Galveston Island remained the mecca of gambling and vice for more than three decades. Civil injunctions filed by the attorney general were a nuisance, but the Hollywood Club always reopened and stayed open. The mob came to look on it as just another cost of doing business.
Oliver Quinn and Dutch Voight ultimately wearied of the battle. Age, and a fortune stashed away in bearer bonds, influenced them to sell their interests to a new generation of mobsters. These new overlords of crime were smart and sophisticated, but they were caught in the tidal undertow of a changing morality. The Texas Rangers finally turned out the lights on Galveston in 1957.
Diamond Jack Nolan became a smuggler, operating out of Jamaica. In 1928, during a run of bootleg liquor to Miami, his schooner was caught in a storm off the Florida Keys. The Libbie, named in honor of his wife, went down with all hands aboard. Elizabeth Magruder Nolan, the mother of two strapping boys, lived out her life in Jamaica, in her villa by the sea. She never remarried, and she never returned to Galveston.
Clint Stoner rose to the rank of captain in the Texas Rangers. For twenty years he stormed Galveston, raiding casinos and gambling dives, plastering the town with civil injunctions. His obsession with the mob left little time for a private life, and he and Janice Overton gradually drifted apart. He retired in 1946 and watched his successors close down Galveston eleven years later. Yet he remained a legend to all of Texas, the Ranger who never quit.
Earl Durant and Catherine Ludlow were married in October 1926. His first film, a Tom Mix western, revealed a remarkable talent as a director. He was in the vanguard of those who made the transition from silent movies to sound, and he worked with stars of the era in comedies as well as drama. He went on to make thirty-four films, and he won the Oscar for Northern Lights in 1932. He and Catherine had three children, and were among the first to build a mansion in Beverly Hills.
Cuddles the parrot lived to be sixteen. In 1927, when Oliver Quinn married Maxine Baxter, Cuddles was moved from the club to the penthouse suite in the Buccaneer. Quinn, whose many business affairs occupied his time, felt a talking parrot would be the perfect companion for Maxine. The first time Cuddles saw her in a negligee, he let loose a loud wolf whistle and squawked: “Ohboy! Ohboy! Lookathetits! Lookathetits!” Maxine, always receptive to a compliment, thought he was adorable.