Kevin Starr Embattled Dreams California in War and Peace 1940-1950, Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 2002, 386 pp., 1938
"[Earl Warren] He made his political reputation as a hard-charging, showboating crime-fighting prosecutor, giving no quarter, for whom the slamming shut of prison doors on convicted felons sounded better than the marching band . . .
[p. 251] "Politically ambitious, Earl Warren never lost an opportunity to get favorable press . . . In 1938 when State Attorney Ulysses S. Webb announced that he would not run for reelection, Warren filed and was elected. As his first act in office, he prosecuted Mark Megladddery, the nephew and secretary of the outgoing governor, Frank Merriam, for taking a bribe to secure a pardon for a convicted murderer. Megladdery had been scheduled to take a seat on the Superior Court, Alameda County, [instead he went to San Quentin]. Warren next went after a statewide bookmaking network, breaking it through indictments and convictions and by getting its telephone service disconnected through a court order. In the most flamboyant raid of his already flamboyant career, Warren went after the gambling ships Rex, Texas, Tango and Showboat owned by bootlegger Tony Cornero, anchored off Santa Monica and Long Beach."
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