FRISCO—The Secret History
Join us on a cinematic journey through the last wild years when San Francisco was still wide-open. The cops ran the town in the Thirties and Bones Remmer ran the town in the Forties.Battles raged between the factions of dark and light in the hidden realms of San Francisco’s power elite, behind the headlines, from the celestial dominions of Nob Hill eateries and private clubs down to the nether depths of the dive bars in the heart of the Tenderloin, up to the Barbary Coast and jazz joints of North Beach and over to the banks and brokerages in...
Frisco Noir 4 with Rachel Walther: Killers, Cops & the Dark City: "The Lineup" and "The Sniper"
San Francisco has always looked good on film, but in The Sniper (1952) and The Lineup (1958), the city becomes something more than scenery. It becomes a character—a maze of steep streets, fog, waterfronts, alleys and lonely neighborhoods where killers can disappear and cops have to pound the pavement to find them. Rachel Walther, author of Born to Lose: The Misfits Who Made Dog Day Afternoon, joins me to talk about two very different pieces of Fifties' Frisco noir.
The Sniper ollows a troubled veteran who stalks women with an M1 carbine, while police struggle to understand what is...
Henry Miller, Big Sur, and the Examiner's War on Bohemia
Henry Miller came to Big Sur with no money and even less interest in behaving himself. He had already spent years writing books that were banned in America, smuggled into the country and sold under the table, and now he was living in the coastal hills with artists, poets, lovers, eccentrics and other people who had apparently misplaced their alarm clocks. The vast Pacific was there, the mountains were there, the fog came and went through the canyons, and for a while it was possible to imagine that a person might simply walk away from the machinery of modern...
The Water Queen: Dolly Adams and FrIsco’s Gilded Vice
Dolly Adams hit Frisco as a wild and precocious child, already carrying the kind of trouble that would follow a girl in the late 1800s. She became infamous as the Water Queen, and she could stay underwater long enough to make a North Beach crowd forget its manners. The bloods, the rich boys, from Nob Hill and Pacific Heights came looking for a little excitement and found Dolly instead. Money followed. Diamonds followed. Soon enough, she had plenty of both.
But Frisco always collects its debts. Dolly moved from the stage into the city’s demimonde and eve...
Nick DeJohn Part 3—The Trial That Fell Apart: The Strange End of the Nick DeJohn Murder Case
The jury's out, sequestered up at the Fairmont like kings in exile, and Frisco holds its breath after four weeks of front page testimony. Part Three opens with the strange coda nobody asked for — a state Attorney General's daughter kidnapped for an hour and a half, grilled about her father's trip to Chicago, then let go with a mobster's name dropped on the way out. The cops call it a prank. Nobody believes that, and nobody does anything about it either. Then Inspector Frank Ahern takes the stand and finally gives the State what it's been missing all trial: Le...
Nick De John, Part 2: She Heard Too Much — The Grand Jury, the Garrot, the Girl in the Bay Window, and a Barefoot Kidnapping in Golden Gate Park.
Fog rolls into the North Beach basements, and Nick DeJohn is still not talking — a garrot saw to that back in May of '47. Part Two picks up the case cold with Freddie Francisco’s break down of rumors in the Tenderloin whisper stream, jumps forward to a judge's chambers where DA Edmund "Pat" Brown torches his own trial rather than let a liar keep the stand, then rewinds to fill in the backstory.
A crab fisherman's wife walks into a police station with an extortion complaint and walks out having cracked a mob murder. Four men plott...
Lithe Ah Toy With The Laughing Eyes
In this episode, I tell the story of Ah Toy, San Francisco's first Chinese prostitute and madam. She arrived in 1849 at the age of 20, just as Gold Rush fever was turning the tiny harbor settlement into the wildest and most chaotic city on earth. In no time at all, she became one of the most infamous women in town.
Ah Toy was many things: entrepreneur, madam, celebrity, courtroom ninja, a source of fascination for some and outrage for others. She made a fortune servicing Gold Rush miners, repeatedly stood up to the extortionists and self-appointed community leaders who...
A Frisco Murder On a Foggy Spring Night, the Nick DeJohn Killing of 1947, Part 1
Nick DeJohn never knew when he had enough.
He’d slipped out of Chicago in the nick of time, so to speak, with a stolen $250K skim in his pocket and a lot of enemies at his back. Safe in Santa Rosa, California, with his wife and children, he could have stayed quiet and counted his money.
But guys like Nick need the action.
He decided he could muscle into the gambling action in Frisco. Old underworld connections were drifting west based on rumors that Northern California was opening up, and not just in Fris...
