Don't Fear The Podcaster

I've had some very kind words lately from a lot of you concerning this project and am over the moon to have so many lovely and thoughtful people enjoying the content, but I feel it's worth reminding that this is an audio podcast.  This website is a place for me to post the episode scripts so you see my sources and put up a few pictures, but the scripts are written to be read aloud.  On the page the writing might not be the strongest and I know for a fact they're riddled with grammatical and spelling errors.
I am finding most people still don't really quite get what podcasts are, but they are easily downloadable to your phone, tablet, or computer, and then easily deletable when your done.  You don't even to really need to download them, you can stream them if you like.  Podcasts are really just radio shows on the internet.  In the past few years, there are a countless number of really talented people making really high quality podcasts.  You easily can subscribe with a click of a button, totally free, and each time a new episode comes up, it will automatically download to your device.  It's like getting a free audio books on any subject you like! Believe me, once you dip your toe into the wide and wonderful world of podcasts, you'll find yourself diving in and wishing you could spend more time in your car.
My favorite history podcasts are History of Rome, Hardcore History, Revolutions, and History of the World in 100 Objects.  You can also listen to pretty much any NPR and BBC show, in total and never have to miss some great part because some jerk cut you off.  I love Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, Radiolab, On The Media, In Our Time with Melvin Bragg.

So...
I use iTunes to listen to shows because I have an iPhone, but there is no reason to go through iTunes.
If you use iTunes, just search "Bear Flag Libation" or you can follow this link.
If you don't want to use iTunes, somewhere on your phone there is a music store that also has podcasts, but for this show you can just click here to listen all past and future episodes of this show.

You can thank me later.

Gambling Ship Photos

Photos provided by Joe Ditler-

Trudy Keys, Dexter and the Busboy after being rescued from the Monte Carlo wreckage.

Newspaper advertisement for the Monte Carlo

Joe's son, Jack Ditler, exploring the Monte Carlo wreckage, c.2004

Jack Ditler and the Monte Carlo, c.2004

The Monte Carlo eventually broke in half just abaft the bow.

Joe's gift to Ralph Mitchell for his 90th birthday

Colonel Dick Kenney, re-examining the silver dollars he retrieved from the shipwreck in 1937.

Photos provided by Sarah Dickey-

The Port of Lost Souls- Gambling Ships Part Three

Okay, so obviously I didn’t get this episode out in three days, but #1) I am starting to consider it a signature of the Bear Flag Libation to always be at least as four times as late as I promise.  #2) I don’t think anybody cares but me.  #3) I was involved in a really cool project that combines murals, painted by students at California College of Arts, and local history, written by Public History students at Cal State East Bay.  I didn’t actually write anything or do any art for this project, but I built the website and used an app called Aurasma that allows you to use a smart phone or tablet to digitally interact with the murals.  The call it augmented reality and when you see it looks sort of like magic.  I think it’s the future of Public History and highly recommend you go see the murals at 11^th and Jefferson Streets in Oakland, or to go to the website at OaklandHistoryMurals.com.  On the About page, you can still use your device to get a glimpse of what we were able to do with Aurasma.  I’m pretty proud of it, especially considering I did the whole thing in less than a week.  So, I think that log has been sufficiently been rolled- on with the show!

This episode is part three of my four part series on the gambling ships of Southern California.  If you haven’t listen to the first two by this point you’ll be fairly lost, I’m picking up where last episode left off with little in the way of catch-up.    This is the Bear Flag Libation.

The level mafia involvement out on Gambling Ship Row was bummed up to the expert when the Monfalcone opened in November of 1928 because one of the four owners of the vessel was Jack Draga.  Draga was the real deal, killing-his-way-up-the-ranks-to-the-head-of-Los-Angeles-La-Costa-Nostra, kind of gangster.  He brought in two of Al Capone’s former enforcers, Johnny Roselli and Charles Fishetti, to protect his interests at sea.  The Monfalcone gained a reputation for grifting their clientele with magnetic dice tables, manipulatable roulette wheels and wired slot machines.  When the house did pay out, they would often did so with counterfeit bills, or sometimes winners were tailed back to land and mugged before they could make it home.  Despite these risks being widely known, what are you going to do?  Not go?  I have just enough gambler’s compulsion in me to understand that if you believe you are lucky enough or smart enough to beat the house, you probably also believe you are lucky enough or smart enough to spend funny money or dodge hired goons.[1]

            In 1930, Jack Draga decided there was no reason that he should only own 25% of the Monfalcone and there was even less of a reason he should have pay for get a hold of the other 75%.  Roselli and Fishetti, along with a fella called “Russian Louie”, appeared on the ship one night with guns drawn and informed the managers-on-duty they could go home for the night, and not bother coming back.  The managers returned to shore and told the three other owners of the Monfalcone what happened, at which time an attorney for one of the owners naturally called the police to report that their offshore gambling business that been operating under the premise that it was outside police jurisdiction had just been violently seized, and could something now be done about this?  The police, the District Attorney’s office, pretty much everybody except for the three forsaken owners, had a great laugh over the irony of the situation and that’s how the mafia took full ownership managed the Monfalcone for the rest of its span at sea.  Which turned out to be only a matter of months.[2]

               The Monfalcone always had a reputation for poor luck.  Even prior to its life as a gambling ship, the wayward vessel, built for service in World War One, had knack of getting caught in storms and spending more time in tow that actually sailing, but it seems like an awfully large coincidence that not long after armed take-over of the craft, she suffered an accidental gas leak that led to an explosion in the engine room.  The fire took place in the early evening while business was relatively slow, only 350 people on board, compared to the over a thousand people onboard only hours earlier.  The water taxies and some fishing boats were able to get everybody off before any deaths, but there were three burn victims among the crew and one dramatic young man dove into the Pacific to avoid the slow moving fire then had to be fished out.  The newspapers praised the professionalism of the staff, all of whom seemed determined to see to the comfort of the patrons over their personal safety.  Even though the explosion plunged the whole ship into darkness a coat check girl named Lillian Kasdon from Venice worked by candlelight to get purses and coats back to their owners, at least until the flames got so bright she could see the tickets more clearly.  The band, Artzell’s Screenland Serenaders, played the song “Happy Days Are Here Again” until nearly everybody else onboard had gotten to the lifeboats.  I know… Who knew bands actually did that?[3]

