It was a bit of an escape, and they became wildly popular,” said Miller. For people during the Depression, this was a chance to have a night on the town maybe a little bit of danger, some risk and maybe a chance to win some money. They had these names that evoked glamour. And, there, you would find gambling boats among them, the S.S. “To get to the gambling boats, you would go to Santa Monica Pier, and you would get on a water taxi, and the taxi would take you about three miles out to sea. Many people wanted to go on these gambling boats during the Great Depression, and they were not far from shore. This is the Battle of Santa Monica Bay: /rwP67Be4Sh Tony Cornero was sunk 82 years ago in a raid three miles from shore - the end of a catch-me-if-you-can thriller that captivated the city. I spent months chasing the ghost of a glitzy gambling boat kingpin across L.A. And of course, she remembered how her husband went on the boats and how his friends lost a bunch of money playing cards,” said Miller. Even though she had not been on the boats, she remembered them and had great stories about being able to see them from the shore. When I interviewed her, she was 107 years old.

His research led him to a woman named Florence Kinney, whose husband used to visit gambling boats. One of Miller’s goals when working on this story was to find people who experienced this era in the 1930s.

Earl Warren oversaw a raid on the gambling boats

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 state’s jurisdiction.

The man at the helm was a brash bootlegger-turned-gaming kingpin named Tony Cornero.

Rex was the biggest and most opulent gambling boat anchored off Santa Monica in 1939

Casinos open right now near me