Music?
Thought
"At twenty you have many desires which hide the truth, but beyond forty there are only real and fragile truths -your abilities and your failings." —T.S. EliotSearch
Frisco Past and Present
| Shell Cooper, Mob Underboss, Frisco 1950 |
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| Thursday, 21 September 2006 | |
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The Cool Grey City of Love—1950 (another excerpt from my next book) I met Shell Cooper in 1975.
Shell,
old and shrinking, but still sharp, tended bar at the Pickwick Hotel
right near the Examiner, where I had a job that required me to work for
about an hour and a half a day, allowing me plenty of time to ponder
the great issues of our time in numerous local watering holes. I got fascinated with that post-war era of San Francisco, 1947-1956. I'd pick old-timers brains for anecdotes & run in the phonebooth & write them down. It would have been a great time to be in San Francisco. In my mind, as I learned about events, places, personalities of the time, I convinced myself it was a more innocent time than the darkening seventies. San Francisco of the thirties, when the town was run by a couple bail bondsmen, the McDonough brothers, the era of Dashiell Hammet and the Maltese Falcon was probably great fun, too. Your humble narrator has no actual knowledge to share here. 1950, the year I was born. Oh my droogies, how battles raged between the factions of dark and light in the hidden realms of San Francisco's power elite, behind the headlines, in the secret world. From the celestial dominions of Nob Hill eateries and private clubs down to the nether depths of the drag and drug dungeons beneath the Tenderloin ... the Barbary Coast and jazz joints of North Beach and down to the banks and brokerages in the Financial District ... skirmishes everywhere ... On one side was Bill Wren, managing editor of the San Francisco Examiner, his knight-errant Freddie Francisco, the most powerful gossip columnist in Northern California, an array of politicians, the mayor, the chief of police, and most of the board of supervisors. Wren's influence spread across the state with the muscle of the Hearst Newspaper chain behind him. On the other side was Shell's friend Bones Remmer, who controlled all the after-hours joints, brothels, gambling houses, and bookies in town. Extortion and loan-sharking may have fallen under his purview as well. His immediate underlings were Jimmie Tarantino, who published a tattle-sheet, Hollywood Life, and my good friend Shell who owned the Cooper and Varni's. Along with a few politicians, a few cops, and various shady lawyers and bagmen, these guys fought to keep San Francisco fun. I believe Shell's bar was a referral station for Sally Stanford's legendary den of desire right up Pine, hence a target for Wren and his minions of morality. Basically a shakedown/smear artist clothed in the Nixonian rainments of anti-communism so common to the crooks of the day, Tarantino had fled Hollywood to escape the wrath of Frank Sinatra, one of the early investors in Hollywood Life. Apparently he had gotten some dirt on Sinatra and blackmailed him for eight thousand dollars. Honor among thieves: whosoever coined that phrase I hope is stuck on Gilligan's Island for eternity, Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini endless background music, surrounded by a hundred burly men line-dancing, Nixon, Rebozo, Roy Cohn, J. Edgar, the Bay of Pigs gang, no Mary Ann, no Ginger. Wait ... that might be someone's idea of heaven. Speaking of tutus, I am going to jump ahead three decades and tell a North Beach, Halloween, 1978, story. I was walking up Columbus at about six thirty, right across from Washington Square Park, in front of the legendarty Washington Square Bar & Grill and a guy was bent over loading cases of beer into his little car. He had short dark hair and a mustache and was wearing a pink tutu and tights. I came strolling by, half-drunk, saw this vision and said — Nice tutu. And he spun around in the gutter and said, — Fuck you faggot! And I observed, — Hey, you're the one in the tutu. He had no comeback for this. I kept rolling on up the sidewalk to Coit Liquor for provisions. Back to Tarantino: he had operated under the protection of Mickey Cohen, rival to Howard Hughes for the affections of many a starlet, but Sinatra was so livid that Mickey couldn't help Tarantino and he had to leave town for the cooler climes of San Francisco, where he went to work for Bones Remmer. Tarantino