Little Pete
Opium Den 
"San Francisco" was only a quiet Mexican village called Yerba Buena on a nearly uninhabited sandy peninsula. When Captain John B. Montgomery raised the U.S. flag at what is now Portsmouth Square (at Washington and Kearny streets) on July 5 1846, he bloodlessly annexed the entire California territory from Mexico, yet no one paid much notice.
All that changed only two years later with The Gold Rush: In 1848,
John Marshall discovered gold on the American river near Sutters Mill, and
it seems boredom was banished forever. Overnite the nearby port of San Francisco
Bay attracted hordes of humanity hunting treasure, and the notorious history
of San Francisco was off to a galloping start. Then with the 1860's came yet
another siren call to riches: The Comstock lode, discovered at Sun Mountain
outside Virginia City Nevada, was the largest discovery of silver in the
history of mankind. The Klondike Gold Strike was to bring yet another wave of
"argonauts" through San Francisco on their way north to the Alaskan gold fields.
Gold and silver transformed sleepy San Francisco into
a populous hotbed of crime that would not soon be tamed.
Vigilante Committees: The lawless conditions of early gold
rush San Francisco gave rise to the original "hoodlums" that terrorized
the marginal populations of the city. Bad went to worse and worse to
open murder in the deadfalls and cribs of what came to be know as the Barbary
Coast, spawning The Vigilante Committees that hung so many infamous
San Francisco citizens. We take you to the former site of their headquarters
at what is now 101 California street near Portsmouth Square.
You'll tour San Francisco's Chinatown (California and Powell Streets),
created by the railroad Robber Barons of Nob Hill, who imported 20,000
Chinese laborers to lay the western portion of the first transcontinental
railroad to Promontory Point, Utah. Chinatown has remained the largest population
of Chinese outside of China, generating it's own notorious history of opium
dens, fighting tongs, and the singular crime boss Little Pete.
Little Pete
Opium Den
Black Bart, perhaps the world's greatest and most poetic
stage coach robber, secretly made his home in San Francisco in the 1870's
during his seven year crime spree far to the north. You'll visit the place
he was captured in November 1881,- lured into the Wells Fargo offices at
what is now 420 Montgomery Street, and browse one of the best Black Bart
and Gold Rush exhibitions in the world.
Black Bart 
Gold Rush Traders
You'll hear about the corrupt exploits of Boss Reuf (circa 1906) as you drive by his former headquarters, now owned by film director Francis Ford Coppola in North Beach.
Fatty Arbuckle
You'll learn the story of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. The affable butterball
silent-film era comedian, once called the "Prince of Whales", was a Prohibition-era
American rags to riches success story until a fateful party at San Francisco's
St. Francis Hotel in 1921, where the death of a girl led to his being wrongfully tried
for murder and brought low by scandal. We'll take you to the St. Francis
Hotel, the still-luxurious site of his tragic turn of fate.
Al Capone
You'll enjoy many spectacular views of the world famous prison Alcatraz,
which has played host to such infamous notables as Al Capone , Machine
Gun Kelly, and "The Bird Man of Alcatraz"
At the Mitchell Brother's Theatre (O'Farrell and Van Ness streets) you'll learn the story of the infamous Mitchell Brothers, the 1960's porno kings who singlehandedly spawned the video pornography industry with their film "Behind the Green Door" with Marilyn Chambers, -and about the scandal that erupted when it became known the porn queen was also television's icon of motherhood "Ivory Snow Girl". And then you'll get the scoop about how and why Jim Mitchell fatally shot his brother Artie in 1992.
The Zodiac Killer
We'll visit the sites of one of the still unsolved 1968-72 serial murders
by The Zodiac Killer at the corner of Cherry and Washington Streets.
Patty Hearst
We'll take you to the apartment buildings where, in 1974-5, newspaper heiress-turned-terrorist
Patty Hearst was held by her Symbionese Liberation Army captors, and
the bank she later helped them rob!
Dan White
You'll see the home of Dan White, the San Francisco City Supervisor
that killed Mayor Moscone and the nation's first openly gay politician Harvey
Milk at San Francisco City Hall in 1977.
Jim Jones
You'll see the site where Jim Jones, the Kool-Aid Killer had his cult
headquarters before he moved the cult to Jonestown, Guyana, where
headquarters before moving to Jonestown Guyana. There, after murdering a
meddlesome U.S. Senator he induced his followers to commit mass suicide by
drinking poisoned Kool-Aid.
We'll show you where the 2002 Marjorie Knoller Dog Maulings happened, drive by the 101 California Massacre, see the home of the Zebra Killers, and much more! We'll even see the haunted home where the ghost of David Broderick, a nineteenth century anti-slavery senator who was ruthlessly slain in a duel with a Supreme Court Justice in 1859, still resides today.