West Coast Gangster

Never Too Late To Change: The Story of a Gangster

Radio Text

HANA BABA: When you think about gangs and organized crime in the early-to-mid-20th century, you might think of Dillinger, Capone, Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson. The “name” gangsters were on the East Coast and in the Midwest. But they were in California as well. And one of the most active was Chuck O’Connor. He was a San Francisco native, born in the Mission, who lived a life of crime from the age of six. At one point, he started the largest heroin smuggling ring on the West Coast. O’Connor was in and out of prisons for most of his life and came across some of the crime world’s most interesting characters along the way. It’s all captured in his autobiography. Bill Wright edited that work. KALW’s Hana Baba met up with him, and O’Connor’s adopted grandson, Todd Bartlett.

TODD BARTLETT: I first met Chuck O’Connor my freshman year in high school. My mom met him in AA. It was her first day, and I remember asking her, “How was your first day?” And she said, “Great – I drove a bank robber home today.” And I said, “Huh??” And I ended up meeting this guy Chuck who was in his 80s, early 80s, and all together there, mentally. And he just became sort of my adopted grandfather. I adopted him, and he adopted me, and we were really, really good friends.  

BILL WRIGHT: He was this huge hulk of a guy – such a character, this guy in his 80s. And he was like a mountain, had this rumbling voice, but then a cackle – just an original character. My impression was this guy has lived a really hard life, but he’s still smiling.

BARTLETT: I’d hang out with him instead of other people, and they’d see me walking around with this old guy and they’re like, “What are you doing?” And I'm like, “You have no idea who this person is, or what he’s done or the life he’s had.”

WRIGHT: At the age of four, he witnessed his father beat his mother to death here in the Mission where they lived here, and he kind of took me to his old home and kind of touched the wall and talked to his mother. It was really a beautiful moment. After that happened, his grandparents took him in and basically, he just went to work because his grandparents were in abject poverty. And so he would sell newspapers on the streets of SF when he was like six years old…

BARTLETT: …so he sold newspapers and was kind of raised in a bordello. These women treated him very, very well – they loved him. They’d always give him a little extra cash for his newspapers, and they fed him, and this and that. One night – I think it was the San Francisco Examiner? He was sleeping on top of a newspaper stack cause they were literally hot off the press so he was keeping warm, and there was a craps game being played below, and something happened. Someone cheated, someone got shot, and everyone just spread. He was eight and he didn’t know, so he was freaked out. So he just stood there frozen and when the cops came…

WRIGHT: They put him into that so-called “foster system” to get him off the streets. And once there, he was molested … had a terrible time there, and ran away. After running away, he got on the railway cars, and he ran into a group called the Bozee Boys. They were the first crime syndicate to ride the rails in the 1800s.

BARTLETT: They invited him in, gave him some coffee, and then the leader named Blackie Carroll walked in and he’s like, “Who’s this kid?” And Chuck told him his story, and this guy just fell in love with him. This guy raised Chuck, loved him to death, taught him a life of crime, but he was a father to him.

WRIGHT: They taught him how to blow up safes with nitroglycerin. So by the age of 10, he was blowing up safes, jumping through windows, letting them in, and he made quite a bit of money that way doing these crimes.

BARTLETT: And from then on, he learned through the teens and the ‘20s and ‘30s and ‘40s and ‘50s – he was like the Indiana Jones of crime. And as he moved along he’d just meet people…

WRIGHT: He began to meet some of the more famous people in the crime world during that time frame. A man by the name of John Paul Chase became an associate of his, who later referred a man by the name of Baby Face Nelson back to Sausalito. Chuck and Baby Face Nelson went up to Washington and robbed a gambling hall there, and had an exchange of gunfire and one of their associates was wounded, and Baby Face Nelson fled and was never seen again. During this time Chuck also got to know Pretty Boy Floyd during this time frame, cause they were really a small group, and they knew each other very well and looked out for each other. And he was one of, not the inner, but outer circle of people who would help them with heists and things like that. Here’s a picture of Pretty Boy Floyd and Chuck O’Connor – one of his prison pics from the pen.

