by Amy Reading
Marks and Mabray turned this swindle into big business by combining it with Marks’s earlier invention of the Dollar Store, creating both a space and an administrative structure for the con to be predictably and repetitively managed. They funneled their marks through a big store in Council Bluffs, the third floor of the block-long Merriam Building on Main Street, which acted as the bureaucratic brain of an organization that employed hundreds of steerers, not to mention a stable of formerly respectable jockeys, sprinters, prizefighters, wrestlers, and racehorses, including the bantam champion Harry Forbes and the wrestler Ernest Fenby.
But Mabray was not as careful a businessman as his partner, and a few minuscule mistakes and one large lapse in judgment cost the men their empire. In 1908, a private detective in Council Bluffs opened a letter he’d received by mistake. Addressed to “Friend 39,” it read, “Owing to a change in administration here, we move to Council Bluffs, Ia., where conditions are perfect. Drop us a line and keep us posted as to your whereabouts.” Instantly alert to the illegalities referenced in these brief words, the detective brought the letter to the attention of the U.S. postal inspectors. The post office inspector J. S. Swenson traced the postal box that the letter referenced, and the trail led to an office in the Merriam Building. Swenson began digging into the Council Bluffs underworld and pretty soon he knew the full story, but he had no jurisdiction until the gang used the mails to defraud their victims. His investigation was forced to pause until someone broke a law.
John Mabray, left, shakes hands with two crooked sportsmen and a mark, identified as R. A. Frazer. (photo credit 1.6)
When Swenson finally unearthed a disgruntled mark who agreed to testify against the syndicate, postal inspectors plotted a raid in Council Bluffs and enlisted the chief of police and the head of the detective bureau in their plan. When the raid failed to go off, Swenson knew just how high up the fix went. His next break came in early 1909 when he trailed the gang to Little Rock, and before Mabray had time to fix city officials, Swenson stormed his house, arrested Mabray and several associates, and confiscated a trunk packed with documents testifying to the new managerial ethos of the big con. A red ledger indexed the names and identification numbers of more than three hundred men working Mabray’s swindle in cities around the country. Eighty-eight envelopes held papers and photographs documenting eighty-eight swindles. For instance, it only took a few lines of shorthand and lingo to notate the entire script and cast of characters for the four-day-long swindle of a mark named Dr. C. C. Vanderbeck in 1907 (at the turn of the century, marks were also called mikes):
Play of 49. June 16. 49 arrived with C. C. Vanderbeck of St. Louis. It is wrestle and “Mike” has $2,500 and his wife is to send three more on Monday. Was interviewed by 12. Will arrange.
June 17. Mike is ready with his $2,500. I will get the balance tomorrow. Met Ogden present, Mike, 49, 12, 13, 36, 66, B. Made match for ten a side and put up two a side forfeit. Bet other three off of him. Turned him five. 36 offered bet of 30 for wine. 49 took 20 of it. Adjourned.
Mike—Dr. C. C. Vanderbeck.
Guide—49.
Outside—Billy Casey—B.
Manager—James Phillips—12.
Inside—Jack McCormick—A.
C.M.—J. J. Pomeroy—36.
C.M.—H. A. Hill—13.
C.M.—F. Barnes—66.
June 19. Met same place. Present same as yesterday. Gave him five. 49 put in five with him. Turned him five. 13 bet him 2. 66 bet him 2 and 36 bet him three, this louied for 2. He went to bank. 49 and 66 went with him. He drew. Made good and we bet other 500 off him. 66 daved and was $450 short. 66 and 12 to box. Contest. Gave him run off.
Will blow W and then Y.
Once the detectives deciphered words like “louied” and “daved,” they added up the amounts recorded in those envelopes to more than $5 million. Marks’s Dollar Store had become a million-dollar store.
In March 1910, the evidence in the trunk earned John Mabray the maximum federal sentence of two years in Leavenworth and a fine of $10,000. Thirteen of his colleagues were sentenced with him. Over the next few years, Inspector Swenson indicted eighty-four of Mabray’s gang, and most of them served time or paid fines. Ben Marks was also tried for conspiracy, and John Mabray was the chief witness against him, testifying that he kicked up 8 or 9 percent of all receipts to his boss in exchange for police protection. Nonetheless, the local jury could find not a single scrap of evidence tying Marks to Mabray, and he was let go. But the long trial affected his health and broke his spirit for gambling; he and his wife turned their attention to stock raising on their vast grounds until his death in 1919.
