The epic battle that sunk Los Angeles’ gambling boats – Los Angeles Times

The government boats knifed across the Pacific, cutting a line toward the ship floating a little more than three nautical miles off the California coast.

The S.S. Rex was the biggest and most opulent gambling boat anchored off Santa Monica in 1939. And the man at the helm was a brash bootlegger-turned-gaming-kingpin who wore a white Stetson, lived in a Beverly Hills bungalow and held court at the Trocadero nightclub.

His name was Tony Cornero.

Cornero and others like him saw a way around California laws prohibiting gambling by operating floating casinos in waters they believed to be beyond the states jurisdiction. But the authorities disagreed with their interpretation of geography.

On this August day, the Rex had 600 passengers, an assortment of Angelenos enticed by booze-soaked games of blackjack, poker, roulette and more. But 250 law enforcement agents were fast approaching Corneros vessel at the direction of California Atty. Gen. Earl Warren, who had labeled the Rex and its peers the states single greatest nuisance.

Agents raided three other ships, and those operators quickly surrendered. But not Cornero. He had the Rexs gangway barricaded and set loose powerful water cannons on officers who tried to board.

The S.S. Rex deployed powerful water cannons to fend off agents trying to board it during the Battle of Santa Monica Bay on Aug. 1, 1939.

(Los Angeles Times)

Nobodys coming aboard this ship! Cornero shouted, according to the Los Angeles Examiner. Were on the high seas and were prepared to defend our rights. Try to use force, and well use it, too.

The Battle of Santa Monica Bay was on.

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They were converted lumber schooners, steamships and minelayers, transformed into vessels with names evoking glamour: Star of Hollywood, S.S. Tango, S.S. Monte Carlo. And the Rex.

VIDEO | 03:49

The forgotten history of Santa Monicas gambling ships

In 1939, there was a fierce battle in the waters off Santa Monica over a gambling ship operated by a notorious kingpin.

In Santa Monica, beachcombers could hear the faint, eerie sound of swing music wafting from the ships, but only when there was an onshore wind. A pamphlet for Corneros Tango promised dinner, dancing and entertainment that lasted from 6 p.m. to ??

The gambling boats of the 1920s and 30s may seem quaint now, given how easy it is to legally gamble in California, and the aquatic raids just a curiosity. But in a roundabout way, what the press called the Battle of Santa Monica Bay helped launch Las Vegas as we know it. And key to it all was the enterprising man few remember, Tony Cornero.

Column One

A showcase for compelling storytelling from the Los Angeles Times.

Born Anthony Cornero Stralla in 1900, he spent his earliest years in Italys Piedmont region, the son of a hard-luck farmer. After three years of bad corn crops there finally was a bounty, but, as Cornero later told the Saturday Evening Post, his father lost everything in a card game.

Meantime I was playing out in the fields and accidentally set the harvested corn afire, Cornero told the Post. My mother said: Theres nothing left; well all have to go to America.

Artifacts from the S.S. Rex gaming chips, dice and a matchbook rest on a photograph of the gambling boats owner, Tony Cornero.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

The family immigrated to the San Francisco Bay Area. Living in Los Gatos a few years later, Cornero had a childhood epiphany while shooting craps. Like his father, he lost everything.

I saw that in playing the other fellows game, I was only making a squirrel of myself, Cornero said. So I decided that the smart caper was to make the other fellow play my game, and thats what I have been doing ever since.

By his teenage years, Cornero was dabbling in crime; robbery charges in 1916 he confessed to leading a gang of jitney bandits, the Oakland Tribune reported led to a stint in reform school.

The advent of Prohibition created an opportunity: People needed their booze, and Cornero provided it. The 1920s saw him arrested multiple times for allegedly violating the National Prohibition Act, the FBIs 539-page Cornero dossier shows. There was even an arrest on suspicion of murder, but apparently no charges were filed.

Gambling boat kingpin Tony Cornero, shown in L.A. County jail on Aug. 8, 1946, was arrested several times over the years.

(Los Angeles Times)

Early on, Cornero developed a flair that served him well in his illicit pursuits. When authorities put up a roadblock to keep him from trucking liquor to the Napa River, he devised a workaround, according to Fred Grange, the son of Corneros business partner.

On one side of the roadblock, they shut off the fire main, said Grange, 77. On the other side, they shut off another pipe. They just pumped the hooch ... underneath where the G-men were.

Safely past the roadblock, the bootleggers pumped the booze out of the pipe and back into containers on their vehicles.

His brain was supercharged, Grange said.

Eventually, Cornero wound up in prison due to another bootlegging operation, but he was a free man by the start of the 1930s. And a rich one. Cornero made $1 million as the Southlands King of Rumrunners, The Times reported in 1955.

