Ep. 9 Bones Remmer Pt. 1—Tenderloin Gambling King, Jack Ruby, & A Short History of Frisco's La Cosa Nostra

In this episode, we step back into San Francisco at the end of the roaring twenties, when bootleggers, blackhanders, and quiet Mafia bosses carved out invisible empires in North Beach. It was a time when the city’s underworld tried to keep its violence out of sight — but the headlines told another story. 

It’s also the backdrop for the rise of Elmer “Bones” Remmer, the city’s gambling king who would come to rule its after-hours joints, brothels, and backroom poker games from the Tenderloin to Lake Tahoe. His story intertwines with that of Jack Ruby, who once dealt cards for him, and the quiet influence of the Lanza family, who kept the Mafia’s presence subdued but steady. The bridges were about to open, the old order was crumbling.

Transcript

Welcome to the  Frisco the. Secret History Podcast. I’m your host, Knox Bronson. 

I have a great episode for you today, about San Francisco’s gambling king of the Thirties and Forties, Bones Remmer with a sidebar on Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassin. As I researched this episode, it became apparent to me that we have to discuss the presence of the Mafia, or La Cosa Nostra, in San Francisco. 

[intermezzo]

Traditionally, the presence of the Mafia in San Francisco has always been somewhat subdued. That’s the way they wanted it.

The exception might be in the four year turf war that began in 1928 and ended with Frank Lanza establishing control over the  rackets in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, also known as Little Italy.

Francesco Lanza, born in Castelbuono, Sicily, in 1873, emigrated to New York City in the early 1900s He arrived in San Francisco during WWI when he was forty years old.

Between the two world wars, the population of Little Italy would peak at around 60,000 Italians in the tiny area, comprised of Telegraph Hill, Fisherman’s Wharf, and North Beach proper, starting at the base of Columbus Avenue and out to the bay at the northern tip. It was one of the largest Italian immigrant communities in the United States. Of San Francisco’s many micro-climates, Little Italy’s was one of the sunniest and warmest.

The tiny area supported five Italian language newspapers, cafes, saloons, and restaurants, bakeries, delicatessens, retail stores, food processing companies, cheese, chocolate, and pasta makers. The air was filled with the smell of espresso, freshly baked bread, and Italian cooking.

Little Italy was a working-class neighborhood with an almost self-enclosed economy that was fiercely self-reliant, from the Italian-dominated building trades to AP Giannini’s Bank of America, which lent money to low-income immigrant families and small businesses based on their reputation within the community. The bank was  crucial in rebuilding the area after the devastation of the 1906 earthquake and fire and then sustaining local businesses through the economic turbulence of the 1920s and 1930s.

Sicilian crabbers sailed out through the Golden Gate daily on motor-powered boats to the Farallon Islands to set their ring nets for crab at dawn, returning late in the afternoon or early evening with their catches in time for the restaurants and markets. Fisherman trawled and trolled for salmon, rockfish, sole, cod, and flounder.

[sounds of waves and seagulls]

Italians from the North east region of Italy dominated truck farming on the outskirts of the city, bringing fresh produce to sell in the city's markets.

During Prohibition, a fair amount of alcohol came in through the North Beach docks and there were speakeasies in the nearby, infamous Barbary Coast area, just south of Broadway, While not officially a part of Little Italy, a vibrant and often illicit entertainment scene thrived. The end of Prohibition in 1933 brought a wave of new bars and clubs to North Beach.

Frank Lanza arrived in San Francisco during World War I at forty years of age. Affiliated with gangsters back east, his directive was to organize the disparate criminal elements in the city. It took a while. 

A low-profile Mafioso, he became a legal supplier of grapes to illegal wine-making operations across the U.S during Prohibition. He wisely remained far in the background while more conspicuous underworld figures perished in Prohibition Era gangland conflicts. He partnered with a Sicilian fisherman, Giuseppe Alioto, and together they exerted great influence over San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf and its development. 

A four year gang war, starting in 1928, often dominated the news, as Lanza made moves to remove rivals and consolidate power as the boss of San Francisco’s Mafia.

It began on  April 28, 1928, when Alfredo Scariso killed Frisco’s top crime lord Gennaro “Handsome Jerry” Ferri, a racketeer known for blackmail and kidnapping, among other things, in his apartment. 

[gunshot]

Scariso, a  bootlegger, was later murdered on December 19. His body was found with multiple gun shot wounds and dumped in the area of Fair Oaks. On December 23 Mario Filippi, a suspect behind the Scariso murder, was found shot to death.

