During the Prohibition years in California, 1919 to 1934, San Mateo County was a hotbed for illegal vices — gambling, prostitution and drinking. Even a Mobster, Hillsborough-based Sam Termini, said the county was the state’s most corrupt one in 1930. This was under the watch of James J. McGrath, the sheriff for 24 years starting in 1926.

McGrath

“There were numerous wide-open gambling joints operating in county territory under his jurisdiction; slot machines were operating in these establishments as well as in other public places; and bookmaking enterprises flourished throughout the county,” reported California’s Final Report of The Special Crime Study Commission on Organized Crime (1953).

Nothing changed after Prohibition ended except bootleggers moved into gambling.

“After years of violating liquor laws, the general attitude toward crime had softened. … Bookies prospered through illegal off-track betting and gambling dens,” wrote Carmen J. Blair in “The Most Corrupt County.”

Big, Big Business

Fast forward to 1949, and McGrath still was in office.* In his county, in the unincorporated community of Colma,** “Red” MacDonald (or McDonald, the spelling and true first name couldn’t be verified) launched a bookmaking enterprise, his area of expertise. The operation primarily was telephone based and a layoff spot for other U.S. bookies. It also served, though, as a West Coast clearinghouse for betting monies coming from and going to other areas of the country.

The business reportedly handled about $100,000 to $200,000 a day (about $1.2 to $2.3 million today).

The California organized crime commission dubbed it the Olmo Group because MacDonald ran it on George Olmo’s ranch and horse stables property, on Washington Street in Broadmoor Village.

“[The book] had operated virtually unmolested during nearly two years during this entire time with the connivance of certain law enforcement officials,” according to the Final Report, its findings based on the testimony of subpoenaed witnesses at hearings.

In Tight With Lawmen

MacDonald paid about $1,000 ($12,000 today) weekly in the form of bribes, most of them “related in one way or another to Sheriff James J. McGrath,” the Final Report noted.

McGrath ordered the occasional raid on the Olmo land, but no arrests were made. At most, officers removed telephones.  

Various relationships between lawmen and various Olmo associates were blatant conflicts of interest. For instance, all of the horse riding members of the San Mateo Sheriff’s Office kept their horses at the Olmo stables.

Also, the deputy sheriff, Milton Minehan, who went on all raids, was related by marriage to John O’Neil, a feed and grain dealer who partly financed the Olmo bookmaking endeavor and personally handled bets. O’Neil and McGrath were good friends.

Further, when the Olmo group’s bagman, collector and enforcer, Richard “Big Dick” Charles Trabert, transported large sums of money from or to the ranch, certain San Francisco Police Department officers escorted him.

The Other Principals

In addition to MacDonald, O’Neil and Trabert, the following men helped bankroll the Olmo bookmaking business:

Emilio “Gombo” Georgetti: an alleged member of the San Francisco-based Lanza Crime Family and the boss of all San Mateo County gambling activities for many years, including slot machine distribution. He ran several gambling establishments there, too, including the Willow Tree in Colma. Georgetti and Sheriff McGrath were close friends.

Ralph Cody: a longtime bookmaker involved in football and basketball pools.

Abe Fox: a bookmaker.

Cody and Fox had been arrested in 1946 in a raid on a different bookmaking business in San Francisco.

Reportedly, Arthur “Artie” H. Samish had financed Cody and Fox in the Olmo operation. Samish was a California lobbyist, representing the interests of race track owners, liquor and brewing producers, movie studios, attorneys and insurers.

John “Red” Robert Gregory: a race horse owner and trainer and a former associate of Southern California’s Guarantee Finance Company bookmaking syndicate.

Frank “Porky” X. Flynn: a lobbying associate of Samish

Circumstances Change

The Olmo group closed their enterprise in Colma in June 1950 and planned to move it to San Francisco as it is in a different county. Two major factors precipitated this: the odds were long that McGrath would get re-elected for a fifth term in the upcoming election, and the book’s leader MacDonald passed away earlier in the year. 

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* McGrath’s 24-year tenure as San Mateo County sheriff was the longest ever in the history of the office.

** Colma, known today as the City of Souls, always has been home to more dead bodies than living people. Due to cemetery overcrowding in San Francisco in the early 20th century, 150,000-plus corpses were transferred to and buried in Colma, which, since, was and still today is the burial ground for The City by The Bay.

