Ah, Utley. Anyone shot at and repeatedly beaten, who refuses to sign a complaint, is OK in my book. Me and all of Cornero’s boys say so.
Cornero was the rumrunner-turned-Pioneer of Vegas, Father of the Stardust. LA County deputies were fond of boarding his ships off Santa Monica (Cornero often turned the firehoses on Earl Warren’s boys) to hack up roulette wheels for the photographers-in-tow. Cornero survived Cohen-ordered assassination attempts in Beverly Hills the way others survive headaches, until he was finally, in 1955, whacked in Vegas by Moe Dalitz (with a poison 7&7 – how else would you want to go?)-
-the fate of Utley, Cornero’s long-suffering concessionaire, is a mystery. All we’ve got is that he may or may not have lived with this Robertson character at 7143. The fate of 7143 is, of course, evident. I picture it as a rambling rough-hewn shingle affair with wide eaves and cross gables, maybe replaced in the mid-50s by a short-lived Polynesian themed apartment complex, who knows. All we have with certainty is that in 1965 somebody erected this fourteen-story concrete warehouse, converted in 1990 to the Hollywood Versailles Tower condominium complex.
A taste of old Hollywood: behind the Hollywood Versailles, across a parking lot, hides this piece of American Foursquare Edwardiana. How this pattern-book prairie box survived is another mystery.