Most of the people rescued chose to be taken to the Johanna Smith rather than go back ashore.  Down at the water taxi dock, the gamblers showed little concern for the dubious safety of the vessels and those in line for the Monfalcone simply moved to the line for the Johanna Smith.  On land, thousands gathered on the beaches, the residents of Belmont Shore could see it the best, to watch the Monfalcone crackle and pop red, orange and yellow fire as the last bits of sunset on horizon let go of the same glowing hues, until the black sky confused the shinning embers with the stars above.  For three hours, the gambling ship burned into the hot August night- loved or hated, the spectacle broke daily routine and invited people for miles around to come down to sand for a demonstration in fluid illumination, to bask in the warmth of common human interest in light shows and curiosity in disasters.  I know nothing of what transpired on those beaches, as a historian it’s not my job really to speculate, but I know at times like these people talk with neighbors they’ve never actually shared words with, mediocre dates turn into memorable ones just due to spontaneous energy wafting through the air, children take advantage of the special occasion and averted gaze of their parents to play in the dark and long after their bedtimes.   I’m not saying there was anything important about that night, but it must have felt like a free holiday, the second 4^th of July of the Summer of 1930 in Long Beach, and never underestimate the intensity of something unexpected happening.  All the best nights are when something unexpected happens.[4]

            Fire would soon take the Johanna Smith as well, and under even more suspicious circumstances.  Rumors of feuds between the owners of the Rose Isle and Johanna Smith had been circulating for some time.  In December of 1930, a group of thugs kidnapped a slick gambling tycoon connected Tijuana casinos, named Ezekiel, or "Zeke", Caress, because when you name is Ezekiel Caress, you kind of have to a be a slick gambling tycoon connected to Tijuana casinos.  Caress ran in the same circles as the Spring Street Gang who owned the Johanna Smith and after Carass, his wife and houseboy were captured he was forced to sign checks totaling more than $50,000 over to four of the men who took him.  The four were on their way to cash the checks on the Rose Isle (have I not mentioned the gambling ships were all a nice way to launder money?), but while parking at the docks two patrol cops, by pure chance, approached their car and a gun battle ensued, resulting in the death of one officer and the capture of two of the kidnappers, one of whom claimed he had been kidnapped himself and forced into this scheme.[5]  

The media and police attention that comes with a dead officer seems to have made the gang war cold for a while, but in July of 1932 Charles Bozmen, a St. Louis mobster, diamond fence and brother to one of the Rose Isle owners, was shot dead one night aboard that ship.  The circumstances are murky and it could have merely been the result of a drunken argument, because all the people in vicinity of the bloody man were all so drunk that they couldn’t even stand.  But somebody certainly thought it was a targeted killing because only two days later the Johanna Smith went up in flames, at two different places at the same time, obviously a case of arson.  The Johanna Smith burned much faster than the Monfalcone, leading to a scene of panic onboard the ship, with players instantly ditching their chips that had just became completely worthless- however, many scrambled about grabbing as many silver coins they could before running for the life boats.  All were rescued and despite all the evidence to the contrary, Charles Brazier, the owner of the Johanna Smith, insisted the fire was the accidental result of a careless smoker.  Evidently, they planned to settle the matter quietly.  The old gambling ship didn’t go down easily though, even after the Coast Guard riddled her with bullets in an attempt to sink her.   The Long Beach Press Telegram described the events as endeavors to “Send the ship without a country to the Port of Lost Souls.”  Eventually, she was towed into to the San Pedro harbor for scrapping, still smoldering, but rather than mourning the loss, Brazier simply began shopping for a new ship.  After all, the Olympics were coming to Los Angeles in summer of 1932 and that meant thousands of out-of-town customers.  Ironically, that new ship turned out to be the Rose Isle.  Who’s to say how or why, but the St. Louis gang suddenly decided they were done with the gambling ship business and Brazier ended up with the title to his former rivals’ vessel.  With points for imagination, the Rose Isle was rechristened as the Johanna Smith II.[6]

In 1933 Prohibition was repealed with the passing of the Twenty-First Amendment, so the gambling ships were able to openly advertise their full bar facilities.  At some point between the Johanna Smith’s coronation in 1928, in which smuggled booze was reportedly thrown overboard, and the repeal of Prohibition the gambling ships must have found some way to work around the alcohol laws because I’ve read plenty of references to drinking on the ships and of customers returning to shore completely drunk.  The ships were raided often and usually with no advanced warning, so there would be little time to hide a bar and stash every person’s cups.

As times passes, the people who are at an age to have actually gone aboard the gambling ships are becoming much more rare, and seeing as this is something of an obscure piece of history, it’s highly unlikely that I’ll ever find the answer to a question like how the gambling ships managed to sell booze during Prohibition.  If anybody were clever enough to pull it off, it’d be the gambling ship owners and their teams high priced attorneys.   However, if you know a piece of this story that I may have overlooked, I’d love to hear from you at BearFlagLibation@gmail.com.  Just this week I got an email from a Seal Beach historian who should help fill in some blanks in the next episode.  Public History is best practiced when we have a dialog, so speak up, folks.

One person I would have love to asked who actually visited the gambling ships was my own grandmother.   She died while my main concern was still not getting beaten up in Jr. High, so I never asked her historical questions, but luckily my aunt Kristi did.  Maryleen Richards Fischer was born Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1917, moved to Long Beach in 1928 in the first wave of Okie migrations to Southern California, just ahead of the Dust Bowl refugees who ran into so much trouble on their farms then out here in California in the “dirty thirties”.  In 1930, her parents divorced, which was obviously extremely rare in those days, and Maryleen was raised by her mother, Ollie, who was rare breed herself in being something of a free spirit.  According to my aunt, Ollie always dressed to the nines, always in purple, and she openly enjoyed her booze and her men, never marrying again.  During Prohibition, she brewed her and bottled her own beer and hid it in the washer bin (apparently, one night when the local minister was visiting, all the bottles of beer exploded in the middle of dinner).  During World War Two, Ollie was a real life Rosie the Riveter at the McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Company.  So it should be little surprise that while most of the Okie families flocked to the bible-thumping tent revivals, like that of Aimee Semple McPherson, my grandma Maryleen was able to reject her grandparents’ old-time religion and do things like visiting the gambling ships while still in high school.  I never came across any references to age restrictions at the ship casinos and this shows, if they were there at all, they were loosely enforced, at least in the case of pretty teenage girls.

Maryleen scrapbooked everything, so when I got to look their these books at the Historical Society of Long Beach, there were flyers, pictures, matchbooks, mailers, pins of the gambling ships, mostly the Johanna Smith II and the Monte Carlo.  Each item was marked with dates and often whom she spent the evening with.  Just one example is a silver matchbook for the Johanna Smith II and written next to it is the date August 5, 1933 and the names Donnie, Charles and Bassa.  The earliest one we found was a flyer for the original Johanna Smith, claiming to be the “world’s most famous pleasure ship”, marked for January 8, 1932, when Maryleen would have been only fifteen.  Scrapbooks were truly the Instagram of our grandparents’ day.  I’ll post pictures of these items, and more, at BearFlagLibation.blogspot.com and at the facebook page, facebook.com/bearflaglibation.

