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  Demand for beer quickly overtook the demand for worms, and by the time Prohibition was repealed in 1933 the owner ditched the bait gig all together and the Kingfish became a bar.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

            It is likely that owners of the Johanna Smith did only consider geography when they chose Long Beach as their launching point, because when considering the culture of Long Beach in the 1920s, it’s about the worst place in the Southland to go to sell sin.  Or perhaps they did recognize the city that was often called the “Iowa by the Sea” as the hotbed holy-rolling it was and figured in the battle of Jesus Vs. vice, vice would always come out on top.  Long Beachers prided themselves on temperance and had since the city founding in 1888.   The community’s first developer, William Willmore, inserted a clause into every deed that forbade the sale of alcohol under penalty of reversion of property, with only a few exceptions for light drinks at some hotels and restaurants.  In 1896, the city actually became unincorporated and run by L.A. County for a year a half because a battle over the one saloon in town basically ground municipal business to a halt.  In 1903, Long Beach voted for complete alcohol prohibition within city limits, then did so again in 1905.  There is a story I came across that sums up, in my mind, what kind of town Long Beach was:  In the early 1910s, Police Chief Captain Williams got wind of a pharmacy suspected of selling liquor without a prescription and orchestrated a bust that could utilize his many talents.  Captain Williams was a practiced minstrel show actor- if you’re unfamiliar, minstrelsy is the very old and uniquely American art of white men painting their faces black and performing comedic variety shows while portraying uneducated, dim-witted and exaggeratedly stereotyped black people.   Classy stuff; because if racial oppression is not enough, it’s also a great, big joke for the oppressors.  Oh, and according to historian Eric Foner, Abraham Lincoln was a fan of minstrel shows, so you can mull on that.  Anyway, Chief Williams put on his best blackface, knocked on the back door of McCarthy’s Drug Store, and asked for a bottle of “likeh”.  Apparently, the shopkeeper didn’t recognize the town’s top cop in the dark and through the shoe polish and sold Williams a bottle.  As soon as, money changed hands a near by sergeant fire his pistol into the air and cops stormed they drug store and shut it down.  That’s the type of town Long Beach used to be.[5]

            By the 1920s, the fervently decent, white Methodists of Long Beach looked on in horror as the communities just north of them- in and around Los Angeles- took in an ever-increasing number of immigrants, people of color and citizens of questionable moral virtue.  Reverend George Taubman hosted the largest bible study group in the nation.  Membership to this bible study group was an unofficial prerequisite for not just public office in Long Beach, but even for municipal bureaucrats.  These were big supporters of Robert Shuler, the fire-and-brimstone radio preacher who railed against the Catholics, Jews, blacks, élites, immigrants.  So it shouldn’t be to surprising that the Ku Klux Klan found a welcoming community in high places in Long Beach. [6]

            The KKK reemerged in many places around the United States in the wake of the First World War, a dark shadow of that hopeful progressivism I talked about last week.  The Klan had evolved to meet the modern age from its foundations in the Deep South as a reaction to Reconstruction after the Civil War, but at it’s core these were still bigoted white male Protestants who saw what they perceived as the natural order of their dominance being upset and sought to correct matters by donning masks and, when they deemed necessary, taking the law into their own hands.  But racist Batmans, these fat middle-aged businessmen, were not.  Klan related lynchings were pretty rare during the 20s, in fact rather than using violence at all, this highly organized Klan preferred parades, protests, the pulpit, and, mostly importantly, recruiting members in positions of power, so to infiltrate their agenda into the infrastructure, creating systematic racism and xenophobia.   This KKK was all about rapid Americanism, about turning back the clock to some idealized time before foreigners, papists and coloreds ruined this country for real Americans.  They militantly supported Prohibition and assumed for themselves the responsibility of being the last bulwark against societal corruption.

