Noir Afloat

Gambling Beyond the Waves

By Libby Motika, Senior Editor

When gambling kingpin Tony Cornero Stralla, captain of the infamous Santa Monica Bay floating casino S.S. Rex, walked into Santa Monica Bank in the late 1930s to make a sizable deposit, the bank president accepted the request, with one stipulation. Cornero had to supply a truck to transport the cash because they didn't own anything sturdy enough to carry that much weight--bags and bags of silver dollars! This was a trifle to a man who was millionaire by the age of 25.

  Cornero was born of tough and hardy Piedmont stock, 'not,' he bragged, 'in the part of Italy that breeds guitar players, opera singers or the lower brackets of racketeers.'

  He was tough and hardy, indeed, but the Piedmont in him had also bred a racketeer of the highest order, says Ernest Marquez in his new book, 'Noir Afloat: Tony Cornero and the Notorious Gambling Ships of Southern California' (Angel City Press).

  In Cornero, Marquez found the ideal protagonist to tell the history of those wild and untamed years when vice was rife, corruption was unparalleled and there was an endless supply of gambling fools.

  The book reads like a 'true crime' novel, following the relentless battle between crooked opportunists and eager law enforcement officials bent on cleaning up corruption.

  Marquez, whose previous book on Santa Monica Beach fueled his interest in the gambling ships, describes a Los Angeles in the 1920s and '30s, when jobs were scarce but where the dream of making it big never died.

  Casino-type gambling was outlawed within California borders, but not on the open sea beyond the three-mile limit. Numerous gambling ship operators seized on this loophole and managed to lure customers to visit these floating casinos. They offered free water-taxi service from shore, as well as free dinner and drinks, and saw the risk pay off.

  A dozen gambling ships operated from 1927 to 1939, each with its own operator, who for the most part strived to remain anonymous to avoid the law. Not so with Tony Cornero. 'He never denied what he was doing,' Marquez says. 'He was an intelligent, charming person'kind and ruthless at the same time.'

  Cornero immigrated with his family to the U.S. in 1904 and settled in Los Gatos. By 15, he was already a mischief; he was convicted of robbery and sent to reform school. He enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve, but was discharged after six months for violating orders and remaining AWOL for various periods.

  At 20 (during Prohibition), Cornero was smuggling liquor from Canada into the United States and became the acknowledged king of Southern California rumrunners.

  Adventures appealed to this risk-prone entrepreneur, who was well known by law-enforcement authorities. By 25, he was riding high. He was living in a Beverly Hills mansion he bought for his mother, close to Bugsy Siegel's house.

  'The mayor of Beverly Hills tried desperately to drive these gangsters out because it wasn't good for the city to have so many being killed,' Marquez says. But, soon enough, the feds caught up with Cornero, convicting him of violating the national Tariff Act and the National Prohibition Act, and he spent two years at the McNeil Island penitentiary in Washington.

  Cornero, never at a loss for a new opportunity, plotted his next move and turned his attention to Nevada, 'where gambling was a way of life.'

  All of this was just a prelude to the extravagant venture aboard the Rex, Cornero's most ambitious project yet'a floating palace.

  The ship was once a beautiful, four-masted windjammer that after decades of service Cornero purchased in 1937. He stripped her masts and dismantled her superstructure, replacing it with a 300-ft. long deckhouse, the future casino area. He set up his water-taxi service at the Santa Monica Pier and opened for business in May 1938.

  Cornero, always eager to promote his latest venture, wrote his own advertising, declaring publicly his honest business practices and pledging that he would pay '$100,000 to anyone who found aboard the S.S. Rex a falsely run game.'

  The ship's layout was straightforward: the lower deck accommodated a 500-seat bingo parlor and horse-race betting in the stern. The grand casino on the upper deck featured 11 roulette tables, eight dice tables, blackjack and faro games. The bar took up one entire wall, while the opposite wall was lined with 150 slot machines. Two dining rooms and a dance floor made for an exciting and romantic evening. Marion Davis reportedly enjoyed ''slumming' by spending the evening on the gambling ship,' Marquez says.

  No doubt Cornero was in it for the money, but he was also capable of the magnanimous gesture, Marquez says. 'It was not unusual for him to reimburse a distraught wife when he saw that her husband had lost an entire week's salary at the tables.'

  For 10 years, Cornero battled efforts to rid the Southern California coast of floating casinos, insisting that his operation was outside the state's jurisdiction. The L.A. District Attorney's office and the Santa Monica police claimed that the three-mile limit extended from an imaginary line drawn from Point Dume on the north to Point Vicente on the south. Cornero argued that he was beyond the three-mile limit. The court would decide.

  Cornero might have rested while appeals were drafted and the jurisdictional question was passed all the way up to Congress, but he hadn't reckoned on the eagerness of California's Attorney General Earl Warren, who viewed gambling ships as 'evil incarnate, and their elimination as a moral imperative.' He did not regard the jurisdictional boundary as relevant. His tack was to charge the operators as a public nuisance that 'led people to an idle and dissolute life, caused citizens to lose their regular employment and attracted pickpockets, bunco men, thieves, racketeers, gangsters and gunmen.' Warren pursued a vigorous crackdown, particularly against Cornero, charging Warren Olney III, chief of the criminal division, with the task of eliminating all four gambling ships operating off Southern California.

  Marquez's chronicle of the events of the summer of 1939 read like an adventure novel, albeit factually supported by newspaper accounts from the Los Angeles Examiner. Cornero managed to stave off Warren's attempts to take over the ship using wits and patience. Warren and his deputies were relentless in their pursuit.

  'Noir Afloat' represents 20 years of research and study. Marquez relied on the history collection at USC and the National Archives maritime documents, as well as a valuable collection of gambling ship paraphernalia: photos, poker chips, advertisements, dice and menus.

  'Putting it together was the challenge,' Marquez says. 'I was thinking of writing the book as a straight chronology, but even though there were never more than three to four ships out there at one time, I thought it would be too difficult to go from one to another. I didn't know what to do. I couldn't write; I failed English and barely got out of high school.' But he kept going and eventually ended up with 750 pages of manuscript, which he cut down to 250. There are also two appendices'the first, the history of every gambling ship from its construction to mothball, and the second, about the men involved in the gambling ships.

  At 86, Marquez is busier than ever. He plans write the history of his family'the original owners of the Rancho Boca de Santa Monica, comprising what is now Santa Monica Canyon, Pacific Palisades, and parts of Topanga Canyon.

  Marquez will talk about 'Noir Afloat' on Monday, April 18, at the Annenberg Beach House, 415 Pacific Coast Hwy. Meanwhile, the book is available at Village Books on Swarthmore.