My aunt has a great memory, but my grandmother told her these things around forty-five years ago and my mom never talked to her at all about this stuff because as far as she was concerned her mom had been born square.  Still my aunt is almost positive Maryleen told her that she had worked as a cigarette girl aboard one of the ships.  She would have still been in high school, but it was the early 1930s, the Depression was on, it wouldn’t have been terribly out of the ordinary.  She also thinks the Maryleen might have been onboard during a raid.  Maryleen described the gambling ships as being pretty seedy and scary places because of the mafia influence.  My grandmother retained after a life-long fascination with the mafia, especially when my mom married my dad, who was the son of an attorney for the Las Vegas Jewish Mobsters, like Mira Lansky and Bugsy Siegel.  My father’s side of the family involves both mafia ties and early Mormon polygamists, but those are tails for another day.[7]

Most of the written accounts at the time about what transpired aboard gambling ships were biased against them.  The Long Beach Press Telegram ran a whole series of articles around the time the first Johanna Smith burned that depicted the ships owners as a pack of cheaters and thieves who employed degenerates and shiftless panhandlers to “led lambs to the slaughter”.  The lambs being an endless stream of “suckers” who were enticed with the invention of a free dinner and then bilked for their dollars once out to sea.  My first instinct is to not trust these stories because the newspaper was part of the establishment who sold copy by simultaneously condemning the lack of morality while pouring of the titillating details of roguish adventure, but then I realize that casinos today pretty much work of the same model, with free drinks, buffets, comped rooms and even buses running daily from senior centers.  The mailers sent from the gambling ships even used the familiar ploy of saying “you were selected” or “you won” a free dinner onboard a “pleasure ship”.

I have another source who has a story, still second hand unfortunately, but it confirms the gambling ships in reality were not nearly as glamorous as they liked to portray themselves as.  In fact, this generous gentleman has a few great stories for us with insight into, not just the gambling ships, but what small town beach city culture was like in the 1930s.  But first I should probably let him introducing himself.

Joe Ditler- Clip 1

If you remember way back to the introduction in the first episode of this series, I talked about the SS Monte Carlo gambling ship crashing up against the shores of Coronado.  And if you know your California geography, you might have noticed Coronado is peninsula on the west side of the San Diego Bay, about one hundred miles south of Long Beach.

Joe Ditler- Clip 2

The Monte Carlo owners were sick of the constant harassment by authorities in Long Beach and figured San Diego was closer to Mexico, therefore the people were more familiar with quick trips across the border to Tijuana, therefore they would be more mellow about this whole sinful behavior thing.   They were not more mellow about it.

Joe Ditler- Clip 3

Before we get into the crash of ship, let’s return to what the ships were actually like.  Joe, have you talked to anybody who actually visited the ship?

Joe Ditler- Clip 4

This is hardly enchanting pleasure palace resort from the advertisements and flyers I had been looking at.  This bares no resembles to the city of Monte Carlo, not even Las Vegas, hell, this make Reno look fancy.  This sounds like some kind of fever dream, if Caligula ran that dumpy casino Randy Quid takes Chevy Chase to in Vegas Vacation, where you can place bets on rock, paper, scissors (movie clip).  It’s no wonder people wanted people wanted the ships shut down.  So how did this end?

Joe Ditler- Clip 5

Just as the fire of the Monfalcone brought people to the shore to witness a spectacle, the people of Coronado woke up News Years morning, 1937, a found a spectacle that was close enough to touch.

Joe Ditler- Clip 6

Let me just say that Bud Bernard has some serious balls.  Nevermind the guy bodysurfs in ten-foot waves, but it would seem his ocean experience was crucial because that same morning a Navy machinist named J.W. Alexander attempted to swim out amongst the roaring waves and was never seen again.  But Bud lied to the group of gangsters about their property and then continued to rob them over a series of months.  His gamble paid off though because after this the owners preferred to stay as far away from the Monte Carlo as possible.  The problem wasn’t so much that they could be prosecuted for the gambling ship now being in San Diego County, obviously no gambling was going on there any more, but authorizes were looking for someone to be responsible for cleaning up this mess.  A mess that literally impossible to clean.  It was a 300-foot long concrete slab lodged in amongst crashing waves.  Correction, it is a 300-foot long concrete slab lodged in amongst crashing waves.  When asked what the city was going to do about this giant hazard, one San Diego city councilman simply said, “Oh well, the Monte Carlo will be Coronado’s fishing pier in two years.”  In the meantime, the wreckage became a feeding frenzy for scavengers, and during the Great Depression.  Everybody was a scavenger.[8] 

Joe Ditler- Clip 7, 8, 9

The book Joe referenced there is called Noir Afloat, by Earnest Marquez, and I’m not sure if I have mentioned it in previous episodes, but Mr. Marquez’s work was vital to constructing these shows.  As you can tell, I thoroughly enjoyed my conversation with Joe.  I think we have enough time for one final story.  Perhaps you can tell us something of what came of that dangerous hunk of concrete out in the surf, and if you would, Joe, could you also tie in the joys of working in the field of local history?

Joe Ditler- Clip 10

You can still see the wreckage of the Monte Carlo today.  It’s about a half a mile south of the Hotel del Coronado, right in front of some tall apartment buildings called the Coronado Shores.  However, you have to go at super low tide, I went at the lowest possible tide during daylight hours on the few days I was there and we could only barely make out a point where the waves were breaking a little early.  There are plenty of pictures through I’ll put up on BearFlagLibation.blogspot.com.  All that is left is a massive block of concrete in the recognizable shape of a ship.  Since Trudy Keys’ day, the Coast Guard periodically went out at extreme low tides and shaved down all the sharp metal edges.  Time and the Pacific Ocean have smoothed out nearly everything else.  Although, every so often the wreckage will take the chunk out of some surfer unlucky enough to whip out just above the old gambling ship.

The Monto Carlo also resurfaces every few years to capture the attention of hopeful treasure hunters.

Joe Ditler- Clip 11

The morning my mom, Anthony and I had our failed expedition to find last physical remnant to the gambling ships, my brother showed me a 2010 article about a diver who had just pulled $400,000 in silver dollars out of the ruin.  I said something stupid to the effect of, “Wow, after all these years, the Monte Carlo is still paying out.”  We mentioned this to Sarah Dickey at the Coronado Museum, who laughed at pointed out the date of publication for the article: April 1^st.   The Monte Carlo was through paying out, in fact, it was pretty rare that she, or the Monfalcone, or the Johanna Smith, or the Rose Isle, or any of the others, ever paid out.  The gambling ships were never more than a fantasy that feed on hopes, desires, and aspirational delusion that you would be the one person that could beat the odds, you alone had the capacity to transcend reality.  Next time, we’ll be focusing the episode on a man who personifies that aspirational delusion as both the greatest gambling ship owner and the biggest gambler on the idea of gambling ships.  He’s been at the edges of this story all along and is about to take center stage, not just on the gambling ship venture, but also in the birth of Las Vegas.  He’s also the perfect person to tie all this together, see how it ended and let us discuss what the whole damn thing meant in effecting the lasting California culture.  Join us next month, for the fourth and final installment in this series with The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall Tony Cornero and the Rise of Las Vegas.

