TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome to the Secret History of Frisco Podcast. I’m your host, Knox Bronson.
I have a fun episode today, a bit of a departure in that it’s a verbatim reading of a portion of an oral history, the interviewing of former California Attorney General Thomas C. Lynch. The interview was conducted in 1978 by historian Amelia R. Fry for the Oral History archives of the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. This is just a small excerpt from the archive. Visit the secret history of Frisco website for full attribution, transcript, and show notes.
Thomas Lynch, a native San Francisco, had a long and illustrious career, serving as the District Attorney of San Francisco and later becoming the Attorney General of the State of California.
One story about him stood out. In 1965, he issued a report from theAttorney General’s office on the ongoing threat of motorcycle gangs, in particular the Hells Angels to society. The press picked up the story and brought the Hells Angels to the attention of the whole country. The sensational story, based on events which resulted in no prosecutions, served as a running theme in Hunter Thompson’s 1967 book “Hells Angels.” Thomas Lynch was a politician and knew how to garner attention from the press. He made a trial run for president in 1968, entering the California Democratic primary after Lyndon Johnson announced he would not run for re-election. He came in third after Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy.
He was in the San Francisco District Attorney’s office during the years that Jimmie Tarantino was operating in San Francisco. As such, he had a wonderful bird’s eye view of what Jimmie and Bones Remmer and the rest were up to and he shared it with a lawman’s perspective.
This is just tiny portion, about 2%, of the whole oral history.
I thought about creating the rest of this episode using AI generated voices, but the thought of using AI makes me want to barf. I’ll put Thomas C. Lynch’s answers using the “old radio broadcast” voice filter. I will stand in for Amelia.
Remember that this was recorded in 1978.
Without further ado.
[intermezzo]
Fry: I have a few questions on specific cases that you might want to talk about. There’s Jimmy Tarantino.
Lynch: Oh, I’d love to. Jimmy Tarantino was from East Orange, New Jersey. I don’t know whether he was a prize fighter or promoter, a snipey little guy. I own his magazine. I bought it for 50¢.
Fry: I couldn’t understand how you and–was it Gordon Garland? Who did you buy it with?
Lynch: Gardiner Johnson, a great Republican. Tarantino came into Los Angeles, and he had a couple of friends. Hank Samicola was one of them. Another was a former prizefighter, a lighweight champion, Barney Ross, who at that time had been a narcotic addict. Tarantino had this magazine called Hollywood Night Life.
He used the information he got from Barney Ross about who was using narcotics and doing other tricks in Hollywood, among the movie and entertainment people, he used it for blackmail in his magazine. I have a copy. My son’s been looking at it, so I don’t have a copy handy. It fascinates him. I can’t find it. No, I don’t know what happened to it. My son had it.
Anyway, Tarantino had this magazine, which he published in Los Angeles.
This is really an old-time San Francisco story. I think it’s probably worthy of being in the archives. It’s a rather complicated story, but it was a part of the times. There were many people involved in it.
Fry: This was in the mid-forties?
Lynch: Mid-forties, Anyway, Tarantino was blackmailing in Los Angeles various movie stars. They would contribute to ads in his magazine. In return, he would give them big puff articles. He would also put on dinners for himself, honoring himself. The greatest egoist that’s ever lived, this Jimmy, but a punk, a real punk. In the meantime, one of his backers was Frank Sinatra. Sinatra didn’t back Tarantino in what he was doing. He just liked the guy.
Frank’s a very generous guy, and he gave him some money to get the magazine going. I don’t think he really knew what he was doing. I don’t think he’d put up with it if he really knew what was going on.
In the meantime, here in San Francisco, Elmer “Bones” Remmer was operating a gambling joint, which wasn’t legal, because there was no city ordinance allowing it. It was down in the Tenderloin area. I’ve forgotten exactly where, but it was a matter of record.
It was a big joint, wide open. Of course, like everything else in those days, you’d go in to play poker and sit down with six people, and five of them were working for the house. You couldn’t get a fair shake unless you brought your own cards. If you did that, you’d probably get killed. [laughter]
We were after Remmer. While we were going after him, so was Bill Wren, W-r-e-n, who was the city editor of the San Francisco Examiner. The funny thing about Bill Wren is he loved to play the horses himself, but he was always after the bookies and the gamblers.
