by Amy Reading
The next time Norfleet found himself in Fort Worth, a few months after Furey’s trial, District Attorney Brown gave him some news that completely shattered the calm he had regained at the ranch: “Reno Hamlin has forfeited his bond and is gone again!” Norfleet could barely believe it. “It was like trying to hold down six keys with five fingers—every time I press one down another pops up.” But Furey had taught him that a con that worked once was surely good for another spin, so yet again Norfleet had the charges against Hamlin dropped and the canceled charge publicized in the papers. Then a grand jury quietly issued a new indictment. Next he contacted a friend named Will Flynn, a police officer in Oklahoma City. He’d heard that Hamlin’s wife lived there, so he sent Flynn a photograph of Hamlin and asked him to keep an eye out. Days later, in October 1921, Hamlin was arrested on a misdemeanor, and when Flynn spotted him in the holding cell, he excitedly wired Hale Center. Norfleet found himself in a race with the solicitor general of Atlanta, Georgia, who also brandished an indictment for Hamlin on swindling charges. Norfleet got there first. Hamlin greeted him debonairly from his cell, but his face blanched when he saw the document Norfleet held out to him between the bars, the newer, stronger indictment. Defeated, he waived the legal requirement for extradition papers, giving Norfleet the ability to transfer him to Texas without delay.
Norfleet and Flynn personally escorted Hamlin back to Fort Worth. They walked into the sheriff’s office and with no fanfare handed over their prisoner, stunning the Fort Worth police officers. When the deputy sheriff set Hamlin’s bond at $20,000, one of the largest in the county, Hamlin gasped. That was a bond he could not post, and at last Norfleet had him fast and tight. Nothing further was heard of him until 1933, when he died in a car accident in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His obituary remembered him as the man who was followed for thirty thousand miles by J. Frank Norfleet, “Texas nemesis of confidence men.”
Once again, Norfleet’s tally stood at four of five swindlers netted and jailed. Only W. B. Spencer, the phony land dealer, was on the loose. To find him, Norfleet would go where all big con artists eventually went, to the rightest town in America, the home of a store so big and modern and lavish it made Council Bluffs and Chicago look like flea markets. Norfleet went to Denver.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Making of a Confidence Kingpin
With Furey’s arrest, Norfleet became a celebrity, and his name became synonymous with con artistry. For each newspaper article that appeared with his name in it, another dozen telegrams and letters appeared at his ranch—“many of which were from women,” he could not help but observe. His fans offered him congratulations and tips, but they also came to him seeking help. After returning home to Hale Center in 1921, he was approached by Judge Adrian Poole of El Paso. Judge Poole dragged with him a young friend, a twenty-eight-year-old named Willis Holman, and the judge pleaded with Norfleet to listen to Holman’s story and knock some sense into him.
With no little defensiveness, Holman began to tell Norfleet about a man he’d met in Colorado Springs with whom he’d formed a strikingly deep if sudden friendship. This man had taken Holman to Denver to introduce him to a second man, a stockbroker with a unique backstage view on the inner workings of financial markets. The second man had ushered Holman and his friend into a deal, and Holman had quickly earned $37,000. The money awaited him in Denver; all he needed to do was collect $20,000 of his own money. Norfleet held up his hand and ordered him to stop right there. And then, to the young man’s astonishment, Norfleet took over the story. He conjured up the scene in which the secretary of the exchange requisitioned Holman’s winnings because he was not a member of the exchange. He told in the minutest detail how Holman’s friends had pleaded with the secretary to allow Holman to confirm his bid retroactively, and then even pledged some of their own money against that formidable sum. With unsettling prescience, he described the friends’ plans to meet Holman in Denver once his portion of the money was securely on his person. And then Norfleet gave a line-by-line itemization of his own losses at the hands of a matching team of swindlers.
Holman set his jaw and denied everything. It wasn’t a swindle, he was sure of it, and he was going to return to Denver to see the deal through to the end. Norfleet sighed. So he told Holman that if he were truly determined to return to Denver, he could count on Norfleet’s company for the journey. Norfleet thought it was just possible that Holman’s team included his one remaining prey, W. B. Spencer, and the lead was just too promising to pass up. After a night’s consideration, Holman decided to give up on his friends in Denver. Norfleet, though, had been infected, and he bought a ticket for that night’s train to Colorado. Presumably, it was Eliza’s turn to sigh. The ranch was in dire straits yet again, so before he left, Norfleet arranged to sell a large flock of turkeys and some hogs. He also called on his bankers in Plainview to obtain yet another extension on his debts, and then off he went.