[gunshot]

At the time of his death, Ferri was soon to marry gorgeous Elaine Worth, a Russian singer and actress. He was murdered just days before the   wedding. 

There was evidence, police said, that quarrels over a woman had inspired the early sequence of shootings.

The woman in question was Elaine Worth, a beautiful Russian emigrant. She seemed to attract bad boys, a number of whom also had a proclivity for getting murdered. 

As the Examiner reported at the time:

[typewriter sound fx]

Elaine's three sad romances all blossomed and died during the year's run of "Easy for Zee Zee," a some- what unique French farce of which she was and still is the star at the Green Street Theatre in what is called the Bohemian or Latin Quarter of San Francisco. The first of the three to capture the heart of the lovely blonde Elaine was Gerry Ferri, a dark, but prosperously dressed man, who was in- troduced after the show with the somewhat vague description of a "regular guy."

Elaine fell in love with Gerry and the two quickly became a public couple, spotted around town in restaurants and nightclubs. Days before they were to be married Gerry was murdered. 

After Ferri’s murder, police linked bloody handprints to his partner, Alfredo Scariso. 

On December 15, Scariso was found dead near Sacramento with an associate, Vito Pileggi, also dead. In Scariso’s pocket were three photographs of Elaine, one of which had been pierced by a bullet. 

[gunshot]

By the spring of 1929, Elaine found company in another one of Ferri’s partners, Rene Fabri. A French immigrant, Fabri was known to authorities as a gambler and procurer, with over 100 women in his address book. On April 29, Fabri’s body was found on Rockaway Beach in San Mateo County. He had been beaten, shot, and slashed across his throat.

[gunshot]

Elaine claimed later that she had had no idea that her boyfriends had been gangsters, that she was an innocent, naive to the ways of the life in America in general, and North Beach in particular. of course, but I do think she might qualify for the femme fatale hall of fame if there were one. We will do a bonus episode on Elaine in the future.

After the Filippi murder , things calmed down for a while. At least no gangster of note was murdered in San Francisco until December of 1929, when Frank Lanza’s underboss Joseph Piazza mysteriously disappeared. Piazza had been trying to extort Giuseppe Alioto, Lanza’s Fisherman’s Wharf partner. An associate of Lanza, Tony Lima, took credit for the killing.

[gunshot]

Jumping ahead to  July 30, 1929 Frank Boca, considered to be Filippi’s partner in the killing of Scariso, was found murdered in his car. 

[gunshot]

The next murder was that of extortionist Genaro Broccolo, known as “Genaro The Magnificent” as well as “The Al Capone of the West” in October of 1930. 

[gunshot]

The banner headline read, “KILLING EXPOSES BLACKHAND RING.” 

Broccolo was universally loathed throughout Little Italy for his sinister extortion of local businesses. After his assassin, Ralph Esposito, was arrested, the Examiner reported that scores of local citizens visited him in the city jail to pay their respects.

The final murder was that of Luigi Malvese, shot down on May 18, 1932 while walking through North Beach. He had made a reputation as a hijacker, bootlegger and gun running racketeer. 

At this point, Frank Lanza had consolidated his power over San Francisco’s . 

Just four years later, on July 14, 1937 Lanza died of natural causes. His son, James, known as Jimmy the Hat, would assume control of the city’s rackets once again in 1961 and stay in power until 2006, dying at the ripe old age of 103. In the annals of organized crime, this is almost unheard of and is simply one more indicator of San Francisco’s unique underworld landscape. Our crime is more distributed.

Jimmy The Hat was very close to Bones Remmer, although by 1961, when Jimmy assumed control in San Francisco, Bones had already been in prison and was no longer in the rackets.. Bones had been, for many years, up to 1953, liaison to Las Vegas interests for the Frisco La Cosa Nostra.

Prior to 1937, underworld power in San Francisco was divided between three entities, the Lanza Crime Family, the bail bondsmen McDonough brothers, and the San Francisco Police Department. 

Prior to the Bay Bridge opening in 1936 and the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937, most people arrived in San Francisco via ferry, from locations in Oakland, Berkeley, Vallejo, and Sausalito. The ferries carried an estimated fifty to sixty million people back and forth across the bay every year. Some ferries carried automobiles as well. San Francisco Police officers were stationed at all ferry terminals on the San Francisco side of the bay.

If they didn’t like the look of some man coming off the ferry, if he looked a little too slick and perhaps a little too Italian, they would detain him and inquire as to his intentions for their fair city. If they didn’t like his answers, if he seemed like a wise guy, they would put him on the next ferry back to Oakland.

