By Natalie Neysa Alund
Bay Area News Group
SAN MATEO -- Wealthy Peninsula sportsman Tom Keen started his morning on Feb. 2, 1952 by giving some duck eggs to a friend. Then he kissed his wife goodbye and got into his Cadillac.
Moments later, when he turned the key in the ignition, a fiery ball of flames consumed the garage of Keen's prestigious 16-room San Mateo home. The 56-year-old man was dead from a suspected car-bombing mafia hit that remains a mystery.
"No one was ever singled out as the car bomber, but the mob was the suspect," San Mateo Police Sgt. Rick Decker said of the more than half-century old cold case that centers around Keen, who held a prominent position in dog-racing circles across the nation.
The proof, Decker said, is inside the department's meaty case file -- a beat-up box containing deteriorating manila folders that contains evidence, including pieces of detonator wire and chunks of shrapnel removed from Keen's body after his death.
Evidence revealed that when Keen started the Cadillac in his garage at 105 Hayward Ave., sticks of dynamite strapped to the bottom of the car exploded.
The blast blew Keen's body into the back of the car, shearing off his legs. Neighbors rushed to the scene believing a water-heater had exploded and called the fire department.
To friends, Keen was a "hearty backslapping sportsman with a million friends," according to reports published by the Oakland Tribune in 1952.
A businessman and engineer, he built the country's first dog-racing track in Belmont in the late 1930s and later established and ran the Town and Country track in Bayshore City.
Keen owned the International Totalizer Co. in Belmont. The company had a virtual monopoly on installing dog-race betting equipment at tracks throughout the nation in cities including Denver, Miami and Chicago.
What may have been his downfall, police said, was his invention of a machine that shows the odds before a race and the race's winning payoffs.
Published reports from the San Mateo Times indicated gangsters wanted to buy Keen's business because "anything that is mechanical can be rigged for a profit" and that gamblers were angered by Keen because "the odds on the dogs weren't coming out of his machines the way the boys wanted them to."
The unidentified sources said Keen refused to sell and his machine guaranteed absolute honesty in betting odds. San Mateo police investigators were looking into reports that, the year before his death, Keen resisted gangster proposals to "fix" the machines in the interest of gamblers.
Decker, who oversees the cold case, said Keen also had connections to "Scarface" Al Capone. Keen and local two local business partners set up a dog-racing track on property owned by Capone in Cicero, Ill, where he became closely associated with one of Capone's "front men" Edward J. O'Hare, who was killed in a 1939 gangland slaying that was never solved.
Keen later dropped out of the Chicago scene and moved to San Mateo, where he continued running dog tracks.
Today, cold case homicide investigators said they don't have much hope of finding out who placed the dynamite under Keen's car.
Too much time has passed, Officer Anthony Riccardi said. "Anything that's been kept quiet for more than 50-60 years likely involves the mafia and typically people don't talk when the mob is involved. Ever."
In addition, evidence is deteriorating and the suspect and witnesses would be very old, if not dead, Decker added.
"If the guy who did it was 18, he's 80 now, and most of the people involved in the case were in their 40s," Decker said. "The suspect and witnesses are likely about 100 today. Like with Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance, it appears it's a true mafia case that may never be solved."
Anyone with information about this case is asked to call police at 650-522-7626
Contact Natalie Neysa Alund at 510-293-2469. Follow her at Twitter.com/nataliealund.