1932-Today

Though local, state and federal authorities were working to eradicate all gambling ships moored off of the Pacific Coast, the S.S. Monte Carlo met its demise at the hands of an unexpected interloper, Mother Nature.

On A Stormy Night

On New Year’s Eve in 1936, the waterborne casino, closed for the winter, offshore of San Diego, California. Only two caretakers, John Miller and John Gillespie, remained aboard.

“Southern California’s weather turned bad,” described Ernest Marquez, author of Noir Afloat. “Snow fell in the mountains, unrelenting rains turned hillsides into mudslides, gale-force winds toppled trees, and small craft warnings went up all along the entire Southland coast. Around the big Monte Carlo the sea churned and heaved. Waves 12 feet high pounded her hull. Around 3:30 a.m. … the Monte Carlo’s anchor chains, stressed to the breaking point by the power of the storm, snapped. She began to drift helplessly.”

The gambling vessel, her hull split in two, came to rest in shallow water close to the shore, about 200 to 300 yards from the beach, south of the Hotel del Coronado.

“With its first impact against the beach, the ship’s wooden superstructure which had housed the dining and gambling rooms began to crumble, and the high waves which swept over her soon began washing the timbers and furnishings up on the beach,” reported the Coronado Journal (Jan. 7, 1937). “The entire forward part of the superstructure was pounded to pieces by the waves, littering the beach with lumber, chairs, tables, roulette wheels and miscellaneous furniture.”

The shipwreck immediately drew hordes of people, who began taking items from the scene. Police arrived, confiscated the slot machines, crap tables and other gambling equipment and prevented any further scavenging. Removing “goods from any stranded vessel, or any goods cast by the sea upon the land” was illegal per then Section 545 of California’s Penal Code, a misdemeanor, punishable by an up to $500 (about $9,100 today) fine or six months’ jail time.

“The ship appeared to burrow its prow deeper in the sand with each pounding wave, and it was evident that it would be impossible to float her,” noted the Coronado Journal.

Her Storied Past

The Monte Carlo began as the Old North State during construction as an oil tanker in North Carolina in 1921. Unlike most other similar ships, her hull was reinforced concrete, part of a U.S. federal program to build such vessels out of materials other than steel. Old North State spanned 300 feet in length and 44 feet in width. Once put into service with the U.S. Quartermaster Corps, she became Tanker No. 1.

In 1923, the San Francisco-based Associated Oil Company bought her, renamed her McKittrick and put her into service.

Nine years later, two men, Ed V. Turner and Marvin “Doc” Schouweiler, acquired and converted her into a gambling ship. This involved, in part, adding a newly constructed wooden structure to house gambling and dining and filling the ship with cement to minimize the impact of movement. After the owners towed and anchored her three miles out to sea from Long Beach to be in federal waters, they debuted the S.S. Monte Carlo as “the world’s greatest pleasure ship,” via a grand opening on May 7, 1932.

The casino featured craps, blackjack, roulette, chuck-a-luck, Chinese lottery, poker and slot machines as well as wagering on boxing matches and horse and dog races.

“Dice were either weighted or edged to increase the house odds, and were etched with the name of the ship,” wrote Joe Ditler (March 10, 2014).

During the offshore gambling era, between 1927 and 1939, vessels offering this activity and located off of the California coast included the Johanna Smith, Monfalcone, Rose Isle, Tango and Lux.

After about four years of various city and state law enforcement agencies trying to shutter the engine-less Monte Carlo for good, via raids, arrests and other efforts, the co-owners moved the asset to offshore San Diego in 1936.

After The Wreck

It’s unclear who was responsible for the floating casino when nature’s forces destroyed it, whether or not Turner and Schouweiler had sold it in the interim. No one came forward to claim it, suggesting Mob involvement.

“While the entire operation is traced to gangster, bootlegger and gambler Tony Cornero, the presence of Al Capone in Coronado at that time raises speculation that he either had a stake in the gambling ships, or wanted to,” Ditler wrote.

The City of Coronado, which lacked jurisdiction, attempted to get the Monte Carlo’s remains, deemed hazardous and unsightly, removed. Already a man had died, drowning while swimming out to the wreckage on the afternoon the craft had gone aground. (Over the ensuing years, several more would die similarly.)

The U.S. government refused to remove the Monte Carlo’s vestiges because they weren’t a “menace to general navigation,” the Coronado Journal (Feb. 4, 1937) reported.

Instead, “she slowly sank into the sand and was eventually buried,” Marquez wrote.

But she wasn’t entombed for good. Since and still today, when the conditions are right — super low tide after a winter El Niño storm — a weather-thrashed, dilapidated Monte Carlo emerges from her sandy grave. It’s as if she’s imploring us to not forget her and what she represents: a unique, controversial, decade-long trend and, thus, period, in U.S. gambling history, that of vast, bustling floating casino enterprises in the Pacific Ocean.

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Have you seen what’s left of the S.S. Monte Carlo? We’d love to hear about it.

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The tri-level Rose Isle, originally the S.S. Rose City passenger ship

1932

“There are no dull moments on the Rose Isle,” the invitation to prospective customers for dinner and dancing on the Southern California gambling ship read. Apparently, the excitement also included murder.

The Crime And The Ship

Alerted to trouble by the ship’s bulldogs Toots and Boots at around 2 a.m. on a Tuesday, a deck hand discovered craps dealer Charles M. Bozeman, 32, dead on a cabin floor, having been shot twice, below the heart and in the arm. Also in the cabin of steward A.C. “Duke” Pohl were café bus boy, Virgil Roach, 32, and casino floorman, James Lee O’Keefe, alive and drunk. An automatic revolver lay near the body (later it was discovered it’d been stolen the previous December in a robbery), and two bullets were lodged in the wall. Bozeman, Roach, O’Keefe and Pohl all were racketeers from East St. Louis, Illinois.

