by Amy Reading
The convoluted story revealed a great deal more than the unembarrassed nature of the fix. First of all, it disclosed the open secret of Blonger’s continued presence in Denver. He’d never left. His sudden exodus to Cuba was a ruse, perhaps a cover for his friends in high places to compensate for the political capital they lost by associating with him. For the next decade, Blonger’s name was never even whispered in the Denver press as he seemed to content himself with farming his cherry orchard and managing his mining concerns. Second, it demonstrated how impervious he was to prosecution: not once in the furor that engulfed city hall before Duffield’s promotion did it occur to anyone to ask Blonger about the British army officer’s enormous loss. Most important, the Duffield story linked Blonger to the big con and tipped off the extent to which his operations had matured into a modern, efficient machine.
Probably by 1915 and certainly by 1920, Blonger had established the big con as Norfleet would encounter it, and he did it by mirroring the era’s fascination with speculation on the stock market. His paneled dens with their buy sheets and stock tickers were the missing, necessary link between the bucket shops and the mining exchanges run by the 17th Streeters. They provided a plausible story for how the mark might gain entry to the closeted world of high finance.
Blonger’s big con fit into its time like a missing puzzle piece. His organization outperformed Chase’s because he required both his marks and his crew to act like businessmen. He created a corporation with bureaucracy, hierarchy, and bookkeeping, and he created in his marks an appetite for gambling that was itself corporate instead of aleatory. Rather than casting bones and exhorting the gods to send luck their way, Blonger’s marks mimicked Blonger’s own labor: they patiently cultivated their capital and nourished its natural tendency to grow under their expertise.
Many years later, an origin story would be told to account for Blonger’s machine, for the way he transformed the big store into a franchise that dominated the city of Denver. As the story goes, Blonger learned what he knew in the Ben Marks–John Mabray school of swindling at Council Bluffs, but he escaped prosecution with Mabray in 1910 through an extremely well-placed pair of defenders, a law partner of a U.S. district attorney and a deputy U.S. marshal, who traveled to Council Bluffs to pressure federal authorities to leave Blonger’s name out of the proceedings and to sit through the trial every single day until it concluded, ensuring that Blonger’s name was not so much as breathed. Other evidence suggests that Blonger’s connection to Mabray’s Millionaires’ Club was through his able lieutenant, Adolph “Kid” Duff, a short, wiry man with a luxuriant wave of upswept black hair. Duff roamed around the country, with stints in Colorado Springs, El Paso, and Council Bluffs as a member of the Mabray gang, until he arrived in Denver in 1904 at the age of thirty. He soon became Blonger’s spokesperson within the syndicate, transmitting the older man’s commands down through the hierarchy and allowing the boss a degree of remove from the tapping of the telegraph machines and the exclamations of exchange secretaries.
Duff could always be seen around town, chatting up the steerers or stopping into the bank to do a bit of business, a pair of glasses perched on his nose and attached to a wide black ribbon strung over his ear. Any bunco man who came to Denver looking for work needed the nod from Duff, and so he would ask someone within the syndicate to make the introduction. The two men would climb the stairs to the Lookout, the all-purpose name for Duff’s rented office, which shifted location from year to year but was always on the second story and always faced Seventeenth Street. Duff would ask the prospective employee where he’d been based, with whom he’d worked, and how much money he’d made. If the answers were satisfactory and if the current employee could vouch for him, Duff would send the man back downstairs as a steerer, assigned to prowl a well-demarcated territory within the city limits: Seventeenth Street from Union Station to Broadway; Sixteenth Street from the upscale department store Daniels and Fisher to Broadway; the Civic Center; and the State Capitol grounds. The steerers, dozens of them, formed a regular army of flaneurs, loafing and strolling this busy rectangle, chatting up strangers, paging through newspapers, eavesdropping, and peering over at hotel registers.