Thank you so much to Joe Ditler for lending us his time, knowledge and voice.  Also thank you to Sarah Dickey at the Coronado Museam of History and Art for putting me in touch with Joe and allowing access to their material on the SS Monte Carlo.  Another huge thank you to Kristi Fisher, my aunt, who not only got me free reign of the Historical Society of Long Beach archives, but also helped me pour through at all just as enthusiastically as myself.  Also thanks to my other research assistants Anthony Lukens and Luanne Burton.  Finally, last episode I forgot to send a shout out to Cindy Ramirez, who gave us proper Spanish pronunciation in her sexy voice and it’s the world’s foremost expect on Zonkeys.  And thank you so much for listening.  If you can find a bartender that can make a good one, enjoy an Old Fashion, bonus points if it also happens to be at a place with an outdoor area that allows dogs.

---

[1] Ernest Marquez, Noir Afloat: Tony Cornero and the Notorious Gambling Ships of Southern California (Santa Monica: Angel City Press, 2011), 136-143.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Marquez, Noir Afloat, 142-43; Long Beach Press Telegram, “Band Plays On as Monfalcone Burns,” Aug 31, 1930.

[4] Long Beach Press Telegram, “Band Plays On”.

[5] Burnett, Prohibition Madness, 106-08.

[6] Marquez, Noir Afloat, 150-2; Long Beach Press-Telegram, “Johanna Smith Burns,” July 22 1932; Long Beach Sun, Saturday, ““Monte Carlo Stations Guards,” July 23 1932.

[7] Interview with Kristi Fischer, January 2014.

[8] Coronado Journal, January 7, 1937, Jan 14, 1937 and Feb 4, 1937.

The Gendarmes of France- Gambling Ships Part Two

This episode is part two of series on gambling ships in Southern California.  You don’t have to go back and listen to the previous episode to figure out what’s going on, but it will provide quite a bit of context and I’ll be referring back to events and arguments from the first episode, entitled The California Brick.

Speaking of which, a correction on something that I really should have got right the first time around.  I butchered a name last time beyond acceptable parameters; it wasn’t even a hard one either.  So I asked my friend Cindy to help out.  The name of President of Mexico from 1920 to 1924 is pronounced: “Alvaro Obregon”.  I could try to explain why I thought “Oberhan” was correct, this podcast is not called Mike Burton Attempts to Recall High School Spanish Classes.  No, friends,  “This is the Bear Flag Libation”.

It is unclear exactly when and how the idea of first emerged to use sea fairing vessels as floating casinos, but I have a guess that it was one of those organic accidents.  A few years ago I was researching the history to a tiny neighborhood pub in Oakland called the Kingfish on Claremont Ave.  It’s a tiny wooden shack with funky angles, a low ceiling, uneven floors, bathrooms that look they were slapped together as an afterthought, so it’s obvious this place was not originally designed as bar.   One of the long time bartenders told me the Kingfish opened during the 1920s as a bait shop for fishermen.  At the time Claremont Ave was the chief thoroughfare for Oaklanders on their way up to the Delta.   A lot of the customers hung out there and chatted, as fishermen are wont to do, and sometimes this chatting including a few casual alcoholic beverages among friends.  The owner also found himself selling some bottles of beer from his stash to fisherman who were going to be sitting on a dock or boat all day and hoped to pass the mind numbing monotony in a semi-altered state, as fisherman are wont to do.  Demand for beer quickly overtook the demand for worms, and by the time Prohibition was repealed in 1933 the owner ditched the bait gig all together and the Kingfish became a bar.  The shuffleboard table and rapid Cal-Bears football fans were added later.

 I see a lot of parallels to between the Kingfish and the first Southern Californian gambling ship, especially since it also includes ways for fisherman to pass mind-numbing monotony.  The public at large only became aware of Barge C-1 when news hit the papers that LA County sheriffs raided the plain-looking fishing barge on July 8^th, 1927 and found poker tables and a roulette wheel in one of the sheds on the deck.  There is no record of how gambling appeared on the barge, but would it really be surprising if on days the fish weren’t biting some of the men on board took to playing cards?   I like card games as much as the next guy, but lemonade is better with gin and card games are better with some monetary wagering in the mix.  Fishing is boring and doesn’t pay, and gambling is fun, so why not bring in a dealer and a roulette wheel, and let the owner, who happened to have some mob connections, get his beak wet on this action?  Again, I don’t know if that’s how events unfolded, but it makes more sense than one fisherman suddenly turning to another and saying, “Want to play some roulette?  I have a table in right in her my tackle box.”[1]

People aboard Barge C-1 apparently saw the sheriff’s boat coming prior to the raid because when the officers came aboard all they found were men lining the decks with fishing poles and the manager, Fred U. Baggs, standing inside the gambling shed.  Baggs quickly announced that because they were outside the three-mile limit Los Angeles County authorities had no jurisdiction to touch anybody or confiscate anything onboard.  The deputies were undeterred by this claim, gambling was gambling, this was still L.A., so they arrested all the employees and confiscated the equipment.  As Baggs was taken into the Santa Monica jail, he loudly proclaimed, “the gendarmes of France had as much right to arrest them as the county sheriff.”  This raid kicked off a legal dispute that would take twenty years and a presidential order to settle definitively. 

The owner of the barge turned out to be a man named Tutor Scherer, a known associate of the Los Angeles mob known as the Spring Street Gang.  Scherer filed for a restraining order against the District Attorney’s office and the Sherriff’s department, in hopes of getting the confiscated equipment back, as well as settling the case against Baggs before the D.A. had a chance to prosecute.  But Judge E.J. Henning ruled L.A. County did indeed have jurisdiction over the spot Barge C-1 was parked at by making the decision that the county line did not end three miles from the shore, but three miles from an imaginary line between Point Vicente in Palos Verdes and Point Dume in Malibu.  If your knowledge of Los Angeles geography isn’t encyclopedic, these are the two landmasses that jut out from the California coast, forming the wide Santa Monica Bay in between. 

