Pelican Club; but the district attorney had it shut down quickly. Later life When Jack Dempsey met Jess Willard on July 4, 1919, at Toledo, OH, Ryan was there in the capacity of betting commissioner for Arnold Rothstein. Dempsey's manager, Doc Kearns, in the company of Damon Runyon, came to Ryan and asked for odds on the chance Dempsey might knock Willard out in the first round. Ryan offered Kearns 10 to 1 odds and Kearns put down a check for $10,000. Dempsey knocked Willard down seven times during the round, and when it ended, Ollie Pecord, the referee, had counted Willard out. Dempsey, at Kearn's urging, leaped from the ring, while Warren Barbour, the official timekeeper, screamed at Dempsey over the roar of the crowd to get back in the ring, or he would declare Willard the winner. Barbour claimed that the round had ended when Pecord's count had reached seven; because of noise, and a supposed fouling of the bell cord, no one had heard it clang. Whether of not Barbour was in conspiracy with Ryan to give Willard a chance to survive Dempsey's relentless attack is unknown, but Kearns lost his bet. Ryan, with law enforcement on his payroll, ran his Detroit club until the spring of 1925. He became associated with three men from St. Louis who would go on to become operators of famous gambling clubs. Lincoln Fitzgerald and Danny Sullivan, would open the Nevada Club in Reno, in the 1930s, and George "Dutch" Weinbrenner, would open the Christiana Club in Sun Valley. Weinbrenner set up a factory in Detroit to manufacture gaming equipment, under the auspices of a mob-connected company, B.C. Willis. These three men, along with Ryan and the Werthheimer brothers, operated a number of gambling clubs in Detroit, including the Chesterfield Club in Macomb County, Michigan which, thanks to bribes paid to authorities, stayed open to about 1939. By that time Fitzgerald and Sullivan had moved on to Reno and "Dutch" Weinbrenner, who had married Ryan's daughter, Helen, to Sun Valley. By 1925, with Ryan now aged 65, the gambling business in Detroit took a dark turn when Italian mobsters began battling the Purple Gang for control of the city's vices. The Italians kidnapped gamblers, including Ryan and "Dutch" Weinbrenner, holding them hostage for ransom. They hired the Purple Gang, led by Joe Burnstein, as protection and the result was open gangster