by David Bishop
Callie looked in my eyes, as if she wanted to find a way in. “I can’t imagine losing you,” she said. “I love you with all my heart.”
“You will never lose me, darling. I shall always be by your side. Always be with you.”
Then our lips touched, and our hearts met. We just stood there with our arms around each other, the wind tossing her hair, the surf clawing at our legs, Callie’s tears wetting my cheeks along with her own.
Life is like the surf. It comes at your gradually, climbing your legs. And I knew life would be that way for us. I would stand through life with Callie, as the years climbed our legs.
Then we went home.
Chapter Twenty-six
Frances was buried on Tuesday of the following week. The autopsy had shown what we knew: Callie’s sister had died from blood loss, a result of her throat having been cut deeply.
Aside from Callie and her father, a few family friends had come, some of the workers from the family business, but none of Frances’s uptown friends. She had been soiled by her choices. She died a gangster’s moll. Mickey Cohen sent flowers, LaVonne came. That was it except for one other person; Pug had taken the day off from his water taxi. Callie hugged him.
Frances was buried three rows over from where Pug had interred his beloved Kitty, his wife, Katherine.
* * *
Callie and I were married in the spring of 1940 and by the coming of the next New Year we had a child whom she insisted we name Matt. I insisted we include the name Tony. Matthew Tony Kile, a strong, healthy boy with a mother who continued to be the loveliest woman I had ever known and, more importantly, the loveliest person I had ever known. Life was good for me, Callie, and Little Matt. However, things had not gone so well for my friend, now our friend, “Tony the Hat” Cornero.
By early 1940 Tony had opened a gambling den onshore.
“Seeing the coppers have no problem with gambling operations in town,” he said, “I decided to come ashore and open a joint. Heck, Scribe, you always wanted me to live in town. So here I am.” He laughed, while continuing to refuse to pay the mob or anyone for protection.
Tony became Little Matt’s godfather and visited us often enough to become honorary family. As for his onshore gambling operation, he refused to pay Cohen the “required” split, so Cohen and the cops thwarted Tony’s operation to the point where The Hat shut it down. With respect to illegal onshore gambling by the mob, the authorities continued to do little more than a token raid from time to time.
After that, Tony went back to Vegas. His friend, Orlando Silvagni, owned and operated the Apache Hotel, downtown. Tony made a deal with Silvagni to lease the hotel casino and rename it. Yep, you guessed it. The new name was the SS Rex. The councilmen on the Las Vegas City Council were aware that Tony Cornero had, at one time years before, owned The Meadows Casino in Vegas, which had burned down. They were also versed in Tony’s well-documented confrontation with California Attorney General Earl Warren in what would always be known as the Battle of Santa Monica Bay. The council turned down Cornero’s request for a gambling license to operate the Rex in the Apache Hotel.
Shortly thereafter, one councilman changed his vote and the motion for Tony’s gambling license passed. Then, not long after that, the Council voted again and that councilman reversed himself again and Tony’s license was revoked. Tony closed the new Rex casino and returned to the sea.
Over the coming months and years, Little Matt continued to grow and impress his mother and me with his developing mind and his respect for others. We continued to see Tony when the events of his life allowed for a visit. Over the years I used my column now and again to write of the exploits and entanglements of the world that spawned Tony the Hat. Some excerpts from those columns included the following:
In 1941, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel was jailed awaiting trial for the murder of Hollywood mobster Harry “Big Greenie” Greenberg. Siegel didn’t like the prison food so he was allowed his own chef. He received unlimited phone privileges, and regular female companionship in his cell. He was allowed out on his own recognizance nineteen times. The records show he was going to the dentist. The truth being he was having lunch with a Hollywood starlet. In the end, charges were dropped against Siegel for the Greenberg murder as the prosecutor lacked a corroborating witness. The one they thought they had on ice through a sharing arrangement with New York authorities, Abe “Kid Twist” Reyes, flew out the sixth story window while under police protection in a Coney Island, New York hotel. Reyes was being guarded by eighteen police officers in three shifts a day. Torn and tied bed sheets hung out the hotel window down one floor. Reyes landed many feet from the building. The six cops on duty at the time claimed to have seen or heard nothing. One officer, reportedly, inside the room with Reyes, and one outside the door in the hallway had been asleep.
