THE FIRST MONTANA snow swirls across the broken yellow line like sand in a desert, dancing in the wind across the stretch of Highway 200 between Missoula and Bonner. A 2010 GMC Denali speeds down the slippery road five miles per hour over the speed limit.

Missoula's most notorious man reaches to the control panel and turns off the defroster.

"I'm gonna let the windows ice up," Rick Tabish says with a grin, "we're Montana boys."

Tabish has spent a lifetime building a reputation for pushing the limits of the law, but he says that the biggest part of that reputation isn't deserved. He admits that he drives recklessly, but is adamant that he didn't kill former casino tycoon Ted Binion, and that he only dug up Binon's silver as a favor to his famous, dead friend.

"I was never a great role model and I did a lot of bad things," he says, "but I've never killed anybody."

It has been 10 years since Tabish was convicted of murdering Ted Binion, the casino manager and heir to Binion's Horseshoe casino in Las Vegas, and then stealing $8 million worth of silver from Binion's underground vault.

Tabish was in the news in Las Vegas every day for years. At least four books were written about him. A Lifetime movie was made about him. But he says his true story has never been told.

After 10 years in different prisons in Nevada, Tabish left Sin City for good after the murder conviction was overturned and he finished his time in prison on other charges. In May 2010, he returned home to serve out parole at his parents' house in Missoula.

Now, he works for his dad, comes home to a dinner made by his mom and spends his weekends watching his nephew's flag football games. He secludes himself from the world that he says betrayed him, and sticks with the people he can trust.

Tabish leaves his parents' house in Missoula every morning at 5 a.m. to work out and then heads to his dad's petroleum company to work as "the extra guy," doing whatever job needs to be done.

The white, five-mile drive from the River City Grill, where Tabish ordered "The Trucker" for breakfast, to his office reminds him of the ride to maximum security Ely State Prison almost a decade ago.

Toward the end of the five miles, the Denali speeds through the snowy mountain gates back into his hometown.

 

A TWO-DECADE ROLLERCOASTER of money and power started and stopped in the same place for Tabish: prison.

Twenty-two years of earning a reputation as the tough guy — known around Missoula as the school bully who stole a $600,000 painting from a local attorney — culminated in 1987 with a charge of criminal possession with the intent to distribute.

Tabish got out of Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge one year into a three-year sentence.

In 1993, he started his first business, Wash Works, washing big trucks, but one small business wasn't enough. MRT Transportation. Tele-pro communications. Neway Transport Company LLC. MRT Contracting. MRT Leasing. Mon Tel Communications.

Over five years, Tabish started seven businesses — worth $3.7 million — in Montana and Nevada. Most of his commercial success came when he moved to Las Vegas in 1994. He brought his MRT tag with him, starting different businesses hauling heavy loads, blasting for pits, drilling and telemarketing.

He made $800,000 to $1 million per year and the money bought him a life Montana couldn't offer. He surrounded himself with gambling, drugs, women and the best friends Las Vegas could sell.

"I got intoxicated with the power," he said.

One night, at a urinal in the bathroom of Piero's, an Italian restaurant and club frequented by the rich and powerful, Tabish met Ted Binion.

Tabish knew it was Binion right away. Binion was a Las Vegas legend; he ran the Horseshoe Casino, the home of the World Series of Poker. His father, Benny Binion, was one of the founders of the modern Las Vegas, and the Horseshoe was his family's gold mine.

Tabish told Binion that he was from Montana, which immediately sparked Binion's interest. Binion had a ranch in Jordan, Mont. and loved talking about it. That night, Tabish made his biggest friend.

"He was a rich, drug addict, alcoholic cowboy," Tabish said. "Everybody treated him like royalty — casino royalty — and that includes me."

They were around each other almost every day in the months leading up to Binion's death. They'd share cowboy stories, Tabish said, or just hang out or talk business. Binion also hired Tabish for side jobs — hauling, building, whatever he needed.

So, when Binion wanted to bury his treasure in the desert like a real cowboy, whom else would he turn to but his Montana jack-of-all-trades? In July of 1998, Tabish built the vault and buried the silver that would round out his rollercoaster ride in Las Vegas.

LESS THAN TWO days after Binion was found dead of what coroners originally called a drug overdose in his Las Vegas mansion, Tabish drove 90 minutes east of the city toward the desert town of Pahrump, Nevada — population 30,000.

He drove to an open field where the town's two major roads intersect.

He drove to a plot of land bordered by a Burger King and a Smith's Food King.

He drove to a place that has no business being lit and security guards shouldn't patrol — but it was, and they did.

Tabish drove to a vault that he had filled with $8 million dollars worth of silver and buried in the middle of nowhere for his friend.

"Why in the hell would you put it where everybody could sit there and see it?" Tabish remembers asking Binion before building the vault. "It's a target."

"Well, that's the best part," Binion replied. "Who's going to come rip it off?"

Tabish arrived in Pahrump in the "oversized load" freightliner in the back of his fleet. He followed his belly dump truck, an excavator and a pick-up truck. The fleet arrived at 7:50 p.m. The sun was on its way down.