Everybody, that is, everybody who mattered and had a say in things, was on board with this protocol that protected their profits.

The opening of the bridges changed everything.

Then came the Atherton report in 1937. 

That year, under great political pressure, the San Francisco Grand Jury had hired an independent investigator, Edwin Atherton, a former FBI man, to investigate San Francisco vice in all its forms. The Atherton Report estimated that the police collected $1,325,000 a year from gambling and prostitution operations alone. That is almost $30,000,000 in 2025 dollars. Not bad for a city with a population of 645,000. 

The bridges open, the city’s old power structure dismantled, the city was ripe for a new boss.

[INTERMEZZO]

Elmer Francis “Bones” Remmer entered this world on the 24th of May, 1897, in Wells County, North Dakota. Growing up, he was the black sheep of his family. In his early twenties, he played football for the Canton Bulldogs in Ohio, one of the dominant teams in the nascent National Football League. He played alongside some of the legendary figures of early football, such as Jim Thorpe in that rough-and-tumble era of the game.

After football, he drifted west into the world of professional gambling, eventually getting hired in 1929 to run the infamous Cal-Neva Lodge on the California-Nevada border at north Lake Tahoe.

The next year, Remmer made national headlines when he tried, unsuccessfully, to collect a $13,000 gambling debt run up by actress Clara Bow, who had cancelled the checks she wrote to cover her losses when she returned home to Hollywood. I will do a future episode about quirky it-girl of the era and her escapades. Bones never collected the money. 

And speaking of that, let’s discuss his nickname “Bones.” I’ve read two different stories about where the nickname came from. The first was that the name Bones was simply an underworld joke, given his huge and ever expanding girth. The other was his reputation as a ruthless debt collector, where deadbeats ended up as bones in the cold ground, Clara Bow notwithstanding. 

Bones was a large, tough man with an appetite for both power and food. As time passed, both his waistline and his ownership in the Lodge increased. In 1937, when Graham and McKay were sent to jail for mail fraud, he took over the Cal-Neva.

The Cal-Neva laundered money for racketeers and bank robbers. Baby Face Nelson, the notorious bank robber, once hid out there, on the lam and wanted by the FBI. Bones introduced him to California bootleggers who hired him to guard their Prohibition era shipments.

At the Cal-Neva in the 1940s, the Nevada State Tax Commission once warned him to "put square dice and new decks on the table." 

1933, while still running the Cal-Neva at Lake Tahoe, Bones opened the Menlo Club, at 30 Turk Street, one of many gambling joints in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. It would be his base of operations in the city and surrounding areas for the next fifteen years. In April of 1948, after sustaining almost non-stop police raids, Bones gave up and closed the Menlo Club. He opened a new gambling house, Bones’ Corner, a couple blocks away on Eddy Street. Like the Menlo Club, Bones' Corner was part of the widespread, illegal-but-tolerated gambling scene in San Francisco's Tenderloin district.

Bones controlled after-hours joints, gambling parlors, brothels, and loan-sharking operations around Oakland, Emeryville, and San Francisco. In Emeryville, the mayor hung out at the Townhouse Bar, drinking all day long, while Bones ran the town. Apparently, Bones made stag films as well, but I cannot find much about the early porn business in San Francisco.

Bones reach extended out to Alameda and Contra Costa Counties, and down the peninsula. Future San Francisco District Attorney Edmund G. Brown helped Bones to incorporate his business interests in San Francisco after he had arrived in town. 

Later, Bones did constant battle with Brown, now District Attorney of the city, but Brown was never able to convict him of any criminal charges. As is often the case, it was the IRS who put Bones away for a couple years in the Fifties. The publicity Brown received fighting gambling in San Francisco helped him go on to be elected as the Attorney General of California and then Governor of the state. 

In the early Forties, Bones moved into a beautiful mansion on Claremont Blvd. in Berkeley’s exclusive neighborhood of the same name. The house is still there, just inside the massive brick pillars at the entrance to the district, across from St. Clements Episcopal Church. In fact, the owners have just finished a beautiful renovation of both the house and the grounds out front. Bones still owned a large interest in the Cal-Neva Club at Lake Tahoe, but he had big ideas for San Francisco and outlying counties so he wanted to be down here in the Bay Area.

[intermezzo]

In 1933, Jack Ruby, future assassin of Lee Harvey Oswald, headed out to Los Angeles from Chicago. Things were tight in Chi-town and they had heard there was work out on the Coast. He and and a few of his young friends from the old neighborhood headed west. 

