Page, described as a “picturesque gambling king” and “one of the most colorful characters in the local gambling world,” turned himself in to police hours after the incident, claiming self-defense. He told authorities that the affray was the result of an extended feud between himself and the slain man, whom Page had once employed at one of his gambling clubs. Josephs, Page said, had been threatening to “get” him in retaliation for being fired.

Gambler King Farmer Page at the Coroner’s inquest. 2-11-1925

Coroner Nance conducted an inquest for Joseph. Page’s bodyguard John “Jake” Barrett backed up his boss’s story of self-defense as did café man Tommy Jacobs. Albert Marco, said to be a “friend of Page’s” produced a gun that he said had been found under the body immediately after the shooting, a .32 automatic- later determined to be stolen, supporting the idea that Joseph was a “gunman and gangster” as Page’s lawyer asserted. To Page’s surprise, the Coroner’s jury found him guilty. D. A. Keyes, however, hesitate to issue a murder complaint.

Farmer Page freed by an L.A. judge, not a jury. 2-22-1925

The next day, Page walked out of jail on a writ of habeas corpus, free for the time being on $50,000 bail. D.A. Keyes reluctantly indicted the gambler. His preliminary hearing a few days later was held at the scene of the crime. The Sorrento Club had since undergone a transformation, however: the bar had been removed, the windows were boarded up and the floor scrubbed clean. The case never went to a jury trial. On February 21, the judge dismissed the charges.

Farmer Page, the “Los Angeles newsie who became a czar” of the Pacific Coast gambling trust. 2-15-1925

A rather romanticiszed biography of Page that appeared in the Los Angeles Times in the midst of the Joseph shooting predicted that Page was “finished.” In fact, he had hardly begun.

Page probably didn’t mind if the newspapers called him a gambler king. Gambling was a fun pastime many Los Angeles citizens regarded as a harmless. But Page was involved in much more than that.

“Barefoot” Rafer Dooley told author John Kobler of his experience as part of his brother Ben’s hijacker gang that went after one of Farmer Page’s loads in the early 1920s:

“Well, the gambling czar of Los Angeles at this time I’m telling about, in 1922 or ’23 was Farmer Page, and he was in liquor too. One of his drivers told his girlfriend where he was going to collect a load of whiskey off a boat- in a little town that sits right on the ocean, adjacent to Long Beach. She happened to be a better girlfriend of my brother than she was of the driver. She revealed the information, so naturally we went in force with sawed-off shotguns eight or ten of us…. We waited until they loaded the truck. Then we merely told them to get out of the truck, that we were taking over. No harsh words, We didn’t harm them. We just drove off and left them as is.

We had a drop for the whiskey with another competitor of Page’s….It became know that it was is that did it. There was a confrontation, and quite a few of my brother’s constituents fell and became deceased on the spot….” (1)

Call House Madam is the slightly fictionalized version of Hollywood madam Lee Francis’ life story that she, with a ghostwriter, completed prior to her arrest in January 1940. Intended for publication in Page’s lifetime and while Francis was still an active madam, it uses false names to not only protect Francis from arrest but to avoid libel suits. In Madam, Francis (as “Bee Davis”) says that Charles Crawford (“Jim Hanford”) asked her to throw a party for himself and rum-runner “Eddie Luce” and his brother (Madam pg 106-107) to see if she has what it takes to run high-dollar brothels for the syndicate. She does, and locks up their cash and jewelry in a safe when they arrive. Hanford is duly impressed and tells her:

“Looks like the party was a hit with Eddie Luce. He’s the big shot when it comes to staking houses. I’ll be in, of course. I go along with Eddie any time.” 

“Bee Davis” had dinner with “Eddie Luce” a few nights later. He tells her “We want a little playhouse for our friends. You do the entertaining. Run it as a call joint, but keep the standard up. High prices. A minimum $25 fee…You go down to this address. It’s a real estate office. Ask for the boss. I’ll tip him to what it’s all about. He’ll show you to an estate on South Belmore. It’s in the Hampshire district. It’ll cost you about a thousand a month.” (Madam pg. 109). 

According to Francis/Davis, the “Luce brothers” kept her houses supplied with liquor through their front man, “Nicky Arcaro” (Albert Marco). “The Luces were rum-running- importing through British Columbia and Nicky was their front man.” (Madam pg. 308).