Photo of money-filled suitcase from pond5.com: by maxxyustas

Sources

Martin Mooney

1935-1936

In about mid-December 1935, New York newspaper reporter Martin Mooney (1896-1967) faced serving his jail sentence during the upcoming holidays. His offense? Contempt of court for refusing to reveal to the local grand jurors the sources he’d used in an exposé on illegal gambling in New York City.

“It won’t be so bad if I have to go to jail before Christmas,” Mooney said. “Just think of all the presents I won’t have to buy or all the parties I won’t have to go to then.”

Journalist Stands Firm

One of the unlawful activities the grand jury had been investigating earlier that year was operating numbers, or policy,* which violated New York state’s gambling and lottery laws.

Mooney, a reporter for the New York American,** a William Randolph Hearst-owned morning newspaper, wrote a series of articles alleging that despite the grand jury’s efforts to curb the local numbers racket, it continued to prosper in the city. In other words, the citizen group’s work was ineffective. To make the case, Mooney used confidential sources, men continuing to run these games, quoting them and describing their enterprises.  

Consequently, the grand jury began looking into the validity of the claims in Mooney’s exposé. The jurors called the reporter as a witness during a related hearing, and asked him to provide the names and addresses of the people and places he’d mentioned in his pieces. The journalist refused, noting his sources were confidential and privileged.

Ethically, that was true. Legally, though, it wasn’t. The state of New York didn’t have any law on the books that protected reporters from having to reveal their sources.

The Bad Guy

Not surprisingly, in May, Mooney was sentenced to 30 days in jail and fined $250 (about $5,000 today) for contempt of court.

“The only reason I am being thrown into jail is because I refuse to head a committee of my colleagues to supply Information to the grand jury,” the reporter told the court. “Had I accepted that offer, I know very well I would have been purged” (Syracuse Herald, May 17, 1935).

The only conviction to come out of the grand jury’s inquiry into the numbers racket was of Mooney, the messenger instead of any of the perpetrators.

“I feel it is a great injustice that an innocent newspaper man should be the great prize corralled by this great grand jury in its lone investigation,” Mooney said. “There is no court in this land which holds me in the contempt in which I hold this grand jury.”

Fighting For Change

Mooney and his attorney James D.C. Murray took the case all the way up to New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals. Before each legal body along the way, Murray argued the privilege afforded physician and patient, attorney and client, should be given to reporters and their confidential sources. Every court’s ruling was the same: Mooney had to cough up his sources or carry out his punishment.

“The decision was based on the law of the state, and that law today prohibits newspapers from protecting sources of confidential information,” noted a Syracuse Herald op-ed piece (Feb. 1, 1936).

Further, the Court of Appeals noted that a decision to enact a shield law for reporters was under the purview of lawmakers not the courts. (Coincidentally, such a bill, calling for reporter immunity, had been introduced in the New York State Legislature in its previous session but had been killed in committee.)

The Epilogue

Following the New York Court of Appeals‘ ruling in January 1936, Mooney served his sentence in the Queens County Jail. (Presumably, he paid the fine as well.)

The year before, at about age 39, he abandoned journalism and pursued screenwriting, in which he would be successful, too. He would base many of his screenplays on the underworld about which he’d written as a reporter. The movies for which he’s best known, according to IMDB, are “Mr. Celebrity” (1941), “Men of San Quentin” (1942), “Silent Witness” (1943), “The Great Mike” (1944) and “Detour” (1945).

As for affording journalists the right to keep their confidential sources, well, confidential, New York wouldn’t enact a law in this regard until 1970, and when it did, the privilege only would apply to certain journalists, ones with staff positions at newspapers, magazines and TV stations.

Mooney’s story, however, spurred quicker action in other states: California (1935), Kentucky (1936), Arkansas (1936), Arizona (1937), Pennsylvania (1937), Indiana (1941), Ohio (1941) and Montana (1943).

To date, the U.S. doesn’t have a federal shield law.

