CRIME: Chance on the High Seas

Offshore from Santa Monica and Long Beach certain long, low rods of red light glowing steadily through the Pacific nights have marked the positions of California’s “floating casinos,” the gambling ships Rex, Texas, Showboat and Tango. Rows of scarlet neon lights picked them out from stem to stern. Largest and swankest was the Rex, an old, British-built square-rigger, formerly the collier Kenilworth. She was demasted, equipped with a 400-foot saloon on her main deck containing roulette wheels, crap boards, tables for chemin de fer, chuck-a-luck, anything else a gambler’s heart might crave. Below were elegant dining rooms, bars, long rows of slot machines.

The Rex was owned and run by Anthony (“Tony”) Cornero Stralla, 47, California’s paramount rumrunner in Prohibition days.* Short and stocky, square shooting by his own code, Tony is well-known around Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, where he lives in a modest bungalow. He loves high-stake gambling himself, against big shots like Nick the Greek or syndicates of movie tycoons who set out to “take” him.

Tony Stralla boasted that his boat was safe, his games honest, his service perfection. For 25¢ you could ride out in a water taxi and gamble 24 hours per day (the return trip was free). He advertised in Los Angeles newspapers and with skywriting. Customers swarmed out to him this season by thousands.

Tony Stralla said the Rex alone cost him $600,000. Mayor Fletcher Bowron (whose closing of Los Angeles gambling nightspots last year vastly improved Tony’s trade) estimated the Rex’s “take” at $300,000 per month. When local officials tried to shoo him away or close him up, Tony Stralla was upheld by California’s Court of Appeals: his ships were beyond the three-mile limit, beyond State jurisdiction.

Last week Attorney General Earl Warren of California, an ambitious Republican in a Democratic regime, personally directed a raid against the gambling flotilla. Police launches visited and closed Texas, Showboat and Tango. But when Mr. Warren’s men sought to board the Rex, they had to deal with Tony Stralla and his skipper, George Kirkham, a retired Navy officer.

It was a good night aboard the Rex; 600 patrons were tossing in their chips. As Attorney General Warren’s boarding party approached, huge nets were flung overside on the Rex. “Stand off!” bellowed Stralla through a megaphone. “We’re on the high seas!”

Two of Mr. Warren’s men grabbed at the netting to clamber to the Rex’s rail. Stralla’s seamen met them with a blast from the Rex’s fire hose. The Warren party fished out their men, returned to shore, where a stronger squadron was organized, including ships of the Coast Guard and Fish & Game Commission. The 600 patrons were returned to shore during a truce, at dawn, and then the Warren fleet anchored or cruised around the Rex, promising to starve its commander & crew into submission.

Tony Stralla, defiant in a tan sombrero, angrily snorted that he had “enough food for a year” on board. He threatened to have the law on Attorney General Warren and his “pirates.” While he stuck to his anchorage, far away in Washington large legal wheels began spinning. The House of Representatives passed and sent to the Senate a quick measure, approved by U. S. Attorney General Murphy, making it a crime to operate a gambling ship under U. S. registry. Tony Stralla had an answer for that one. If need be, said he, he would fly the flag of Japan.

> Pricked by reports that gambling would be “wide open” at Saratoga Springs during this season’s Diamond Jubilee race meeting, Lieutenant Governor Charles Poletti of New York last week gave assurance that nothing of the sort would be allowed; in Governor Herbert Lehman’s absence on vacation, his office would expect the law to be enforced. As in years gone by, Saratoga’s gambling public was thus obliged to bank its own games in its own parlors, or travel by night to hideouts.

*He served a term (1929-31) in Federal prison on McNeil Island, Wash. for income tax evasion, divorced his wife in 1932 because she called him “ex-convict.” His current girl: pretty, shapely, dark-haired Barbara Land.