However, the D.A. didn’t feel this line of argument would hold up in criminal court, or some of the right palms were greased by the Spring Street Gang, because nobody arrested in the Barge C-1 raid was ever prosecuted, hence setting no real precedent regarding offshore gambling.  Voluntarily, the barge never reopened after the raid, but the idea of gambling ships was out there now, and like a teenage boy who gets denied a kiss and then suggestively pulls out condom, the gangsters who ran the gambling rackets saw the first rebuff as no reason to quit and were about to go much bigger.[2]

While going through the newspaper archives at the Historical Society of Long Beach I was lucky enough to find the original advertisement in the Long Beach Press-Telegram from June 30^th, 1928 that announced the opening of Johanna Smith, which billed itself as an “amusement steamer” promising “Grill- Cabaret- Dancing”, a “full course meal” for $1.50, all with “no cover charge”.  Two large speedboats waited at the foot of Pine Ave in Long Beach, only costing fifty cents for a fifteen-minute ride out the 260-foot long vessel that was Southern California’s first full fledged gambling ship.[3] 

The Johanna Smith launched from North Bend, Oregon in 1917 and was the first steam schooner specifically designed to carry packaged lumber, which she did faithfully until 1927, when she was bought be Clarence Blazier.   All we know about Blazier is the he kept company with mobsters, bootleggers and Tijuana gamblers, and that he had the finical backing to not only buy the old lumber ship, but to completely gut the Johanna Smith and build a fully functioning casino resort on it.  The grand opening obviously was no secret; no a secret knock, no passwords, just come down to the docks, get on a boat and legally leave California.  Blazier took out ads in the local papers, sent out mailers, printed coupons, all right out in the open for the public and police to see.  None of the many advertisements for gambling ships ever actually mentioned gambling, but they did not need to.  Everybody just knew. 

Drinking alcohol was still illegal even outside the three mile limit- if you remember from the last episode, in 1924 the United States expanded federal territorial waters to sixteen miles off the coast for the express purpose of catching booze smugglers, but the U.S. had no federal gambling ban, so the casino could function once passed the three miles limit, safely outside of state and county jurisdiction.  The Johanna Smith crew claimed to strictly forbid alcohol, even tossing overboard any hooch passengers brought themselves.  That was the story printed in the paper anyway.[4]

                  If one were just looking at a map of Southern California, setting up shop off the coast of Long Beach made the most sense.  The Barge C-1 incident set no legal precedent, but the judge’s ruling with the restraining order showed a valid argument for the imaginary line crossing the Santa Monica Bay, meaning any gambling ship parked three miles west of this theoretical border would have to be more than thirty miles from the Santa Monica Pier, making for a very long boat ride.  Long Beach sits on just the other side of that bay, and at the beginning of a long stretch of nearly featureless beaches.   By parking about six miles south off Seal Beach, the boat ride was short and no argument could be made for jurisdiction.  As raids and court cases became constant, the patch of ocean called “Gambler Ship Row” moved occasionally over the next decade, usually further out.  If you can’t quite picture the Southern California coastline in question, I’ve posted a map at bearflaglibation.blogspot.com.

  Warning: Technical Ignorance- Please Click Here to See Map

Your California Dive Bar Jukebox Song of the Week-

You'll either get The Mummies or you won't.
The early 90's Bay Area garage rock n roll scene was once the envy of the leather jacket and tight jeans wearing world.  The Mummies, Supercharger, The Trashwomen, The Rip-offs, Phantom Surfers and many more bands took fast, catchy 1960's teen rock and stripped it down even further, playing with ridiculous amounts of reverb, recording on the most low-fi equipment possible and made raw, lewd and explosive music that always sounded as if it was shooting out of a blown speaker.
In other words, they made rock n roll fun again. 
The Mummies were famous for antagonizing of the their already revved up crowds and for breaking their equipment on a regular basis- and not like The Who or Nirvana smashed their expensive gear for show, The Mummies just played so damn hard that keys were always flying off the organ, amps blew out, mics spent more time slamming into the ground than in mic stands, guitars were used to fight off a drunken fans wielding a broken bottles.  Here is the full performance from 1991 on the San Francisco cable access show, Counter Culture.  If I have to pick a song from here, I'll pick two: the cover of Pleasure Seekers' 1964 song, "What A Way To Die" (at 3:54) and the cover of Devo's 1978, "Uncontrollable Urge" (at 22:35).

The California Brick- Gambling Ships Part One

The SS Monte Carlo

You can probably tell from the sound of the waves and the wind, that I am not in a bar today.  I’m standing on a beach, just south of the famous Hotel del Coronado and just north of the Naval Amphibious Base on the Coronado Peninsula, on the western side of the San Diego Bay, and I’m a very intently watching how the Pacific Ocean here tumbles against the earth.   Its 8:30 in the morning, it’s cold, it’s overcast, and I’ve dragged my mom and my friend Anthony out of bed and down to this beach, so that we can witness a low tide with the hopes of catching a glimpse of the wreckage of the SS Monte Carlo gambling ship.

 In the wee hours of New Years Day 1937, a massive storm, one of those once-in-a-century sized storms, broke the Monte Carlo free of its anchors, about three miles west of here, just barely beyond the imaginary barrier that legally defines California’s territorial waters.  In that moment, this floating pleasure palace- a ship three football fields long, decked out with a ballroom dance floor, orchestra stand, chandlers, fine dining facilities, a bar that advertized being the most fully stocked the Pacific Coast, and of course, card tables, roulette tables, dice tables, slot machines- all of it gave into the unforgiving indifference of Mother Nature and was sent crashing amongst the waves, bounding toward San Diego.  The Monte Carlo had closed for the winter, so there were no New Year’s revelers aboard that fateful night, but there were two caretakers who not only rightfully feared for their lives as the ship rolled, creaked, leaked across the lightless ocean, but they also realized the legally precarious position they were in.   Authorities did know who the owners where, so at the moment, the caretakers bore sole responsibility for this Gomorra of the High Seas that had been eluding state and local law enforcement across the Southland for years.  With every eastward wave, the long arm of the law drew ever shorter, until WHAM!  Some sixty yards off where we stand now, the Monte Carlo slammed into the shallow earth and permanently embedded into the sand.

A crowd gathers in Coronado to see the crash of the Monte Carlo

The SS Monte Carlo was christened with the inauspicious name Tanker Number One in 1921, as part of a government experiment in constructing ships with alternative materials.  It launched from Wilmington, North Carolina with a solid concrete hull.  The government quickly realized concrete hulls made for durable and workable, but extremely slow ships and they sold the boat to an oil company in San Francisco.  In 1932, the concrete hull actually became an asset to the ship’s final owners, Southern California mobsters who preferred a ship that would remain stationary.  After significant remodeling, the newly minted SS Monte Carlo offered all the glamour, extravagance and excess the mainland denied.  You could come out just to freely relax with a drink and a gentlemanly card game; or bring your special lady friend for a romantic evening of diner, dancing, and most breathtaking views coast; or come alone and perhaps Lady Luck will favor you with a chance encounter with the woman of your dreams- rumor has it, gorgeous Hollywood starlets have been regularly spotted gracing these decks.  Water taxis are await, right down on the harbor, ready to transport you from your mundane life to a world of possibility.