But that was nothing compared to the Rex. Cornero spent $200,000 transforming a 300-foot-long former windjammer into a casino. It boasted 150 slot machines, a 250-foot bar and ladies in form-fitting dresses to lure customers, the L.A. Herald Examiner reported years later. It also boasted something sinister on the off-limits top deck: machine guns set up fore and aft, according to the Saturday Evening Post. Three shifts of gunners man them every minute.

The Rex opened on May 5, 1938; Cornero promoted it with skywriting and ads assuring it was run honestly.

The ships many gaming offerings and that promotion added up to an innovation: making gambling appealing to the middle class.

Gambling was either the purview of the very wealthy or the very poor; it was either in luxury surroundings or in some kind of snake pit, said historian Alan Balboni, whose book Beyond The Mafia: Italian Americans and the Development of Las Vegas covers Cornero. He did open it to the middle class. For any of his failings, he was a real entrepreneur.

A 1939 advertisement for Tony Corneros S.S. Rex gambling ship that appeared in the Los Angeles Times invited guests to enjoy an atmosphere of unbridled luxury.

Soon, the Rex was claiming a daily profit of as much as $12,000 the modern equivalent of $231,000. By then, Cornero was tied to a constellation of high-profile criminals, among them Benjamin Bugsy Siegel. Cornero had nicknames of his own: Tony the Hat and Black Tony. Out on the water, he went by another: the Admiral.

Still, if not for the gambling boat plotline in Raymond Chandlers Farewell, My Lovely, which includes a character scholars say is modeled after Cornero, its doubtful many Angelenos would have even a foggy sense of this era.

Cornero certainly seems lifted from a noir novel, but was the gambler also a gangster?

An answer appeared elusive, because the dead dont talk, and sometimes the living wont, either. One of Corneros few remaining relatives declined to be interviewed and warned that a writer shed spoken to years earlier wound up mothballing a project on Cornero under mysterious circumstances.

She implied that organized crime was involved in the silencing.

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In some accounts, Cornero was ruthless; in others, merely a provocateur.

But further insight into him comes from a surprising source: the unpublished autobiography From Grunt to Colonel in 33 Years by Louis J. North. His mother was Corneros sister. North completed the manuscript in 2016, two years before he died at 93.

He taught me how to shoot craps on the living room rug, North wrote of his uncle. The memoir also revealed a secret.

Louis J. North, shown here in a 1974 photo, was a retired U.S. Army colonel who was the nephew of Tony Cornero and wrote about his uncle in a memoir. North died in 2018.

(Jan North)

During Prohibition, Cornero and Norths father, Charles North, started a bootlegging outfit on a small island along Canadas Pacific coast. They would buy Canadian booze, load it on their boat, run it across Puget Sound, and offload it on the beach near Bellingham, Washington, North wrote.

But one night things took a turn. Some banditos thought it would be a great idea to hijack a load of their booze, the manuscript read. A shootout ensued, and one of the banditos died.

The brothers-in-law fled and eventually made it back home. Norths autobiography, however, spotlights an enduring mystery, according to his widow, Jan North.

Who shot that guy and killed him? she wondered. Nobody ever did know for sure if that was my father-in-law that shot and killed that person. Or if it was Tony.

North told her the story a handful of times over the years, though she doesnt know if he knew more than he shared. But she knows this: After the killing, Charles stayed the heck away from Tony forever.

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Cornero mastered the ocean. Its murk and churn. Its bounty.

He was the ultimate impresario, welcoming 1 million-plus patrons to the Rex in its first year or so he claimed and making them feel special as he emptied their pockets.

He had a photographic memory, said Ernest Marquez, 97, author of 2011s Noir Afloat: Tony Cornero and the Notorious Gambling Ships of Southern California. He could meet you one week, a month would go by, and youd come back hed call you by name.

Author Ernest Marquez in his West Hills home office, which is filled with books on Southern California history.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Cornero remembered the nobodies, but there were plenty of somebodies, too.

Robert Galbreath, whose father captained water taxis to the Rex, recalled him talking about celebrities that would be on his boat.

Thats no surprise: Errol Flynn, Cesar Romero and other Hollywood types stopped by. The Saturday Evening Post reported on one high-stakes game of Faro involving legendary gambler Nick the Greek Dandolos that drew spectators Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal Pictures, and Academy Award-winning producer Winfield R. Sheehan.

Ferrying such luminaries to and from the Rex was an exotic gig for Galbreaths father, then a young USC student in need of part-time work.

Gamblers line up to board a water taxi that would take them out to the S.S. Rex gaming vessel in the late 1930s.

(UCLA Daily News Collection / Los Angeles Times)

Much better than parking cars, Galbreath, 81, said.

The elder Galbreath, also named Robert, never shared much about his Rex days but left his son a memento from that time: a yachting cap.

Revving the engine of a powerful boat, helping fancily dressed flappers in and out, the prospect of big tips from the perspective of a male college student, it seems like a dream job, Galbreath said.

Corneros FBI dossier tells a darker story about the Rex one of trick dice, pickpockets, crooked croupiers, gun-toters and bunco men.