Norfleet stopped at Colorado Springs to see if he could gather more intelligence on Holman’s team of bunco artists before exposing himself in Denver, but no sooner had he stepped off the train than Captain Irving Bruce of the Colorado Springs Police Department told him to go back home. Captain Bruce warned Norfleet that his amateur sleuthing was not welcome in Denver, because a brash young district attorney was about to bust wide open the swindling syndicate that had been throttling civic life for more than two decades. The district attorney was at the delicate end of a sting that had consumed eighteen months, thousands of dollars, and the best undercover detectives in the country. Captain Bruce told Norfleet that his presence in Denver would only disrupt the swindlers’ routine on which the district attorney depended in order to track and net his quarry. So, for the next several days, Norfleet stayed at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, asking questions and piecing stories together. It was here that he learned the full story of the Denver mastermind Lou Blonger, the openly acknowledged boss of the city, the one with a private telephone line to the chief of police, the one whose mistress’s lavish home served as a secret rendezvous from which politicians and the syndicate’s top executives ran the city. Blonger was what Joseph Furey might have been had he stayed put and dominated a single city, what Big Mike McDonald might have been had he lived into the era of the big con. Could Norfleet stay away from that? No, he could not.
Lou Blonger didn’t seem like much of a criminal mastermind. His sad eyes and hot-dog-bun nose didn’t exactly inspire fear. One reporter affectionately described him as “short, rotund, affable,” another as “always a big-hearted spender,” yet another as “generous and kind.” He was famous around town for his cherry list. He owned a fifty-five-acre cherry orchard just outside the city, and at harvest time he’d give away crates of cherries to the friends and charities on his list, which served as a kind of directory of the innermost circle of Denver elite. The rest of the year, he’d reach into his pocket for anyone in need and pull out a thick wad of bills folded in half lengthwise and then doubled. One recipient recalled, “He would peel off a twenty or a fifty or a ‘grand’ with the ease an ordinary fellow flips out a dime.” At Christmas, poor families all over Denver would feast on turkeys that Lou had sent them.
Each weekday morning, Blonger would climb to the third floor of the American Bank Building on Seventeenth and Lawrence. Behind a plaque that identified his business as mining, he tended to the operations of the Forest Queen Lode, the gold mine on Ironclad Hill in Cripple Creek that he had claimed with his brother Sam in 1892. The mine had quickly proved to be a steady producer, and then in 1909 a rich seam of ore was discovered that began to yield even bigger dividends. By 1911 the operators were shipping close to eight hundred tons of ore a month at a price of $40 per ton, and Blonger’s share made him a wealthy man. Each weeknight, he joined his mistress, Iola Readon, in the mansion he had bought her in the country-club district, just down the street from the fashionable Church of the Ascension. Each Saturday morning, Readon would drive him in her purring limousine to the Kentom, an e
legant brick apartment building in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, where he would spend the weekend with Cora, his long-suffering wife. In the evenings, he could frequently be seen in dress clothes on his way to the theater in an exceedingly convincing impression of a prosperous businessman.
And yet every last person in town knew him as the fixer. It was perhaps the city’s most wide-open secret that Lou Blonger ran Denver. Everyone knew that only a fraction of his wealth came from mining, and everyone knew that though he was the sole person at work in room 309 of the American Bank Building, he commanded an army of men. The ropers, spielers, and bookmakers who filled the corps of the big con were strictly prohibited from entering his office lest they encounter one of the politicians whom Blonger controlled. Each side of the law needed to be able to say plausibly under oath that it had never met the other.
