FRISCO—The Secret History

Join us on a cinematic journey through the last wild years when San Francisco was still wide-open. The cops ran the town in the Thirties and Bones Remmer ran the town in the Forties. Battles raged between the factions of dark and light in the hidden realms of San Francisco’s power elite, behind the headlines, from the celestial dominions of Nob Hill eateries and private clubs down to the nether depths of the dive bars in the heart of the Tenderloin, up to the Barbary Coast and jazz joints of North Beach and over to the banks and brokerages in the Financial District … FRISCO will bring alive that wild and bygone era of the Cool Grey City of Love that seduced the world.

FRISCO—The Secret History is a true crime podcast hosted by Knox Bronson, with 41 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Knox Bronson hosts FRISCO—The Secret History, a true crime show with 41 episodes published.

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  Episode #38

  Elaine Worth Pt. 1 - Star of the French Sex Farce "Easy For Zee Zee" at the Green Street Theater

  Sep 29, 202635 minS1

  North Beach, September 1928. There's a walk-up playhouse on Green Street with a stage the size of a dining table and fourteen actors crammed onto it. The show is a French farce called "Easy for Zee Zee." Opening week, it's bombing. Beautiful Elaine Worth, a Russian emigre, replaces the leading lady in the role of Zee Zee. Elaine is the kind of dame who brings trouble with her the way some dames bring perfume. Frisco can't get enough of her and leading man Robert Chapman. The show takes off and soon sets attendance records for Frisco. November 24, 1928, half past midnight. Somebody puts six bullets into Jerry Ferri at his apartment on Lombard Street. The cops find letters addressed to Elaine on a dresser there. She had just moved out a week before the murder. January 29, 1929, the cops bust the manager and the cast on an obscenity charge. The judge goes to see the show to see for himself. He dismisses the charges, but the story boosts ticket sales even more. For nearly a year, "Zee Zee" is the hottest ticket in town. In August 1929 the show's Robert Chapman goes out a sixth-floor window at a friend's place after a cast party. The Chronicle wants the show shut down, and the District Attorney is looking for a way to do it. Producer Sid Goldtree is sitting in Los Angeles and pulls the plug himself before they can. The Coroner's Jury determines Chapman's death an accident, which makes no sense, but that is Frisco. He is the fourth bee buzzing around Elaine Worth's hive to turn up dead in a span of nine months. Part One of the Elaine Worth story. Part Two, "Where There Is Honey, There Are Bees," picks up the bodies. #SanFranciscoHistory #NorthBeach #TrueCrime #Prohibition #Frisco

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  FRISCO—The Secret History

  Bones Remmer, Jack Ruby, and Frisco's La Cosa Nostra

  Sep 24, 202632 min

  Frisco in 1928 was a town with fog in its lungs and money in its pockets, and somebody had to decide who got to keep it. Frank Lanza, a quiet Sicilian who ran Fisherman's Wharf and sold grapes to half the bathtub wineries in America, sat back and watched the gunsmoke drift over Little Italy. Handsome Jerry Ferri went down days before his wedding. The men who put him there went down after him, one after another, and a blonde stage star named Elaine Worth stood in the middle of it all with a lot of dead boyfriends and a story about how she never knew a thing. Then the bridges opened, the cops lost their grip on the money machine, and the city was ready for a new boss. Elmer "Bones" Remmer walked in: a North Dakota farm boy who had played football with Jim Thorpe and had grown into three hundred pounds of trouble. He ran the Cal-Neva up at Tahoe, owned the Menlo Club on Turk Street, ran Emeryville while the mayor drank all day at the Townhouse. Dealing cards at Bones's tables in the thirties was a skinny kid from Chicago they called "Sparky." The Warren Commission would call him a clean-cut, honest kid. The world would know him as Jack Ruby. This is Part One of the Bones Remmer story, a tour of the Frisco underworld where everybody knows everybody and they all talk. #TrueCrime #SanFrancisco #OrganizedCrime #JackRuby #BonesRemmer #FriscoSecretHistory

