About the Book
Satan’s Playground chronicles the rise and fall of the tumultuous and lucrative gambling industry that developed just south of the U.S.-Mexico border in the early twentieth century. As prohibitions against liquor, horse racing, gambling, and prostitution swept the United States, the vice industry flourished in and around Tijuana, to the extent that reformers came to call the town “Satan’s Playground,” unintentionally increasing its licentious allure. The area was dominated by Agua Caliente, a large, elegant gaming resort opened by four entrepreneurial Border Barons (three Americans and one Mexican) in 1928. Diplomats, royalty, film stars, sports celebrities, politicians, patricians, and nouveau-riche capitalists flocked to Agua Caliente’s luxurious complex of casinos, hotels, cabarets, and sports extravaganzas, and to its world-renowned thoroughbred racetrack. Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Louis B. Mayer, the Marx Brothers, Bing Crosby, Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, and the boxer Jack Dempsey were among the regular visitors. So were mobsters such as Bugsy Siegel, who later cited Agua Caliente as his inspiration for building the first such resort on what became the Las Vegas Strip. Less than a year after Agua Caliente opened, gangsters held up its money-car in transit to a bank in San Diego, killing the courier and a guard and stealing the company money pouch. Paul J. Vanderwood weaves the story of this heist gone wrong, the search for the killers, and their sensational trial into the overall history of the often-chaotic development of Agua Caliente, Tijuana, and Southern California. Drawing on newspaper accounts, police files, court records, personal memoirs, oral histories, and “true detective” magazines, he presents a fascinating portrait of vice and society in the Jazz Age, and he makes a significant contribution to the history of the U.S.-Mexico border.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments ix
1. The Mob Strikes the Border Barons 1
2. Mobs 12
3. Playground of the Hemisphere 37
4. Fortuitous Breaks 51
5. Border Babylon 71
6. King of Border Vice 80
7. "They're Off!" 90
8. Prohibition's Bounty 103
9. The New Wave 119
10. Agua Caliente in Gestation 134
11. Building Camelot 140
12. Capt. Jerry's Day 172
13. "Silent" Marty's Oration 179
14. Veracity 190
15. Fixes 199
16. Sentencing and Censoring 212
17. Hollywood's Playground 222
18. "Place Your Bets!" 238
19. Get the Barons 272
20. Fools and Thieves 291
21. A Dead Cock in the Pit 304
22. What Ever Happened To? 320
23. Ghosts 336
Notes 341
Bibliography 373
Index 385
About the Author :
Paul J. Vanderwood (1929-2011) was Professor Emeritus of Mexican History at San Diego State University. He was the author of several books including Juan Soldado: Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint, also published by Duke University Press; The Power of God against the Guns of Government: Religious Upheaval in Mexico at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century; Disorder and Progress: Bandits, Police, and Mexican Development; and Border Fury: A Picture Postcard Record of Mexico’s Revolution and U.S. War Preparedness, 1910–1917.
Review :
"Paul J. Vanderwood is the master. I have come to him for guidance both as a scholar and as a writer/historian more than once. I think, if the truth be told, we all steal from him. This is a fascinating book with Vanderwood's usual insight and brio. I found it delightful."--Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Hummingbird's Daughter "In Satan's Playground, Paul J. Vanderwood tells several stories at once, lovingly, in splendid detail, and with a wonderful sense of pacing. He combines biography, urban history, and crime narrative in a unique blend of elements to produce a robust and fascinating social history of gambling and other sorts of vice (bootlegging, prostitution, political corruption) in a particularly volatile and colorful area of the world, the U.S.-Mexico border around Tijuana, during the Jazz Age."--Eric Van Young, author of The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Mexican Struggle for Independence, 1810-1821 "Satan's Playground: Mobsters And Movie Stars At America's Greatest Gaming Resort is the story of the gambling business in Tijuana, Mexico, during the 1920s... Were a rousing success with American tourists, and run by crooks from both sides of the border. Corruption was rampant: San Diego's district attorney prosecuted a city councilman for taking bribes in 1925, only to be put on trial for the same thing a year later, and Mexico's government was rife with underhanded activity. And the four men behind Agua Caliente--Americans Wirt Bowman, James Crofton, and Baron Long, and Mexican Abelardo Rodriguez, also known as the Border Barons--faced a threat of their own in 1929, when an Agua Caliente guard and driver were shot to death during a road robbery, resulting in a sensational investigation and trial." - AV Club
