FRISCO—The Secret History

In this episode, I tell the story of Ah Toy, San Francisco's first Chinese prostitute and madam. She arrived in 1849 at the age of 20, just as Gold Rush fever was turning the tiny harbor settlement into the wildest and most chaotic city on earth. In no time at all, she became one of the most infamous women in town. Ah Toy was many things: entrepreneur, madam, celebrity, courtroom ninja, a sou...

Nick DeJohn never knew when he had enough.  He’d slipped out of Chicago in the nick of time, so to speak, with a stolen $250K skim in his pocket and a lot of enemies at his back. Safe in Santa Rosa, California, with his wife and children, he could have stayed quiet and counted his money.  But guys like Nick need the action. He decided he could muscle into the gambling action in Frisco. Old underwo...

The city was young then, all bad whiskey, muddy boots, and men chasing gold like it was salvation itself. Meet Belle Cora, the most notorious madam west of the Mississippi. She came in hard from New Orleans with gambler Charles Cora and enough nerve to tame a town that didn’t scare easy. A sorry of crooked gamblers, desperate miners, abandoned ships rotting in Yerba Buena Cove, and a city where vi...

Yesterday, I published wherein I interviewed drummer and jazz historian Hal Smith. We discussed the music scene in San Francisco in the 30s and 40s and how one man, Lu Watters and his band The Yerba Buena Jazz Band, saved traditional jazz after the emergence of swing music.  I asked him for a playlist our listeners. He provided this list of songs and youtube links with extensive commentary. Thank...

In this episode, I interview drummer and jazz historian Hal Smith. We discuss the music scene in San Francisco in the 30s and 40s and how one man, Lu Watters and his band The Yerba Buena Jazz Band, saved traditional jazz after the emergence of swing music. The musicians, the clubs, and how an girlfriend's irate father with a pistol put Lu and his band on the front page, launching their career...

We are going to look at the life and times of little Francis Van Wie, the Diminutive Dutchman known also as the Ding Dong Daddy of the D-Car Line, the Car Barn Casanova, and the Trolley Toreador, and other nicknames. Francis managed to get hitched eighteen times over the course of his eighty-eight years. He rarely, if ever, bothered to get divorced. He did a stint in San Quentin for bigamy. He sta...

In this episode, I talk about the time well-known grifter, Charles Auberguy, he of the Frisco netherworld and serial inheritance scams, contacted San Francisco Examiner columnist Freddie Francisco, ex-con and brilliant chronicler of high society foibles and underworld gossip, with a lucrative bribe offer, $500 a month, for laying off Chin Lim Mow, aka The Chinaman, gambling boss of San Mateo Count...

In this episode, I’m diving into one of my favorite San Francisco stories—the kind that lives right at the intersection of journalism, mischief, and outright audacity. It centers on two unforgettable characters from the San Francisco Examiner : the hard-driving, razor-sharp editor Bill Wren, and the wildly charismatic columnist Bob Patterson—better known to readers as Freddie Francisco. Bob was on...

In Part Four of the Dolly Fine story, I bring the Dolly Fine story to a close.  Where we last left off, Dolly had been arrested and charged on eight felony counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The DA had her dead to rights and such was the political climate of the moment, he was going to make hay by pressing her to the full extent of the law.  Instead of arriving for her arraignme...

In this episode of Frisco: The Secret History , Knox Bronson welcomes back film writer Rachel Walther to explore two classic film noir movies set in San Francisco: Sudden Fear (1952) starring Joan Crawford and Jack Palance, and House on Telegraph Hill (1951) starring Valentina Cortese and Richard Basehart. Rachel dives into the production history, fascinating behind-the-scenes drama, and the real...

On April 27, 1938, San Francisco woke up to a banner headline: “Jury Indicts Dolly Fine as Boys Tell of Vice Den.” In this bonus episode of Frisco: The Secret History Podcast , I zoom out from Dolly Fine’s indictment to take you inside one extraordinary spring day in the city. I explore the political optics behind Dolly’s charges, the lingering fallout from the Atherton corruption investigation, a...

In this episode, I let Jake Ehrlich do a lot of the talking, because frankly, no one skewered San Francisco’s hypocrisy quite like he did. Dolly wasn’t just fighting a criminal charge—she was being fed to the wolves in a city that had tolerated, taxed, and quietly protected vice for decades. Suddenly, after one raid involving a handful of well-connected teenage boys, everyone found religion. What...

