Published January 12, 2006

Despite the Wild West look to the area, the Sonoma Valley did not rank high on the crime-rate scale during its first century-and-a-half compared to its Northern California neighbors.

Certainly there was gunplay, some assaults (usually traceable to liquor intake), and horse stealing (considered a capital crime by many). But this was nothing compared to San Francisco with its Barbary Coast full of cheap houses of prostitution which were not primarily occupied by golden-hearted pretty girls, but usually sad alcoholic or drug-addicted women left behind by society. Theft, cheating gamblers, shanghaiing kidnappers of sailors, and casual murderers dominated the Barbary Coast.

Napa’s first judge was stabbed in the back while he sat chatting in a local general store in 1850 and died on the spot. His killer was lynched. A laborer, who shot his Napa employer in an argument over a bad check, became the first Napan to be legally executed. An eight-time killer in Napa was caught after he murdered the father of a girl he hoped to seduce. He then was legally tried and hanged. When a Napa County bordello manager shot and killed an unruly customer, he was hauled from jail and lynched to prevent him from revealing to the public the names of the clientele of the bawdy house on the night of the shooting. In the 1870s Napa County had the distinction of having the highest percentage of prostitutes in the population of any California county.
During a three-year period in the 1850s, there were a total of more than 60 murders in Monterey County without a single conviction. Several of the shootings and a lynching resulted from a feud with the crooked Sheriff William Roach, who was trying to cover up his looting of an estate he was administering. Eventually Roach was shot and his body thrown down a well.

But Sonoma Valley was far from squeaky clean. The rush of gold seekers and gold finders who stopped by Sonoma starting in 1849 made liquor and gold dust flow freely, and when restless American soldiers from the slums of New York were added to the mix, fighting, assaults, gambling and prostitution were sure to follow. When the New York Volunteers left Sonoma in 1853, the soldiers’ camp followers, named “Hooker’s Girls” for General Joe Hooker, second in command in Sonoma, went also.

In 1856, when Blue Wing co-owner James Cooper dropped by the elementary school principal to discuss treatment of Cooper’s son, the principal responded by pulling a knife and stabbing Cooper to death. Before the end of the century, when a foul-mouthed customer began to berate the older Chinese laundry shop owner on First Street West, a young Chinese visitor emerged from the back room and fatally shot the customer. The shooter took one look, bolted out the door and was never seen again.

For 30 years starting in 1910, a madam known as Spanish Kitty moved from San Francisco and set up a string of pleasure girls in cottages on property she had purchased in El Verano. The aging Kitty was busted on a drug charge in 1941 and retired, or so she said.
When the Prohibition amendment to the Constitution came into effect in 1920, the result was that most people regarded it more of joke than a limitation on the dissolute life. Many restaurants, former saloons and homes became purveyors of various forms of alcohol. For a region used to making wine, it was only natural that Sonoma would begin to distill bootleg booze for an eager public. Eventually throughout the Valley there were more than 50 stills making various grades of liquor, including some powerful — if not plain dangerous — such as white lightning, faux gin, and various other mixtures. From Boyes Hot Springs up into the hills at the end of Lovall Valley Road, liquor distilling went on. And with the general disrespect for that law, other forms of lawlessness were tolerated.
In a cottage at Parente’s Villa in El Verano for a time lived a five-foot-four-inch tall 23-year-old who was making money as a transporter of illegal liquor, with a couple of young bucks actually delivering the bottles. A popular customer at McNeilly’s Tavern, it was whispered about that he was actually an escaped killer from Chicago named George Nelson, high on the FBI wanted list, and known as Baby Face Nelson. One night Emmett Mullen, an intrepid Sonoma County deputy sheriff, charged through the cottage’s front door while Baby Face ran out the back.

Baby Face, under the name Lester Gillis, headed for Sausalito where he took a room in a converted mansion with his young wife Helen and their three-year-old son. He tended bar at the wide-open “speakeasy,” the Walhalla, which also operated a bordello upstairs. Later known as the Valhalla starting in the 1950s, the colorful saloon was run by notorious San Francisco ex-madam Sally

Stanford. Baby Face also fell in with San Francisco gangster Joe Parente and remnants of notorious John Dillinger’s gang. Growing up in Sausalito, I heard the local lore that once Dillinger himself had lived in a house on Fourth Street near Richardson Street.

Baby Face returned to the Chicago area where he pulled off several spectacular bank heists. Cornered by federal agents he was fatally wounded after he had killed two agents.

Meanwhile in the early 1930s in Sonoma, a dispute between two older men over a probably misplaced suspicion that one was paying too much attention to the other’s wife resulted in a face-off on the sidewalk across from the Plaza on First Street East. One man came on swinging a baseball bat and the other was packing a pistol. The gun packer won and the batter died. So did Prohibition.