FRISCO: The Secret History
Frisco was the cool grey city of love that seduced the world. It had has always been an outlaw town. Crime, or at least vice, was in its very DNA.
Prohibition brought about the end of the Barbary Coast, but the party rolled on in Frisco. Frank Lanza’s family ruled North Beach and Fisherman’s Wharf, the McDonough Brothers handled the payoffs, and the police ran the town. Examiner Editor Bill Wren ran the cops. Gambling boss Bones Remmer arrived in ‘41 and took over the Tenderloin. Jack Ruby dealt cards for him.
Jimmie Tarantino worked for Bones and ran an anti-communist shakedown tattle sheet financed by Frank Sinatra and mobster Mickey Cohen. Ex-con Bob Patterson, aka Freddie Francisco, worked for Wren, had his own action going, and terrorized the upper-crust matrons about whom he wrote in brilliant prose.
Frisco was still wide-open, and the overriding ethos of the city was keep your powder dry; eat, drink and be merry; and, especially, live and let live, as long as the proper payoffs had been made.
Frisco: The Secret History is an immersive, cinematic, and kaleidoscopic podcast that brings alive the last decades of the Wild Wild West with true tales of vice, politics, culture, entertainment, movies, romance and literature, from the last good-time years when Frisco was still the wide-open city the whole world loved.
FRISCO: The Secret History
Latest Episodes
Frisco: The Secret History Trailer
Prohibition brought about the end of the Barbary Coast, but the party rolled on in Frisco. The ’20s, ’30s and ’40s -- when the police ran the town, Frank Lanza’s family ruled North Beach and the Wharf, the McDonough Brothers handled the payoffs...
Freddie Francisco's Post-Mortem On The Green Street Theater, January 1, 1947
Welcome to the Frisco: The Secret History Podcast. I'm your host, Knox Bronson. I have a great episode for you today about the Green Street Theater, which we have focused on in the last couple of episodes. Although this time I'm just going to r...
Elaine Worth Pt. 2—Where There Is Honey, There Are Dead Bees
Frisco, 1928. A French sex farce at the Green Street Theater in North Beach, and a blonde in the title role who turned it into the hottest ticket in town. She claimed to be a ballerina, Naana Wartova, from Moscow. Offstage she was Elaine Worth....
Elaine Worth Pt. 1 - Star of the French Sex Farce "Easy For Zee Zee" at the Green Street Theater
North Beach, September 1928. There's a walk-up playhouse on Green Street with a stage the size of a dining table and fourteen actors crammed onto it. The show is a French farce called "Easy for Zee Zee." Opening week, it's bombing.Beauti...
Bones Remmer, Jack Ruby, and Frisco's La Cosa Nostra
Frisco in 1928 was a town with fog in its lungs and money in its pockets, and somebody had to decide who got to keep it. Frank Lanza, a quiet Sicilian who ran Fisherman's Wharf and sold grapes to half the bathtub wineries in America, sat ...