            Oakland had a major Klan presence during the 20s.  So did San Diego.  Near by Long Beach, in Inglewood, now a city famous for its black and Latino communities saw one of the most notorious cases of Klan violence of the era.  In April of 1922 over a hundred hooded Klansmen broke into the house of a Spanish Basque couple that the Klan suspected of bootlegging.  They severely beat the men in the house, contemporary accounts strongly imply the rape of the teenage daughters, and when the cops arrived a shoot-out occurred leaving one Klansmen dead and two wounded.  It turned out the dead one was an Inglewood cop himself, and when a Federal invitation of the Klan in Southern California ensued, many of the members turned out to local law enforcement officers.  Naturally, none of the Klansmen involved were ever convicted and the communities around Los Angeles rallied to support the vigilantes who claimed to they were out to “clean up the town’s bootleggers.”[7]

            In Long Beach, this led to a purging of Klan from the police force, they had a choice to remain cops or remain Klansmen, and some chose the Klan.  Whatever support the KKK may have enjoyed within the department, it became obvious that they could not have their officers committing vigilante crimes, or covering up for them after the fact.   Nonetheless, in Reverend Taubman’s bible group, in city government, in the local newspapers, the Klan still carried a strong and subtle influence.[8]

            I bring all this up, first because I find it so weird to imagine the Ku Klux Klan, a nightmare from the backwoods of the Civil War South, popping up in sunny California in the twentieth century, white pointy hoods and all and having support from the public- they marched in parades with marching bands, for god’s sake, my own grandmother growing up in Long Beach may have seen the Klan on parade, it’s just weird!  I also wanted to show something of how seriously people in LA and Long Beach took their “moral virtues”.  When the Johanna Smith suddenly appeared offshore, with water taxis leaving from the Long Beach Harbor, an LA Times article proclaimed, “They chose the wrong coast.  Long Beach has always been noted for its morality and sobriety.  The criminal class has never felt greatly at home there.”

The gambling ships were run by mostly Italian American, Catholic, bootleggers and career criminals, who basically said, “Fuck all that noise, just come gamble.”  They had no way of knowing how people would react to gambling out in the open, but worked off a “If you build it, they will come” model.  And come they did.[9]

           

            We don’t have partially reliable numbers on how many people went to the gambling ships or how much money they made, but two months after the Johanna Smith opened, a newspaper reported that the water taxis, which ran twenty-four hours a day, had not been idle once since ship opened for business and as many as twelve hundred people could visit on the holidays and weekends.  I found an article written in 1981 that claimed 50,000 people a week regular visited Gambling Ship Row and at any single time during the late 20s and early 30s, as many as 1500 were employed by the nautical gambling industry, but I’m not sure where the author got those numbers.  One thing we do know is the business was so instantly successful that six months after the Johanna Smith opened for business she was joined by the Monfalcone, which the newspapers said cost up to $100,000 to renovate (and this is 1928 dollars) into an even larger, even more luxurious, multi-deck “gamblers heaven”.  Over the next two years, three more ships appeared on the So Cal coast: the Rose Isle, William H. Harriman and the SS Monte Carlo.  If one of the ships was destroyed or shut down, the investors behind the booming industry were able to instantly remodel another vessel and had it out on Gambling Ship Row with hardly a loss to business.  Also, we’ll soon see, as well, there was enough money floating around out there to kill for.[10]

The casino on the Johanna Smith, Aug. 1928
(from LA Times article)

            Obviously the conservative powers-that-be in Long Beach were not going to accept their city had just become the waypoint for all the gambling degenerates in the Greater Los Angeles area to pass through on their way out to the Sodom of the High Seas.  Four days after the Johanna Smith opened her doors members of the LBPD vice squad and detectives from the LA County District Attorney’s office rode the water taxis out to the ship and found seven tables and twenty three slot machines, all packed with people freely gambling, but no intoxicating liquor.  The cops poked around, but eventually concluded there was nothing they could do and left.  One of the dealers onboard explained to a reporter from the Long Beach Press Telegram that one of the leading maritime lawyers in the country looked over Johanna Smith plans to ensure the whole operation remained, if not above board per se, but out of the reach of law enforcement.  They had even added an extra layer of legal obfuscation by having the water taxis leave from Long Beach in LA Country, but then parking the mothership off the coast of Seal Beach, in Orange County.[11]