[laughs] And he was taking off after Bones Remmer.
Fry: Was Remmer also a bookie?
Lynch: No, no. Remmer was the big gambling man.
At one time Remmer had taken over Cal-Neva Lodge, the Lake Tahoe gambling casino, when two men who ran it, Graham and McKay, were in a federal penitentiary for running a racetrack swindle. While they were gone, Bones ran Cal-Neva.
Then he opened this joint in San Francisco. It was a big operation, and Bill Wren was after him.
The stories we got, and I’m sure it’s true, is that Remmer imported Tarantino to San Francisco to take on Wren. And Tarantino did, in no uncertain terms. Every issue he’d come out with something about Bill Wren, talking about how he was a gambler–oh, accuse him of anything.
He didn’t care what he accused him of.
Fry: The magazine was imported along with Tarantino?
Lynch: It was printed in L.A. They sent the copy down there. Some of it was hilarious because the guy was illiterate, but he had this power.
Then, of course, he had to have some sort of revenue up here, outside of Remmer.
So he started pulling the same thing up here. He took on various people. He took on a man who had a restaurant here, because he had married his adopted daughter. He made a lot out of that. I don’t think it’s illegal. This man ran a restaurant here.
(It wasn’t a very good restaurant. It was a popular one, down in the downtown area.) So, he paid for ads in the paper for that restaurant.
There was another man who had a restaurant here in town. As a matter of fact, it was Vanessi’s, Joe Vanessi, a great guy.
Joe is a very nice citizen. His right name is Zorzi, and he didn’t like to use the name. Also, many years ago in the bootlegging days, somebody fell down the stairs in his place, and he just didn’t like those things brought up. So he paid for an ad. There were all kinds of people around town.
One of the devices Tarantino used was to say, “Well, you don’t want to use your name. We’ll take an ad out for the blood bank.”
He put in an ad, all right, for the blood bank, but what the guys around town didn’t know is that about forty of them were paying for it.!
It was strictly a shakedown.
He ran into one Tartar, and that was Sally Stanford. He’d figured, “There’s one I can really take on.’
Well, he didn’t know who he was taking on, because Sally is one tough lady. She said to me one time, “I’ve done a lot of lousy things in my life, but I never blackmailed anybody, and that son of a bitch isn’t going to blackmail me.” And she meant it. She meant it so much that she offered to come in and testify when we tried him. We didn’t have to use her.
He used to give himself testimonials, “The Man of the Month.”
They’d call up everybody to send In a present, and they called Sally. They wanted her to send a pair of cuff links or something, that she was presenting to Jimmy.
I’ve got pictures here of some of those affairs, and there are judges and prominent citizens, all admiring Jimmy.
Fry: He could always find something in their past.
Lynch: Oh, yes. Judge Michelson, for example, would always appear and praise him to the skies. Tarantino was nothing but blackmailing S.O.B. We were after him. We put a bug in his joint. Well, he not only did the black-mailing. At one time he had an Army sergeant who was telling him what we knew to be military secrets. We were taping them.
He also had a radio program on Sunday nights. He told two things on the radio that you know now were true.
The two things were that the U.S. was experimenting with bacterial warfare–we know that to be true; the U.S. had a capsule called BX or B2X–and that the Marines in Korea were wearing bulletproof vests. Now, that doesn’t sound like much but it means a lot, because some guy’s not going to be firing a popgun at them. These things were true, but nobody knew it. Tarantino was getting it from this sergeant. We went to all kinds of extremes not to tip our hand that we had a bug in the joint, which afterwards [laughs] was decided was illegal, but it wasn’t then.
We called the Army people about it and told them about it. They didn’t do anything. It was during the Korean war. So I called Senator Estes Kefauver, who was head of the–whatever committee it was; I’ve forgotten now, military affairs or something–and he was very upset about it.
I think they transferred the guy to Germany,
We didn’t want to expose our hand, of course, on the tapes.
So we finally lowered the boom on Tarantino. Norman Elkington tried him. We convicted him. He had all kinds of character witnesses.
We took them apart too. He went over to San Quentin for a long period of time.
Then he was paroled on condition that he leave California. He went back to East Orange, or South Orange, New Jersey and died there. That’s the end of Jimmy Tarantino.
Fry: Why did you buy his magazine?
