Gambling kingpin William George Lias, aka "Butt Boy" and "Humpty Dumpty." (Image courtesy of the Wheeling Area Genealogical Society.)

Even if he hadn’t been so overweight, West Virgina gambling kingpin William George Lias would have been a larger-than-life character. According to the Wheeling Area Genealogical Society, the man who would someday tip the scales at close to 400 pounds quit school after sixth grade to become a bootlegger. It was the start of a brilliant career in underworld booze and gambling, work that was in large part responsible for giving Wheeling its freewheeling reputation.

In the early 1950s, the Feds thought they found a loophole that could rid them of Lias’ shady business deals: They claimed he was a foreign citizen who was brought into the country illegally by his family when he was a child. It appears the government’s case was baseless as Lias beat the rap and lived on as an American-born citizen until his death in 1970.

During this federal effort to deport Lias, Life ran the article, “He Wants To Stay Put: The Biggest Gambler in Wheeling Fights a U.S. Try to Deport Him.” An excerpt:

“In a federal court in West Virginia last week the government tried to put the squeeze on all 368 pounds of William George (‘I ain’t been no angel’) Lias, a big wheel in Wheeling. Starting with a bread wagon and working up through restaurants, speakeasies, gambling rooms and the numbers racket to control of Wheeling Downs, a pretty half-mile track on an Ohio River island, Lias has prospered despite a few sorrows: a couple of brief Prohibition jail sentences; the sudden death of his first wife, shot down in self-defense by the pistol-packing wife of a pal of his; titanic legal struggles over $2.8 million in unpaid taxes.

Through it all Lias stood up for his rights. He could say that he was, after all, an American. Now the government says that he is not American. It is trying to send him back to Greece where it claims documents prove he was born. Lias, supported by witnesses who remember him as the chubbiest dumpling ever to sag the springs in a baby carriage, argues desperately that the government’s case is a mistake, that he was born and brought up in Wheeling.”