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. 

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[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.