In a little, wood-paneled room above the pier’s carousel, Jim Harris jiggled a pair of red dice in a loose fist and opened it onto his desk. His 300-foot-long Rex, the most opulent of the barges, promised “all the thrills of Riviera, Biarritz, Monte Carlo and Cannes surpassed” and attracted all manner of Angelenos.Īnd the water-taxi ride to the Rex began not far from where I was standing on the pier. (He went to prison over it.)Ĭornero wasn’t the first to open a gambling boat in the Southland - Long Beach saw one debut in the late 1920s - but he knew how to stand out. I wanted to understand how the tony city had contended with Cornero, a cavalier ex-bootlegger who once cheekily claimed that his Prohibition-era rumrunning exploits were actually a public service meant to protect “120,000,000 people from being poisoned to death” by bad hooch.

To Santa Monica.īefore long, I was crisscrossing the city, whose coastal waters had accommodated the Rex and other gaming barges until 1939, when the battle put an end to the scene. Like a mysterious ocean current, something kept pushing me along.