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* Numbers, or policy, of the past was lottery-type games in which players bet on a number they predicted would appear in a specific source on a specific future day and time. Originally, operators generated the winning numbers through lottery drawings but that evolved into them using baseball scores, parimutuel totals, cattle receipts and other combinations of figures that routinely appeared in a local newspaper. Because players could wager nickels and dimes, even those who couldn’t afford even part of a lottery ticket could play numbers. Therefore, the game became prevalent in poor U.S. neighborhoods.

** The New York American was published between 1902 and 1937, when Hearst merged it with its afternoon newspaper, the New York Evening Journal, and the combined papers became the New York Journal-American. The Journal ceased publication in 1966.

Sources

When police arrived at the alley behind the Carlton Bar in Reno just after midnight on May 16, 1946, they found an unconscious man lying on the ground, covered in blood. An American Legion ambulance rushed him to Washoe General Hospital, where a medical team worked to save his life. Their efforts unsuccessful, though, and the physician there pronounced Joseph Vaughn Spratt dead at 1:15 a.m.

Grave Injuries

Spratt, in his early 30s, a World War II veteran and pharmacy student in Denver, Colorado, was in the “Biggest Little City” with a handful of schoolmates to take the Nevada Board of Pharmacy exam. With the test behind them, the group went to the Carlton Bar that fateful night, for music, drinks and gambling before returning home. (The saloon offered 21, craps, roulette, poker and slots.)

All of the students but Spratt eventually left the bar. One of them, Roy Spencer, who exited out the back, was struck immediately after, in the dark alley.

One or more of the establishment’s personnel tossed Spratt out of the rear door into the same unlit area. Somehow, he wound up with a 5-inch-long skull fracture that caused a subdural hemorrhage. He also suffered bruising on the back and one side of his skull and three facial cuts, on his chin, above his eye and on his nose.

The events leading up to him dying on the pavement differed, depending on who relayed them.

Spratt

Someone Must Pay

The police arrested the Carlton Bar’s co-owner, Sam Delich, and its bartender, Guido “Gene” DiIullo. (The other two proprietors were Sam’s brother George Delich and Franz Gersich). Sam Delich and DiIullo were charged with voluntary manslaughter.

Their trials didn’t take place until November of that year. In the interim, the Carlton Bar owners sold their business for $20,000 (about $284,000 today) to Stan Hanson, in June.

Manslaughter V. Self-Defense

At the joint trial of DiIullo and Delich, the prosecution argued that the two were responsible for killing Spratt. They’d beaten him when evicting him from the bar, had tossed him out the back door and had left him for dead in the alley. One prosecution witness, Colonel William Steer, testified Spratt had been unconscious inside the Carlton bar after being struck several times by either DiIullo and/or Delich and, therefore, couldn’t have advanced toward DiIullo, a weapon in his hand, outside.

The defense contended that only DiIullo had hit Spratt, twice, and had done so in self-defense because Spratt had pulled a nail file or other sharp object on him when the duo had escorted him out of the bar. The defense also asserted that it’d been his head hitting the ground that had resulted in Spratt’s

demise. Nevada’s governor at the time Vail Pittman testified to the good reputation of Delich and DiIullo.

The jury acquitted Delich of manslaughter, but was hung, 10 to 1, regarding a verdict for DiIullo.

Dilullo As Defendant Again

In March of the next year, 1947, the district attorney’s office tried DiIullo a second time. He again took the stand and recalled his version of the events.

“The three-day trial was featured by conflicting testimony regarding how and when the fatal blow was struck,” reported the Reno Evening Gazette (March 21, 1947).

After deliberating 11 hours, the jurors returned a not guilty verdict.

No one but Spratt paid, after all.

Time and time again, in these fatal historical incidents, the perpetrators were acquitted on the grounds of self-defense, and one has to wonder why. What do you think? Should DiIullo and/or Delich have gotten off like they did or not? Why?

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Sources

Fantan

1887

A newspaper blurb touting the availability of gambling in Reno titled, A Feast for the Gamblers, read:

“Those who delight in gambling sports can be accommodated in Reno … no less than thirty-one games are in full blast.

“They comprise seven stud poker, two wheel games, one rouge-et-noir, one ichi ban, six faro, four rondo, two fantan, four chuck-a-luck, one Arabian pool, two forty-ball games and one red-and-black game” (Reno Evening Gazette, Sept. 27, 1887).

Photo from Art and Picture Collection, New York Public Library Digital Collections: “Chinese Fantan Game”