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overtook the demand for worms, and by the time Prohibition was repealed in 1933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 8th,
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 30th, 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.
