We certainly can. We've always considered Tony Cornero to be one of the most colorful and incredible stories in Las Vegas history.
Anthony Cornero Stralla, also known as Tony Stralla and Admiral Cornero, was born in 1895 (or 1900, depending on the source) in a small village in Italy near the Swiss border. The story goes that the Corneros owned a large farm, but his father lost it in a card game. It's also believed that as a boy, Tony accidentally set fire to one of the harvests, which broke the family and forced them to move to San Francisco.
Apparently, Tony ran a little wild in the Bay Area and when he was 16, he served 10 months in a reform school for robbery. After moving to southern California to evade further legal troubles, Cornero was reportedly arrested 10 times in 10 years, mostly on bootlegging charges, but also on several attempted-murder bits.
Rum-running was his main source of income during Prohibition (though he also drove a cab). He started by smuggling top-shelf whiskey from Canada, which he sold to upscale speakeasies in Los Angeles. He also bought or stole a number of small boats, with which he ran booze between southern California and Mexico. Cornero wound up specializing in running his small boats between mother ships off the southern California coast to deserted beaches late at night. Moving up, he acquired a merchant ship, the SS Lily, which could hold 4,000 cases of alcohol at a time. But he finally got busted, was convicted, and served time in prison.
He was released in 1930 and, in 1931, he and his brothers Frankie and Louie wandered east to Las Vegas to build a fancy hotel-casino. Arguably, Cornero should receive credit that's usually reserved for Bugsy Siegel; his Meadows Club, which opened a mere two months after gambling was legalized in Nevada (the Cornero brothers were building the casino before gambling was even legal in Nevada), was a classy carpet joint near the intersection of Charleston Boulevard and the new Boulder Highway, just outside the city limits and beyond the Las Vegas Police Department’s jurisdiction. It contrasted sharply with the Western-style sawdust saloons in vogue downtown. Each of the 30 rooms had its own bath and hot water was available 24 hours a day, as were electric lights. In addition, the Meadows was celebrated locally for the "friendliness" of the food and beverage waitresses (meaning they were for sale). In fact, Frank Wright, in his book Nevada Yesterdays, writes, "The Corneros thought they had a deal with city politicians. Block 16, the downtown red-light district, would be forced to close, and the entire operation could be moved out to the Meadows. If they had a deal, it fell through with the election of new officials in 1932."
The Corneros sold the hotel to a southern California developer two months after the Meadows opened; a fire on Labor Day 1931 burned it down. They bailed out of the casino in 1932. Some say the business failed. Another account claims that Tony refused to fork over a cut of the action to the New York mob, led by Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello (dubious). Whatever the cause, the casino closed and the Meadows turned into the Cocoanut Grove, modeled after the famous L.A. club of the same name. That closed too, and the building became a cathouse before burning down in 1943.
Meanwhile, the Corneros returned to southern California. With Prohibition ending and casinos now in their blood, they went into the offshore gambling-boat business. Tony was involved with several gambling ships that operated just outside the three-mile jurisdiction of the L.A. authorities, but were only a 10-minute water-taxi ride from the Santa Monica Pier. He reportedly lost the ownership of one of those boats, the SS Tango, at a crap table -- a game with which Tony had an unhealthy relationship, as we'll see in tomorrow's installment.
