Bob Gans
Robert Joseph "Bob" Gans was the "slot-machine king" of the Los Angeles underworld during the interwar period, and later a philanthropist and civic leader. For many years, he ran the board of Mt. Sinai Hospital, now Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Gans was one of the most circumspect figures in the history of organized crime in southern California, but he was associated with both Charlie Crawford's City Hall Gang of the 1920s and Guy McAfee's Combination in the 1930s.
The slot-machine kingdom was a family business built by Bob Gans with his older brothers Joe Gans and Charlie Gans, Bob's son Cliff Gans, and his nephew-in-law Abe Chapman. The finances of the business are poorly understood but the amalgamated best guesstimates of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service and the handful of local crime-beat newspaper reporters who were not personally graft-adjacent seems to suggest that the Gans operation may have had gross revenues over 20 years of approximately and top-line profits for the proprietors over the same period of, at minimum,.
Background
In early 20th-century California, there were countless venues for gaming, and their importance only grew as the Roaring Twenties collapsed into the Great Depression: "Slot machines could be found in the rear of many restaurants. Pinball machines that paid off in cash helped pay the rent in many small-business establishments". Many of the sins attributed to Prohibition were equally associated with gambling, which was America's biggest underworld business by 1931. Many of the places in Los Angeles that were storied "secret" bars were also secret or not-so-secret casinos. For example, at Frank Sebastian's Cotton Club on Washington Boulevard, half the reason for the floor show and the "brassy band" was to "drown out the sounds from the casino upstairs". Charles J. Lick claimed to believe he was leasing the "submarine garden" hidden below his Dome Pier to honest aficionados of billiards, but after the heavily guarded basement casino outfitted like a "junior Monte Carlo concession" was raided four times, he canceled the lease. Jack Doyle's place in Vernon had alcohol after neighboring Los Angeles passed the Gandier ordinanceand a card room. Generally speaking, coin-operated slot machines and pinball machines were a poor man's game, that brought in a flow of cash with a profit margin ample enough to make their operators rich over time. There were slots and pinball machines in the back of just about every bar, nightclub, pool hall, amusement park, carnival, ice-cream parlor, and drugstore in the Greater Los Angeles area during the interwar period, and as one nostalgic account put it, "It is probably true that the pinball business was not simon pure...It is probably true that bars paid off big-hitters with beers, and tobacco shops paid off big-hitters with cigars. It is probably true that, worse, money changed hands. It is probably true that more than one L.A. schoolboy spent his lunch money and carfare in a pinball machine and had to walk home from school hungry." A darker interpretation claims that Al Capone once said he'd give up every other criminal enterprise if he could have slot machines, and that slot machines were invented the day the devil was accidentally left in charge of the world.After "bell" slot machines were banned over the course of the 1920s and 1930s in various California jurisdictions, they were replaced by pinball machines, which at that time were not games of skill with flippers and lights, but rather "a gambling game, a bingo game, there isn't any play. You put in your nickel and five balls are released. You shoot the balls and watch them drop into a pattern of 25 holes, each one guarded by a series of pins the size of finishing nails. Each hole is numbered, each number corresponds to a bingo kind of board on the back-box. If you get three, four or five in a row you win 4, 16 or 75 to 1, unless you've pumped in some extra nickels and succeeded in changing the odds to 8, 24 and 96 to 1 or up to 192, 480, and 600 to 1. There's no play. The ball rolls, and you're as helpless to direct it as you are to affect the wheels on a slot machine".
