The Underworld of Mountain View During Prohibition

An untold story of bootleggers, speakeasies, and secret stills.

👋 Hello, I’m Kevin Ferguson, author of 🍷 Rain on the Monte Bello Ridge,🍷 my forthcoming memoir about health, aging and winemaking. (Read the origin story of the book.) 🍇 The Centenarian Playbook is my newsletter, which features longevity tips and stories from Grandma Kay’s long life. It also includes stories of the Gemello Winery, which her late husband, Mario, ran for nearly half a century. 📖 I’m sure you’ll find my maternal grandparents are quite lovable characters.

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This post comes with a heavy heart. Earlier this year, one of my contributors, Connie Bertrand, passed away at age 76. She was the one who tipped me off about a bootlegging story in the early days of Mountain View. In honor of her, I thought I’d revisit this Prohibition story about her grandfather Fred Riccomi and her great uncle George who ran an underground distillery beneath a vegetable farm in Santa Clara County.

This came to light when she reached out after the Mountain View Voice published a story about the Gemello Winery history in early 2023. She said her grandfather provided the winery with its winepress, years after Prohibition.

But that day on the phone in 2023, we spent more time talking about the Prohibition days.

Mountain View was a small, quiet, orchard-filled town¹ in the early 1930s, but still had its share of bootleggers, speakeasies, and even a bordello during Prohibition. A common practice of this underground world was to use a legitimate business on the premises, like the dog-racing Blue and Gold Kennel Club, as a front for its brothel or other illicit activities. In the Riccomi case, they ran a Mountain View vegetable farm near El Camino Real and San Antonio Road (now the site of the Walmart-anchored San Antonio Shopping Center), according to Bertrand. 

While many Italian transplants, like my great grandfather John Gemello, came to the Santa Clara Valley with winemaking in their blood, Bertrand said her grandfather forged a slightly different path.

“Fred Riccomi, a fellow Italian, was on the ‘distribution side’ of the liquor business during Prohibition,” she said.  

That’s where the intriguing story kicks into gear.

“[Fred and George] were more invested in distilling and moving trainloads of booze,” Bertrand said. “They built a still underground on that property. To evade federal agents, they dug the still deep and zig zagged the passage to the top so that the fumes were completely vented by the time they reached above ground. No smell – no problems with the Feds!”

“To evade federal agents, they dug the still deep and zig zagged the passage to the top so that the fumes were completely vented by the time they reached above ground,” Bertrand said.

Bertrand added, “my mother had once told me her after-school job was to go down into the still and put the labels on the bottles. Lots and lots of bottles of wine, Cresta Blanca,² and gin.”

In the 1950s, developers who built the San Antonio Shopping Center found the still, Bertrand said. “By that time, my family was a couple of owners removed from the property.”

Years after Prohibition, the Riccomi brothers shifted their business efforts towards San Francisco, running night clubs. That included the famed Music Box (now called The Great American Music Hall), that during the 1940s starred famed burlesque pioneer Sally Rand.³

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1. Mountain View, the heart of Silicon Valley, has a population of 81,000 residents, according to 2021 the US Census By contrast, the 1930 census count reported only 3,300 residents.

2. Cresta Blanca Winery launched in 1882 in Livermore Valley, Calif. It closed in 1965. The site is now a historical landmark.

3. Burlesque pioneer Sally Rand and the Riccomi brothers were partners in the Music Box from 1936 til 1946.