It also boasted something sinister on the off-limits top deck: machine guns “set up fore and aft,” according to the Saturday Evening Post. It boasted 150 slot machines, a 250-foot bar and “ladies in form-fitting dresses to lure customers,” the L.A. Cornero spent $200,000 transforming a 300-foot-long former windjammer into a casino.

Cornero made $1 million as the Southland’s “King of Rumrunners,” The Times reported in 1955.īut that was nothing compared with the Rex. “His brain was supercharged,” Grange said.Įventually, Cornero wound up in prison due to another bootlegging operation, but he was a free man by the start of the 1930s.

Safely past the roadblock, the bootleggers pumped the booze out of the pipe and back into containers on their vehicles. “On the other side, they shut off another pipe. “On one side of the roadblock, they shut off the fire main,” said Grange, 77. When authorities put up a roadblock to keep him from trucking liquor to the Napa River, he devised a workaround, according to Fred Grange, the son of Cornero’s business partner. He had the Rex’s gangway barricaded and set loose powerful water cannons on officers who tried to board.Įarly on, Cornero developed a flair that served him well in his illicit pursuits. Earl Warren, who had labeled the Rex and its peers the state’s “single greatest nuisance.”Īgents raided three other ships, and those operators quickly surrendered. But 250 law enforcement agents were fast approaching Cornero’s vessel at the direction of California Atty. On this August day, the Rex had 600 passengers, an assortment of Angelenos enticed by booze-soaked games of blackjack, poker, roulette and more. But the authorities disagreed with their interpretation of geography. And the man at the helm was a brash bootlegger-turned-gaming kingpin who wore a white Stetson, lived in a Beverly Hills bungalow and held court at the Trocadero nightclub.Ĭornero 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. Rex was the biggest and most opulent gambling boat anchored off Santa Monica in 1939.

The government boats knifed across the Pacific, cutting a line toward the ship floating a little more than three nautical miles off the California coast.

1920's casino chips