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  Episode #37

  The Millionaire, the Madam, and the Marriage That Rocked Frisco

  Sep 10, 202641 min

  In October 1893, San Francisco society was rocked by the secret marriage of millionaire Charlie Fair and Maud Nelson, a well-known madam. The couple quietly crossed the bay to Oakland intending to elope without attracting attention. Instead, their wedding became front-page news. Charlie was the son of Comstock silver millionaire and former U.S. Senator James G. Fair, while Maud had built a reputation and a business of her own in the city’s notorious late-nineteenth-century underworld. The newspapers turned the marriage into a scandal, with increasingly outrageous stories about the couple. The San Francisco Examiner , in particular, crossed the line from sensational reporting into outright fabrication, even publishing a story that Charlie had been arrested for insanity. Yet beneath the headlines was a much more complicated story. Maud appears to have become a stabilizing influence in Charlie’s life, eventually helping him reconcile with his family and take their place among San Francisco’s wealthy elite. Their remarkable story takes us from the city’s parlour houses and high-society mansions to European travel, the emerging world of automobiles, and a final chapter that would leave millions of dollars—and the question of what really happened—to be fought over in court for years.

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  Episode #35

  Henry Miller, Big Sur, and the Examiner's War on Bohemia

  Aug 26, 202637 minS1

  Henry Miller came to Big Sur with no money and even less interest in behaving himself. He had already spent years writing books that were banned in America, smuggled into the country and sold under the table, and now he was living in the coastal hills with artists, poets, lovers, eccentrics and other people who had apparently misplaced their alarm clocks. The vast Pacific was there, the mountains were there, the fog came and went through the canyons, and for a while it was possible to imagine that a person might simply walk away from the machinery of modern life and disappear into the California landscape. Naturally, the San Francisco Examiner could not let that happen. In 1947 the paper sent reporter Clint Mosher south with a mission: find the dirt on Miller and his bohemian companions. What followed was a four-day campaign portraying the Big Sur artists as a cult of anarchists, nihilists and general enemies of decent civilization. There was marijuana, surrealist poetry, barefoot girls, a dismembered mannequin, Central American jungle music and enough sinister laughter to frighten the average subscriber straight back into his chrome-and-bakelite toaster kitchen. Miller himself was less interested in the American Dream than in escaping it, and the Examiner seemed determined to make that escape look like the beginning of the end of Western Civilization. But there was something wonderful underneath all the newspaper thunder. Miller believed the artist had a duty to go against the crowd, to choose the uncertain road, even poverty, rather than surrender the imagination to convention. Big Sur gave him a place to live that philosophy. The Examiner gave him a villain. And postwar America, busy building suburbs, appliances, conformity and a new industrial future, suddenly found itself staring at a bunch of strange people on a mountain who appeared to be having a pretty good time. This is the story of Henry Miller, Big Sur, and the newspaper crusade that tried to turn bohemia into a public menace.

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  Episode #34

  The Water Queen: Dolly Adams and FrIsco’s Gilded Vice

  Aug 11, 202641 minS1

  Dolly Adams hit Frisco as a wild and precocious child, already carrying the kind of trouble that would follow a girl in the late 1800s. She became infamous as the Water Queen, and she could stay underwater long enough to make a North Beach crowd forget its manners. The bloods, the rich boys, from Nob Hill and Pacific Heights came looking for a little excitement and found Dolly instead. Money followed. Diamonds followed. Soon enough, she had plenty of both. But Frisco always collects its debts. Dolly moved from the stage into the city’s demimonde and eventually established a bordello on Ellis Street. For a few wild years she made a fortune and sent money home to her family. Then the booze, laudanum, opium, and syphilis began taking their cut. Her beauty faded, her customers disappeared, and her name turned up in William Chambliss’s poisonous book about San Francisco society—a book full of scandal, grudges, and whispers about the respectable men who knew Dolly. In 1887, Dolly went back to the Big Apple for five months and came back to Frisco looking like a wreck of the woman she had been. She still had diamonds and railroad bonds, but the good times were gone. She sailed for the Orient, learned in Hong Kong that her mother had died, and turned around for home. She never got there. Dolly Adams died aboard ship on the voyage back to San Francisco, twenty-six years old. They embalmed her body and brought her home with a little tin trunk containing diamonds, bonds, and the remnants of a life that had burned hot and fast. In a city built on gold, vice, and second chances, the Water Queen ran out of all three.

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