Belle Cora, Frisco's Notorious Gold Rush Madam Tries To Save Her Man
The city was young then, all bad whiskey, muddy boots, and men chasing gold like it was salvation itself. Meet Belle Cora, the most notorious madam west of the Mississippi. She came in hard from New Orleans with gambler Charles Cora and enough nerve to tame a town that didn’t scare easy. A sorry of crooked gamblers, desperate miners, abandoned ships rotting in Yerba Buena Cove, and a city where vice wasn’t hidden in alleyways: it sat right at the head of the table wearing silk gloves and diamonds.
Belle and Charles were the kind of lo...
A Playlist From Hal Smith To Accompany His Interview On Lu Watters' Yerba Buena Jazz Band
Yesterday, I published wherein I interviewed drummer and jazz historian Hal Smith. We discussed the music scene in San Francisco in the 30s and 40s and how one man, Lu Watters and his band The Yerba Buena Jazz Band, saved traditional jazz after the emergence of swing music.
I asked him for a playlist our listeners. He provided this list of songs and youtube links with extensive commentary. Thank you, Hal!
Enjoy!
Lu Watters and his Yerba Buena Jazz Band Save Trad Jazz, An Interview With Hal Smith
In this episode, I interview drummer and jazz historian Hal Smith. We discuss the music scene in San Francisco in the 30s and 40s and how one man, Lu Watters and his band The Yerba Buena Jazz Band, saved traditional jazz after the emergence of swing music. The musicians, the clubs, and how an girlfriend's irate father with a pistol put Lu and his band on the front page, launching their career.
All in all, fascinating story!
Links:
Hal's website: http://halsmithjazz.com.
Books:
Clancy Hayes, T...
The Ding Dong Daddy of the D-Car Line!
We are going to look at the life and times of little Francis Van Wie, the Diminutive Dutchman known also as the Ding Dong Daddy of the D-Car Line, the Car Barn Casanova, and the Trolley Toreador, and other nicknames. Francis managed to get hitched eighteen times over the course of his eighty-eight years. He rarely, if ever, bothered to get divorced. He did a stint in San Quentin for bigamy.
He started making nationwide news in 1915 at the age of twenty-seven and would continue to do so until he passed on from this mortal coil.
Bones Remmer Bribe Attempt Refused!—Freddie Says No To Gambler's Cash
In this episode, I talk about the time well-known grifter, Charles Auberguy, he of the Frisco netherworld and serial inheritance scams, contacted San Francisco Examiner columnist Freddie Francisco, ex-con and brilliant chronicler of high society foibles and underworld gossip, with a lucrative bribe offer, $500 a month, for laying off Chin Lim Mow, aka The Chinaman, gambling boss of San Mateo County.
Freddie played along and invited Auberguy to come visit him at his luxury apartment atop Nob Hill, replete with butler, the following week.
Immediately, Examiner Editor Bill Wren, Freddie, reporters Ernie Lenn and Ed...
Bonus #5—Wren vs Patterson: Does The Word "Poontang" Belong In A Family Newspaper
In this episode, I’m diving into one of my favorite San Francisco stories—the kind that lives right at the intersection of journalism, mischief, and outright audacity. It centers on two unforgettable characters from the San Francisco Examiner: the hard-driving, razor-sharp editor Bill Wren, and the wildly charismatic columnist Bob Patterson—better known to readers as Freddie Francisco. Bob was one of the most charming and fascinating men I’ve ever met.
This was the clash of two monumental titans over the use of the word "poontang" in the newspaper.
I walk you through Wren’s a...
Dolly Fine Part 4: Dolly Comes In From The Cold & Waltzes Off Into The Night
In Part Four of the Dolly Fine story, I bring the Dolly Fine story to a close.
Where we last left off, Dolly had been arrested and charged on eight felony counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The DA had her dead to rights and such was the political climate of the moment, he was going to make hay by pressing her to the full extent of the law.
Instead of arriving for her arraignment, she took flight and forfeited her $1000 bail. Every sighting of her, from San Diego to Paris, made he...
Frisco Noir with Rachel Walther #3; "Sudden Fear" (1952) & "House On Telegraph Hill" (1951)
In this episode of Frisco: The Secret History, Knox Bronson welcomes back film writer Rachel Walther to explore two classic film noir movies set in San Francisco: Sudden Fear (1952) starring Joan Crawford and Jack Palance, and House on Telegraph Hill (1951) starring Valentina Cortese and Richard Basehart.
Rachel dives into the production history, fascinating behind-the-scenes drama, and the real San Francisco locations that shaped these atmospheric thrillers. From Joan Crawford’s tense love triangle with co-stars to wartime backstories and dramatic Telegraph Hill chases, the conversation reveals how the city itself became a character in...
