Bob Gans

Robert Joseph "Bob" Gans (October 27, 1887 – September 17, 1959) 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 Slot machines in collection of National Museum of American History, transferred to the Smithsonian after being confiscated by the U.S. Marshal's Service 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. 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. Gans started his career as an employee of his two brothers, Jonas Joseph "Joe" Gans (1875–1926) and Charles J. Gans (1880–1961), 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". Interior of unidentified tobacco shop , probably in Anaheim, California; OC Libraries Digital identifies the slot machine as a 1912 Mills O.K. Gum Vendor 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 (or Automatic Vendors). 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.

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, bookmaker Tutor Scherer, club owner and bookmaker Farmer Page, attorney Charles Cradick, bookmaker Chuck Addison, 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 (including chief James E. Davis), 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. 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 [ Clifford Clinton's municipal anti-corruption group CIVIC] 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 [over] the slot machines".

Later career alt=Newspaper clipping of photo with headline "Figures at Ex Commissioner Hearing" Gans (center), at age 50, pictured with his lawyers, former Superior Court judge Isaac Pacht (left) and Hiram E. Casey (right), at a hearing about the bankruptcy claim of former Los Angeles police commissioner Harry E. Munson (Los Angeles Times, March 10, 1938) At its peak, the Syndicate is believed to have controlled approximately 300 secret casinos, 23,000 slot machines, 1,800 bookmakers, and 600 brothels in Southern California. Gans allegedly retired from slot machines in about 1938 (after Earl Kynette bombed Harry J. Raymond), handing the reins of the racket over to Curley Robinson. The coin-operated games running at the end of the era were "machines that flash little lights, ring bells, buzz buzzers; shoot steel bearings, glass marbles, agate balls; register the totals by agitating dancing girls, airplanes, swimmers, racing cars. They include, in fact, all the tricky machines that seemed as much a part of many a store's fixtures as its showcases".

Prior to the passage of Los Angeles City Proposition No. 3, there were roughly 3,000 slot machines in Los Angeles in 1939 that were under the control of CAMOA, the California Amusement Machine Operators Association. The racket was that anyone who wanted to or who was forced to operate slot machines in the city had to pay a certain fee per machine per month to CAMOA. CAMOA then used some of this money to pay city police and county sheriffs to overlook their slot machines or give them advance notice that a vice raid was coming, as well as paying the cops to enforce anti-gambling statutes against anyone who was running slot machines who wasn't a dues-paying member of CAMOA. In 1940, three members of a local gaming firm were arrested on charges of income-tax evasion, which resulted in a courtroom disclosure hinting at Gans' business practices: "Faint rumbles were heard yesterday of a slot-machine war in which Morris and Frank Kozinsky and their sister, Nettie K. Segal, allegedly tried to muscle in on territory which Bob Gans claimed as his own. The Kozinskys were said to have harvested hundreds of thousands of dollars and everything was going along in great shape, until Gans became irked. As a result, said investigators for the internal revenue department, the Kozinsky machines were knocked over repeatedly but they refused to weaken and the war was going full tilt when the pinball machines were kayoed by vote of the citizenry". Police testimony in 1939 asserted that that analysis of one Los Angeles slot machine, which had been confiscated in a raid on a Scheffler brothers warehouse at 1823 South Hope Street, found that "the take for the slot-machine owners is about 30 percent. There is but one chance in 1000 to win a jackpot, and for every dollar invested by a player the return is about 66 cents." As Bowron oversaw a drastic LAPD house cleaning in 1939, he told reporters asking about personnel changes: "No one is satisfied with the department except Bob Gans, Charley Craddick, and Chuck Addison". The World War II draft registration card submitted by Gans' nephew-in-law Abe Chapman in 1940 listed his employer as Automatic Vendors, located at 1612 W. Pico Blvd. The one-story storefront at 1612 W. Pico was one piece of an portfolio of real estate that had been sold off by the same agent in November 1939; the Pico building seller was Security Pacific National Bank. As of 1969, Cliff Gans was doing publicity for the principality of Andorra, pitching the "pearl of the Pyrenees" as a travel destination. Cliff Gans died in 1983 and is buried near his parents.