A “Bee Davis” Francis also depicts an incident involving “Nicky” when she visited his Sixth St. warehouse to pick up some liquor and was caught in the middle of a gangland shooting. She could be referring to the gang warfare between the Page faction and rival rum-runner Tony Cornero that took place in the summer of 1925.

It began that June, when one of Tony’s loads was hijacked and one of Tony’s men, Jimmy Fox, was shot. Tony subsequently broke into one of Page’s warehouses and stole back the cases of booze that were rightly his- plus a few more to even the score. Snatched off the street and ordered to return the liquor or else, Tony made arrangements for the transfer to take place August 4, 1925, on a foggy road near Long Beach. But when the other side arrived, they were met by machine gun fire. Three of Page’s crew, included Jake Barett, and Les Bruneman, were wounded. Questioned by the D.A., Tony admitted that there was a bootleg war going on between independent operators and the “bootleg trust,” which, he said, was headed by a “well-known Los Angeles gambler.” Following this incident, however, Page and Tony appear to have settled their differences.

7-25-1925

In the midst of the 1925 bootleg war, Page also came under fire from the ladies of the W.C.T.U., who complained to the City Council about a gambling and bootlegging joint he reputedly ran at 1361 E. 7th St. Men with suitcases were lurking about outside the place at all hours, the ladies complained. An ex-policeman guarded the door. Councilman Allen charged that Page was running 8 or 9 clubs, and all were protected by the police. Page laughed off the reports, saying he no longer had any interest in gambling. The City Council called for a police investigation. Vice squad leader Inspector James E. Davis, another former colleague of Guy McAfee’s, claimed his officers visited 1361 and found the dive dark.

Another City Councilman, Carl Jacobson, continued Allen’s fight against gambling and the protection of vice and in the city into the summer of 1927. On July 28, 1927, federal dry agents raided Albert Marco’s North Side Pleasure Club, a “bootlegging dive” at 130 S. Spring Street, arresting Marco on Volstead Act charges. At the City Councilman’s meeting August 3, Jacobson proposed a council resolution to commend the federal agents for carrying out the raid, and pressed for a police investigation into a gambling club he alleged was being run by Farmer Page. Less than 48 hours later, the councilman was implicated in an alleged moral office- which the woman in the case later admitted was a frame-up initiated by Marco and others including Harry Raymond and Guy McAfee, the raiders of McAfee’s Star Social Club back in 1919.

These days, Guy McAfee was described as a gambler “high in the Councils of the Farmer Page faction.” That Page and McAfee also interacted socially was revealed in 1927, when the two and other Page were fined for violating state game laws on a hunting trip in Inyo County.

1-29-1928

In January 1928, Page, “popularly recognized as the king of the gamblers,” voluntarily submitted to questioning by the sheriff’s office in the death of suspected bootlegger William Henry Lafferty (alias George Rosen) who had been found shot, gangland style on Western Avenue near San Pedro. Page admitted he had once employed Lafferty/Rosen at one of his gambling clubs near Fifth St. & Central Avenue. Page was not held. The case was never solved.

5-15-1930

In March, 1930, Page was arrested in a gambling raid at 710 S. Broadway. Police charged him for possession of liquor when they found a bottle on him. Two months later, on May 14, he was arrested at his offices in the Loew’s State Building (703 S. Broadway) on the more serious charge of possessing racing forms, a misdemeanor under a Los Angeles city ordinance. On June 2, he was convicted and sentenced to 6 months in the city jail. He did serve some of that time, but the ordinance was later declared unconstitutional in the District Court of Appeal.

Farmer Page (left) ahown as one of the owners of the Rose Isle. 10-4-1930, Oakland Tribune

In October 1930, it was announced that Page and Tommy Jacobs, the onetime witness in Page’s shooting death of Al Joseph, and others had purchased the passenger liner Rose Isle and were outfitting her as a “floating Monte Carlo.” Two months later, the Rose Isle figured into the botched kidnapping of Zeke Caress. The D.A., Buron Fitts, used the incident to raid the ship and claimed to have found a stash of machine guns. Page’s old Spring Street associate Tutor Scherer was also said to be invested in the Rose Isle, which suffered more bad publicity in August 1932 after a murder occurred on board.