Ben Marks’s legacy lived on, for if the log mansion and the Merriam Building were the corporate headquarters for a con conglomerate, they were also a training ground for the legions of steerers and ropers who studied under Marks and fanned out to the great cities of the nation to set up their own stores. One of them was Joseph “Yellow Kid” Weil, otherwise known to the postal inspectors as “steerer No. 157,” who was convicted in 1909 in Chicago and served a few years before returning to one of the many elegant suites he rented in the Loop for his swindling dramas. Chicago was the other incubator for the con at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, and after the Mabray gang was jailed, it became the home of the premier graduate program for the deceptive arts.
In Chicago, the counterpart to Ben Marks’s Dollar Store was “the Store,” Michael “Big Mike” McDonald’s saloon, and it peddled every crooked game the frontier had yet invented, a veritable “department store of gambling.” Both Chicago and McDonald owed their rise to the railroad. At a young age, McDonald left home to ride the rails as a train butcher, someone who peddled newspapers, candy, and other comforts to weary travelers, hustling tips and meals. McDonald added to his income with a short con of his own invention, the prize package swindle. He’d flamboyantly insert $5 bills in several of the candy boxes in his cart and tell passengers that every box held a prize ranging from one penny to $5. Mysteriously, no one ever drew one of the $5 boxes out of his cart. After spending some time in New Orleans, McDonald returned to Chicago with a recipe for vice that would prove enduring: separate gambling from prostitution, further separate brace games, or rigged house games, from honest gentlemen’s gaming, centralize the gaming interests, and pay regularly and handsomely for protection from police raids. After operating a series of saloons around town, McDonald opened the Store in 1873, spending $15,000 to renovate the five-story building on the corner of Clark and Monroe into the city’s most lavish and brazen twenty-four-hour house of games. The first floor was strictly legitimate—a saloon and wholesale liquor and cigar depot—and the second floor was strictly illegal with all manner of card, dice, and wheel games. Like Marks’s casino, the Store’s plush carpets concealed trapdoors in its floors, and its ornate moldings hid peepholes and secret closets. The third floor hosted out-of-town guests, and the top two floors cosseted the McDonald family in style and acted as a clubhouse for his select circle of friends and politicians.
Most important, the Store was thickly fringed on its sidewalks by bunco men of all varieties who lured traveling businessmen into its hallways. McDonald would buy passenger lists from railroad stationmasters, then dole them out to his lieutenants, who could easily match names to faces by their minute knowledge of regional fashion. A businessman would alight at the Van Buren Street depot only to be greeted familiarly by someone whom he simply couldn’t place, and soon they’d be walking arm in arm up Clark Street. Forty percent of whatever the dupes lost at the Store belonged to the men who roped them in, 20 percent went to the police, and McDonald kept the balance. McDonald never held office, but for twenty uncontested years he ran the entire city, installing politicians and collecting the tributes of the grifters who worked for him, men like Tom and John Wallace, Red Adams, Snitzer the Kid, Dutchy Lehman, Black-Eyed Johnny, Hungry Joe Lewis, Appetite Bill, Tom O’Brien, and the brothers Fred and Charl
ey Gondorf. Only when Carter Harrison, the man McDonald had ensconced as mayor, was assassinated in 1893 did McDonald’s political power begin to ebb. After that, Bathhouse John Coughlin and Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna stepped up to take control of the First Ward Levee district and preserve it as a safe haven for vice and larceny, ruling as its joint aldermen into the 1920s. Coughlin and Kenna ran the First Ward as a kind of big store, not only taking a percentage of every underworld dollar and converting it to Democratic votes and police protection, but also curating the Levee as if it were an exclusive social club by making introductions and mentoring young talent.