He didn’t last long in Los Angeles. Work was scarce. His contacts, connected guys, had nothing for him and his friends.

Ruby’s sister, Eva Grant, said this about his time in LA: “I don't remember out there anything but for the newspapers, you know, and first he came to Los Angeles and he nearly starved to death. He became a singing waiter and someone told him--well, he said he was on his way to San Francisco but I think he didn't have enough money or gas to get there--to San Francisco.”

Ruby somehow later made his way to San Francisco and got work selling horse racing tip sheets at a mob-owned racetrack in San Mateo. Eva moved from Chicago with her son to live with Ruby.  Around this time, Ruby became involved in the outfit's little known but very lucrative marijuana smuggling operation from Mexico into California.

Eva had a close relationship with a Chicago gambler, Frank Goldstein, who had moved out to San Francisco. Goldstein put in a word with bones and, as a result, both Jack Ruby and sister Eva got jobs dealing cards at the Menlo Club.  After a couple years, Ruby returned to Chicago. Eva stayed on in San Francisco. Ruby, of course, would move to Dallas in 1947. Eva joined him briefly there and then went back to Chicago.

The Warren Commission reported: 

[typewriter sound fx]

Although virtually all his San Francisco acquaintances knew Jack Ruby as "Sparky," there is no evidence that, he engaged in violent activities in San Francisco or was reputed to possess a vicious temper. One friend, who stated that he resided with Ruby and Eva for about a year, described him as a "well-mannered, likable individual who was soft spoken and meticulous in his dress and appearance." 

Another friend described him as a "clean-cut, honest kid," and the manager of a crew with which Ruby worked stated that he had a good reputation and appeared to be an "honest, forthright person." The crew manager reported that Ruby associated with a sports crowd, some of whose members were involved with professional boxing, but not with criminals. He added that Ruby had a personal liking for law enforcement and would have wanted to become a police officer had he been larger physically.

This seems to be a whitewash, an attempt to paint Ruby as simply an everyday citizen, who, the story went, was so overcome with emotion at JFK’s murder, he felt he had to kill Oswald to protect Jackie Kennedy from the pain of Oswald’s eventual trial. 

In truth, Ruby had a violent temper, was for a time an enforcer for Chicago labor bosses, and treated his employees badly at his Carousel Club in Dallas. He traveled with some Chicago wise guys to Dallas in 1947 with the intent to take over gambling operations in the area. Although he was considered a small-time peanut in the scheme of things, his involvement with organized crime was constant throughout his life. 

His ties to San Francisco remained after he moved to Dallas. The Warren Commission reported that, on July 27, 1963, Ruby called Dave Rapkin, the owner of Moulin Rouge Club at 412-B Broadway in North Beach. The call to EX 7-6488, the club’s phone number, lasted for 3 minutes. Ruby reportedly owned a porn store located at 412-A Broadway.

A few weeks prior, his old employer, Bones Remmer, had passed away on June 11.

In four short months, on November 22, the world would be irrevocably changed.

[three gunshots]

[intermezzo]

In the Bones Remmer story, Jack Ruby dealing cards at the Menlo Club is just a footnote. However, stumbling across Ruby’s not insignificant connections to San Francisco in my researches for this podcast was a surprise. I’ve been obsessed with the assassination of John F. Kennedy for over fifty years and this little bit of information took me down a wormhole, a vortex of players and their connections in the world beneath. 

Most of what I learned is not germane to Frisco—The Secret History, but it certainly brought home a few things for me. Criminals are not like us. They are like sharks, always swimming toward the next score. They move around the country but remain connected. Money flows accordingly. They all know each other. James Ellroy once put it this way: “Everybody in The Life knows everybody in the Life and they all talk.”

When Ruby went on trial in Dallas for killing Oswald, his old friend from Chicago Barney Ross testified as a character witness. Do you remember Barney Ross, war hero, boxing champ, and writer for Jimmie Tarantino’s scandal sheet “Hollywood Nite Life?” Jimmie came to San Francisco in the mid Forties and went to work for Bones. If you haven’t already, I recommend  listenings to the two Frisco episodes on Jimmie Tarantino. Easy to find at the website.

I will get back to Bones Remmer shortly. This is part one of the story. He was a massive presence in San Francisco for many years. 

[intermezzo]

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Once again, I’m your host, Knox Bronson. Thank you for listening. Until next time, please get a little crazy and call it Frisco.