The Bear Flag Libation: May 2014

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 Bear Flag Libation

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Thursday, May 29, 2014

Don't Fear The Podcaster

Sunday, May 25, 2014

Gambling Ship Photos

Friday, May 23, 2014

The Port of Lost Souls- Gambling Ships Part Three