Early career
Gans was born in New York where "the name Gans was huge in New York tobacconist circles." Gans started his career as an employee of his two brothers, Jonas Joseph "Joe" Gans and Charles J. Gans, who by the turn of the 20th century had "a pair of cigar shops on Spring Street" operating under the business name J. J. Gans & Bro. According to a 1952 Los Angeles Daily News series on the history of crime in the city: "Two brothers who were engaged in the wholesale tobacco business were quick to see the power for profit from slot machines. They acquired a few and installed them around the city. The brothers were Bob and Joe Gans, the latter now dead for many years. The boys were favorably known in Los Angeles as legitimate businessmen and were well-liked. They were gentlemen and had taken a modest interest in municipal and county elections, staking various candidates to financial help." For example, in 1924, according to the Municipal League of Los Angeles, half of the $2,069 campaign budget reported by Superior Court judge Hugh J. Crawford was provided by his campaign manager, Robert J. Gans.A 1925 article about Ocean Park refusing to allow J. J. Gans to operate "peppermint vending machines" in the town stated that representatives for the company insisted that "the machines were absolutely within the law, had been decided so by many court decisions and that every time a customer put a nickel in machine he received a five-cent package of mints. Sometimes they received more, but never less". The brothers were described as "wealthy inventors of gambling devices" in September of that year, after being arrested in Avalon on Catalina Island "on charges of maintaining gambling devices in the form of slot machines....According to deputy sheriffs who made the arrest, the two Gans brothers maintained 11 slot machines which paid off in cash instead of the usual trade checks. Justice Hunter notified authorities that he had been warned to lay off the prosecution of the Gans brothers and had been threatened with the loss of his position should he continue with the case".
Joe Gans died suddenly in 1926 at La Vida Hot Springs in Orange County's Carbon Canyon, leaving an estate reported to be worth. Later, J. J. Gans & Bro. operated as Gans Company, and eventually as Automatic Venders. Employee Curley Robinson, who worked for Gans for "many years," took credit in 1947 for having expanded the firm's business in "Central America and the West Indies".
In 1927, Bob Gans returned profit he'd made on Julian Petroleum "stock pools""Julian Pete" having turned out to be a massive scam that defrauded thousands of people of millions of dollars. Gans was also an investor in Baron Long's Agua Caliente resort and racetrack in Mexico, which opened in 1928. A new district attorney, Buron Fitts, targeted gambling beginning in 1928, repealing a "city ordinance that had legalized slot machines" and raiding "downtown nightclubs and gambling ships off Long Beach," but this did not seem to meaningfully disrupt the Gans operation. The Internal Revenue Service believed that the Gans brothers made profits of between $15 million and $20 million from their slots business in the 1920s.
File:Bob_Gans_to_Burns_F._Knapp,_Los_Angeles_Evening_Post-Record,_July_25,_1931.jpg|right|thumb|On July 25, 1931, the Los Angeles Evening Record published a copy of a letter from Bob Gans to a once and future Los Angeles police officer, which the Record considered to be suggestive of corrupt cooperation between local gambling rackets and the LAPD
In 1928, bootlegger and pimp Albert Marco was convicted of assault and sent to San Quentin, and in 1931, local underworld boss Charlie Crawford, the Gray Wolf, was shot and killed. The Gans brothers had been associated with Crawford's City Hall Gang, but following Crawford's murder, Guy McAfee took over a great deal of the organized crime in the city, assisted by what was called the syndicate, which included Gans, political fixer Kent Parrot, "king of the bookies" Zeke Caress, bookmaker Tutor Scherer, club owner and bookmaker Farmer Page, attorney Charles Cradick, bookmaker Chuck Addison, and rum runner turned gambling-ship operator Tony Cornero. Organized crime run by the likes of Marco and Crawford under Los Angeles mayor George E. Cryer was "no cheap-change operation. It raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. But under McAfee and Gans, illegal gambling, prostitution, and drug revenue amounted to as much as $50 million a year". As for unorganized crime, there was a stickup at Gans' downtown "novelty shop" in 1932 in which robbers made off with roughly in cash. According to an International News Service account of the holdup, the office was staffed by 15 collectors and two "girl stenographers," and the $2,000 carried off was in "half dollars, quarters, and nickels, taken from the slot machines by the collectors". Gans' machines reportedly operated unmolested throughout most of the 1930s under the protection of Joe Shaw, brother and secretary of Los Angeles mayor Frank Shaw. According to one history, "To Joe Shaw, vice was a legitimate business subject to the same demands for contributions to the mayor's campaign coffers as City Hall employees and friends and acquaintances seeking city jobs." So long as Gans and associates kept cash for City Hall leadership as a line item in their budgets, they would have free rein to run their businesses as they saw fit. In 1933, the Los Angeles Evening Citizen News editorial page stated, "Bob Gans, slot machine boss who boasts that his contributions to campaign funds enables him to control the police department, the Sheriff's office, and the District Attorney's office has pulled his unlawful robbing slot machines out of Hollywood. Chief of Police Davis says that the slot machines will be driven out of the city. Sheriff Biscailuz says that the slot machines that pay in tokens will remain in the county territory to rob the youth of the city, but that he will drive out those that pay in coins. We cannot follow the Sheriff's logic. We recognize of course the importance of campaign contributions."
