Los Angeles Gambling

 Gambling in Los Angeles, 1900. Saloons had poker and roulette tables. Elaborate  casinos offered more variety where 'well-dressed' mingled with Chinese immigrants identified by their braided queues. Photo from CA Historical Society. 

 Corruption, in the form of payoffs to city hall and bribes to cops on  the beat, had followed players wherever poker tables were set up in Los  Angeles County. Spasms of reform sent gamblers to new venues, eventually  beyond the three-mile-limit to the casino barges of Santa Monica Bay.  After much litigation, the gambling ships were forced into port and out of business beginning in 1939.

By the time of Mayor Shaw’s recall in 1938, good government activists like Clifford Clinton in Los Angeles and Clinton’s counterparts in other cities had begun  shutting down the cardrooms. With the loss of political and police  protection, cardroom operators scattered, some of them to the little  town of Gardena. The  most successful was Ernie Primm, who, by 1937, had moved to a site on Vermont Avenue in Gardena where the  principal game was draw poker.

 It helped that Gardena was a mostly Japanese-American community with a  significant number of immigrant residents. Few Gardena voters patronized  the cardrooms. The players weren’t high rollers. In the early 1950s, Gardena cardrooms  limited bets to a maximum of $1 or $2. No drinking was allowed. Husbands and wives weren’t  permitted to play together. There were limits on check cashing and  playing on credit.  

 The loan sharks and bookmakers along Vermont Avenue were part of Gardena’s poker society. So was cheating – by cardsharps and cardroom workers who took money to  look the other way when cheating was going on. Armed highjacking of  no-limit games, muggings of poker winners, and the occasional murder  troubled Gardena’s image as a quiet place to play cards. 

Today, card players who can’t travel to fancier Las Vegas-style games  at Indian casinos,  are able to sit down at tables at the Bicycle Casino,  Commerce Casino, Crystal Park Casino, Gardens Casino, Hollywood Park  Casino, Hustler Casino, and the Lady Luck. The Hustler, opened by  Larry Flynt in 2000, and Flynt’s renamed Lucky Lady Casino (formerly the  Normandie) are the last of the cardrooms in Gardena.