An unforeseen consequence of the experiment in concrete hull construction was once the Monte Carlo beached up against the shore, the ruin of it can still be witnessed almost eighty years later.  Nobody then, or now, has any idea how to remove a 300-yard long concrete slab from the relentless breakwater of the Pacific Ocean.  It’s still out there, right now, just below the gray-green waves I’m looking at now.  Unfortunately, this trip to Coronado, to see last physical monument to the great gambling ships, was a bust- we can’t see a damn thing.  The tide isn’t low enough.  My old enemy, the Moon, has screwed me over yet again.  There are signs posted that warn of an “underwater obstruction” and there is a point out there, a spot where the waves break a little earlier and unevenly.  We can only assume that is it.  We’re going to say that is it.  The Monte Carlo is like the rest of these episodes you are about to hear on Southern California gambling ships of the 1920s and 30s, the real story has somehow become submerged, just below plain sight, a weird relic of gone time, and nearly forgotten.  So for the purposes of this introduction, I’m standing near the wreckage of the SS Monte Carlo in Coronado, and this is the Bear Flag Libation.[1]

Anthony and I looking for the wreckage of the Monte Carlo

(Courtesy of the Historical Society of Long Beach)

When I tell people I’m working on a podcast that uses bars and saloons as a way of telling California history, the first thing they say is, “That’s really cool!”  This response is invariably followed by a suggestion of their favorite old bar or saloon that I need to look into.  I’ve never had a bad suggestion, some places lend themselves to better stories than others, but before I began this project I established a set of qualifications for any bar or saloon the Bear Flag Libation would potentially highlight.  Those qualifications are three:  1) It has to be an establishment people primarily frequent for the purposes of drinking.  2) It has to be in California.  3) It has to still be in business. This topic meets none of those qualifications.  The gambling ships usually served alcohol, but not always, and as the name implies, they were primarily frequented by people hoping to make a fast buck.  Even during Prohibition, there were easier ways to get a drink than taking a speedboat three miles out into the ocean.  Which leads to the next betrayal of my own standards: for the gambling ships to exist, they had to be legally outside the jurisdiction of California law enforcement, hence they sat three miles out into the Pacific, therefore by definition, outside California.  Finally, there hasn’t been a gambling ship off an American since 1948.  The legal basis for this was largely due to the efforts of then California governor and soon-to-be legendary Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, whose crusade against the gambling ship owners led to Harry Truman’s presidential order to ban gambling in all U.S. territorial waters.  However, over the coarse of these shows I hope to show in this story the death of the gambling ships actually occurred prior to the legal basis because, between the 1920s to the 1940s, Americans sentiments toward casually flouting vice laws changed dramatically.  

But I had to tell this story because I fell in love with it as soon as I heard it, and the more I read about the weird and juicy details behind the gambling ships the more I was shocked I had never heard this story before.  Not only were there fully functioning resort style casinos operating off the California coast, with water taxi speed boats running 24 hours a day, but they existed by constantly spurning police and district attorneys’ offices for more than a decade, who wanted nothing more but to sink these swimming sin sellers.  Both law enforcement and the owners continually came up with creative legal loopholes and redefining of vocabulary in which to act against each other.  It’s a story with the mafia, holy rolling preachers, bootleggers, pirates, dirty politicians, good cops, bad cops, degenerate gamblers, international playboy gamblers, seedy lawyers, the Klu Klux Klan, the birth of Las Vegas, fires and explosions outside the Long Beach Harbor, shipwrecks in San Diego, gun battles between mobsters and the Coast Guard in San Pedro Bay!  Why had nobody told me anything about these gambling ships before?  Because nobody I’ve been talking to really new the story either.

Also, I fell this topic falls within the Bear Flag Libation’s purview because alcohol, and the undying human need to have alcohol, made the gambling ships possible.  These forthcoming episodes will not be explicitly about Prohibition in California- and I did say episodes because I’m going to try out breaking this topic up and bring you three or four shorter episodes that will come out weekly- but today’s episode will be all about Prohibition in Southern California because there could have been no gambling ships without the implantation of Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which made the production, transport and sale of alcohol illegal in January of 1920.  I argue this is for two reasons:  The first is the fact that Prohibition was successful at nothing as much as it was transforming small time thugs into fabulously wealthy members of organized crime syndicates.  In Southern California, many of the men who started out bootlegging Canadian whiskey in the early 20s, and by the late 20’s were able to take all the money they’d been earning, along with their excellent knowledge of the Pacific coastal waters and boating, and invest in gambling ships.  Often the speedboats they used as water taxis, to shuttle citizens from the harbor out to the gambling ships, were simply boats they had retired from rum running.  The second reason is slightly more abstract: Prohibition had many powerful and lasting effects on American culture, but I believe one of the temporary and fascinating ones, was a shift in attitudes about finding ways around laws that felt unjust or ineffective, specifically these morality laws that attempted to regulate personal behavior. 

Think of it this way: you’re a good, hard-working citizen who never got so much as a parking ticket.  You see the valid arguments behind banning alcohol- it leads to domestic violence, to indecent behavior, to addiction that ruins lives, to impulsive crime, to people like that lazy bastard at your job who is always hungover, if not still drunk, and you have to be the one who covers for him.  Sure, there are a lot of people who should be kept out of the bottle, maybe even most people, but you!  You handle your alcohol just fine.  You don’t drink and drive, you don’t beat your kids, you’ve never missed a day of work, you rarely even get drunk, there was that one time you had a few too many and punched out your landlord, but everybody agreed he had it coming.  The point is, you’re not a drunkard, so if you go down to the speakeasy and have cocktail or buy a bottle of smuggled hooch, it’s not really a violation of the law because they law wasn’t made to apply to you.  Besides, everybody else is drinking in some form or another, why should you be the only sucker who isn’t having some fun?  This goes on for a few years and this new way of drinking on the D.L. becomes the new normal.  Sure, there are some shady people involved, but they have no reason to harm you, you’re a customer and they’re ones that keep the whole city from going insane with sobriety.  Now a gambling ship opens up off the coast, is this really so different than a speakeasy?  Why shouldn’t you enjoy a game of cards with your drink?  The government said you can’t drink, you did, you have been for years in fact, the sun still rises every morning, you’re still a productive member of society and you are an adult.  It is obvious that you know better than the government when it comes to what you should and shouldn’t do.