FRISCO TALES - APRIL 27, 1938 - A trailer
On April 27, 1938, San Francisco woke up to a banner headline: “Jury Indicts Dolly Fine as Boys Tell of Vice Den.” In this bonus episode of Frisco: The Secret History Podcast, I zoom out from Dolly Fine’s indictment to take you inside one extraordinary spring day in the city.
I explore the political optics behind Dolly’s charges, the lingering fallout from the Atherton corruption investigation, and the broader culture of tolerated vice that defined Frisco in the 1930s. From a shocking “white slavery” trial to a police sergeant’s scandalous midnight “auto ride” with an arrested street...
The Lady in Red Vanishes; Dolly Fine Part 3
In this episode, I let Jake Ehrlich do a lot of the talking, because frankly, no one skewered San Francisco’s hypocrisy quite like he did. Dolly wasn’t just fighting a criminal charge—she was being fed to the wolves in a city that had tolerated, taxed, and quietly protected vice for decades. Suddenly, after one raid involving a handful of well-connected teenage boys, everyone found religion.
What fascinates me most here is Dolly’s code. She could have blown the lid off police graft. She could have named names. Instead, she chose silence—and then she chose...
The Lady In Red Part Two: Collateral Damage
In this episode, I continue the story of Dolly Fine as San Francisco’s long-standing system of tolerated vice begins to unravel in the wake of the Atherton Report of 1937. Police shakeups, grand jury investigations, and rising public pressure tightened the noose the long-tolerated and city-wide machinery of grart, even as those very same players who profited for decades scrambled to protect themselves.
When a police raid on Dolly's house triggered by a high-society matron's call to the Chief of Police, caught her son and his friends in her parlor, the response was swift and ferocious: felony indi...
Dolly Fine—The Lady In Red & Frisco's Empire of Vice
Dolly Fine was one of San Francisco’s last great madams and a defining figure of the city’s wide-open 1930s nightlife. Tall, blonde, impeccably dressed, and deeply embedded in the city’s underworld, Dolly ran one of the most profitable and professionally managed houses in town—right as Frisco’s long tradition of tolerated vice was beginning to crack under public scrutiny.
Before diving into Dolly’s reign, Knox takes us on a whirlwind tour of the city’s legendary madams, from Gold Rush pioneers like Irene McCready and Ah Toy to fan favorites Tessie Wall and Jessie Hay...
La Cosa Nostra Gang War 1928-32 Bonus Episode Trailer
We pick up alongside Episode Nine on Bones Remmer, zooming out to look at what was happening in San Francisco in 1928 as the La Cosa Nostra gang war intensified in North Beach. Along the way, we pause on the culture of the moment: the movies people packed theaters to see, the arrival of Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie, and the everyday stories that shared front-page space with organized crime.
A Very Frisco Christmas Special
This special holiday episode of Frisco — The Secret History explores how Christmas was celebrated in San Francisco from the Gold Rush through the 1940s. The episode opens with a reflection on Emperor Norton, the city’s most beloved eccentric and an early, outspoken champion of civil rights, whose proclamations stood in stark contrast to the exclusionary realities of his era.
From there, the story traces the evolution of Christmas in San Francisco: from the rough-and-tumble mining camps of the foothills, where celebrations could stretch on for days, to the rise of elaborate urban traditions centered around downtown depa...
Call It Frisco Part 3: Emperor Norton and Herb Caen Myths Debunked!
In this episode of The Secret History of Frisco, Knox Bronson returns—hopefully for the last time—to San Francisco’s most emotionally charged semantic battlefield: the word “Frisco.”
Building on the earlier episodes Call It Frisco and Call It Frisco #2 — Sally Stanford Weighs In On The Eternal Conflict, Knox dismantles two of the most commonly cited weapons in the anti-Frisco arsenal: Emperor Norton’s supposed 1872 proclamation banning the word, and Herb Caen’s famously stern admonition, Don’t Call It Frisco.
New historical research from the Emperor Norton Trust reveals that Norton’s decree almost cert...
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 deal...
Rachel Walther Discusses "The Lady from Shanghai" Orson Welles’ Fractured Dreamscape of San Francisco Noir
This installment is all about the wild 1947 film noir The Lady From Shanghai, and guest Rachel Walther, a film historian with a book coming out soon called Born To Lose, The Misfits Who Made Dog Day Afternoon, breaks down the chaotic story behind it.