            Six weeks later authorities believed they had gotten the upper hand and were ready for to end the gambling ship experiment right then and there by applying a rarely used law dating back to 1793, written to deter pirates, involving commercial licensing.  The Johanna Smith was licensed for “coastwide trade” but had not moved from its position for more than 60 days.  It was a pretty flimsy infraction, but it was enough for Federal Deputy Marshal to ride out and confiscate the vessel.  As soon as the Deputy Marshal pulled up to the Johanna Smith in a Coast Guard boat, the employees broke the winches that brought up the anchors, delaying the moving of the ship for three days.  The crew remained belligerent and deliberately unhelpful.  When a Los Angeles Times photographer began snapping pictures of the seizure an employee smashed the photographer’s camera and offered a hundred dollars to anyone who would throw the man overboard.   Nobody took the offer, but what to maintain our image of what mafiosos act like.  Eventually, the Johanna Smith was towed to the San Pedro Harbor, a judge ruled the seizure legal and the ship was sold at an auction for $9000… right back to a front man for the Spring Street Gang, who owned to ship to begin with.  They reopened off the coast of Venice, then moved up to Ventura, then Point Magu before finally ended up in Long Beach again alongside the Rose Isle and the Monte Carlo.[12]

            The first two tries at gambling ships did not go particularly well for the owners, but the Johanna Smith brought in enough money after only two months that the mobsters felt this was endeavor worth continuing.  They were learning from their mistakes as they went.  The licensing law got worked around by simply having the vessels on Gambling Ship Row switch spots every month; thereby somehow they were able to argue they were engaging in “coastwide trade.”  Legally beaten on this front, authorities took up another angle: going after the water taxis that shuttled people to the gambling ships.   Initially, the speedboats charged fifty cents for a ride out, but the Long Beach City Attorney announced the operators did not have a license to run a ticket booth at the wharf and they were not going to get one.  This was easily dodged by no longer charging the passengers, the real money was made from the gambling anyway and there was no law against offering free boat rides.  So Long Beach found a law in the State Penal Code authorizing the arrest of anyone soliciting, inviting or enticing another person to go to a place where gambling or other “immoral acts” were being committed.  The gambling ship attorneys countered that the water taxis were no different than bus trips to Tijuana, which was quite clever because any attempt to change the law would mean crossing the legitimate tourist industry, which had deep pockets and a powerful lobby in Sacramento.  In the meantime, the owners figured out a way to get a step ahead of the authorities.  The Monfalcone bought an old ship that had been in Hollywood movies, mostly famously from the Battle of Trafalgar, and placed it three miles out, between the gambling ships and the shore.  They called it the Pirate Galleon and billed it as a tourist attraction, a piece of Hollywood history with a great view of the coast, and also offered fishing.  If some of the people who came to Pirate Galleon decided they wanted to get onboard another boat to go out to the gambling ships, well, they weren’t technically leaving from Long Beach now, where they?  To the frustration of the authorities, a lot of people actually did go out to the Galleon just to fish, mixing the regular citizens in with the rascals. [13]  

The Long Beach City Council was failing so hard at shutting down this offshore blight that religious leaders, like Reverend George M. Rouke, began accusing the politicians of being in cahoots with gambling ship owners because they had authorized a permit for buses to run down to the water taxi dock.  So they drafted a city ordinance restricting the buses, surely knowing all this would do is add to traffic problems.  Rouke then asked why didn’t Long Beach have a law, like Santa Barbara passed when the William H. Harriman gambling ship showed up there, that allowed anyone who visited a gambling ship to be arrested for vagrancy?  A draconian law to be sure (homelessness has nothing to do with gambling), but Long Beach caved and passed a similar ordinance.  When they tried to enforce it, the water taxis simply started offering sightseeing tours and moonlight boat rides, meaning to arrest somebody you would have to actually have an officer on every boat watching to see who got on and off a gambling ship.  As you can see, this process got surreally complicated over time.  So much drama in the LBC.[14]