BARTLETT: He didn’t like robbing banks with Baby Face Nelson. He really liked Pretty Boy Floyd. Baby Face Nelson and Pretty Boy Floyd had two very different ways of robbing banks. He said Pretty Boy Floyd was always nice, polite, used violence always as the last means, and Chuck always did that. And he said Baby Face Nelson was a psychopathic killer, where he would mow down anyone in his way – a mom holding a baby if need be. Chuck was not down for that whatsoever. WRIGHT: He went to the Oregon pen, many other pens. He had a tumultuous young life. He was in the Folsom prison riots in the late ‘20s and the National Guard was called in to machine gun a number of prisoners…

BARTLETT: …and he was so nervous from that incident that they had to raid the pharmacy, and they gave him his first shot of morphine, and then he had a heroine and morphine addiction for a very long time.

WRIGHT: He also fell in love with a prostitute named Millie who became pretty much the love of his life.

BARTLETT: He married this lady Millie who he loved to death – loved her, loved her…

WRIGHT: …and she stayed with him throughout the course of his criminal career until she passed away while he was in prison. He got out of prison, and he was miserable. He was a drug addict and not doing drugs. He was a criminal and not doing any crime. Eventually came to San Francisco, was broke and became a really big drinker out here – was drinking, just drinking vodka like it was water. He was doing nothing but drinking, he was miserable every day, just really, he was done. It was a good eight or nine years, and he really began a descent. He would hang out on all the bard on Lombard Street and wouldn’t even make it to work sometimes. And he really wasn’t doing much of anything. He would see some of his old friends in the Tenderloin and they were all criminals who were really beat up and at the end of their days.

BARTLETT: He was so miserable one time that he went out to the Golden Gate Bridge one night…

WRIGHT (reading from Chuck O’Connor’s autobiography): “I had reached a state of total incomprehensible demoralization. At 3 a.m. on March 13 1977, I stopped my car and got on the pavement on the Golden Gate Bridge. I was determined to jump over the bridge.”

BARTLETT: And he was so drunk he couldn’t get over the ledge, he kept falling down, and then he heard this big voice say, “Pedestrian – halt!” And he thought it was God. Turns out it was a cop behind him on a motorcycle, and he grabbed him and took him to Ross Valley Hospital in Marin County. Ross Valley Hospital – it was a treatment facility for drugs and alcohol, and he was so sober for four years but miserable.

WRIGHT: Life went on, up until about the ‘70s, and around that time – the ‘70s – is when things really began to change for him..

BARTLETT: He said the final thing that did it was, he in San Francisco, he laid out a suit on his bed that he wanted to be buried in, and he put a gun to his head. And he said at that crazy point, a neighbor that hadn’t visited him in years, his next door neighbor, opened the door and saw, hit the gun out of his hand and he went back to another rehab. And this time he listened and did it, and after that he was sober. Sobered up, and while he was doing this, he met other people, and just started helping them out. He said there was not any amount he could do that could make up for the bad that he did. He was trying to make up for a lot of things. He said he couldn’t make up for all of it, but he was doing his best to really give back. He started the O’Connor House. It was the first rehab center in Marin for men, there wasn’t anything there for men.

WRIGHT: It’s amazing what the world of recovery can do. At the age of 75 to 91, he changed his life and was able to help people. He devoted his life to helping people after that age.

BARTLETT: He was the most unselfish person when I met him at that time – he was always trying to help people out. Bill and I really wanted the book to come out before he passed away…

WRIGHT: …died of old age. Died in his bed. At the age of 91.

BARTLETT: I was in UCLA. It was in the year 2000, and Bill Wright called me when it happened, and it was sad. I mean he was 91, but I just miss him so much, just listening to his stories and talking to him. He helped me out when my mom was having a difficult time with alcoholism. Yeah, he doesn’t know how he lived for so long. He’d been shot before, he’d been stabbed. He always felt bad; he’d say, “I don’t know how I lived for so long, and so many good people haven’t.”

WRIGHT: He had a light inside of him. You could see it. It seemed like – I don’t want to say Forrest Gump – but an amazing span of time he spent with all these famous people.

BARTLETT: I don’t know what makes someone famous or not famous. I don’t think he was trying to be known. He was trying to be not known more than known. Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Bonnie and Clyde – they were all killed in the same year. You know, once your marked, you’re marked. If he spent his life in prisons and died there, it wouldn’t be as important as a story. But how he changed, sobered up, how he cleaned up and helping out people rather than stealing from people – it’s how he changed into something he never thought he would be: a good guy.