Even though she had not been on the boats, she remembered them and had great stories about being able to see them from the shore. When I interviewed her, she was 107 years old. His research led him to a woman named Florence Kinney, whose husband used to visit gambling boats. One of Miller’s goals when working on this story was to find people who experienced this era in the 1930s. Earl Warren oversaw a raid on the gambling boats Cornero and others like him saw a way around California laws prohibiting gambling by operating floating casinos in waters they believed to be beyond the state’s jurisdiction.
The man at the helm was a brash bootlegger-turned-gaming kingpin named Tony Cornero.Rex was the biggest and most opulent gambling boat anchored off Santa Monica in 1939