In mob circles, Abraham “Kid Twist” Reyes was known as the canary that could sing, but couldn’t fly.
In 1944, the S.S. Rex, which had been outfitted as a cargo ship for World War II was sunk by the Germans off the coast of Africa.
My columns in 1945 continued to cover Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen along with the lesser luminaries of the L.A. Crime scene, but my column gave more time still to the events of World War II. In May, Germany surrendered. On August 15, 1945, after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese commercial centers, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria. Facing another new front, Japan surrendered.
In August of 1946, with Southern California growing like a weed, I told my readers that Tony Cornero had, a few months before, bought a minesweeper named Bunker Hill. After renaming the ship the S.S. Lux, Tony had her rebuilt in the image of the Rex.
A few days later, August 7, 1946, to be exact, Tony Cornero announced he was again officially in the gambling ship business and the three-mile jurisdictional line from the imaginary state border could no longer be a bone of contention. He had the Lux anchored over seven-and-a-half miles off Long Beach, California, outside the jurisdiction of California law by the state’s own claims. In the first three hours of operations the Lux took aboard thirty-six-hundred customers. Local and state officials fumed, but the people who gambled seemed pleased that Tony’s square dealing tables were again open for business.
Tony had again grabbed a firm hold on the tail of the tiger.
“Buron Fitts is no longer D.A. in L.A.,” Tony said.
“Cornero has absolutely defied us,” cried Earl Warren, now governor of California. “No human being in the country is big enough for that.”
“I accept the [governor’s] challenge,” Tony boasted from the bridge of the Lux.
It was as if my friend was saying I’m set up in federal waters. Earl Warren ain’t governor out here. He ain’t nothing out here unless he comes on board as a patron. I invite him to do just that. Come aboard the Lux as my guest for dinner.
Three days later, my column reported that California had cut off the water taxi service that transported people to and from the Lux. The cops did so ignoring the angry crowd waiting at the Long Beach Pier. August 9, 1946, was Tony’s last day of operations on the Lux, a total take of $175,000. Cornero was arrested on six counts of gambling and conspiracy. Freed from jail under a hefty bond, Tony went to work on public opinion.
“My arrest was illegal. The Lux sailed the high seas, not California’s waters as defined by the California Supreme Court. The water taxis were engaged in servicing foreign commerce, by that I mean they were providing services to business done outside California. The law doesn’t shut down trains and buses which take people to Nevada where gambling is legal. The water taxis are like them trains and buses. They take people to federal waters where gambling is legal.”
Early January the next year, the feds seized the Lux for violating its license as a coastwise trading vessel, claiming the Lux had no motive power so it could not be a trading vessel of any kind, and also for being suspected of sheltering gambling operations below decks. Shortly thereafter, stil
l in January 1947, U.S. Coast Guardsmen assisted state authorities in relieving Cornero of his physical control of the Lux. Soon thereafter, given its military history, the minesweeper, once known as Bunker Hill, was laid to rest among the good ships in mothballs near San Francisco.
Tony and his wife, Barbara, bought a home in Beverly Hills and in January 1948, while attending Little Matt’s seventh birthday party, Tony told me he was making plans to invest in Baja California in Mexico.
A few weeks later, on February 9, Callie and I went to Tony and Barbara Cornero’s home for dinner. We got a sitter for Little Matt. After dinner, the doorbell rang. Tony opened the door to see two Hispanic men. I heard one of them say, “Mr. Cornero, this is for you.” After Tony took a package from the men, he was shot four times in the stomach. By the time we got to the door, all that remained was the sound of a car speeding away from the scene. We could see only taillights, which we could not even swear were of the vehicle in which the shooters rode.
