"Illegal Of The Day????" That might be stretching the term a little.
A member of our team found the CWM chips and sent them to us. In past IOTD's we have seen chips tied to big time sports stars, The "Crime Of The Century," US senators, a President, and Congressmen.

IMO, this tie to one of the biggest crimes ever in the USA tops all past documented connections.
The assassination of John F Kennedy.

Enter Ed Hertel:

C.W. Murchison
Dallas, TX
1933

They say everything is bigger in Texas, and that includes chip histories – even those without an illegal gambling tie.

Clint W. Murchison, Senior, was born in 1895 in Tyler, Texas, to humble beginnings. He spent his youth in the small town trapping skunks and raccoons for fun, while working odd jobs. Never one for college, he dropped out after two months and starting working as a teller in the local bank while awaiting the next big thing. It was around this time that the oil industry starting gaining momentum and Clint moved into trading oil leases and eventually to drilling his own wells. By the age of 30 he sold his oil wells for $5 million and expanded into a conglomerate of different businesses including insurance, publishing, manufacturing and energy. The Southern Union pipeline company would be his largest, and exceedingly most profitable, venture that would outlive both he and his son and would eventually be sold for billions.

By the time the chips were ordered in 1933, Clint was a mover and shaker in the business world and was no stranger to hosting the rich and powerful in both industry and politics. It is fun to imagine whom among his friends and associates might have used the chips in a friendly poker game. We tend to think of personal chips was something less than those used in clubs and casinos, but these chips have the potential to represent enormous amounts of money. It boggles the mind to think what the non-denominational chips might have been worth in a game between the richest men in America.

More tantalizing, perhaps, is how these chips might have been associated in one of this country’s most tragic events. Thirty years after the chips were ordered for Clint Murchison Sr, he would host a party at his Dallas mansion for some of this country’s most powerful men – including Vice President Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon. These men, as well as other conservative oil tycoons, met behind closed doors for part of the evening (did they maybe play some poker?). Among the guests that night was Madeleine Brown, self-proclaimed mistress to Lyndon Johnson. According to her, Johnson came out of the meeting and exclaimed, “After tomorrow, those goddamn Kennedys will never embarrass me again. That’s no threat. That’s a promise!” The next day, President Kennedy would be assassinated on the streets of Dallas.

As with so many JFK conspiracy details, this one is impossible to prove. The fact that it still continues to be cited does show that it is at least conceivable that Murchison could have hosted such a party.

As Clint Murchison moved into his 70s, his health declined rapidly and most of his business interests were handed down to his son Clint Murchison, Junior. Finally, in 1969, after years of struggling with illness, Clint Sr. passed away leaving a fortune estimated at $500 million.

As the torch passed to the next generation, it was clear that Junior was made of different stuff than his namesake. His father had grown his empire using wit and sound business skills, where Junior partook in questionable deals and big gambles. Risky real-estate ventures and dubious trading in energy schemes quickly eroded his fortune.

Not all of these gambles were failures however. In 1960 he purchased a license and created a team to play in the struggling National Football League, calling them the Dallas Cowboys. I didn’t research to see if this venture ever took off…

(Picture of Clint Murchison Jr with some guy named Tom Landry…)

By the mid-1980s the legacy and fortune that Clint Murchison Senior had built was gone, leading to one of the biggest bankruptcy cases in history. Liabilities from creditors were filed against the Murchison estate to the tune of $500 million – a billion dollar swing from the heydays of Clint Senior. Clint Junior would not live to see the case resolved, passing away in 1987.

If only those “CWM” could talk, what a story they would tell…

My Note: I guess everyone remembers where they were on November 22, 1963.
I was 21 years old. I had moved my wife and newly born daughter to La Habra, CA a few months prior. I was working in a gas station, doing a brake job on a car. The Radio in the grease pit was on. Everything stopped. The lot out front filled up with cars that just pulled over. It looked like a used car lot.

We packed up a few months later and went back to KY. I missed the poker games. Should have stopped in Dallas and see if I could have gotten an invite to one of CWM's games.