According to the Herald Examiner, Cornero called the patrons squirrels. It was supposedly a term of affection, but the story said winners often complained they were beaten and/or robbed, and lawmen discovered more than one body washed ashore with a bullet hole in the head.

Local authorities filed criminal charges against the operators of the Rex in 1938, but not for violence or theft. Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Buron Fitts alleged the Rex was anchored in California waters and thus operating illegally.

Fitts legal team argued that Santa Monica Bay was actually part of the coastline. The prosecutors contended that the three-mile limit for Californias waters should be calculated from an imaginary line in the Pacific connecting the bays two headlands: Point Vicente and Point Dume. Under these parameters, the states jurisdiction would extend much farther from shore.

After several legal skirmishes, the matter headed to the California Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the Rex kept operating, which seemed to inflame Warren, whod later dub Cornero a symbol of the underworld.

The attorney general hit Cornero and other gambling boat operators with public nuisance charges, which they ignored. Thats what prompted the afternoon raid of Aug. 1, 1939.

The Rexs top-deck guns stayed silent as 250 government agents approached. But Corneros crew barricaded the gangway and flung huge nets over the sides of the ship, according to a United Press account of the drama. The nets could be maneuvered from the deck as a barrier against anyone seeking to board. And soon, officers were trying to clamber up the netting.

Tony Cornero, third from right, huddles with associates aboard the S.S. Rex amid 1939s Battle of Santa Monica Bay.

(Paul Calvert)

Stand off! Cornero yelled into a megaphone, the United Press reported. Were beyond the three-mile limit.

But the agents kept coming, and two made it to the top of a net. As they tried to pull themselves up onto the deck, Cornero unleashed the water hoses. The officers tumbled ... ignominiously into the sea and had to be fished out by their colleagues. The United Press added, Other officers, attacking in groups, met the same fate, some being helped to it by a seamans rough straight-arm to the face.

But Warren had an advantage: The Rex, converted from a windjammer to a barge, couldnt move under its own power. Escape was impossible.

Still, at least one member of Corneros inner circle tried, according to Grange, whose father served as the vessels purser. My dad apparently jumped overboard and tried to make it back to shore, said Grange, recalling a story told by an aunt.

A law enforcement agent aboard a government boat, left, keeps an eye on the Rex during the Battle of Santa Monica Bay.

(Los Angeles Times)

Before he leaped, the purser gathered all the money he could and stuffed it in his raincoat, all the way from his feet to his shirtsleeves, said Grange, adding: Just imagine, youre going to swim three miles, its cold water and youve got a bunch of cash what else are you going to put it in?

His father was apprehended before he got very far.

Cornero was defiant. As the standoff began, he boasted to the press that he had a loyal crew of 200 and plenty of food aboard for his 600 guests. But onshore, The Times reported, friends and relatives of the temporary prisoners apparently werent assuaged and anxiously milled about the Santa Monica docks with the hopes of an update on the standoff.

Warren, who watched the raid from a beach club binoculars in hand was defiant, too, according to the Examiner. Well starve em out, he said.

Nobodys coming aboard this ship! Were on the high seas and were prepared to defend our rights. Try to use force, and well use it, too.

Tony Cornero

As the first night wore on, the weather grew colder and Cornero flashed his characteristic cheek, tossing bottles of top-shelf scotch down to officers on two of the government boats that circled the Rex, according to Noir Afloat.

But a U.S. Coast Guard commander assessed the situation more gravely, telling Warren that the patrons needed to be evacuated because panic might start in [the] night, which would cause loss of life, according to an FBI report.

Cornero relented, and the guests were removed. The early-morning evacuation took hours, with the usually efficient water-taxi system becoming snarled by the scale of the endeavor, a United Press report said.

It then became a waiting game.

For days, the government boats which Cornero derided as Warrens Navy kept circling. At one point, Cornero was said to have hauled down the Rexs U.S. flag and threatened to raise that of the Empire of Japan. The provocation, Warren told The Times, revealed the character of the gentleman operating these barges. (Cornero later disputed the characterization of the episode, telling The Times it was bull.)

Though Cornero had boasted, If I go off, it will be in a box, after 10 days, he gave up. But he did it with more cheek.

Reaching the pier, he said: I have to get a haircut, and the only thing I havent got aboard is a barber.

Cornero soon lost the courtroom battle, too. On Nov. 20, 1939, the states Supreme Court sided with Fitts. As a result, Californias jurisdiction was extended about 15 miles from Santa Monicas shore. The Times concluded: The day of the gaming ships is done.

A day later, the Rex, which had sat empty since the battle, was boarded by ax-wielding agents who hacked up craps tables and roulette wheels and heaved the scraps, along with dozens of slot machines, into the ocean. In photos, the pillaging officers faces are twisted with emotion its hard to say whether in agony or in glee.

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The epic battle that sunk Los Angeles' gambling boats - Los Angeles Times