FRISCO—The Secret History

Join us on a cinematic journey through the last wild years when San Francisco was still wide-open. The cops ran the town in the Thirties and Bones Remmer ran the town in the Forties. Battles raged between the factions of dark and light in the hidden realms of San Francisco’s power elite, behind the headlines, from the celestial dominions of Nob Hill eateries and private clubs down to the nether depths of the dive bars in the heart of the Tenderloin, up to the Barbary Coast and jazz joints of North Beach and over to the banks and brokerages in the Financial District … FRISCO will bring alive that wild and bygone era of the Cool Grey City of Love that seduced the world.

FRISCO—The Secret History is a true crime podcast hosted by Knox Bronson, with 36 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Knox Bronson hosts FRISCO—The Secret History, a true crime show with 36 episodes published.

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  Episode #34

  The Water Queen: Dolly Adams and FrIsco’s Gilded Vice

  Aug 11, 202641 minS1

  Dolly Adams hit Frisco as a wild and precocious child, already carrying the kind of trouble that would follow a girl in the late 1800s. She became infamous as the Water Queen, and she could stay underwater long enough to make a North Beach crowd forget its manners. The bloods, the rich boys, from Nob Hill and Pacific Heights came looking for a little excitement and found Dolly instead. Money followed. Diamonds followed. Soon enough, she had plenty of both. But Frisco always collects its debts. Dolly moved from the stage into the city’s demimonde and eventually established a bordello on Ellis Street. For a few wild years she made a fortune and sent money home to her family. Then the booze, laudanum, opium, and syphilis began taking their cut. Her beauty faded, her customers disappeared, and her name turned up in William Chambliss’s poisonous book about San Francisco society—a book full of scandal, grudges, and whispers about the respectable men who knew Dolly. In 1887, Dolly went back to the Big Apple for five months and came back to Frisco looking like a wreck of the woman she had been. She still had diamonds and railroad bonds, but the good times were gone. She sailed for the Orient, learned in Hong Kong that her mother had died, and turned around for home. She never got there. Dolly Adams died aboard ship on the voyage back to San Francisco, twenty-six years old. They embalmed her body and brought her home with a little tin trunk containing diamonds, bonds, and the remnants of a life that had burned hot and fast. In a city built on gold, vice, and second chances, the Water Queen ran out of all three.

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  Episode #33

  33 - The Trial That Fell Apart: The Strange End of the Nick DeJohn Murder Case

  Jul 25, 202637 minS1

  The jury's out, sequestered up at the Fairmont like kings in exile, and Frisco holds its breath after four weeks of front page testimony. Part Three opens with the strange coda nobody asked for — a state Attorney General's daughter kidnapped for an hour and a half, grilled about her father's trip to Chicago, then let go with a mobster's name dropped on the way out. The cops call it a prank. Nobody believes that, and nobody does anything about it either. Then Inspector Frank Ahern takes the stand and finally gives the State what it's been missing all trial: Leonard Calamia's own confession, a hand-drawn map of a barroom, and the names of every man who waited for Nick De John in that basement. But this case doesn't want to be won clean. Alibis collapse on the stand — Catherine Calamia can't keep her dates straight, Sebastiano Nani can't explain a hotel register with his own signature on it, and a mysterious in-law who was supposedly dead three weeks before the murder somehow lets a witness into a basement anyway. The jury tours the murder scene, La Rocca offers the judge a drink. Thirty hours of deliberation takes the jury to seven-five for acquittal — with the jury still reading back transcripts when the District Attorney asks for the judge to dismiss both the jury and the case. And that's it. No verdict, no reckoning — just three gangsters walking out the city jail smiling, two more still in the wind, and a District Attorney's decision nobody in the room, on either side, seems willing to explain. Nine dead men traced back to the Chicago Cheese Syndicate mob moving into town, and Frisco never gets its answer for a single one of them. Some cases close. This one just swirled like mist out into the cool Frisco night and disappeared.

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  Episode #32

  32 - Nick De John, Part 2: She Heard Too Much — The Grand Jury, the Garrot, the Girl in the Bay Window, and a Barefoot Kidnapping in Golden Gate Park.

  Jul 21, 202644 minS1

  Fog rolls into the North Beach basements, and Nick DeJohn is still not talking — a garrot saw to that back in May of '47. Part Two picks up the case cold with Freddie Francisco’s break down of rumors in the Tenderloin whisper stream, jumps forward to a judge's chambers where DA Edmund "Pat" Brown torches his own trial rather than let a liar keep the stand, then rewinds to fill in the backstory. A crab fisherman's wife walks into a police station with an extortion complaint and walks out having cracked a mob murder. Four men plotting in a back bedroom, not realizing the walls have ears — and one very unlucky woman caught listening. The Grand Jury scene reads like paperback fiction nobody would believe: a widow turning hysterical on the stand, a son dropped at a movie house hours before his father’s killing, and Leonard Calamia — the friend who delivered Nick to the wolves. He runs, changes his name, even gets himself elected an election worker in Albuquerque, and still can't outrun a Christmas package. The trial turns into theater — memories evaporating on the stand, until a secret witness nobody knew existed turns up watching it all from a bay window above the murder scene. And because this story never ends a chapter quietly: a California Attorney General’s daughter is kidnapped when three men jump into her car and make her drive barefoot through Golden Gate Park, grilling her about her father’s business in Chicago. When they let her go, finally, they drop one last name, a mobster on the lam. Part Three, next week.

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  Episode #31

  31 - Lithe Ah Toy With The Laughing Eyes

  Jun 24, 202637 minS1

  In this episode, I tell the story of Ah Toy, San Francisco's first Chinese prostitute and madam. She arrived in 1849 at the age of 20, just as Gold Rush fever was turning the tiny harbor settlement into the wildest and most chaotic city on earth. In no time at all, she became one of the most infamous women in town. Ah Toy was many things: entrepreneur, madam, celebrity, courtroom ninja, a source of fascination for some and outrage for others. She made a fortune servicing Gold Rush miners, repeatedly stood up to the extortionists and self-appointed community leaders who thought the tall, thin young woman from Canton would be easy prey. She used the courts to defend herself when powerful men tried to dominate her. This worked until they rigged the game. Through Ah Toy's adventures, we see a city exploding in opportunity, greed, vice, prejudice, and ambition. For those few brief years, she outsmarted her rivals gloriously, made a fortune, and never submitted to those who would attempt to extort her.

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  Episode #30

  30 - A Frisco Murder On a Foggy Spring Night, the Nick DeJohn Killing of 1947, Part 1

  Jun 4, 202639 minS1

  <p><br/><br/>Nick DeJohn never knew when he had enough. <br/>He’d slipped out of Chicago in the nick of time, so to speak, with a stolen $250K skim in his pocket and a lot of enemies at his back. Safe in Santa Rosa, California, with his wife and children, he could have stayed quiet and counted his money. <br/>But guys like Nick need the action.<br/>He decided he could muscle into the gambling action in Frisco. Old underworld connections were drifting west based on rumors that Northern California was opening up, and not just in Fris...

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