A gambling ship was a barge or other large vessel used to house a casino

Casino

In modern English, a casino is a facility which houses and accommodates certain types of gambling activities. Casinos are most commonly built near or combined with hotels, restaurants, retail shopping, cruise ships or other tourist attractions...

 and often other venues of entertainment. Under the old three-mile limit

Three-mile limit

The three-mile limit refers to a traditional and now largely obsolete conception of the international law of the seas which defined a country's territorial waters, for the purposes of trade regulation and exclusivity, as extending as far as the reach of cannons fired from land.In Mare clausum John...

 of territorial waters

Territorial waters

Territorial waters, or a territorial sea, as defined by the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, is a belt of coastal waters extending at most from the baseline of a coastal state...

 they were anchored usually just over three nautical miles off the United States coastline to avoid governmental interference. Organized crime

Organized crime

Organized crime or criminal organizations are transnational, national, or local groupings of highly centralized enterprises run by criminals for the purpose of engaging in illegal activity, most commonly for monetary profit. Some criminal organizations, such as terrorist organizations, are...

 was frequently involved in their operation.

Some state governments later tried to control the effect of gambling ships through the use of convoluted statutes. When territorial waters were redefined to 12 nm, this made the prospect of maintaining a gambling ship by any means extremely impractical.

Gambling ships in California

In 1928, the lumber schooner Johanna Smith

Johanna Smith (ship)

The Johanna Smith was a wooden-hulled schooner that transported lumber along the West Coast. She was built near North Bend, Oregon in 1917. She was sold to the Coos Bay Lumber company in 1918 and transported lumber until 1928....

was converted to a gambling ship and moored off Long Beach, California

Long Beach, California

Long Beach is a city situated in Los Angeles County in Southern California, on the Pacific coast of the United States. The city is the 36th-largest city in the nation and the seventh-largest in California. As of 2010, its population was 462,257...

. She caught fire and sunk in 1932.

On New Year's Day 1937, during the Great Depression

Great Depression

The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...

, the gambling ship SS Monte Carlo

SS Monte Carlo

The SS Monte Carlo was an oil tanker launched in 1921 as the SS McKittrick but later became a gambling and prostitution ship in 1936 off the coast of Coronado, California.- Grounding :...

, known for "drinks, dice, and dolls," was shipwrecked on the beach about a quarter mile south of the Hotel del Coronado

Hotel del Coronado

Hotel del Coronado is a beachfront luxury hotel in the city of Coronado, just across the San Diego Bay from San Diego, California. It is one of the few surviving examples of an American architectural genre: the wooden Victorian beach resort...

, near San Diego.

Californian gambling ships appear in several novels of the period, including Sing a Song of Murder (1942) by James R Langham and The Case of the Dangerous Dowager (1937) by Erle Stanley Gardner

Erle Stanley Gardner

Erle Stanley Gardner was an American lawyer and author of detective stories, best known for the Perry Mason series, he also published under the pseudonyms A.A. Fair, Kyle Corning, Charles M. Green, Carleton Kendrake, Charles J...

.