The Lady From Shanghai film was a last-ditch effort by Orson Welles to get back in Hollywood’s good graces after his studio battles over The Magnificent Ambersons. He literally phoned up Columbia head Harry Cohn and pitched a thriller based on a random book title he saw...
"WOMEN IN SALOONS—The Shame of My Sex" (1944) Part Two
Welcome back, Frisco fans! You're tuning into Part Two and the conclusion of our deep dive into the San Francisco Examiner's 1944 sensation: "WOMEN IN SALOONS—The Shame of My Sex," by the legendary, if controversial, author Gertrude Atherton. If you missed the start, you definitely want to go back and listen to Part One! This episode picks up where we left off, following Atherton's increasingly frantic, first-hand reports as she descends from the glittering "Top of the Mark"—where she finds "all...attending strictly to business" in the gloom—down to the "s...
The Examiner's 1944 Moral Crusade Against Barfly Women—"WOMEN IN SALOONS—The Shame of My Sex" Part 1
In this episode of The Secret History of Frisco, we're diving into the San Francisco Examiner's sensational 1944 moral crusade against Barfly Women and the threat they posed to the social fabric of San Francisco. The paper hired the renowned 86-year-old author and novelist, Gertrude Atherton, a San Francisco native, to mount an investigation into the phenomenon of unaccompanied women drinking in saloons and nightclubs.
We trace the history of William Randolph Hearst's and Joseph Pulitzer's battle for domination in New York City at the end of the nineteenth century and the sensational, fact-free style style of reportage...
Jimmie Tarantino Pt. 2: D.A. Thomas Lynch Spells Out Jimmie's Scams in Post-WWII Frisco
California State Attorney General Thomas C. Lynch was the Assistant D.A. in San Francisco in the late 1940s, the years Jimmie Tarantino, blackmailer and extortionist magazine publisher, was plying his trade in San Francisco at the behest of Frisco gambling czar Bones Remmer.
This episode comes from the Oral History Department of the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, an interview conducted with Lynch in 1978. It's a fascinating overview of the era and the behind-the-scenes battles I inadvertently stumbled up so many years ago that led to the creation of "The Secret History of Frisco" podcast.
...
Jimmie Tarantino Part 1: When Frank Sinatra and Mickey Cohen Invested in His Hollywood Nite Life Magazine
This episode of "The Secret History of Frisco" podcast introduces listeners to Jimmie Tarantino, a man described as a "louse, a blowhard, a barely literate, anti-Communist shake-down artist." The episode delves into Tarantino's early life in East Orange, New Jersey, and his eventual move to Hollywood where he became a peripheral member of Frank Sinatra's inner circle, "The Varsity."
I discuss Sinatra's deep and complicated ties to organized crime and he used those connections to get out of his contract with bandleader Tommy Dorsey. It involved a pistol jammed in Dorsey's mouth.
The podcast then d...
Call It FRISCO Part Two—Sally Stanford Weighs In On The Eternal Conflict
In "Call It FRISCO, Part 2," host Knox Bronson defends his podcast's name, "The Secret History of Frisco," against objections from hither and thither, including the Reddit San Francisco group. Historical figures like Emperor Norton and madam Sally Stanford each make an appearance, showcasing their differing views on the term "Frisco." "Colorful characters like Foghorn Murphy and Charles Cora, embraced the name, contrasting them with later transplants who, according to Stanford's autobiography, brought "provincial" sensibilities and disapproved of the city's previously open and permissive culture. The Secret History of Frisco is a deliberate nod to this older, more authentic San Fr...
FRISCO NOIR With Rachel Walther—The Maltese Falcon No.1 (1931) & No.2 (1941) and Dark Passage (1947)
In this episode, the first of a series, Knox Bronson, host of "The Secret History of Frisco" podcast, welcomes Rachel Walther, a film noir expert and author, to discuss the genre's connection to San Francisco. Walther, who writes for the Film Noir Foundation's "Noir City" magazine and has a forthcoming book on "Dog Day Afternoon," highlights San Francisco's significant role in film, particularly after World War II, due to its cinematic landscape and the rise of on-location shooting. The conversation then delves into two adaptations of "The Maltese Falcon," the 1931 and 1941 versions. While the 1941 film, directed by John Huston a...
The Story of Johnny Ochsner, The Rich Kid Romeo, and the Lovesick Stowaways
The episode chronicles the romantic life of Johnny Ochsner, a young Oakland oil heir whose escapades in the 1940s became international news.
Marguerite Faye Human and Teresa Briston, separately stowawayed across the Pacific in pursuit of Johnny, driven by dreams of marriage.