As early as 1895, Denver newspapers had begun referring to him as one of the bosses of the town, even helpfully listing his crew, which back then rather touchingly consisted only of Little Duff Cline, Long and Shorty Washburn, Red Gibson, and Jim Thornton. By 1901 he was “the recognized leader of the gang of bunco men.” By the 1920s, at least seventy men worked under Blonger in Denver, though some would later number his international corps of swindlers at over five hundred. They’d work in Florida over the winter, and then in the summer the Denver swindling season would commence. From the first of June to the first of November, three- and four-man teams ran the fake stock exchange or the fake horse race on traveling businessmen, often lining them up like trains in a station and methodically processing them in successive or even overlapping dramas. In 1920, Blonger’s crew earned $100,000. In 1921, they more than doubled that, earning over $225,000. And 1922 was shaping up to be their best year yet. By August, when Norfleet sat ready to spring into town, they already had over $270,000 in their pockets or on the send. The ring was said to have earned $1.5 million from its shadow play of gambling and speculation. In the 1920s, the newspapers called him “King” Lou Blonger.
He had come a long way from unremarkable beginnings. He was born in Vermont in May 1849, the same month that the Confidence Man began to appear on the streets of Manhattan. He grew up in Wisconsin, one of five brothers and nine sisters. He left home three days before his fifteenth birthday to enlist in the Union army. After the war, he followed his brother Sam around the Southwest, pacing from one boomtown to another. He arrived in Denver in 1888, when he was thirty-nine years old. At that age, Joe Furey had already been arrested half a dozen times and was a familiar figure to police officers and newspaper editors around the country. J. Frank Norfleet was a married father with his own homestead and the beginnings of a valuable herd of cattle. The men they were to become were already apparent in the men they were. Blonger, on the other hand, had no arrest record, no ties to elders in the con fraternity, no clever innovations on bunco schemes or games of chance. What he did have was the perfect city in which to stage his improbable rise.
The town that Blonger found, when he disembarked at the new Union Station at Wynkoop and Seventeenth, was not terribly different from the ragged camp that had sprung up in 1858 when gold was discovered up in the mountains, but it was on the verge of its renaissance. The man and the city would shape each other. Between 1860 and 1870, Denver gained only ten inhabitants, but between 1870, when the railroads arrived in town, and Lou Blonger’s arrival the city grew more rapidly than any other in the country, from 5,000 to 106,000 residents. If they weren’t there to mine the mountains, they were there to sell goods to those who did, or to speculate on the real estate of those who would soon arrive. A handful came in the hopes that the dry mountain air would cure their tuberculosis, but the pollution from the ore-smelting factories on the outskirts of the city gave the lie to that civic claim. All of a sudden the city’s development was heedless, swift, and dizzyingly profitable. Denver was, in the admiring words of a contemporary writer, “crowding a century into a generation.”
Blonger would have left Union Station and embarked down Seventeenth Street, a wide thoroughfare of contradictions. Depending on who was doing the naming, Seventeenth was called either “the Wall Street of the West” or “scratch alley.” It was lined largely with three-story buildings in Denver’s trademark red brick and yellow stone, but it still lacked sewers and pavement; throughout the day, sprinkling tanks would slowly empty water onto the sand and gravel to keep the street compact. When it rained, one dry goods merchant would hire a porter to stand in the mud in hip-length boots and lay down planks for pedestrians to cross the street into his store.
The first thing a miner, cowboy, or farmer would do upon arriving in Denver after months in the mine or on the range would be to seek out a shave and haircut. A so-called bandit barber on Seventeenth would show him a sign with the reasonable price of two bits, half the going rate in other towns. Then the barber would drape his grateful customer’s head in a hot towel and turn the sign around to read “shave and a haircut, eight bits.” As he lifted the towel off the man’s face, he’d swipe a bit of mud from his boots and display it on the white cloth, convincing the customer to spring for a shampoo as well. In like fashion, the barber would treat his customer’s blackheads and dandruff, trim and curl his mustache, and control his split ends. The cost of the haircut could reach as high as $5 or $10. And if he got that far, the bandit barber would shave a tiny inverted V at the base of the man’s neck, literally a mark on the mark for the swindlers who worked the sidewalks of Seventeenth Street to detect when he emerged from the salon.
