Justice for All (22 page)

“Professional gamblers,” Warren wrote to police and prosecutors in 1939, “are the most persistent of law violators. They have no scruples as to how they secure immunity for their illegal operations and their large profits make them a power in any community where they obtain a foothold.”
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In addition, as he once wrote a lawyer with a client inquiring as to whether Warren enjoyed the support of gambling interests, the men who backed wagering were “the most corruptive influence in local government.” To the lawyer, Warren added, “you may assure [your client] that it will meet with no sympathy from my office.”
²⁷

Good to his word, Warren moved first against California's dog tracks. John “Black Jack” Jerome was at the top of the list. Warren summoned the tough track owner to a meeting in early 1939, informed him that his business was illegal, and told him he would soon be shut down, by force if necessary. Jerome briefly protested and asked for time to consult with a lawyer. Warren agreed, and Jerome made a call. The three then discussed the matter further, and Warren promised that he was not singling Jerome out but rather launching a larger effort against dog tracks in general. Warren's record of that conversation illustrates the depth of his loathing for gambling and its social consequences, as well as his compassion for those affected by it. “You are employing a number of men to assist you in these operations and are thereby directly causing each of them to commit felonies in the course of their daily employment. I do not believe that these men, if left to their own devices, would thus be violating the law,” Warren wrote to Jerome.
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If the track was closed down immediately, Warren added, the employees would not be arrested or prosecuted, sparing them “the resulting hardship and suffering to their wives and children.” Jerome agreed, and closed his track that weekend.

Over the coming months, Warren shut down the rest of California's dog tracks, and every time the owner of one threatened to defy him, Warren's deputy, Oscar Jahnsen, asked, “Do you think you are tougher than Black Jack Jerome?” Warren's efforts wiped dog racing out of California; it has never returned.
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While the dog track owners went quietly, the operators of a fleet of gambling ships in Southern California put up more colorful resistance. There, Warren and Olney set out to clean the seas of four ships that had taken up anchorages off the coast of San Pedro and Santa Monica, two small cities south and west of Los Angeles. The planning for the raids involved extensive legal maneuvering, as Warren built the case for his authority to act against the vessels by arguing the theory that bays encompassed by headlands fell within the state's jurisdiction, even when the closest point to shore was more than three miles away. Olney and Helen MacGregor supplied research arguing the attorney general's right to abate the nuisance of the ships, in part on the headland-to-headland theory and also by maintaining that the nuisance extended to shore, since servicing the ships with customers required a fleet of water taxis. Satisfied that he could win in court, Warren then directed a careful operation for the raids—one that required restraint and a dash of high-seas swashbuckling.

One option never discussed was that of simply leaving the ships alone. Their presence off the coast, and their water taxis delivering gamblers to them at all hours, seemed to mock law enforcement. “With things like this going on, nobody can take us seriously,” Warren told Olney. “We have to find some practical way of bringing these operations to a stop.”
³⁰

On July 28, 1939, Warren and law-enforcement executives in Southern California warned the gamblers to close immediately or “we will take all necessary steps to compel them to cease their activity.”
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They refused, claiming a legal right to operate off the coast, and on August 1, Olney, assisted by Oscar Jahnsen, took command of his armada. “When the time came, I found myself, to my great surprise, the commander for all practical purposes of a fleet of four patrol boats, sixteen water taxis and seventy-five or 100 men,” Olney recalled later. “We were to board and take possession of four large ships located in two widely separated bays and manned by hostile crews and all in the presence of unfriendly and excitable public participants. Quite an assignment for a young man who had never commanded so much as a corporal's guard.”
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Olney may have been new to the business of admiralty, but he was no stranger to detail. The officers involved were carefully briefed, and Olney even thought to bring along Price Waterhouse accountants to vouch for the disposition of the money that the raiders knew they would find on board the casinos (a few photographers went along as well; Warren was not immune to the lure of publicity). As the spectacle unfolded in Santa Monica Bay, Warren played the role of theater commander. He watched through binoculars from a beach headquarters and sent in directions via shortwave radio.

The little fleet under Olney and Jahnsen's command shoved off early that morning, and three of the ships—the
Texas
, the
Showboat
, and the
Tango
—surrendered without a fight. Boarding, the investigators tossed gambling equipment overboard from one ship, causing the owner later to threaten a lawsuit for piracy. But for the most part, captains allowed their vessels to be raided, and passengers were moved back to shore without incident. The exception, and the case that made the raids a running state story for days, was that of a daring gambler named Tony Cornero and his vessel, the
Rex
. Cornero was a smuggler and rumrunner from Prohibition days whose exploits had made him a minor celebrity and longtime irritant to federal and California law enforcement. He'd once commanded a fleet of speedboats used to ferry liquor into California after dark, and rumor was that Al Capone supplied the cash that got him into the gambling business. Cornero believed he'd outfoxed local authorities with his offshore gambling ships, reasoning that California could not regulate activity beyond its waters. Indeed, by 1939, Cornero's operations were so public that they advertised in Southern California newspapers.
³³
(At Warren's request, the attorney general's staff analyzed those advertisements and in June 1939 concluded that $24,375 was spent on advertising for the
Rex
in the
Times
during May and early June, another $27,075 in the
Examiner
, and $15,750 in the
Herald-Express
. Lesser sums were spent on advertising for other ships in those and other local papers.
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)

Having operated within sight of police for years, the gambler may have assumed Warren was bluffing when he threatened raids in late July. If so, that was a misreading of the new attorney general, for Warren was not inclined to bluff. Nor, however, was Cornero one to surrender easily. When the attorney general's navy arrived at the
Rex
, Cornero's crew refused to let the
Rex
be boarded: “Either leave quietly or be thrown overboard,” the boarding party was told as it tried to step aboard the
Rex
. The officers retreated to their boats, and then the crew of the
Rex
opened fire on them with hoses.