The story involves underage sex, a high-seas burglary, and the intervention of the FBI, naval officers, juvenile court, as well as Johnny's wealthy mother, who actively interfered to protect her son from what she perceived as "gold-diggers."
Johnny's romantic life continued to be tumultuous, marked by a number marriages...
Bonus Episode 3—When Sally Stanford Kicked Humphrey Bogart Out Of Her Flagship Pleasure Palace At 1144 Pine Street In 1941
This bonus episode of "The Secret History of Frisco" podcast delves into the scandalous lives intertwined with San Francisco's notorious madam, Sally Stanford. Born Mabel Busby in 1903, Stanford's early life of poverty and a wrongful imprisonment for cashing stolen checks fueled her determination to achieve financial independence. By 21, she opened her first brothel in San Francisco's Tenderloin, adopting the name Sally Stanford and quickly expanding her empire to multiple locations across the city. Her autobiography, "The Lady of the House," paints a vivid picture of a "live-and-let-live" San Francisco, where her establishments thrived.
The podcast...
The Secret Life of Bob Patterson, The Charming Ex-Con Who Terrrorized High Society With His Column, "Freddie Francisco Observes" In The 1940s
The Secret Life of Freddie Francisco: A Rogue's Rise and Fall
This episode of "The Secret History of Frisco" delves into the captivating, often scandalous, life of Bob Patterson, a writer of prodigious talent and even more prodigious roguishness. Under the pen name Freddie Francisco, Patterson became Northern California's most powerful newspaper columnist in the 1940s for the San Francisco Examiner. His dazzling prose and irreverent insights into San Francisco's elite captivated readers, but his career came crashing down in 1949 when Hollywood Life exposed his hidden past: a convicted criminal who had served...
Interview with Paul Drexler, Author of "Notorious San Francisco: True Tales of Crime, Passion, and Murder"
In this episode, I talk to author and historian Paul Drexler about the crime and vice rooted in the very birth of San Francisco and their evolution and influence in the city for the next hundred years.
People and groups discussed in the episode include the Sydney Ducks, the Hounds, the San Francisco Police Department, Donna Fine, Sally Stanford, Bones Remmer and his mafia connections, including one-time employee Jack Ruby, California Governor and Attorney General Edmund G. Brown, and various other criminals and their Frisco escapades.
Paul's Book, Notorious San Francisco: True Tales of C...
The Hawaiian Princess Who Wanted To Sing
I have a wonderful episode for you today, the story of the Hawaiian princess who came to San Francisco to open a nightclub where she could sing. We will again encounter lawyer Jake Ehrlich, of course. The McDonough Brothers, who controlled all the vice in the city, Chief of Police William Quinn and his corrupt Captain Fred Lemon at Central Station, also make appearances.
The Princess came to California in 1930. In 1933, she opened the Club Kilokawa on Bush St., full of pictures of Diamondhead and Waikiki Beach, palm fronds, coconuts, and prostitutes in grass skirts. It was...
Bonus Episode No. 1—Call It Frisco!
This episode explores the long and often contentious history of the nickname "Frisco" for San Francisco. Despite the strong disapproval of many, including Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, the term has deep roots stretching back to the Gold Rush era.
We delve into the earliest documented uses of "Frisco" in the mid-19th century, finding it in letters from 1849 and newspapers like the Placer Times in 1850, suggesting it was once a common and respectable abbreviation, even appearing in genteel literature by 1868. The episode also touches on the theory of a Middle English origin for "Frisco" as a port...
Episode 1: Vice Defined San Francisco's DNA At Its Inception
Welcome to The Secret History of Frisco, a podcast peeling back the layers of San Francisco's vibrant and often illicit past during its last wide-open era, 1934 to 1953. Join host Knox Bronson as we journey through the city's smoky backrooms, bustling waterfronts, and glittering nightlife, where fortunes were made and lost, and a unique live-and-let-live ethos reigned supreme, naturally contingent on the right palms being greased. From the early days of Gold Rush outlaws like The Hounds and the Sydney Ducks, who set the stage for a city steeped in vice, to the looming figures of Mafia boss Frank Lanza...
When Gamblers and Newspapermen Ruled The Cool Grey City of Love
Ever wondered who really pulled the strings in San Francisco during its post-war golden age? It wasn't the mayor or the board of supervisors.
When the war ended in 1946, San Francisco experienced an unprecedented boom. Servicemen who'd fallen in love with the city returned to stay, nightlife flourished, and business thrived in what appeared to be a model American city. But beneath this picturesque facade, two men – neither elected nor appointed – controlled nearly everything.
On one side was Bill Wren, a powerful newspaperman working for William Randolph Hearst's Examiner, who effectively ran both the city and...