Lou Blonger and Adolph “Kid” Duff, the top of the Denver swindling hierarchy (photo credit 1.8)
When a steerer landed a mark, he’d contrive to walk with him down Seventeenth Street. As they passed under the window of the Lookout, the steerer would “give the office,” or secretly signal by raising his hat. George “Tip” Belcher, Duff’s own lieutenant, would be sitting in the window and would let Duff know that a play had just begun. On any given day, two or three or four spielers would be waiting in the Lookout, and Duff would dispatch one of them to grab a sheaf of yellow telegrams and position himself for his entrance onto the scene as the highly important and deeply distracted speculator who’d recently been in the news for his impossible stock market winnings. The steerer and the spieler would smoothly convey the mark through the play, telling him the tale, giving him the convincer, putting him on the send. The very instant that the mark handed over his cash in the inner office of the stock exchange and then retreated to the reception room, Duff would come in through a side door, wrap the money up in newspaper, and leave the building with it. Tip Belcher would follow him, armed and ready to attack if anyone threatened Duff. The two of them would stash the money in a safety-deposit box near Daniels and Fisher and let it sit until they could ensure the mark had been cooled off. The steerers and spielers were required to sequester themselves at home until Duff called them to tell them the mark had left town.
A week or ten days later, Duff would stage a little ceremony in the Lookout with Belcher and each crew member of that particular play: the exchange secretary would get 5 percent, the spieler 15 percent, Belcher would get 2 percent, and the steerer would make about 45 percent, out of which he would have to tip his bank teller about 5 percent for not going to a bank officer for approval when cashing the mark’s large draft. Duff and Blonger each took 10 percent, leaving roughly 13 percent for the fix. Each policeman and detective on their payroll received $50 a week whether the big store made money or not. And then they’d all go to Tip Belcher’s private Grafters Club on Fourteenth and across from the Public Market. Even Blonger would make an occasional appearance at the club, granting the lower echelons a rare opportunity to glimpse his visage.
Blonger’s highly articulated corporate body did not always function well. A bunco man could be fired for a breach of swindler etiquette like marrying a local girl or making too much money and getting cocky and careless. The system did work beautifully, though, when it was the mark who malfunctioned. If a mark kicked to the police, he’d be turned over to the bunco squad, all of whose weekly payments were up-to-date. The bunco detectives knew precisely where the Lookout and the fake stockrooms were located each season, so they’d walk the victim around town in increasingly dizzying circles yet somehow never arrive at a building he could identify. One time, two con men sat drinking in the Quincy Café when in walked two detectives and a very familiar man. One swindler told the other, “Don’t look around. There is a fifty-five grand sucker with two dicks, so come on.” The detectives obligingly called the mark’s attention to a nickel piano against the wall while the con men slipped outside behind his back. Another time, a mark kicked to the Denver police, and the detectives propelled him around the city streets before sending him out of town, but for some reason it cost Blonger $8,000 of the mark’s $19,300 score to keep the officers silent on that one.
One formerly rich mark skipped over the cops entirely. Norfleet’s arrest of Joseph Furey in 1921 had been so broadly publicized that when Dr. W. H. Scherrer lost $25,000 to the Denver syndicate, he paid Furey a visit in the Texas penitentiary to see if the convicted con man could help. Furey listened to Dr. Scherrer’s tale with sympathy. “Well, Doc, you are a pretty good sport. I would like myself to have taken you on for about ten thousand, but they shouldn’t have trimmed you for twenty-
five thousand. That’s too much.” He continued, “I used to work in Denver. You go there and see the Boss.” Furey refused to elaborate further, so Scherrer headed back to Denver, employing first the district attorney, Charles Fox, and then a Pinkerton Agency detective as his go-betweens. Blonger had been expecting him, having already heard of his conversation with Furey, and he proceeded to give the doctor the runaround, promising him a $10,000 refund while whispering to the DA and the Pinkerton detective that he’d pay them $2,000 to make Scherrer go away. Scherrer never got his money.