Rather than try to force their way on board, the raiders, at Warren's direction, backed off and encircled the ship. “It's their next move,” Warren announced with studied indifference. “We are satisfied that the
Rex
is not doing business, and if he and his crew want to remain in seclusion three miles out in the ocean indefinitely, we can wait longer than they can.”
³⁵

Warren surmised correctly that Cornero could not hold out long. His ship was full of passengers, many of whom had hoped to duck out for a quick afternoon of gambling and who were expected back at jobs and homes. The longer the standoff went on, the more Cornero's customers would grow impatient for a resolution. Since they could not take it out on Warren, they would inevitably demand that Cornero surrender. Cornero briefly fought for time, and Warren agreed to remove his increasingly restless passengers, leaving the captain and crew alone on the ship. That ended the gambling, but not the standoff, which dragged on through the week. After five days, during which time Cornero at one point threatened to seek Japanese registry for his ship—a gambit intended to raise the specter of accusing Warren's agents of attempting to board a foreign vessel—the gambler folded and allowed the raiders on board. He would continue to fight in court until, in November 1939, the California Supreme Court upheld Warren's view of the headland-to-headland definition of California waters. With that, Cornero realized he was finished, and he accepted a fine as well as the destruction of his gambling equipment, in return for the right to keep the
Rex
, so long as it left California waters. Warren was deeply satisfied, both by the smooth work of his little navy and by the now-clear waters of San Pedro and Santa Monica Bays. “Our ultimate objective of closing all the gambling ships was achieved, and I must say that, of all the raids on law violators I have known, these, as organized and executed by Warren Olney with the help of my investigators under Oscar Jahnsen, were by far the most intelligently planned and successfully carried out,” Warren wrote thirty years later.
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The standoff with the
Rex
did more than close down a gambling ship. It established the new power of the attorney general's office under the amendments voters had approved in 1934. And as proof that good government can be good politics, too, the raids gave stolid Earl Warren a tough-guy glamour. He liked it, and kept at it. In the coming months, investigators from Warren's office would travel the state and report back on gambling from Orange County to the Oregon border. Olney would review their work and recommend actions to Warren, who would then determine where to concentrate his efforts. Sometimes that merely involved a call to the local sheriff or district attorney; at other times, Warren could be brusque, even threatening. In Riverside County, for instance, the local sheriff resisted Warren's efforts to shut down gambling in the hotels of Palm Springs. On January 3, 1941, he got an abrupt reminder of his duties from the attorney general:

 

Warren called the sheriff's attention to his obligations to enforce California laws and then demanded written notice that the gambling had been stopped. There is no record of the sheriff's reply.

Warren's campaign against gambling earned him headlines up and down California, and his determined effectiveness contrasted with the flailing efforts of the Olson administration. While Warren was taking gamblers off the high seas, Olson was beset by one petty argument after another with the legislature. The contrasting images—of a professional administrator charged with enforcing the law and a partisan, beleaguered governor arguing politics with other politicians—gave Warren the upper hand in his building feud with Olson, and that advantage became especially significant as the world lurched toward catastrophe.

On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. Roosevelt was sleeping when the invasion began but was awakened by a call at three A.M. from William Bullitt, the American ambassador in Paris. “Well, Bill,” the president said. “It has come at last. God help us all.”
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Chapter 7

DUEL FOR POWER

WILLIAM SWEIGERT (CUTHBERT IS CULBERT OLSON)
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THROUGH THE WINTER of 1939 and the following spring, Earl Warren's widowed mother, Chrystal, struggled with her health and fortunes. After Methias's death she had settled his estate. Her health, never strong, continued to fail. One of her few remaining pleasures was shopping with her granddaughter, Virginia, Earl and Nina's oldest daughter. The two spent many afternoons picking out gloves or other finery in downtown Oakland.
²

One Tuesday afternoon in April, Chrystal was heading downtown to meet Nina Warren, where they too planned to spend an afternoon. Chrystal arrived first at the office building where they were to meet, but she then stumbled and collapsed outside a beauty parlor. She was carried inside, while Dr. Hamlin, the family doctor, rushed to the scene. Hamlin sent Chrystal Warren to Providence Hospital, just a few miles away. Earl Warren was at work across the Bay when the phone rang with the news. He rushed to the hospital, where he was met by his sister. Chrystal Warren never regained consciousness, but she died with her children at her side.
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On May 3, her son presided over her funeral at Grant Miller's chapel in Oakland. Her body was cremated.
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With Chrystal Warren gone, her son was severed from Bakersfield and the childhood he now had left behind. He rarely would speak of it in the years to come. And yet his mother's gentle passing seems not to have moved him in the same way that the violent circumstances of his father's murder did. Warren neglected to even mention her death in his memoirs, leaving her to simply drift off the narrative as his life continued. As was so often the case, it was left to others to articulate his loss.