I do not mean to imply that Prohibition was a slippery slop to anarchy or lawlessness, but people found stepping outside the boundaries of law more socially acceptable than they had before 1920.  Once one gets comfortable dwelling in legal loopholes, trading one vice for another hardly seems to matter.  And Prohibition in California offered many legal loopholes.  For instance, winemakers began selling a product called the “California Brick”, which was a box of compressed grapes sold completely legally for two dollars.  On the box came the “intended use” instructions on how to mix the grapes with water to make a refreshing punch, then it warned that one must be careful because if you accidently mixed the brick with a gallon of water, added sugar, shook it daily and decanted the product after three weeks, well, then you’d have wine.  So you know… don’t accidently do that.  California winemakers actually did quite well during Prohibition because homemade wine was so easy to make, there was another loophole that allowed wine for religious practices (“Yeah, I worship, um, Blotto… he’s the god of smiles, false confidence, and forgotten nights, yeah, Blotto, that’s the ticket).  And now wine had less competition with other types of booze.[2]

However, it is not as if drinkers really needed to go through the hassle of these “nudge, nudge, wink, wink” maneuvers.  Bathtub gin and moonshine were abound and if you had a little more scratch in your pocket you could afford Canadian whiskey.  Many historians have noted a nasty class distinction within Prohibition because they rich could get booze from so many places and drank with impunity, while the poor were forced to stay sober or risk drinking backyard rotgut that made folks go blind.  Anyhow, Prohibition did not destroy alcohol production and distribution as the designers had hoped, it was simply pushed it underground and passed the industry over to criminals.  Anybody who has watched Boardwalk Empire knows how quickly and easily the underworld stepped into their new role.  Small bands of minor criminals from cities around the country now had reason to talk to each other, to organize a distribution network, to play on each other’s strengths.  Later in the story we’ll see two of Al Capone’s gangsters sent out from Chicago to Los Angeles to take gambling ship management to a new and ruthless level.  It’s likely they were liked by a police for a crime in Chicago, so they went West and picked up there hardly missing a beat, it’s not as if there was a national criminal database in those days, the Bureau of Prohibition was still unsure if there even was a criminal network.[3]

Gangland crime, which is to say, murder, corruption, robbery, extortion, and the like, in San Francisco did not spike as significantly as it did in other cities, and it is thought one of reasons why was the city’s loose enforcement of the Volstead Act, which is the actual legislation that gave authority to enforce the Eighteenth Amendment.  The law was still the law and all the booze was still there, in the “Wettest City in the West”, but nobody had much interest in stopping flow of alcohol into the city.  The bootleggers were mostly Irish, the cops were mostly Irish, many of the city officials were Irish, and all stereotypes concerning cultural and/or generic predilections for the fermented beverages, San Francisco was a relatively small big city with strong cultural hegemony in those days, so nobody was going to get too popular going after friends and neighbors for something as petty as a wee bit poitin (potcheen).[4]

Historically speaking, the effect of cracking down on vice crime tends to bleed other types of crime out of other orifices: competition gets fiercer leading to gangland murders and hijacking; city officials, witnesses, journalists, etc., all requiring bribing or blackmailing; corruption runs rampant; kidnapping isn’t far behind; and every step of the way the dumb, weak and expendable are thinned from the heard, leaving behind the smart, hardened gangsters who know exactly when and where to apply bills and bullets, and aren’t afraid to do so.  This is why Southern California was a whole different animal than San Francisco; there were too many people in the City of Angels who held on to foolhardy notion that the public would hate bloody sidewalks more than they loved a stiff drink.

 Was that too much?  You try reading a bunch of LA crime stories, sit in front of a keyboard and not write purple prose like Danny Devito in LA Confidential.  I’m certainly not the first person to get wrapped up in Los Angeles Noir and that comes from this idea of a new city, full of promise and sunshine, but once you scratch at the gilded surface you find a river of smut and violence.  The source of this river can be traced directly back to the 1920s.  Going into Prohibition, Los Angeles was supposed to be the shining example of temperance.  According to the census of 1920, Los Angeles mainly populated by white, Protestant, agriculturally employed Midwesterners; we’re talking earnest, god-fearing, hardy American stock, salt of the earth folk that were the backbone of the Temperance Movement.  While California generally was known to be the wettest state in the Union, Los Angeles County was one of the driest.  I know that now that it is hard to image LA being the great white hope for moral virtue, but in first two decades of the 20^th century the major battle in city politics was between the Anti-Saloon League and the Prohibition Party on the best way to restrict drinking, at the bar or at the liquor store.[5]

So what happened?  I’ve been arguing this far that Prohibition changed everything, but in this case, what happened is exactly what been happening since the Franciscans showed up and said, “Holy shit, this place is nice,”: a population boom.  According to historian Kenneth D. Rose, Southern California flooded with migrants, still most of them white, Protestant Midwesterners, but these Midwesterners had more of an opportunistic streak, forgoing agriculture to make quick buck in real estate, oil and of course, the ever growing movie industry in Hollywood.  And with every burgeoning industry, comes parallel conventional industries, for every new land surveyor or oil pump man, there are even more people to build their houses, sell them groceries, drive their buses, etc.  For the first half of the 20s, as many as 100,000 people a year were moving to the Los Angeles area.  It hardly needs stating that the lettuce farming family man and the strike-it-rich hopeful oilman probably had different attitudes about what best to do with a bottle of bourbon.[6]

One of the parallel industries new to Los Angeles was organized crime and systemic corruption.  Obviously, members of La Costa Nostra didn’t keep detailed records of their dealings for future historian to pore over, but men like Jack Dragna and Charles Crawford near openly ran racketeering operations, gambling rings and committed murders.  Crawford bragged of having a private telephone line to “all the right places” in City Hall.  Key pieces of evidence always seemed to disappear, juries would suddenly refuse to convict, and people in the D.A.’s office were regularly fired for corruption.  The LAPD’s vice department, often called the “Purity Squad” under Captain Guy McAfee, ran gambling dens while shutting down competitors.  Even at the Federal level, local heads of agencies in charge of enforcing the Volstead Act, could expect only months in their positions before they were fired or quit under mysterious circumstances.  All of this can be traced back to booze and bootlegging, because the public’s inexhaustible thirst provided the means for finding the right price, or dirty secret, of even the most honest of men.[7]

I read somewhere that during the winter bootleggers in Detroit would actually drive across the frozen Detroit River from Windsor in Canada, which I always thought was pretty cool, but rumrunning in Southern California worked more or less like most coastal places.  Large ships hauled booze all the way down the West Coast from Canada, then anchored some thirty to fifty miles of shore.  They served as “motherships” to a small fleet of speedboats that raced back and forth to the mainland under cover of darkness.  Southern California has a unique coastline in that there are very few inlets, coves and islands for bootleggers to hide in or behind.  It is mostly long stenches of beach where anybody could spot an approaching boat.  So speedboats made runs at night, dodging Coast Guard patrols.  To remain quite as possible they cut their engines as few hundred yards off shore and coasted into the surf line, where they released even smaller rowboats to take crates of bottles ashore.  Armed guards and trucks met them, loaded up and sent the precious cargo to warehouses across the Southland, until each thirsty person with a wad of cash got their own bottle of liquid gold.[8] 

The U.S. government had so much trouble curtailing the work of bootleggers and considered it such a serious problem that in 1924, the United States renegotiated a series of treaties with foreign powers that expanded Federal territorial waters from three miles off all American coasts, to twelve miles.  This effectively gave the Coast Guard, whose fleet was also expanded, a much larger area to catch and legally prosecute people with a literal boat load of liquor.  Key to our story going forward, however, gambling is not illegal or regulated by the United States Constitution.  States and local municipalities decide gambling laws.  So when the first floating casino suddenly appears off just three miles the coast in Seal Beach, it is still subject to U.S. law, but outside the jurisdiction of California and Orange County law enforcement.[9]

Games of chance were, and still are, illegal in California.  We’ve touched on some of gambling operations the mob ran, which during the early 20’s, was fairly typical of any big city in America.  Nevada didn’t legalize gambling until 1931- one of the upcoming episodes will discuss the mobster Tony Cornero, a early visionary of Las Vegas and last man in the United States to attempt to run an offshore gambling ship.  Tijuana, just south of U.S. border, offered both drinking and gambling, especially in their famous racetrack, which opened in 1915, but Mexico proved an inconsistent haven for American vice, as well.