The year before Norfleet was swindled in Texas, a mark named Albert Backus came to Denver and returned home to Okmulgee, Oklahoma, $8,500 poorer. He proceeded to spend his own money to chase down the three-man crew who’d taken off the touch, one of whom was William Elmer Mead, the inventor of the wallet drop whom Hoover would later arrest for mutilating his fingertips. Backus actually found one of his swindlers, a man named J. P. Kinsman, among the celery fields of Sanford, Florida, the same place where Norfleet met Johnson before being lured to the sinister clubhouse in Daytona Beach. Backus had Kinsman detained, but the Denver DA refused to issue extradition papers, and Kinsman was released. Three years after his swindle, Backus was still writing to the Denver DA’s office, pleading with it to prosecute his men or dismiss the criminal case so he could proceed with a civil action. A letter from 1921 reads like an anguished cry into a void: “I offered a $1,000.00 reward for arrest and conviction, and spent a good deal of money in tracing them, but I have lain off until a change in the district attorney’s office should occur at Denver, hoping that some day the State of Colorado, would have officers who would have an interest in the prosecution of those who rob tourists at Denver.”
By the early 1920s, Lou Blonger seemed invincible. The men who accepted his money included not only detectives in the Denver Police Department but the district attorney and even staffers in the Denver office of the U.S. Department of Justice. He was a close personal friend of Harry H. Tammen, co-owner of The Denver Post, the most powerful of the city’s four dailies. Blonger had created a black hole in the center of the city into which truth slid and vanished. If he harbored any vulnerabilities, no one had found them during his twenty years of indomitable rule.
Denver district attorney Philip S. Van Cise in 1921 (photo credit 1.9)
Philip S. Van Cise didn’t intend to be the one to take on the power–monger of Seventeenth Street. In fact, he had been elected district attorney almost by accident. For one thing, his demeanor made him a most unlikely political candidate. A contemporary described him as “abrupt, incisive, a bit inclined to deal with people as if he were a drill sergeant,” and “the sort that repels familiarities”—and that from an admirer. His family remembers him the same way: he simply couldn’t be made to care what other people thought of him and never modified his words in order to cultivate someone else’s impressions of him. If he didn’t like someone, he’d simply cut that person off. As a result, people either loved or hated him. He was the polar opposite of a salesman or a swindler, congenitally incapable of glad-handing like Blonger or shape-shifting like Norfleet.
He’d distinguished himself in his father’s law firm in the eleven years since he’d joined the bar, and he’d further burnished his credentials with a stint in the Colorado National Guard. He then served as an intelligence officer during World War I in France, where he attained the rank of lieutenant colonel, and from then on he was the Colonel to his friends and law associates. Even so, he had nobody’s backing when he entered the Republican primary for district attorney in 1920 at the age of thirty-six. He was the long shot in a race against two other candidates, one backed by the political machine and the other by a U.S. senator, but the two more powerful candidates split the votes between them and Van Cise emerged as the surprise victor in the primary.
A few days later, the Colonel got his first glimpse of what he had taken on. A man named Leonard DeLue, a former police inspector who was now head of the city’s largest private detective agency, called upon him at his office, and after congratulating him on his win, he got right down to business. He had a friend, he told Van Cise, who controlled at least fifteen hundred votes in the general election. Would Van Cise meet with him? At first, Van Cise turned DeLue away. It took Van Cise a little nudging from colleagues to understand that this was how the game was played, and eventually he agreed to meet the power broker in DeLue’s office. When he opened the door, there sat Lou Blonger. He smiled affably at Van Cise and introduced himself as a veteran of the Civil War. “I wear the same G.A.R. button that your father did,” Blonger told the Colonel. “We old soldiers feel mighty proud of you young fellows.” Then Blonger smoothly asked how Van Cise’s law practice had fared during the war. When Van Cise was forced to admit that he’d given it up to enlist, Blonger had his opening. He informed the candidate that it would cost $25,000 to win the general election. “I like your style,” he told Van Cise, “and I want to help you, and because you are the only soldier on any ticket, I’ll put up that twenty-five thousand. You can either have it now, or call on me as you need it, and you don’t owe me a cent.” The district attorney’s yearly salary was $5,000.
Van Cise mustered the appropriate amount of deference and replied, “This is the first time I ever ran for office, and I don’t know much about the game. I don’t need your money now. I want to get through without any outside help. But I may need it, and if it costs as you say it does, I will certainly call upon you. I don’t know just how to thank you.” The two men smiled in perfect agreement, and then Blonger continued to the next phase of his campaign. He explained that his friends’ grandsons were, like Van Cise himself, just coming into manhood and venturing into business on their own. He sighed as he explained that many of them sold mining stocks which, while perfectly legitimate, would occasionally land them before the district attorney on some irritating complaint or other. “Now, Phil,” said Blonger, “what I would like to have you do is agree with me that whenever I have to go on a man’s bond, you will fix it at a thousand dollars. Then I can just have a regular arrangement with a bondsman and not have to bother at all.” So there it was, and it was just plain insulting.
