I found this story in the book, “Chief Justice: A Biography of Earl Warren” by Ed Cray, and from a conversation I had with a retired Nevada City policeman. He told me that everyone knew about the gambling dens, but rarely did anyone do anything about it until Pat Brown became California’s Attorney General.
I heard this story many years ago from somebody who knew the Brown family well:
Pat Brown’s father ran a gambling operation in the back of his cigar shop. When Pat got elected district attorney of San Francisco, he told his father to shut-down the operation by the time he took the oath of office.
About 2 weeks after he took office, the police chief told Brown that the gambling operation was still going strong. Brown’ s father kept avoiding his phone calls, so Brown told his mother that if the operation wasn’t shut-down by a certain date, the police would raid it the next day.
Brown’s father went out of the gambling business and didn’t talk to his son for several years.