Lynch: He had slandered a schoolteacher. That was one of his big deals. He went after Nixon. He went after J. Edgar Hoover. And he went after so-called Communists. Anybody who was a liberal was a Communist to him.
This gal was a schoolteacher, a perfectly legitimate person. She was for some good cause, I don’t know what it was.
But he called her a Communist, So she sued him for libel and got a Judgment against him.
He was judgment proof, except for the magazine. So the magazine was sold on the steps of the City Hall, in the traditional manner, and the bid was $1.00, 50¢ of which was mine. [laughter] As a matter of fact the lawyer called, and he offered to share it. He got a big kick out of it. He says, “Tom, you want half of this?”
It doesn’t show on the record, but it was a little gag that we had.
It was fun while it lasted.
It was a pleasure to go after a bum like that. The best part of it was that he knew everything that was going on in the town because of his underworld friends. [laughs] We used to get all kinds of information from him on the tapes.
Fry: When did all this end?
Lynch: Close to ’48, ’49.
Fry: The Korean war started in June of ’50.
Lynch: In 1950, then. Tarantino was winding up then. He hated me, and he hated Elkington.
I’ve got a copy of the magazine upstairs. Just flip the tape off for a minute, and I’ll get it. [returns with magazine]
This is in February of ’53; the seventh anniversary issue. Here’s the blood bank ad.
Fry: Irwin Blood Bank Needs Your Blood.
Lynch: Everybody paid for that one.
Fry: Did the magazine have much circulation?
Lynch: Oh yes, it was a very popular item.
[looking at magazine] See, “Politicians Scheme to Frame the Editor.”
(He was always “the Editor.”)
#Two days after my initial appearance before the grand jury, mysterious forces, headed by DA Tom Lynch, Norman Elkington, and Captain James English, undoubtedly expecting fireworks, showed their hand and color by attacking the reputation of this reporter before the grand jury.”
(He didn’t have a reputation.)
“Police stooge… kangaroo court.”
“During my campaign on Wren’s status I revealed that Wren obtained…’
Oh, Tarantino said something about Bill Wren having a bum birth certificate. I don’t know what it was.
It didn’t mean anything.
One of the reasons Remmer got Tarantino up here was a man named Freddie Franciso. That was a pseudonym, pen name. His right name was Bob Preston, but he used the name of Bob Patterson. He was a scamp, but a very charming one, and he wrote for the Examiner. He’d been in every penitentiary. He’d been in Sing Sing. He’d been in Atlanta, which is a federal pen. He’d even been arrested and sentenced in Shanghai, and sent to the pen at MacNeil’s Island, back when we had extraterritorial jurisdiction after the Boxer Rebellion.
He made it up there. I think he sold the Virgin Islands one time to somebody else after we bought them. [laughter]
Bob was a charming rascal, real rascal, but he was a glib writer. The Examiner hired him back because the people there who had known him were gone. Somebody came to see me and I said, “What’s
changed about Patterson.
You’ve got Bob Patterson working for you again.
Lynch: He says, “Do you know him?” I said, “Who doesn’t.” He had about five pages of record. But
he used to write for the Examiner, and he was raising hell with Remmer and a lot of Remmer’s friends.
He’s dead now. He was shaking them down, too.
Fry: You’re giving me a whole other view of San Francisco!
Lynch: Tarantino was after Bob Patterson because Patterson was working for Wren, and Patterson and Wren were taking on Remmer. That was the reason for Tarantino’s coming here.
Then you get over here [pointing to magazine], and it’s all character assassination. Now you can see the ads in here. Here’s “Kay Thompson, the Williams Brothers.” You know who that was? That’s Andy Williams’s original group. I think Kay Thompson is a switch hitter. I don’t know.
But see, here are all the ads in here. “Irwin Blood Bank Needs
You.” That’s your ad, Charlie. [laughs] They’re space fillers.
There are Tony Martin and Cyd Charisse. I don’t know why they
took out an ad.
He even got Lawrence Welk. “Congratulating Your
Seventh Year, the Bank Club Casino.”
That’s Bill Graham and Jim McKay, two of the biggest, most powerful men in Nevada in the old days.
Ask any old-timer if they ever heard of them, and they ’11 say, “Did we ever hear of them!” [reading from magazine] Harry James , the Ritz Brothers, Nick Lucas. Spade Cooley–he murdered his wife, or murdered somebody. These are all the big ads, when you get over here: Golden Hotel in Reno, Bill Graham and Jim McKay.