“Phil” could no longer play the part that was being offered to him. “Blonger,” he said, “my hunch would be that the safe rule to follow is to fix the bond at double the amount which the defendant is said to have stolen.” And with that, the meeting was over. Blonger had no further use for Van Cise. On election night, Blonger’s downtown district went firmly for the Democratic incumbent, William E. Foley, but the race was so close that even Foley’s own gambling hall would not make book on his reelection. Van Cise had run an aggressive campaign—his slogan was “A Fighting Man for a Fighting Job”—and the suburbs overwhelmingly tipped the polls in his favor. As the Post reported the next morning, “His victory is chiefly due to the almost unanimous support of the best element of Denver’s citizens.”
Before being sworn in, Van Cise decided to take his political education into his own hands, and he paid a call on someone whom the entire city viewed as a man of integrity, despite the curse words that detonated inside each one of his sentences. Hamilton Armstrong was in the midst of his fourth nonconsecutive term as chief of police in a town where few men lasted long at the job. He was the one who had temporarily shuttered the establishments of Blonger, Chase, and Soapy Smith, and he kept up his reputation for direct action. Once, he stormed into the home of a Capitol Hill socialite during one of her soirees and without a word smashed a roulette wheel in her living room with a firefighter’s ax, then gathered up the shards of inlaid mahogany and walnut to give to the janitor to feed the furnace at city hall. If he caught a police officer drinking while on duty, he wouldn’t wait for a trial board to weigh in on the matter; he’d simply snip the man’s copper buttons off his blue coat and send him home unemployed.
Yet when Van Cise came looking for advice, the chief took a subtler approach. He beckoned over one of his captains and asked hi
m to give Van Cise a tour of the town. “What do you mean, Chief,” asked Captain August Hanebuth, “how much shall we see?” “Everything,” answered the chief pointedly. And so for the next few nights, Captain Hanebuth took Van Cise on a tour of the Denver underworld as seen by a police officer. Van Cise trailed along as Hanebuth strode up to saloon after saloon, knocked, waited a few minutes as scrambling and dragging sounds came from the other side of the door, then entered into a room of poker-faced men holding nothing but drinks. In Chinatown, when the two men gained access, the bars were eerily empty, tobacco smoke hanging in the air, with no sign of the means by which their patrons had vanished. Van Cise was mystified. He had seen nothing on the captain’s tour of everything.
A few days later, the chief spelled it out for him. Did Van Cise know anything about Lou Blonger? It was then that Van Cise learned that the man with the ridiculously generous offer was the boss of the entire town. Chief Armstrong served at the pleasure of the mayor, who reported to Blonger through Adolph Duff and two insiders, Abe Silver, the constable, and Hal Crane, chief deputy sheriff. Any attempted raid would be quashed beforehand or thrown out of court afterward. “But, son,” said Chief Armstrong, “if you are on the level, I will get you the dope and you do the work, and we will smash the whole damn bunch of them.” The day before Van Cise’s inauguration, Chief Armstrong died. The official cause of death was heart failure, but The Denver Times headline read, “Heartbreak Kills Armstrong”—heartbreak over his ineffectuality as a reformer in a fixed-up town. “I am being jobbed,” he told his friends. “I am being double-crossed on every side; I am so tired of it I will be glad when it is all over.”
The mantle now passed to Philip Van Cise, and on his first day he tacked up to the wall of his office a vice map of the city, coded for districts particularly plagued by bootlegging, gambling, prostitution, and “general lawlessness.” That same day, Union Station witnessed an unusually large exodus from the city, when fifty or sixty of the city’s best-known gamblers and bunco artists fled the town in groups of five or ten for St. Louis and Chicago. “We are laying off temporarily to see what Van Cise is going to do and who is the next chief of police,” one of them confided to the Times. “We hope to be back in town in sixty days if all goes well.”