Mexico was just coming out of a revolution and the new government encouraged temperance, especially amongst the lower classes who were disproportionally distressed by alcoholism, but the government did not feel they could attempt prohibition while simultaneously rebuilding their nation.  In the early 20s, Mexican President Alvaro Obregon attempted supporting American Prohibition by establishing “vice-free zones” within fifty miles, all along the U.S. border.  I suspect, but read no reference to Obregon expressing this, that aside from his own sympathy for the American anti-alcohol laws, that the President knew of Mexico’s dangerous potential in trafficking in American vice.  Perhaps he envisioned a scenario in which America’s desire for illegal substances and the cash to pay for it would create massive smuggling cartels that could become so powerful that they could use violence and corruption to undermine the already weak Mexican government authority, because if something like that ever happened, well… oh, right.  Just because Obregon fought to overthrow Porfirio Díaz, doesn’t mean he ignored the dictator’s most famous quote, “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States.”[10]

Regardless, the “vice-free zone” proved only partially effective.  Mexico never became the ceaseless source for alcohol Canada was, but Tijuana served as a gambler’s getaway for Southern Californian’s willing to make the trip.  The car or train ride was a little long for most residents of Los Angeles and Orange counties, but for San Diegans and the sailors stationed at their Naval Base it was easy to pop across the border for drinks, dicing and prostitution.  The population of Tijuana grew from 1000 to 8000 from 1920 to 1930 and many of the illegal gambling empresarios across the Southland used the border city as a base of operations.  Every attempt to restrict border traffic, such as closing the U.S. side from 9PM to 6AM, were eventually overruled by San Diego business community who relied to regular trade with Mexico.[11]

I’m going to end it here for this episode, right at the point before I actually talk about the gambling ships.  Was that a tease?  I hope so.  Next time, which will probably be in about ten days, we’ll pick up story with how a fishing barge parked off Santa Monica suddenly started sprouting roulette wheels.

Before I go, a final thought on Prohibition:

It seems laughable to us today, that there was a time in which some people believed passing a law would actually stop other people from drinking, but Prohibition is just one aspect to a wide spread belief in the early 20^th century that a utopian society was actually possible by way of government policy and regulation.  Think of what else was going on around the world in the 1920s: Russia, the largest nation on the planet, was restructuring itself on an unprecedented scale with the hope of fulfilling Karl Marx’s vision of a perfectly scientific managed society. The fascism in Italy and rising in Germany, was very much the other side of the coin of communism, a real attempt at manufactured utopia, just by right-wing means rather than left-wing means.  Great Britain began toying with ideas that would lead to the modern welfare state.  The Spanish Civil War was just around the corner, with a myriad of big ideas on how best to make a society, including many anarchists, real anarchists taking a shot on establishing an anarchist nation.  In the United States, aside from Prohibition, there were many powerful people who believed in eugenics and some cities, including Los Angeles, actually sterilized citizens who were thought to be unfit to breed, in hopes of weeding out criminal behavior at a genetic level.  Faith in the power of science through social engineering was riding at an all time high.  So by comparison, trying to get people to stop drinking and beating on their wives seems like a pretty good idea.

Unfortunately, all those big ideas completely blew up in everybody’s faces- well, except for Great Britain and the welfare state, that’s actually working quite well for them.   The idea that humanity could better itself through scientific methods never died out, nor, in my personal belief, should it.  But after World War Two we all became very suspicious of anybody promising they knew how to create utopias.  Anybody who believes they are on the edge of perfect society can justify any evil deed to make it happen. 

As ridiculous of a notion Prohibition turned out to be, I have to admire the people of the time who were willing to try and actually made it happen.  Can you imagine an idea so grand and sweeping passing through congress today?  Bills that should be slam-dunks, like offering benefits to veterans or 9/11 widows, can’t even enough votes.  So next drink you have, raise a toast: to those crazy, starry-eyed bastards followed their dreams, tried to make the world a better place, ended up giving power to the Mafia, which resulted in giving us The Godfather trilogy.  Cheers!

This week, I’d like to thank my companions in the search for the Monte Carlo, my mom, Luanne Burton, and Anthony Lukens, who also happens to be the BLF’s one-man-house-band.  Sarah Dickey at the Coronado Historical Association Museum of History and Art, who allowed me access to their archives and put me in touch with local historian, Joe Ditler, who will be invaluable in next week’s show.  Also Kristi Fischer, from the Historical Society of Long Beach, who first told me of the gambling ships existence, allowed me access to their archives and also happens to be my awesome aunt.   I have a ton of really cool pictures thanks to these great people, so please go to the show page at BearFlagLibation.blogspot.com or the facebook page at facebook.com/bearflaglibation to check those out.  And thank you for listening.  I’ll see you in ten days, but in the mean time, enjoy your Spring Break and drink gin gimlets, just like Philip Marlow. 

---

[1] Ernest Marquez, Noir Afloat: Tony Cornero and the Notorious Gambling Ships of Southern California (Santa Monica: Angel City Press, 2011), 168-80, Coronado Journal, “New Storm Lashes Gambling Ship on Beach,” January 7, 1937.

[2] Marquez, Noir Afloat, 15; Kenneth D. Rose, “Wettest in the West: San Francisco & Prohibition in 1924,” California History 65, No. 4, (Dec. 1986), 289.

[3] Kenneth D. Rose, "‘Dry’ Los Angeles and Its Liquor Problems in 1924”, Southern California Quarterly 69 (Spring 1987), 52-53.

[4] Rose, “Wettest in the West,” 287.

[5] Rose, "‘Dry’ Los Angeles”, 52-56.

[6] ibid.

[7] Marquez, Noir Afloat, 12-14; Rose, "‘Dry’ Los Angeles”, 57-60.

[8] Marquez, Noir Afloat, 19-20.

[9] Rose, “Wettest in the West,” 286.

[10] Robert Buffington, “Prohibition in the Borderlands: National Government-Border Community Relations,” Pacific Historical Review 63(Feb. 1994), 24-31.

[11] ibid.