Fry: Tarantino must have really had something on these people.
Lynch: Here are the boys. Look at this crowd here. This is Gus Farber. He’s A big jeweler here in San Francisco.
Fry: This is the “Man of the Year” party for Jimmy Tarantino.
Lynch: Here’s Dr. Sage; Murray Giffen, salesman; Chronicle newspaperman Benny Barish.
He delivered papers.
He was known as Benny the Bum. We charged him, too. Robert DiGrasso, Nate Cohen, who was a pretty well-known lawyer here; Joe Diviney; Ken
Tinney; Jack Golberger, a big labor man here, now retired. He represents the Teamsters here in town.
Fry: They were all there at his party.
Lynch: Better than that, get down here and see who’s here. Here’s the public defender. Here’s Judge Michelson. Look at this fellow here, Jimmy Jay, this character.
Fry: He looks like Clark Gable.
Lynch: He doesn’t really look like Clark Gable, I can tell you that. He had a wiry–here’s Sinatra. Here’s the Ritz Brothers. Who’s this–Jim Haver. That guy looks familiar. I don’t know who he is. [reading
from magazine] “Best Wishes, Mel Belli.” [laughs]
Horse Trader Ed. That’s before your time. Max Sobel.
Fry: Who’s Horse Trader Ed?
Lynch: Horse Trader Ed was the first of the loud-mouthed used car salesmen.
“Ah got ’em.”
He finally went to the bucket, too, for something or other, income tax.
Fry:
[reading from magazine] “Bones Comer.”
Lynch: One eighty-six Eddy Street. Walter Hart–he’s a female impersonator. [reading the ad] “Write your own ticket.”
Fry: The ad says, “Thanks for Everything, Walter Hart.”
Lynch: [reading] “Tommy’s Joint,” that’s Tommy Harris’s.
Fry: How did Tarantino get the goods on all these people? How did he find
out about their past?
Lynch: I would say only there were enough people around who would provide him with information. There were characters around town that hung around the Tenderloin.
They were generally known. I knew that Joe Vanessi’s name was Zorzi. His wife has always used the name. I’ve known him all my life.
I remember another fellow here in town. His wife bought some hot coats one time. I think he bought a whole set of hot coats that came out of Ransohoff’s or Levis’s, one for his wife and one for each of his kids.
They were hotter than a three-dollar pistol. He found out about it because the DA’s office had the case.
A lot of the information was stuff that was known at the time that it happened, but over the years had been forgotten. Tarantino was just resurrecting most of it.
Fry: So he could have gotten the information out of newspaper files or public records?
Lynch: He wouldn’t do that kind of research. No, he had informants, a bunch of scabby informants. Jimmy Jay was one of them. (He was selling Bibles after we convicted him.)
Lynch: There was one fellow by the name of Brandhoff who worked for Tarantino. He was a double agent.
He didn’t know that we were triple agents. Brandhoff would tell us what he was allegedly telling Tarantino, but we would listen to him talking to Tarantino and we knew he wasn’t telling him that. He was planting stuff with us. He was just the agent provocateur. But that was fun.
[intermezzo]
So, there you have it, the lawman’s perspective of the post-World War II Bones Remmer, Jimmie Tarantino era of San Francisco. It was some of these stories that I accidentally stumbled upon, pure serendipity, many years ago, that gave me the idea for the Secret History of Frisco.
Jimmie eventually spent three years in San Quentin for extortion. Released in 1957, he was met at the prison gates by Marcella Kimball, a dancer.
A couple years later, in September of 1959, Mike Connoly, a writer for The Hollywood Report magazine, wrote in his Rambling Reporter column, “Jimmie Tarantino is rehabilitating himself. He’s now Christine Jorgenson’s business manager.”
Christine Jorgensen was the first person to become widely known in the United States for having sex reassignment surgery in 1951. She was an actress, a singer, a recording artist, and America’s first transgender activist. I can’t any more information about that partnership. Christine never broke into Hollywood, as she had hoped and I don’t think Jimmie found the redemption he sought.
We will certainly return to Jimmie Tarantino in the future. There are plenty of stories. He was a criminal and, as we know, criminals just can’t stop criming. Perhaps that’s why we find them so fascinating.
[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.