Tony survived the attempted murder, although it had been touch and go for a while that first night.
June 20, 1947, Bugsy Siegel was shot through the eye while reading the paper in the living room of his girlfriend, Virginia Hill, who happened not to be home at the time. After that, Ms. Hill moved to Europe and lived in considerable comfort.
On April 21, 1948, I wrote a full column about U.S. President Harry Truman having signed an act prohibiting the operation of any gambling ship in U.S. territorial waters. The legislation had been encouraged by California Governor Earl Warren with Senator William Knowland sponsoring a corollary law giving the Coast Guard the right to seize not only gambling ships, but any vessel or aircraft used to carry passengers to such a ship. The floating gambling ship business was no more. The authorities, having gone all the way to the White House office of the president of the United States had finally and completely defeated my friend, Anthony “Tony the Hat” Cornero.
Tony had said that all the “services” the mob provided to the public would eventually be made legal so the government could get some combination of profits, taxes, and fees. If Tony was right, someday there would again be gambling on the high seas, also numbers running by the government, although likely under some other name. Time will tell.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Sergeant Fidgery, your friend is awake.”
“Thank you, Doctor.” Fidge turned toward Axel and shook his shoulder. “Axel. Matt’s awake. He’s okay.” Then Fidge spun back toward the doctor. “He is, isn’t he, doc? Okay I mean. Nothing’s gone wrong, has it?”
“Naturally, he’s not a hundred percent at the moment. Matt approved my telling you anything you want to know. As we suspected, it turned out to be a leaking brain aneurysm. We operated to stop the bleeding and clean out the clotted blood. Following surgery we kept him in an induced coma for a couple more days. After that, we brought him around and for the past week he’s been progressing without any hitches. Your friend’s very lucky. Aneurysms kill a lot of people. We kept him in a quiet, controlled environment. That’s why we’ve held visits to a minimum. Residual damage is very minimal. I’ve seen nothing to suggest he won’t be fine. We’re still monitoring everything. I want to keep him a while longer, check him in the morning. Assuming no complications, you should be able to take him home fairly soon.” After taking a few steps in the opposite direction, the doctor turned back. “Sergeant, please keep today’s visit short, not more than fifteen minutes. It will do him good to see you both, but he still needs lots of sleep.”
Axel and Fidge walked into Matt’s room. The nurse had propped up the head of his bed. Matt perked up as soon as he saw his two closest friends walk into his room.
“Hi ya, fellas.”
“Hi ya, boss,” Axel said.
“Are we ever going to get those puffy pancakes?” Fidge asked.
“You’re darn tooting,” Axel said. “The first day the boss says he’s ready.”
“Fellas, I gotta tell ya something. You know that story I was struggling with. That I told you about? The one I couldn’t quite figure out how to carry off?”
They both nodded.
“Well, I got it. I dreamed the whole thing as if I were my grandfather, the newspaper columnist I told you about. But it was me, not him. There was a woman, too. She reminded me of my grandmother, but it wasn’t her. You both were in the dream too, but you were two other guys”
“Who were we?”
Matt pointed at Fidge. “You were an ex-cop named Carter Mitchum. Axel, you were a guy called Pug.”
“Pug? A fighter?”
“Used to be. But in the story you drove a water taxi in Santa Monica Bay.”
“What the hell was that all about?”
“Wait for the story. You’ll see. Pug was a cool dude. You’ll like him.”
“You writing a love story this time, boss?”
“Well, sort of. But it’s an American drama and a mystery, too, although not my typical whodunit style. Don’t worry, Axel, it has plenty of gangsters of various stripes, but, yes, a love story is the thread which will sew it together. You’ll see, as soon as I get it written. When can I get out of here? I need to get to work. Get it all down.
Fidge stepped closer. “The doc says he’s shooting for soon. I don’t know maybe tomorrow or the next day. He just said soon. He wants to give you another test drive in the morning.”
