[frisco] Bones Remmer, The Tenderloin Gambling King, Jack Ruby, & A Short History of Frisco’s La Cosa Nostra

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. As the turf wars raged and the names Ferri, Scariso, and Lanza splashed across the papers, one front page carried a heartbreaking tale about a destitute family so poor they were forced to eat their children’s pet rabbits just to survive. That contrast — the brutality of organized crime and the desperate innocence of ordinary people — reveals everything about San Francisco’s character in those years: beautiful, cruel, and endlessly human.

It’s also the backdrop for the rise of Elmer “Bones” Remmer, the city’s gambling king who would come to rule its after-hours joints, brothels, and backroom poker games from the Tenderloin to Lake Tahoe. His story intertwines with that of Jack Ruby, who once dealt cards for him, and the quiet influence of the Lanza family, who kept the Mafia’s presence subdued but steady. The bridges were about to open, the old order was crumbling, and a new kind of power was moving in — one that would change Frisco forever.