It was in Coughlin’s Silver Dollar saloon that the Yellow Kid met Fred “the Deacon” Buckminster, the former policeman who became his partner, and Billy Wall, the leading con man in Chicago who would tutor him at the racetrack. Soon the Yellow Kid graduated from short cons to the kind of big con that would make him renowned even in the upperworld. By the second decade of the twentieth century, the Chicago Daily Tribune dubbed him “one of Chicago’s landmarks.” His exploits were covered exhaustively, even lovingly, by the metro reporters, and the Yellow Kid obliged them by showing up for every court appearance in exquisite suits and his trademark round spectacles, posing for the flashbulbs, and offering them bons mots on his way back to his chauffeured coupe. “Mr. Weil wore blue over a white shirt studded with gold, a diamond blazer in his cravat, an overcoat of Killarney green, a green velour hat of gay and rakish tilt, and a spanking pair of tan shoes,” read one typical article. When Mrs. Anna J. Weil sailed into court one afternoon to post a $20,000 bond for her husband, the gown she wore elicited gasps from the “usual fans” who gathered whenever the Yellow Kid was onstage.
The First Ward was so tightly fixed during the Bathhouse–Hinky Dink era that Weil’s untouchability formed the wry subtext, the tacit punch line of every newspaper article about him. He was arrested quite by accident in 1917, much to the Tribune’s mirth. A friend had lent Weil his apartment while he was away for the weekend, but when Weil let himself in, he was arrested for attempted burglary. “With the police Weil could reckon,” observed the Tribune, “but with suspicious janitors not.” Once Weil was at the station, the police had no choice but to match him up with the various warrants out under his name, and he soon found himself answering to charges that he’d swindled Albert A. Charles of Kokomo out of an unfathomable sum of money. As he was released on bond, the Yellow Kid played his part perfectly, opening his eyes as round as his glasses: “Why they say he lost $100,000. I never knew there was that much money in the world.” In that instance, Weil’s bondsman was a former state representative, but just as often he retained the services of the licensed bondsman Cassius McDonald, Big Mike’s youngest son.
Joseph “Yellow Kid” Weil in 1923 (photo credit 1.7)
In 1918, the Chicago Daily Tribune yawned and announced, “Ho Hum! Yellow Kid Gang Lands Another ‘Hick.’ ” A stockman from Indiana had mortgaged his ranch and sold his cattle to raise $18, 000 to purchase surefire stocks from two of the “Yellow Kid’s gang of immunes,” one of whom was Joseph Furey, “a long time member” of the syndicate. Furey played the junior partner to a swindler named Edward Burns, and he had clearly been apprenticing for a while by 1918. “Mr. Furey’s chances of being captured appear remote,” noted the article, because a group of his previous marks had already posted a $1,000 reward, with no results.
And so it appears that Joseph Furey learned tradecraft from one of the con’s highest practitioners. According to his self-mythologizing, the Yellow Kid invented the wiretap, but that is almost certainly not true. The wiretap was, after the big store, the second genius idea in the evolution of the big con, a way to make money from horse racing without going to the baroque measure of faking a jockey’s death or even staging a race. Chances are, though, that the Yellow Kid cannot claim the title of inventor. The New York Times gives credit to Tim Oakes, an ill-fated genius known in the criminal world as “the glass of fashion,” who once cleared half a million dollars on the sale of bogus Standard Oil stock, only to die after three years of “queerness” in Ward’s Island Asylum for the Insane. Jay Robert Nash, an avid historian of fraudulent crime, believes the wiretap to be the work of Paper Collar Joe Kratalsky, a con man who was unusual for also dabbling in art theft and forgeries, even working with the aristocratic Adam Worth in the sensational theft of Thomas Gainsborough’s Duchess of Devonshire in 1876. An obscure con man named Curt Jeffreys baldly stole credit in his “Confessions of a Con Man,” published in the Chicago Daily Tribune. But the real inventor was probably Larry Summerfield, Oakes’s partner on the Standard Oil deal, who legend has it was a former telegraph operator and thus well positioned to exploit the medium’s weaknesses.
Wiretapping most likely began in New York on December 20, 1885. Bookmakers all across the country were taking bets on a series of horse races in New Orleans, and the results were transmitted to saloons in major cities via telegraph. The first two races went off without incident. At the beginning of the third race, the odds stood at “Bob Swim, even money; Fletch Taylor, eight to five; Fleur de Lis, three to one; John Sullivan, five to one; Judge Jackson, thirty to one.” Just before the betting closed, over a dozen young men sprinted into poolrooms around New York and laid heavy bets on Judge Jackson. When the race posted, Judge had won, and the same bright-eyed young men swiftly collected about $8,000 in winnings before bookmakers got wise to the trick. The young bettors had worked in concert with shady telegraph operators in Cincinnati, who had held back the telegraph results of the third race long enough for their confederates to place bets with perfect foreknowledge of the long-shot winner.
Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, wiretappers refined their art—and their Morse code. If the swindlers couldn’t bribe anyone inside Western Union to further their schemes, they’d splice the telegraph lines themselves and delay or even fake the transmissions. In 1896, a well-coordinated group of bettors took about $150,000 in fraudulent winnings when rogue tappers seized control of the line that relayed race results from New Orleans and announced that Royal Nettle had won the sixth race. Not until eight o’clock that evening, when it came time to post the next morning’s entries, did anyone discover the “slight mistake.” Bookies were then instructed to pay out on the true winner, a horse named Plug. In subsequent days, as metro newspapers sussed out more of the story from irate poolroom owners, it became clear that this touch was subtly, even sensually, taken. Days in advance, bettors well armed with funds had begun stepping into poolrooms all around the country to buy tickets for Royal Nettle. The New-York Tribune reported that “perhaps not a half dozen poolrooms of consequence in the United States had escaped without loss.” Only those few prudent bookmakers who waited for the published race results the next morning before paying out their bets were spared.
The Royal Nettle affair was, according to The Washington Post, “one of the most daring and successful swindles ever perpetrated in this country,” and a month after Chicago police made a single unsatisfying arrest, the paper ran a breathy exposé of precisely how the trick was done. The average citizen could have no true conception of how complex such a con was, the paper claimed: “None but an expert lineman could do the work.” The article went on to describe several other successful wiretap swindles from the past few years, making it sound as if the nation’s largest cities were being hollowed out from the inside by teams of tappers: “When the workmen were tearing down the old walls of the Hoffman House, not many months ago, they broke in upon two wire tappers who were busy with their pliers and wires in a vault under the sidewalk.” Similar exposés ran in subsequent years in papers from the National Police Gazette to the Los Angeles Times.
Such articles played so beautifully into con artists’ hands that one might even suspect them of having been planted there, for they provided the setup for the big con. The papers demonstrated to the reading public, that teeming multitude of potential marks, that wiretapping worked, and anything that succeeded so efficiently i
n producing magical money could then be marketed as a sound investment. Just four months after the Royal Nettle affair, even those swindlers who were not “expert linemen” were peddling the wiretap, and thus began the era of the wireless wiretappers. In Chicago, four men were indicted on conspiracy charges when they induced George Peck, son of an alderman, to invest $1,000 toward the opening of a crooked poolroom with its own hidden cache of “valuable telegraphic equipment” that purportedly filched Western Union transmissions but that was in reality empty boxes with useless knobs, screws, and wires.
Swindlers continued to splice wires, reroute cables, and falsify race results. As late as 1902, swindlers moved the “old sure-thing” out west and tapped wires at a Los Angeles racetrack. But the game had forever shifted away from racetracks and poolrooms and toward the kind of big stores that con men were, by now, so well practiced at furnishing. In 1905, a consortium of four sharpers shocked and thrilled New Yorkers when they fitted up a fake Western Union office in Manhattan and fleeced a German businessman for an astonishing $96,000, the equivalent of roughly $2.5 million in today’s money; the police commissioner, William McAdoo, stated that it was the largest amount lost to date in the big con. In 1907, a Connecticut man named William F. Walker, treasurer of the New Britain Savings Bank, disappeared after having looted his employer of more than $600,000 in order to invest in the wiretap in New York City. The swindlers got about $100,000 of Walker’s money, and then they got a handful of arrest warrants for larceny and receiving stolen goods and a thicket of newspaper headlines. To no one’s surprise, the gang leader turned out to be Charley Gondorf, “well known about the Tenderloin as a sporting man.” What the Yellow Kid was to Chicago, the Gondorf brothers were to New York: notorious, tolerated, even a little respected for their native cleverness. Like Weil, Fred and Charley Gondorf got their start in the great Chicago store under Big Mike McDonald; then they moved to New York to work the wiretap with their own coterie of lieutenants and apprentices. Even after Walker was found, he refused to testify against his swindlers, like so many marks who decline to hold their gullibility up to scrutiny in the courtroom. Connecticut officials were forced to let Charley Gondorf go free, and he rejoined his brother Fred on the well-trodden streets of Manhattan.