“Then I’d best be getting some sleep. And, Fidge, thanks. Something you said to me the other day … I guess it was last week or whenever. Back before I hit the deck. You gave me what I needed for the story.”
“Me? What the hell did I give you?”
“The part about an attractive woman who needed help finding her missing younger sister. That’s what launched the whole dream. I’ve been living it out in my head.”
“Okay. If you say so.”
“I do. And, yes, I’d like to meet her, the woman you told me about. Maybe I can help her find her little sister.”
Axel stepped in close. “So long, Boss. See you tomorrow.”
“So long, cellmate. Say, what’s happening on Clara? The death of the man who broke into her home?”
“It’s all squared up,” Fidge said. “You asking shows your memory’s working right.”
“I’m fine. Just need to ease back into it. No problems. It’s good to be rid of that horrific headache I had. That’s for damn sure. So, Clara’s okay?”
“Yeah,” Axel added. “The guy had a mile-long rap sheet. She’s in the clear. The guy reminded me of Sniffles, the career burglar we knew in the slammer.”
“Okay, you two, hit the road. I don’t want any hitches about getting sprung. I need to get home and get started. I have a story to write and a woman who needs help finding her little sister.
The End
Author’s Comments
While not an epilogue, I felt you might want to know a bit more about what happened to some of the real people who rubbed shoulders with our fictional characters in the telling of this story. This seems particularly important with respect to Anthony “Tony the Hat” Cornero, and Earl Warren. I mostly left out Mickey Cohen and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel because so much has already been written and filmed about those two that I didn’t want to ask you to read through my replowing of their fields.
Earl Warren can be covered in almost bullet point style.
Attorney General of California.
Governor of California for three terms, twelve busy years in the dynamic growth of California.
The man who spearheaded the ending of the gambling ship era and likely was the persistent voice behind what became a federal prohibition against gambling in U.S. waters. Some feel that was not something the government should have done, but it was monumental and has a continuing impact on how things are still done. For example: This may be why cruise ships keep their casinos closed when they are within U.S. waters.
Moving force behind the unpleasant internment of Japanese during World War II.
&nb
sp; Vice presidential candidate in 1948 with Thomas E. Dewey who lost to Harry Truman.
In 1952 Republican presidential nominee who lost to Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court for sixteen years (1953 – 1969)
Chairman of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, commonly called the Warren Commission which looked into the murder of our thirty-fifth president, John F. Kennedy.
With respect to Tony the Hat Cornero, by his own admission he was a gambler and, during prohibition, a bootlegger. So, yes, Tony was a gangster. Yet, about Cornero, clearly one of America’s most colorful and confounding gangsters, not so much has been written. I suspect this is true because Tony Cornero was not part of the organized crime syndicate, not part of some great takedown by the law, or a squealer, in mob talk, like Joseph Valachi or Abe “Kid Twist” Reles. Tony Cornero stayed true to his code. He was what many men claim to be, his own man.
If Tony were alive today he’d likely remind us all that his two gigs, booze and gambling, are now all but totally legal in America, and slowly but steadily moving further in that direction. He would also remind us that the numbers racket run by the mobs in his day has been replaced in modern times by government owned and operated lotteries. That gambling on the high seas is now done on cruise ships after they move beyond jurisdictional waters—where he had moved the S. S. Lux. Off-track betting and casinos have proliferated in population centers and on Indian reservations as well as other states and nearby countries—“Tony the Hat” might say, “in places where the swells can finagle a departure from the law.” Tony would likely notice that newspapers print odds on sports and races which are used by bookies. Prostitution is not yet legal, but, along with most forms of gambling, it is largely ignored as a crime. That marijuana is legal in some states and moving more that way every day, including publicly traded shares in marijuana dispensary companies. To quote Tony, or at least paraphrase him: All the consumer services provided by the mob will one day be legal through direct government ownership, or taxes and regulation. Once the swells understand the money they can rake in from these things, they will find a way to get their cut all legal like.
