The barons of border vice
Jun. 19th, 2024 03:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileAfter zipping through two other books at the lake I spent the bulk of the weekend immersed in a book from my Casino City days that I had apparently picked up at Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg, PA: Paul J. Vanderwood’s Satan’s Playground: Mobsters and Movie Stars at America’s Greatest Gaming Resort. During Prohibition, it turns out that for legal reasons America’s greatest gaming resort was actually in Mexico–specifically in the border town of Tijuana, just a few miles from the supposedly respectable city of San Diego. This book is a little bit a history of Tijuana and a little bit a history of San Diego, but mainly it is a history of the short-lived but majestic precursor to the great Las Vegas casino resorts: the Agua Caliente.
The incident that forms the structural backbone of the book is an attempted stickup of the Agua Caliente money van on its way back to a San Diego bank, in which two small-time mobsters with machine guns get into a shooting match with the drivers of the money car, even though–according to the mobsters–the job was supposed to be ‘fixed.’ The robbery thus escalated into a double homicide, shocking San Diegans and kicking off a massive and sometimes embarrassing manhunt and investigation. This was the first and most infamous but not the last of a series of attempts by organized crime to get money out of the very profitable Agua Caliente without doing the thing you ordinarily needed to do to get money out of the Agua Caliente, i.e., be on the business end of it and skim.
Along the way of this nearly 400-page book (it could have been a little shorter, frankly), we get to meet the Agua Caliente’s owners, patrons, workers, government enablers, enemies, and even some of its horses. There are plenty of pictures, both of the over-the-top Spanish Mission Revival-style resort itself and of the various people profiled. Could I keep them all straight? No. Did that matter? Probably also no; I could usually follow what was going on. My biggest criticism of the book is that sometimes the author’s opinions were a bit intrusive, but mostly it was a fun read.
The incident that forms the structural backbone of the book is an attempted stickup of the Agua Caliente money van on its way back to a San Diego bank, in which two small-time mobsters with machine guns get into a shooting match with the drivers of the money car, even though–according to the mobsters–the job was supposed to be ‘fixed.’ The robbery thus escalated into a double homicide, shocking San Diegans and kicking off a massive and sometimes embarrassing manhunt and investigation. This was the first and most infamous but not the last of a series of attempts by organized crime to get money out of the very profitable Agua Caliente without doing the thing you ordinarily needed to do to get money out of the Agua Caliente, i.e., be on the business end of it and skim.
Along the way of this nearly 400-page book (it could have been a little shorter, frankly), we get to meet the Agua Caliente’s owners, patrons, workers, government enablers, enemies, and even some of its horses. There are plenty of pictures, both of the over-the-top Spanish Mission Revival-style resort itself and of the various people profiled. Could I keep them all straight? No. Did that matter? Probably also no; I could usually follow what was going on. My biggest criticism of the book is that sometimes the author’s opinions were a bit intrusive, but mostly it was a fun read.