He said he was going to secure the silver and put it in a safe place for Binion's daughter. He estimated that he would bill $40,000 for a couple hours of labor and trucks. This job was worth his time.

About two and a half months earlier, Tabish made the same trip, in the middle of the night, accompanied by Binion and Binion's girlfriend Sandy Murphy, a woman prosecutors alleged both Binion and Tabish were dating.

It took hours to put the treasure down there, and though Binion first thought it was a perfect hiding place, he grew paranoid about whether it was safe, Tabish said.

He was always talking about how to make it more secure, Tabish said. Alarms. Razor Wire. Once, Binion lit some charcoal in a hibachi and left it in the vault to smoke out any thief.

Binion thought someone was going to try to steal from him. In his testimony, Tom Standish, Binion's lawyer, remembered sitting with his client and Tabish at Binion's Cafe in the casino, about a month and a half before Binion died.

Binion said, "Tom, somebody could, like you know, try to kill me, then go get that silver. So, you know, if anything happened to me, then, you know, somebody better get out there right away and protect it and take it out of there right away."

It took Tabish almost two days to get out there to take the silver to a safe place — one of Binion's ranches about a mile away. Court records show that he called the property manager, David Mattsen. They also show that he called the sheriff, Wade Lieseke, three times to tell him what was going on.

The 12- by 10- by 10-foot, eight-inch thick concrete vault laid about a foot and a half under the dirt. Tabish and his crew scraped the dirt off the surface and moved aside the lid. Only two living people knew the combination to the vault: Tabish and Mattsen.

He went down the manhole alone with a Coleman lantern for light. When he got it open, the vault was just as he left it.

He peered in and thought, "it's gonna be a long night."

The concrete box was damp, dark and packed with silver. There were bars. There were circulated coins. There were uncirculated coins. There were Morgan silver dollars. Some were in bags. Some were loose. Some were in ammunition tins. Some were in rotten boxes.

Binion loved silver, but toward the end of his life, he wanted to get rid of it. "It's big, it's hard to move around, I would just as soon take the currency and do something with it," Tabish remembered Binion telling him before he got it appraised in 1998. Court records show that he planned to cash in when the silver market went back up.

The crew of Tabish's employees loaded 50-plus-pound bags of silver back up the ladder and into the trucks, Tabish said. The Morgan silver was the most valuable, so it went in the bed of the pickup. They stacked the rest in nice piles in the freightliner.

They had worked for more than four hours when the police showed up.

Sergeant Ed Howard asked Tabish what he was doing. He told Howard to talk to Lieseke. Howard asked what was in the truck. Tabish told the sheriff's deputy there was nothing — "In a place like that, how am I to know they aren't just going to put a bullet in my head and take the silver themselves?" he said.

When Lieseke finally did arrive, Tabish, his crew and Mattsen were all being arrested for robbery. At first, according to court documents, Lieseke said no crime was being committed, but after prodding from the deputies, he said, "Fuck it," and told them to do what they wanted.

They wanted to arrest Tabish.

Binion's wish for his silver was fulfilled when it was impounded that night. Meanwhile, Tabish and Murphy were convicted of conspiring to kill and rob Binion.

"It just doesn't make sense," Tabish said, "I'd have to be a complete fool to come out and load a Beall trailer full of silver and think I'm going to steal it." He said that without the silver conviction, the other charges would have fallen apart.

The Nevada Supreme Court overturned the convictions of Murphy and Tabish, based mainly on prosecutorial errors. In retrial they were acquitted of murder. Medical evidence suggests that Binion died from a non-homicidal overdose of a mixture of Valium, Xanax and heroin.

But, Tabish prison hopped for over a decade from July 1999 to May 2010 for a series of other charges.

THE BUS DROVE down Interstate 93 through the windy, cold Nevada desert. Prisoner 66689 sat inside surrounded by murderers and child molesters. His feet, waist and hands were all chained. He could barely move.

It's almost 300 miles from High Desert State Prison to maximum security Ely State Prison and it took a little longer in the snow. The bus entered the first gate, which shut out the icy desert behind them. Armed guards eyed every inch of the bus — in, under and all around.

Through another gate, another step away from reality, the bus stopped and the door opened. The prisoners were marched out in their chains.

Straight to the wall. Nose and feet touched the concrete wall as 66689 used his peripheral vision to see what was happening. His nose left the wall for a second as he spotted a Rottweiler pacing. A guard grabbed him by the hair and shoved his nose back to its spot, smashing his face into the concrete.

After a long minute, he felt the guard unlocking his right hand behind him. When it was loose, he slowly palmed the wall. Then, his left hand. Right foot. Left foot. All five points of contact firmly pressed against the wall.

Even a longer minute passed before the guard came back. Following orders, he slowly lifted off his shirt and handed it back. Then, his pants. One leg at a time. Nose on the wall. When he handed back the pants, a guard told him to get on his knees.

Naked, cold, still — he knelt unwavering for an hour as the Rottweiler terrorized his peripherals.