Both sides were prone to giving into frustration in this constant dance of ambiguous legality.  One afternoon, while the Long Beach Vice Squad once again raided the water taxis for the Rose Isle, some of the irritated boat drivers tried to drive away while the detectives were boarding, fist fights ensued, one cop was tossed into the water.  One of the other crews refused to come back ashore to be arrested, and just went idle in the water, at least until the whole squad trained their guns at the boat.  The cops were not in a generous mood after this ordeal and arrested, not just the crews, but any employee of a gambling ship, even the valet car parkers, all were handcuffed and put in the patty wagon.  The customers on the Rose Isle found themselves stranded out there for hours, as they had to organize themselves, agree to pay for a charter boat and radio back to land in hopes of finding somebody who would pick them up.  The idea of marooning customers out at sea became a reoccurring tactic for the police.  They would raid a ship late the evening and hold everybody on board as “material witnesses” until long after the sun came up.  No real arrests were made this way, but it gave future gamblers something to think about before going down to the docks because most people need a better excuse than “I was on a gambling ship” when they don’t come home to their wives at night, or to their boss when they don’t show up to work in the morning.[15]

Roulette on the Rose Isle
(photo from LA Times)

 I can’t help myself in rooting for the gambling ships here.  For one thing, I admire their cleverness in circumventing the law at every turn and going about their business in plain sight.  Also, in any story, I tend side with anybody rebelling against the established order; it is a very American trait I’m proud to have, to root for the disobedient underdog.  Especially, when the gambling ships were merely offering a popular form of entertainment in the face of, in my opinion, an extremely arbitrary sense of morality.  But I have to remind myself this is not Footloose: the gambling ships were not Kevin Bacon, who just wants to dance, while stogy, old John Lithgow hems and haws about the evil dancing leads to.   These were hardened gangsters.  In 1929, 30, 31, we’re getting into the Great Depression years and gambling ships were exploiting people’s desperation and hope by taking money they did not have.  Reverend Rouke, who led his congregation in crusade against the ships, was inspired to do so after a man named Guy Bonner committed suicide in April of 1930, leaving behind a note that read, “My uncontrollable desire for gambling has made me a tramp.  I went to that ship last night and lost all my money.  I wrote checks and have no money to pay.  I owe $2000.”  And I certainly understand the frustration of law enforcement, who were doing their jobs in trying to enforce the law in the spirit in which it was written.  I imagine their attitude being something along the lines of: “We live in a society of laws, gambling is illegal in California, everybody knows it, how can these assholes be getting away with this?”  It must have been a bittersweet turn of events when the criminals started doing what they usually did- they turned on each other. [16]

            Alright, I just finished writing this full episode and its pretty long.  I’m trying to avoid marathon episodes, so this felt like a good spot good of place for me to call an audible and divide the episode.  I’m going out of town in three days, but in that time I’m going to half ass all my other obligations in attempt to get out the next episode before I leave.  So check your downloads for the Port of Lost Souls straight way.  For now, enjoy our global warming and drink a Tom Collins, because it’s refreshing. 

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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), 122-23.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Advertisement in Long Beach Press Telegram, June 30, 1928.

[4] Marquez, Noir Afloat, 125-26; Long Beach Press Telegram, July 3, 1928.

[5] Joanne Fenbach, “Gambling Ships Went to the Limit,” Long Beach Heritage, Vol.2 No 2.  May, 1981; Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: WW Norton & Company, 2010), 120.

[6] Claudine Burnett, Prohibition Madness: Life AND Death in and Around Long Beach, California, 1920-1933 (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2013), 16-23.

[7] Cecilia Rasmussen, “Klan's Tentacles Once Extended to Southland,” Los Angeles Times, May 19^th 1999.

[8] Burnett, Prohibition Madness, 18-26.

[9] Long Beach Press Telegram, “Gambling Ship Evades Law Raid,” July 5, 1928; Patricia Cooney Crawford, “Gambling Ships Went to the Limit,” Long Beach Heritage, Vol.2 No 2.  May, 1981.

[10] Marquez, Noir Afloat, 121-63.

[11] Long Beach Press Telegram, “Gambling Ship Evades Law Raid,” July 5, 1928.

[12] Long Beach Press Telegram, “Gambling Vessel Under Guard Following Seizure,” Aug 24 1928; Marquez, Noir Afloat, 133-35.

[13] Burnett, Prohibition Madness, 100-02.

[14] Burnett, Prohibition Madness, 105-06.

[15] Marquez, Noir Afloat, 148-50.

[16] Burnett, Prohibition Madness, 104-05.