never received the same acclaim as his reporting. Four other novels on the same character came out shortly after.

But Swanson, who’s mild-mannered with a dry sense of humor, is more interested in talking about his most recent passion: nonfiction books.

“Texans like to read about Texas,” he said.

Texans also like to talk about Texans, and the native they talked a lot about was Benny Binion. A man with everything to lose, he was an early 1900s Texas gangster who broke the law to get what he needed. Swanson emphasizes that Binion was not a criminal who happened to be a businessman but the opposite.

“I heard about [Binion] for many years,” Swanson said. “I did some research and realized there had not been a full biography written about him, which was a happy surprise … I sort of stumbled upon it.”

Binion created the Westerner Gambling House and Saloon in 1951 and founded the World Series of Poker 1971, which spurred poker’s popularity across the world. He also evaded taxes and murdered when it furthered his business. Despite this, he was such a beloved and generous civic figure in Las Vegas that the city raised statues in his honor. Known for selling $2 gourmet steaks and being connected to a family known for donating to city government, among other charitable acts, Binion became a well-loved man in Vegas.

“There were 18,000 people at his birthday party. He was the greatest friend you could ever have — and the worst enemy,” Swanson said.

It took Swanson two years of thorough research to complete the 309-page book. As an investigative journalist, Swanson knew what research to do. But he wasn’t expecting just how much pushing he would need to dig up some information — it took about a year just to receive Binion’s prison records from the United States Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. His patience and work paid off, though, and he found out more about Binion than anyone ever had. Even after the book, Swanson kept uncovering details of Binion’s storied past.

“People kept coming to me with stories [after the book was published], like a woman who played with Binion’s child,” Swanson said. “She told me when Binion lived in Dallas, his house had underground escape routes in case any enemies came up to kill the family.”

The research uncovered deeply buried facts, including memos to the attorney general showing President Harry Truman’s involvement in pursuing Binion on tax evasion.
For his work, Swanson received attention from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, which described the book as a “slam-bang thrill ride” about a man not well known outside of Texas.

Following the release of the book, Swanson’s wife Susan Rogers — also a former journalist — received an offer to become Pitt’s vice chancellor of communications. Previously, she was vice president for university advancement at the University of Texas. Swanson also received an offer for a part-time teaching job. Rogers and Swanson packed up their belongings and moved into a historic, leaky home 10 minutes from campus.

Swanson’s fifth floor Cathedral office is plain. His desk isn’t cluttered with papers, and no pictures of his wife Rogers or his two children hang on the off-white walls. He hasn’t had much of a chance to make the space his own since he arrived in Pittsburgh this July, but he’s spent plenty of time exploring.

“There’s a lot of parts of the city to look into and explore. That’s what I like about here. So far it’s great … Though if you’re not used to this, it can seem claustrophobic with the hills and the trees,” he said. Even the weather doesn’t bother him yet.

Swanson’s favorite part of Pittsburgh is its architecture. Dallas tears down and makes new buildings when they get too old. Pittsburgh preserves them. Even in the South Side Slopes, where small brick buildings intersperse between trees above the hills, Swanson was amazed.

“It was like [a] small West Virginia coal town,” he said. “It was such a startling sight.”  

Swanson is now working on a book on the history of the Texas Rangers Division, as well as starting an investigative journalism class at Pitt. As the future unfolds for Swanson, he can’t help but look at the past, whether through his books or his visits to Texas. He says the cliché of the West is that most think it’s still a frontier.

In Pittsburgh, a town where history seeps out from a landscape littered with decrepit steel mills and buildings faded by years of stale air, Swanson said he’s noticed something different about the atmosphere. Maybe unfolding Pittsburgh’s past requires a little less digging.

“Pittsburgh has reinvented itself, though there’s a sense that it’s an old place too. You don’t get that in the West.”