Bones Remmer, Jack Ruby, and Frisco's La Cosa Nostra

Frisco in 1928 was a town with fog in its lungs and money in its pockets, and somebody had to decide who got to keep it. Frank Lanza, a quiet Sicilian who ran Fisherman's Wharf and  sold grapes to half the bathtub wineries in America, sat back and watched the gunsmoke drift over Little Italy. 
Handsome Jerry Ferri went down days before his wedding. The men who put him there went down after him, one after another, and a blonde stage star named Elaine Worth stood in the middle of it all with a lot of dead boyfriends and a story about how she never knew a thing.
Then the bridges opened, the cops lost their grip on the money machine, and the city was ready for a new boss. Elmer "Bones" Remmer walked in: a North Dakota farm boy who had played football with Jim Thorpe and had grown into three hundred pounds of trouble. 
He ran the Cal-Neva up at Tahoe, owned the Menlo Club on Turk Street, ran Emeryville while the mayor drank all day at the Townhouse.
Dealing cards at Bones's tables in the thirties was a skinny kid from Chicago they called "Sparky." The Warren Commission would call him a clean-cut, honest kid. The world would know him as Jack Ruby. This is Part One of the Bones Remmer story, a tour of the Frisco underworld where everybody knows everybody and they all talk.
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