would go on to theaten to expose fellow anti-communist Vice-President Richard Nixon's slush fund, threatening Nixon's place on Eisenhowers 's 1952 presidential ticket, leading to Nixon's infamous Checkers speech. I am not sure how the war between these titans, Wren and Remmer, broke out. Shell said that Bill Wren was a serious horse player and if he lost a lot of money to a bookie, he'd have the bookie raided, controlling the police as he did, rather than pay the debt. And when he won, he demanded his winnings immediately. The Examiner was located at Third and Market. Third Street between Market and Mission was a colorful collection of newspaper and cigar and magazine shops, most of which booked action, and saloons, like the legendary Breen's and Jerry and Johnny's. There was one big book, a mothership betting parlor, on an alley off Third on which Wren got a line. With the help of the police and his trusted lieutenants Bob Patterson, aka Freddie Francisco, gossip columnist extraordinaire and a convicted safecracker who never let the facts get in the way of a story, Josh Eppinger, possibly the meanest city editor in the history of the city, and Ed Montgomery, later to become a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for his story on Barbara Graham, the convicted murderess whose story was the basis for the movie, I Want to Live, Wren planned a huge, secret raid. Weeks of preparation went into the invasion. Bread trucks were borrowed, to transport the cops without tipping off the sentries who were stationed around the block. The night of the raid, Wren had extra photographers and reporters on duty to write it up. The raid took place at 3 a.m., perfectly, no leaks to warn the bad guys. The police raced up in the bread trucks, right past oblivious sentries, charged through the doors and up the stairs, arrested every man in the place, seized piles of bets and cash. Wren was ecstatic. Banner headlines. Justice served. Major gambling ring broken. Suspects in custody. Influential citizens revealed. A blow for decency. Only one problem: when they went to print the paper, Wren discovered his whole morning shift of pressmen had been hauled away in the raid. There was no crew to print the paper. Bob Patterson, aka Freddie Francisco, the original Mr. San Francisco, was a Kojak fan. As was I. I was drinking with him one night at the M&M and he mentioned he had heard I was too and that my appreciation for Kojak had raised me in his estimation. Funny what impresses people sometimes. We talked Telly S. for a while. Obsessed as I have been throughout the decades with the dark side of American politics and power, I asked him if he thought there were any cops as pure as Kojak. Very old now, and about to be fired from the Examiner for a supposedly bogus dispatches from his undercover trip as the first American into Red China after many decades, he addressed my question with a series of rambling qualifiers and evasions. He never really answered the question, but somewhere in there was a "no," I'm pretty sure. Bob Patterson would shortly take a cab to a Twin Peaks motel, send off the cab driver with $50 to go buy some underwear for him, run a bath, get in, and slit his wrists. The cab driver would discover Freddie Francisco dead in the bathtub upon his return with the new boxer shorts. Bones Remmer went to prison in 1953. Jimmie Tarantino faded into obscurity. Shell spent all his money and ended up at the Pickwick where we crossed paths. He wouldn't really tell me much about the old days after a certain point, to my dismay, no matter how much I pressed him for more. He said, "Forget it, kid. The ballgame's over. Let it be. People will get hurt." And then he added, cryptically, "But remember one thing: I don't care what anybody says, they were just as dirty as we were." After I had been drinking at the Pickwick for awile, and we'd chatted more than a few times, Shell asked me my name. "Knox." "Knox what?" "Bronson." "Any relation to Knox Bronson?" Peering intently at me. "He was my grandfather." Shell looked up and down the bar, put his hands on the counter and leaned over toward me so I could hear him very clearly. "Your grandfather ... was a player." The Bronson Dharma. The path wide and gleaming as seventies unfold. |
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written by Jimi Tarantino, February 19, 2008
you should watch whos names you use in your book the families of Jimmie Tarantino do not like it when you slander there name. I know, I am his son.