PORTLAND — The father of the suspected Las Vegas gunman Stephen Paddock operated an Oregon bingo parlor after escaping from a Texas prison in the late 1960s.
An Oregon Supreme Court opinion from 1981 said FBI agents arrested Patrick Benjamin Paddock — also known as Bruce Ericksen — on Sept. 6, 1978 at the Bingo Center in Springfield. Despite the escape, He was paroled the following year and returned to Oregon, where he continued the bingo operation until authorities shut it down in 1987 and charged him with racketeering.
He went by different names. Benjamin Hoskins Paddock was put on the FBI most wanted list after the escape.
Don Bishoff, a columnist for The Register-Guard of Eugene, wrote in 1998 that Paddock pleaded no contest to the charges, but received no jail time. He wrote that Paddock spent the last decade of his life in Texas.
