The Real Thing

The table man chanted: "Here he goes for line bets . . . Pay the line . . . Shooting ten, ten's the point . . . No roll, no roll." One of the bettors crowding around the Capri Club dice table was a tall, dark-haired man named Donald Loughnane, who was in the midst of a three-month tour of the illegal gambling joints and after-hours drinking places in and around Omaha, Neb. But Loughnane was no playboy. He was a reporter-announcer for Omaha's station KOWH, and his method of reporting seemed straight out of Dick Tracy: hidden in his wristwatch was a tiny, German-made microphone, from which a wire led up Reporter Loughnane's sleeve to a recorder strapped to his shoulder.

In a recorded show called Omaha After Dark, Loughnane and Station Manager Todd Storz aired some of the gleanings of the remarkable wristwatch, brought to listeners the actual click of illegal dice, the clink of ice in illegal highballs, and the voices of illegal nightclub owners and employees. One waitress was heard to reassure Loughnane that her place had not been raided in more than a year; an owner answered a question about gambling by saying: "Sure, downstairs. Just go on down. You know everybody down there."

Omaha reacted to the broadcast with a flood of indignant, civic-minded letters and phone calls. (There were also three threatening messages to Loughnane, which encouraged him to leave town for a brief vacation.) Local officials were embarrassed. Omaha's mayor, Glenn Cunningham, took to the air himself to insist that "Omaha is so clean you could eat off it as you would a tablecloth." But though public protests continued, by last week the gambling joints were still going full blast.

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