A romantic postcard view of the S.S. Rose Isle c. 1930. Passengers caught a water taxi from the P & O docks at 501 Pico Avenue, Long Beach.

Charles Crawford was shot to death on May 20, 1931 along with newspaper man Herbert F> Spencer. McAfree took over as head of the rackets.

As of 1933, with Prohibition coming to an end, Page, McAfee and Scherer, partner with another henchman of the bootleg war days, Eddie Nealis, newcomer Nola Hahn, and other partners were invested in land-based casinos, most notably the Clover Club on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood and the Airport Gardens in Glendale (later renamed the Continental Club), the latter managed by Tommy Jacobs.

1-29-1935. Top image to this post shows Page arriving to testify.

In January 1935, Page, Hahn and three others were subpoenaed by the county grand jury investigation into whether city and county officials were being “paid off” by gamblers. Nothing came of it.

Then in August, 1937, Page was one of 8 men identified as the “captains of the Los Angeles underworld,” along with Tutor Scherer, Guy McAfee, Eddie Nealis, Chuck Addison, Ross Page, Johnny Rosselli, and Jack Dragna, and subpoenaed before the grand jury to tell what they knew, if anything, about he attempted murder of Les Bruneman, the onetime henchman of Page’s, wounded in the bootleg wars of 1925. This inquiry, too, went nowhere, but fed-up citizen and church groups launched their own investigation into the city’s vice conditions, most notably cafeteria owner Clifford Clinton’s CIVIC.

On January 14, 1938 Harry Raymond, now working once again as a private detective, was nearly killed in a bomb attached to his car. The bomb was traced to a police detective, Earl Kynette. The ensuing trial of Kynette and expose of corruption at high levels of City Hall by CIVIC led to the recall of Mayor Frank Shaw and the election of his replacement, Fletcher Bowron, a reform candidate, on September 16. Chief of Police Jim Davis retired in November.

Just after Christmas 1938, Page and Guy McAfee were sought for questioning in the murder of a bookmaker, Weldon “Duckie” Irvin, who had been found shot to death behind the wheel of his car in the 6000 block of Selma Ave., Hollywood on December 28. Page admitted having had business dealings with Irvin but denied any knowledge of the murder. As in the Lafferty/Rosen case ten years earlier, he wasn’t held. The case went unsolved.

Page questioned in the Duckie Irvin case. Arcadia Tribune 12-29-1938

In June 1939, the Los Angeles Times reported that Guy McAfee had left Los Angeles for Las Vegas, while Farmer Page was said to be on a gambling boat. That August, new State Attorney General Earl Warren launched a successful effort to shut down the four gambling ships that still operated off the Southern California coast: the Tango and the Showboat near Long Beach, and the Rex and the Texas at Santa Monica. Long Beach papers reported that Farmer Page was said to be a backer of the Tango. A subsequent lawsuit involving the Rex also listed him as an investor in that ship, which belonged to Tony Cornero.

June 1939. Los Angeles Times.

D.A. Buron Fitts hinted that there was a more sinister reason for the old Spring Street gamblers leaving town than the mayor and his reforms, indicating that a “well know figure” was squeezing them out, establishing a dictatorship over local gambling.

In any case, Farmer Page did turn up in Las Vegas along with McAfee and Scherer. In 1942 he and Tutor Scherer opened the Pioneer Club on Fremont Street. Page was also said to be operating the casino at the Colony Club in Las Vegas, a swank club recently opened by Nola Hahn. In 1948, Page, McAfee, Scherer and other took on the casino at the El Rancho Vegas.

1947 ad for the Pioneer Club with old friends Tutor Scherer, Bill Curland and Chuck Addison.

Farmer Page and the Boulder Club on Fremont Street, 1957

As of the late 1950s he owned a piece of the Boulder Club on Fremont Street. In late June 1955 he took on the gambling operation for Tony Cornero’ spectacular $6 million Las Vegas Strip casino, The Stardust, when Governor Russell declared that the ex-gambling ship operator (Tony, that is) would never get a gaming license in the state. Tony didn’t live to see the project completed in any case- he died of a heart attack at the dice tables on July 31, 1955. Farmer Page, lone among the old L.A. gamblers, attended the funeral of his onetime competitor.