Awful memories filled the silence. The stolen painting, the cocaine sale, his friend's death, the buried treasure. "How the fuck did I get myself here?" he wondered. After an hour kneeling in the snow, a guard put all of 66689's belongings on a six-foot, cardboard wagon with a rolled-up garbage bag for a handle, chained him back up and told him to walk.

His fingers struggled to pull the wagon up the hills and his Achilles took a beating on the slopes of the hilly, couple-hundred yard path to his cell. When the breakless wagon crashed into his leg, he looked back at the guards for sympathy. "How's that big shot?" they chided as he eyed his goal: 3-A cell 3.

For the first time, he saw his cement cell — fourteen feet deep from the door and seven feet wide — not a home.

The mattress that he would wake up on at 5:30 a.m. every morning for the next two and a half years was blood stained and piss stained and who-knows-what-else stained. Its curved steel frame inverted the bed. A steel toilet sat three feet from his head while he slept.

Every morning he took his small Viva milk carton in a towel and put it in his refrigerator, the sill of the icy window.

He spent a few hours reading up on his case — trying to show that he didn't need to steal the money because he was worth $3.7 million, trying to point out that a thief doesn't drive a bunch of big rigs into the middle of town, trying to prove that he didn't want to kill or rob his friend. Trying to get out of 3-A cell 3 on a Brother ML100 typewriter.

He worked out every day. Some days crunches, some days pushups, some days dips on the bed. An office-sized box called the "gym" resided in the open air outside of the cellblock. Guards called the workout times in the middle of the night because state law required them to. At night, they knew they wouldn't have to bring the prisoners out. He worked out in the gym once and decided it wasn't worth waking up.

He didn't watch T.V. But, sometimes when TNT premiered a movie on a Friday, he made a special night of it. He took a hard-boiled egg from last night's meal, cut up a carrot in a cheese grater, mixed it in with his Ramen and added a packet of soy sauce to make a stir-fry. He heated the water by rigging a paper clip and a pen to stick in an outlet. Then, he would use a cup of water like a conductor; the electricity passing through would heat the water.

For the most part, a five-minute chained shower every three days, a fifteen-minute-and-zero-second phone call home maybe twice a week, daily exercise and legal work consumed him.

 

TWELVE YEARS AFTER Binion was found dead in Las Vegas, Tabish has a body shaped by a decade in prison, but well-kept, black hair; soft, enormous hands and a multimillion-dollar smile ease the intimidation of his size.

His office sits just on the other side of the railroad tracks. A hall lines the deserted front desk, a bathroom, a closet and a small work desk. Non-descript office paintings hang on the walls, which are otherwise bare.

His dad's petroleum company fills out the blank for his court-ordered job, but sitting in this office, Tabish tries to prove his innocence. This is his real job.

The attached garage is stacked with appeal documents he typed out in prison. Boxes are crammed with briefs. Shelves are stocked with court videos and DVDs. This is how he spends his time.

Two computer monitors connect to his desk's keyboard. It's easier to look at a court document on one monitor and type on the other, Tabish says. This is where he writes his book, which will tell a different story than the other four or the Lifetime movie.

A ring comes from one of the monitors.

"Hey, Mom," Tabish answers. "How are you?"

"I'm okay, just sitting at home," Lani Tabish replies. "Are you coming home?

"Well, what are you making for dinner?"

"I'm not too sure yet, I was going to wait until I heard from you. When will you be home?"

"Mom, why don't you go ahead and make dinner and I'll be home whenever you are ready for me."

Lani and Frank Tabish stood by him through everything. They went to Nevada for all of the court appearances. They sounded hopeful on the other end of the 15-minute-and-zero-second phone calls. They smiled on the other end of the glass in the visitation room. They flew him home the minute he got out in May.

"It was really a dark time for our family," Lani said over the computer screen in the meager back office.

Frank lets himself in and makes his way back to the office. He hands his son two company hats and puts two more on the coat hanger in the corner. "We just like having him around," Frank says.

Tabish says that he's happy to be back, that it's almost like he was never gone. He says that the difference is that now he lives for his family.

"If my parents asked me to stay at home and do the dishes and wash windows all day, I'd do it happily," Tabish says. "After everything they went through — I mean, I'll move on eventually — but right now, I just want to make them happy."

Tabish says that the people who know him treat him like they always have and nobody else matters. We live in a cynical culture, he says, people want to see him break the law.

"They hate to see me succeed, to drive a new car, to make money," he says. "They want to see me mess up so they can say, ‘See, just like we said, he is a derelict.'"

Tabish says that he could live anywhere, the court order just asks for an address, and it's not like money is a problem. He moved in with his parents because his mom was having health issues and once you spend time in prison, you appreciate what you never used to, he says.

"Sometimes when you have nothing, you have more than when you have everything," Tabish says. "I like things like walking to the ‘M' with [my parents], having dinner with them, just being around. I like things that I didn't used to give a shit about."

Tabish's highs have been higher, and his lows have been lower than most, but now his life consists of dinner at his parents' house, flag football games starring his brother's kid and a spare office from his dad. To him, that's more than when he had everything.

joseph.pavlish@umontana.edu