Blonger would have been wise to the bandit barbers. Four blocks from the station, he would almost certainly have encountered the city’s most eminent swindler hard at work on the corner of Seventeenth and Larimer, just outside the newly opened Tivoli Club. A reporter for the Rocky Mountain News once stood at that same corner and disgustedly noted “a fleet of old shoes, cabbage leaves and potato peelings … vainly trying to sail upon a lake of liquid putrefaction.” Stench notwithstanding, there was always a small crowd gathered there, and inside the knot of onlookers would be a slender, dapper gentleman with dark hair and a Vandyke beard, his voice raised to the audience as he held out a satchel filled with milky white blocks.
This was Jefferson Randolph Smith, sometimes known as Jeff but more frequently called Soapy after the product he peddled so lucratively, though when the newspapers were in a sardonic mood his moniker would be heightened to Sapolio. “Ladies and gentlemen,” his spiel would begin, “I’m out here to do some advertising. The company that I [represent] could plaster the walls of your city [with] billboards, with advertisements, that cost plenty of money. We’re going to do it direct, direct to you. We’re going to hand out this beautiful soap. The idea is to get this soap in your hands so that you’ll speak a good word for it. We don’t care how much money it costs to get it there. Money or nothing, I’m going to start giving some prizes out right now.” And before the astonished eyes of the crowd, he’d take out a sheaf of $20, $50, and $100 bills and start slipping them into the paper labels wrapped around the bars of soap, then tossing the soap back into his sack. Someone would come forth and hand him $5 for a bar, then fish around in the satchel, pick out a bar of soap, and unwrap it to find his prize. Soon all the people in the crowd would be digging into their pockets for $5, and Soapy Smith would say, “Now, one word before you go. I don’t want any of you to show that until you get home. The reason is that I don’t want one person to see a hundred dollar bill, another one to see a fifty, and [another one to] reach down and [see] he only got twenty.” As his customers grabbed their bars and pocketed them, he would jovially tell them, “Good day, gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to use that soap. I want you to use it. It’s worth every cent you paid for it.”
Of course no one ever discovered a cash prize inside the penny soap when he or she unwrapped it at home. It was the same con that Mike McDonald would work so well on the railroads before settling in to fix and oil Chicago’s machine, but Soapy took it to new heights by h
iring a legion of shills, half a dozen of them planted in each crowd to find the lucky soaps. Afterward, they’d further sweeten Soapy’s profits by steering men into the Tivoli, which Soapy owned and where he sermonized over its long cherrywood bar and its two dozen green baize tables as what he called a “non-ordained preacher on the vagaries of fortune.” There, out-of-towners would be dealt into the Big Hand, a daily poker game run by one of Soapy’s best “deck mechanics.” Four or five shills would fold good hands and run up the bets on bad ones until the victim felt confident enough to go all in. Soapy kept a business ledger, and in one three-month period he rather unnecessarily broke down his profits and losses for the Big Hand: “Winnings: $4,087, Losses: $0, Volume: $4,087, Win/Loss: +4,087—win/loss to volume: +100%.” Figures like this would occasionally bother city officials enough to haul Soapy into court, but he always got off with a bit of Barnumesque showmanship. At one court appearance, he claimed the Tivoli was, in truth, a reformatory for gambling addicts. “After a man once comes to my place he is cured of gambling absolutely. He doesn’t want any more of it.”
Perhaps Lou Blonger climbed the stairs to the Tivoli for a game of faro, or perhaps he walked two blocks down and two blocks over to the Palace Theatre at Blake and Fifteenth Street, one of the most notorious gambling halls of the West. Inside, twenty-five dealers raked in patrons’ money at tables in front of the long bar with a sixty-foot mirror behind it. At the back of the room, perched on his trademark high stool, sat Big Ed Chase, a shotgun across his immaculately tailored lap. The Palace Theatre, which Chase opened in the 1870s, was a magnificent combination of a 750-seat theater, at which a chorus line danced from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m., and a gambling hall large enough for a crowd of two hundred. Curtained booths on the upper floors allowed senators and city founders to frolic and fondle the “wine girls” in private. Chase hired a string orchestra down from Chicago, and so lovely was its music to the culture-starved families of the boomtown that on summer nights, they’d park their broughams, berlins, phaetons, and surreys in the blocks outside the Palace to listen to the notes that rose above the whir of the roulette and the chink of coins.