In this episode, I continue the story of Dolly Fine as San Francisco’s long-standing system of tolerated vice begins to unravel in the wake of the Atherton Report of 1937. Police shakeups, grand jury investigations, and rising public pressure tightened the noose the long-tolerated and city-wide machinery of grart, even as those very same players who profited for decades scrambled to protect themse...

Dolly Fine was one of San Francisco’s last great madams and a defining figure of the city’s wide-open 1930s nightlife. Tall, blonde, impeccably dressed, and deeply embedded in the city’s underworld, Dolly ran one of the most profitable and professionally managed houses in town—right as Frisco’s long tradition of tolerated vice was beginning to crack under public scrutiny. Before diving into Dolly’...

We pick up alongside Episode Nine on Bones Remmer, zooming out to look at what was happening in San Francisco in 1928 as the La Cosa Nostra gang war intensified in North Beach. Along the way, we pause on the culture of the moment: the movies people packed theaters to see, the arrival of Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie , and the everyday stories that shared front-page space with organized crime.

This special holiday episode of Frisco — The Secret History explores how Christmas was celebrated in San Francisco from the Gold Rush through the 1940s. The episode opens with a reflection on Emperor Norton, the city’s most beloved eccentric and an early, outspoken champion of civil rights, whose proclamations stood in stark contrast to the exclusionary realities of his era. From there, the story...

In this episode of The Secret History of Frisco , Knox Bronson returns—hopefully for the last time—to San Francisco’s most emotionally charged semantic battlefield: the word “Frisco.” Building on the earlier episodes Call It Frisco and Call It Frisco #2 — Sally Stanford Weighs In On The Eternal Conflict , Knox dismantles two of the most commonly cited weapons in the anti-Frisco arsenal: Emperor No...

In this episode, we step back into San Francisco at the end of the roaring twenties, when bootleggers, blackhanders, and quiet Mafia bosses carved out invisible empires in North Beach. It was a time when the city’s underworld tried to keep its violence out of sight — but the headlines told another story.  It’s also the backdrop for the rise of Elmer “Bones” Remmer, the city’s gambling king who wou...

This installment is all about the wild 1947 film noir The Lady From Shanghai , and guest Rachel Walther, a film historian with a book coming out soon called Born To Lose, The Misfits Who Made Dog Day Afternoon , breaks down the chaotic story behind it.  The Lady From Shanghai film was a last-ditch effort by Orson Welles to get back in Hollywood’s good graces after his studio battles over The Magni...

Welcome back, Frisco fans! You're tuning into Part Two and the conclusion of our deep dive into the San Francisco Examiner 's 1944 sensation: "WOMEN IN SALOONS—The Shame of My Sex," by the legendary, if controversial, author Gertrude Atherton . If you missed the start, you definitely want to go back and listen to Part One! This episode picks up where we left off, following Athe...

In this episode of The Secret History of Frisco, we're diving into the San Francisco Examiner's sensational 1944 moral crusade against Barfly Women and the threat they posed to the social fabric of San Francisco. The paper hired the renowned 86-year-old author and novelist, Gertrude Atherton, a San Francisco native, to mount an investigation into the phenomenon of unaccompanied women dri...

California State Attorney General Thomas C. Lynch was the Assistant D.A. in San Francisco in the late 1940s, the years Jimmie Tarantino, blackmailer and extortionist magazine publisher, was plying his trade in San Francisco at the behest of Frisco gambling czar Bones Remmer.  This episode comes from the Oral History Department of the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, an interview conducted with Lyn...

This episode of "The Secret History of Frisco" podcast introduces listeners to Jimmie Tarantino, a man described as a "louse, a blowhard, a barely literate, anti-Communist shake-down artist." The episode delves into Tarantino's early life in East Orange, New Jersey, and his eventual move to Hollywood where he became a peripheral member of Frank Sinatra's inner circle,...

In "Call It FRISCO, Part 2," host Knox Bronson defends his podcast's name, "The Secret History of Frisco," against objections from hither and thither, including the Reddit San Francisco group.  Historical figures like Emperor Norton and madam Sally Stanford each make an appearance, showcasing their differing views on the term "Frisco."  "Colorful characters...

In this episode, the first of a series,  Knox Bronson, host of "The Secret History of Frisco" podcast, welcomes Rachel Walther, a film noir expert and author, to discuss the genre's connection to San Francisco. Walther, who writes for the Film Noir Foundation's "Noir City" magazine and has a forthcoming book on "Dog Day Afternoon," highlights San Francisco&a...