The Rose Isle was one of numerous boats that offered gambling offshore the West Coast during the 1930s. To skirt the state law that prohibited most forms of gambling, these vessels had to be anchored in federal waters, which were at least three miles out from the shoreline. This particular ship sat on “gambler’s row” off of Long Beach, between the Johanna Smith and the Monte Carlo.

Rose Isle’s owners* were believed to be East St. Louis gangsters — Erastus “Raz” E. Pendleton, D.P. Bozeman (the victim’s brother), Frankie Waller and William “Billy” F. Gleason — along with Chicago Mobster Johnny Rosselli, Los Angeles Mobster Jack Dragna and Los Angeles Spring Street Gang affiliates, Tommy Jacobs and Luther “Tutor” B. Scherer.

FBI agents investing the murder learned that earlier that day, July 19, 1932, Bozeman and O’Keefe had gone fishing together and after returning, had done some drinking with Roach in the cabin.

Roach fingered O’Keefe as the shooter and said the murder resulted from a quarrel over a married woman. However, both of these claims would come into question at O’Keefe’s trial in December 1932.  O’Keefe was booked into the Long Beach Jail and charged with Bozeman’s murder. Roach was held in the Los Angeles County Jail as a material witness.

Subsequent Mysterious Crimes

Later that Tuesday, in the evening, another East St. Louisan, John Miley, 36, also was shot to death while fleeing from a robbery he and his underlings had committed at the Lexington Pharmacy in Long Beach. For the theft of about $125 (about $2,300 today), police arrested and charged four suspects: Ed Allen aka Al Reed, 25; John Teeter, 33; Verner Hansen, 20; and Joe Aycoy, 26.

Allen revealed that he, Miley the leader and the others had held up 40 or more drugstores and gas stations over the preceding several months. He said Bozeman fenced the stolen goods for Miley’s group and that Bozeman had $15,000 worth of diamonds (about $281,000 today) in his possession on the day he was murdered. Allen also asserted that Miley was killed by one of his own, “a red-haired East St. Louis gangster” after they’d argued all that day over division of the loot they’d plundered and that the same person murdered Bozeman. The motive, according to Allen, was to gain control over the group of thieves.

About 2.5 days later, the Johanna Smith was set on fire around 6 p.m., and after three hours ablaze, only a charred hull remained. The floating casino was owned by men associated with the Los Angeles Spring Street Gang — Clarence Blazier, his brother Ed Blazier, Herbert C. Sousa, Marvin “Doc” Schouweiler, Ed V. Turner — along with front Albert Howard. Prosecutors at O’Keefe’s trial named the owners as Dan McGIynn of East St. Louis, Kirk Harrington of St. Louis and A.M. Gleason of Long Beach.

“A ‘gambling war’ broke out in the ranks of those controlling and employed on the vessels, where merrymakers from the mainland nightly court the favors of Lady Luck at craps, roulette, blackjack, chuck-a-luck and other games of chance,” the Los Angeles Times quoted Assistant U.S. Attorney Milo Rowell as saying (July 24, 1932).

James L. O’Keefe

Justice Is Done … Or Is It?

O’Keefe’s trial kicked off on Dec. 5. The woman over whom O’Keefe and Bozeman allegedly had argued testified. Edna Frances Smith Wilson said she frequented Rose Isle and knew both men but didn’t believe they’d fought over her.

Another witness testified that shortly after the shooting, Roach had thrown a small lockbox inside the cabin overboard.

When Roach was on the stand, he said O’Keefe and Bozeman had begun arguing in the dining room and then all three had gone to the cabin and had begun drinking from the 5-gallon jug of gin in the room. The dispute, which centered on O’Keefe allegedly having made a female friend of Bozeman leave the ship, had continued. Eventually, O’Keefe had pulled out the gun and had shot Bozeman. Roach said he’d yelled that O’Keefe had shot Bozeman, after which O’Keefe had tried to choke Roach.

Defense attorney John S. Cooper created reasonable doubt by suggesting that Roach could’ve been the killer. Numerous witnesses testified that he’d been drunk and obnoxious from Monday afternoon to the discovery of Bozeman’s body. Roach himself admitted to having consumed at least four drinks.

“Didn’t you shoot and kill Charles Bozeman?” Cooper asked Roach.

“I did not,” Roach answered. “It was James O’Keefe, not I, who shot him.”

Next, O’Keefe testified. He admitted to having been drinking but denied having had words with Bozeman. He claimed that he’d been asleep when Bozeman had been shot, had awoken to the sounds of the shots and had grabbed ahold of Roach who’d shoved him off. He said he hadn’t seen a weapon in Roach’s hand and didn’t know who killed Bozeman. He emphatically denied shooting Bozeman, who he said was his friend.

The ship’s chef testified that after the shooting, Roach had told him O’Keefe had fired the gun and also had expressed concern that his own fingerprints might be on it from his struggle with O’Keefe after Bozeman’s murder.

The jurors found O’Keefe guilty of manslaughter. After, Judge Frank H. Norcross sentenced him to five years’ probation because “the court is not convinced as the court would like to be that the defendant is the one who fired the shot,” he said (Reno Evening Gazette, Dec. 17, 1932). O’Keefe left the courtroom a free man.

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