Despite whatever change prompted the Citizen News to declare a battle won, not much changed as the Great Depression slogged on. Two years later a column in the Eastside Journal described widespread gambling and prostitution: "Something must be done about the prevailing vice conditions in the city of Los Angeles. Beer gardens are serving hard liquors to youngsters and providing a place for street-walkers to conveniently meet their 'customers'...Slot machines, gambling lay-outs, punch boards, and marble machines are apparent throughout the city. An article in a local daily paper recently stated that these various machines, are making nearly $100 million a year for the operators. Merchants have been known to brag that their gambling devices show a greater profit than their legitimate business." In 1935 an informant told the county grand jury that local gambling establishments were well-known to city police, and that "Open gambling flourished...and proprietors of clubs were tipped off in advance of raids, so that when the raiders arrived the gambling equipment had been put away and there was only dancing and dining." Charles Gans testified at the same time that there had not been any slot machines running in Los Angeles for the past year; deputy district attorney Grant Cooper told the jury that former slot-machine operators were now in the "pin-and-marble game" business. In 1936, Gans reportedly donated $27,000 to the gubernatorial campaign of Buron Fitts.
Gans was the second listed, after Guy McAfee, of 27 "vice chiefs" identified in a 1937 county grand jury minority report on organized crime, along with Wade Buckwald, Sam Temple, Chuck Addison, Nola Hahn, George Goldie, Eddie Nealius, Joe Botch Davis, Andy Foley, the Curland brothers, the "Page boys", Slim Gordon, Dennie Chapman, Doc Kehoe, Doc Daugherty, Joe Hall, Tutor Scherer, Teddy Crawford, Dick Elgin, Louie Barddeson, Floyd Odin, Rice Baker, "Ex-Bail Bond Murray," High Goldbaum, Dick Consadine, and Lucius Lomax. Cafeteria owner and accidental reformer Clifford Clinton, who was responsible the minority report, alleged that the grand jury had been stuffed with allies of the Syndicate, including a brother of Gans' nephew-in-law Abe Chapman, and a wife of Gans' "auditor". Harry R. Chapman was secretary of the grand jury criminal complaints committee.
On the last day of 1938, following the epochal 1938 Los Angeles mayoral recall election that removed Frank L. Shaw and put Fletcher Bowron in L.A. City Hall, a police raid on a warehouse on South San Pedro Street found 1,200 slot machines bearing the label J. J. Gans & Bro., which was believed to be "the first time an action of this magnitude" had been taken against the "erstwhile impregnable" Gans outfit. An LAPD officer testified in 1939 that he was offered a bribe to protect certain slot machines and similar games under the control of a group called CAMOA, which had extensive offices in the Subway Terminal Building downtown. The officer told a jury details of the local slot-machine business such as that "CAMOA machines had a label which was changed each month. During April and May this was a blue bird...Kendall told me he would pay me from 50 to 65 cents a week per machine to take care" of the 200 to 300 slot machines in the Hollywood area. At the same trial, the person accused of offering the bribe claimed, "The gamblers and the marble-machine operators and prostitution interests are using to turn the heat on each other...One gambler will call up the Police Department and say he is from Clinton's C.I.V.I.C and demand they arrest a rival. The next day the rival will call up end report the other gambling place. Both the LAMOA marble association and the CAMOA group do the same thing with each other, and they all fight the slot machines".