Great Falls, Montana and the Mafia Whispers
By Michael Kelman Portney
Great Falls has always been a working town, but behind the taprooms, rail yards, and polite nods on Central Avenue, there’s a history told in quieter voices. The kind of stories that aren’t in the tourist brochures — stories about coin machines, backroom poker, and men whose names could stop an argument mid-sentence.
It’s here, in Cascade County, that the name Zollie Kelman became more than a businessman’s signature. It became a rumor, a shorthand, and for some, a warning. Kelman built the American Music Company into the undisputed supplier of jukeboxes, pinball, and later video poker and keno machines across town. He ran World Wide Press, selling punchboards and gambling supplies. And for decades, you couldn’t walk into a bar with a machine in it without touching his reach.
The line between legal and illegal in Montana gambling was thin. In the 1960s and ’70s, slot-style devices and private bookmaking were still outlawed. Kelman pushed that edge — raided, fined, but never stopped. By the mid-1980s, as the state legalized machine gambling, he was positioned to dominate. When a clever “Raven Keno” loophole needed a blessing, Kelman’s friend Gene Daly, a former Cascade County Attorney turned Montana Supreme Court justice, wrote the opinion that made it legal. The same year, Daly’s election had been quietly secured when Kelman confronted Daly’s opponent with a canceled check from a Black Eagle brothel and suggested he bow out.
Stories like that don’t fade — they calcify. So did the whispers about Kelman’s temper. In 1976, three armed men broke into his home to steal his silver coin hoard. Police caught them, but not before Kelman allegedly kicked one of them while he was in handcuffs. Later, an accused co-conspirator — a disbarred attorney — claimed the whole thing had been staged by Kelman and a pair of Great Falls police officers to frame him. The courts dismissed it, but the image stuck: a man who could turn even a crime into a message.
Kelman leaned into the mythology. He’d smile and tell people he was “in the Jewish mafia,” half a joke and half an invitation to keep wondering. His own grandson later said he was influenced by Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky to “bring gambling to the West.” Whether it was a bluff or a truth wrapped in humor, it worked. Rivals thought twice. Partners stayed in line.
In Great Falls, the lines between the house and the courthouse blurred. Former governors and retired justices sat on the boards of Kelman-backed companies. Contracts bound casinos to his machines and his revenue splits — and when an owner tried to break free, there was a lawsuit waiting. Protection here didn’t always come with a threat; sometimes it was just a clause in the fine print, or the knowledge that the man across the table had friends in the right seats.
Ask around today and you’ll hear the word “mafia” used with a shrug, a smirk, or a shake of the head. Maybe there was no formal family. Maybe it was just Great Falls — small enough to know everyone, and smart enough not to write everything down. But the whispers remain, because whispers like these don’t need proof. They only need a history where the same names appear in the businesses, the court cases, and the rumors.
In that history, the house didn’t just win — it wrote the rules.
