The Battle of Santa Monica Bay: When a Floating Casino Fought the Police
On 1 August 1939, California law officers sailed into Santa Monica Bay to close a collection of illegal casinos. Three floating gambling houses submitted. The fourth responded with fire hoses.
This was the Battle of Santa Monica Bay, a confrontation in which no battleship was required, but a considerable amount of official dignity went overboard.
At its centre stood Tony Cornero, a bootlegger turned gambling entrepreneur, and his floating casino, the SS Rex.
For years, offshore gambling ships had offered Californians a convenient answer to an inconvenient law: if gambling was prohibited on land, why not take the tables out to sea?
A Casino at the End of the Pier
During the 1930s, visitors to Santa Monica could board water taxis bound for ships anchored offshore. On board were roulette wheels, card tables, food, drink and the reassuring suggestion that the authorities had no business interfering.
Cornero, also known as Anthony Stralla and nicknamed "The Hat", was particularly adept at selling the experience.
His Rex was less a pirate vessel than a floating leisure business, promoted to ordinary customers rather than exclusively to wealthy gamblers.
Its appeal depended on an argument simple enough to fit on a postcard: the ship lay beyond the three-mile limit, so California gambling laws supposedly did not apply.
That sounded plausible to paying passengers.
To prosecutors, it sounded like an invitation to examine a map.
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The Three-Mile Problem
The law was more complicated than Cornero's advertisements suggested.
Santa Monica Bay curves between Point Dume and Point Vicente. Did the three-mile limit begin at the beach, or from a line connecting the bay's headlands?
That difference was worth a fortune to the gambling-ship operators.
A ship might sit several miles from Santa Monica Pier and still be inside California's jurisdiction if the entire bay counted as state waters.
The question reached the courts while the casinos continued to operate.
Cornero's defiance was not simply a refusal to obey a straightforward order; the legal boundary itself was contested, and earlier decisions had favoured the offshore operators.
California Attorney General Earl Warren, however, was not inclined to leave the matter to another round of roulette.
A Battle Fought With Water
On 1 August 1939, a force of roughly 250 officers and other officials moved against four gambling ships.
The operators of three vessels surrendered.
Cornero's crew barricaded the Rex, hung protective nets along its sides and aimed powerful water hoses at approaching boats.
Officers attempting to climb aboard were driven back into the Pacific.
Cornero insisted the ship was beyond the state's authority. The authorities insisted he was wrong. Neither side could resolve the dispute by shouting across the water, although both gave it a fair attempt.
Hundreds of passengers were aboard when the raid began. They were eventually allowed to leave, turning what might have been an entertaining evening into an unusually long explanation to the family.
The confrontation lasted about ten days.
Cornero finally came ashore, reportedly explaining that he needed a haircut and the Rex lacked a barber.
It was a useful line for the newspapers, whether or not it represented his principal reason for surrendering.
The Supreme Court Draws a Line
The decisive legal ruling came on 20 November 1939.
In People v. Stralla, the California Supreme Court held that Santa Monica Bay was a bay within the state's territorial boundaries, and that California's jurisdiction extended across its waters and at least three miles beyond the line joining its headlands.
The Rex was not safely outside the law after all.
Its operators had been arguing about the wrong stretch of ocean.
The following day, officers boarded the now-empty vessel and destroyed gambling equipment.
Tables were broken up and slot machines thrown into the sea. Years of legal wrangling ended with the Pacific receiving an unexpected shipment of casino hardware.
The Offshore Casino That Foreshadowed Vegas
Cornero's career did not end at Santa Monica.
He later became involved in Las Vegas casino development, including the unfinished Stardust project, before his death in 1955.
The floating casinos had already demonstrated an appetite for large-scale, accessible gambling entertainment.
But the Battle of Santa Monica Bay is worth remembering for something more peculiar than the eventual rise of the casino resort.
It was a dispute about where a line on a map began, played out as a maritime siege between police launches and a stationary gambling barge.
The spectacle is almost impossible to invent: an outlaw casino, a future chief justice, high-pressure hoses and a surrender allegedly prompted by a haircut.
The law won.
The story, rather more enduringly, belonged to Cornero.
Hellwood's Anthony 'The Hat' Cornero T-Shirt recalls one of the more colourful figures in America's criminal history, a man whose ambitions stretched from the Pacific Ocean to the Las Vegas Strip.
Discover more stories from the darker side of American history in Hellwood's Mobsters and Gangsters collection, explore the True Crime T-Shirts collection, or browse the wider American History T-Shirts collection.
ANTHONY 'THE HAT' CORNERO T-SHIRT
Bootlegger. Gambling kingpin. The man who fought California with fire hoses.
A Hellwood tribute to Tony Cornero, the notorious gambling entrepreneur whose floating casinos challenged California law and whose later ambitions helped shape the emerging Las Vegas casino industry.
Featuring a striking monochrome portrait, distressed red-and-charcoal artwork and bold vintage-inspired typography, this design celebrates one of the most extraordinary characters in American underworld history.
VIEW THE ANTHONY CORNERO T-SHIRT