by Amy Reading
They did come back, all of them, fooled by the con that Van Cise was running on the entire city. He pretended to be a naïve young lawyer still running to catch up with his superiors, but all the while he was devising a sting operation to take down Blonger’s syndicate. Van Cise started by gathering his facts, using what he’d learned under Chief Armstrong’s tutelage to guide his self-education. Now that he knew what to look for, Van Cise found Blonger’s tracks all throughout the district attorney’s filing cabinet. There he was, the invisible presence who finessed Robert Ballard’s bond down to $2,500 when he was arrested for swindling a Dallas florist named Nitsche out of $25,000; the one who’d posted bond on the handful of cases that had come before judges in the last two decades; the one who collected the $12,000 that the Reverend Albert S. Menaugh stole from his church back home in Goshen, Indiana, to bet on the stock market. After meeting Blonger’s crew, Menaugh returned home from Denver, confessed to what he’d done, and pleaded with a judge to be sent to jail. His parishioners refused to prosecute him, so he went home and swallowed poison.
Van Cise made a list of all the victims who’d been denied justice in the Denver courts during Blonger’s reign, and he wrote to them to convince some of them to testify in the distant future. He visited other law enforcement officials who’d made public stands against confidence men, officials at the federal level in the Secret Service or the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and he used the evidence they’d gathered to educate himself in the con man’s script. At first he said nothing to the others in the DA’s office, unsure of whom he could trust, but soon two men, Fred Sanborn and Kenneth Robinson, impressed him with their brains and honesty—and their service in the war didn’t hurt. He brought them into his confidence, and together they bided their time.
In August 1921, eight months into his term as district attorney, he read in the Rocky Mountain News about a moving-picture proprietor named George Kanavuts from Sapulpa, Oklahoma, who had been trimmed of $25,000 and had complained to the police, with no results. To ignore this incident without being on Blonger’s payroll would reveal too much to the underworld, so Van Cise opted for a bit of theater. He called the detective department to ask where the investigation stood. Captain Bacon informed him that he had two of his best men on the case, Pete Land and George Lusk, and at Van Cise’s request he sent the detectives and Kanavuts over to the district attorney’s offices. “Who were the men, and what have you done to catch them?” Van Cise asked the detectives. “It’s the same old racket about the stock market,” Land responded. “We tried to locate the place, but though he has taken us all around town, he can’t find the building where it occurred. And he can’t describe the men.” Van Cise turned to Kanavuts and told him, “There’s nothing this office can do to help you. These are the two wisest dicks on the force, and if anybody can locate your men they can.” And he escorted the three men out, sending Land and Lusk back to headquarters to report on the district attorney’s ineffectualness. Once the detectives were out of sight, Van Cise brought Kanavuts back and amended his earlier statement. “We can’t do much more now, but give us some time and we think we will get your men. We will keep in touch with you, and don’t give up hope. Will you keep away from the police department and never tell them anything and only work with us?” With nothing to lose, Kanavuts agreed, and so Van Cise secured his first cooperating witness.
As a former army intelligence officer, Van Cise was more qualified than the average lawyer for the job at hand, and as his resolve and knowledge grew, he began to orchestrate a military-style campaign to bring down his enemies. First, he refined his understanding of who might be dangerous to his campaign. Unlike the Progressive reformers who had done so much to clean up and open out civic life in Denver, Van Cise was forced to consider the press as one of his enemies. Several times he had gone to the editors of the dailies and asked them to suppress stories if publicity would have damaged the public good, but for this case even that backdoor maneuver wouldn’t work, since everyone knew of Blonger’s close friendship with Harry Tammen, co-owner of the Post. Therefore, everything Van Cise did must be cloaked in secrecy, even—no, especially—from his own employees. He installed a secret telephone line and purchased a secret safe for documents related to the conspiracy. And, he reasoned, if he were hiding information, others were probably seeking it. Surely the Blonger syndicate, after their failure to buy Van Cise, would be trying to find a way to burrow inside his office. So Van Cise hired someone to spy on him. He called the detective department and asked it to dispatch one of its officers to act as his investigator. When a man named Oliver Smith arrived, Van Cise beckoned him over and told him, and only him, that they were going to raid the red-light district on the twenty-eighth. “Keep that date open, because you boys will be busy.” When Van Cise began to hear of the raid through the grapevine, including from Abe Silver, the constable in Blonger’s employ, he knew he had an open line to the boss, and he began to pipe false information down into the underworld.
Van Cise next sought to widen his band of conspirators by considering where his best evidence was likely to originate. He asked the president of the First National Bank to comb through his draft register for large cash withdrawals to out-of-town men, and from that he found three more marks who agreed to provide information. Van Cise wrote to other police departments to gather photographs of known swindlers from rogues’ galleries, painstakingly matching aliases and nicknames, filling in the gaps where photographs had been removed or records expunged, eventually compiling an index of 631 bunco artists. The federal postal inspectors were unable to open any of Blonger’s mail, but they readily agreed to copy all of the information on each envelope that they delivered to him in the American Bank Building. Western Union and the Postal Telegraph Company agreed to save Blonger’s communications and produce them whenever Van Cise secured a court order. The janitor in Blonger’s building was willing to deliver the contents of Blonger’s wastebasket every single day. The local telephone company collected data on Blonger’s long-distance calls.
But more was needed. To prosecute a group of criminals on a conspiracy charge, Van Cise would have to submit airtight evidence linking them to one another and divulging each of their roles in Blonger’s corporation. It wasn’t enough to sit in his office, sifting through Blonger’s detritus for clues; he needed to penetrate Blonger’s organization and ride invisibly through it, no matter how dangerous. So Van Cise hired three private detectives from out of state. First came Arch Cooper, a lazy, sociable fellow, which made him perfect for loafing about the underworld and making friends among Blonger’s lower corps. Next came Andrew Koehn, a navy man with a photographic mind and an incredible eye for detail who was assigned to watch the executives. Last was Robert Maiden, a fearless, sometimes heedless man, who worked under Koehn to follow bunco men from the Lookout.
All three men filed daily surveillance reports in careful code, using numbers for the bunco men—Lou Blonger was number 9, and Adolph Duff was number 1—and false names for themselves. Maiden’s reports show a particular relish for the job, as well as the tedious business of incrementally collecting data without exciting the suspicion of preternaturally cautious men:
#1 and another stranger came to 17th and Arapahoe and split. #1 watched to see if any one was about. He went into McPhee and McGinnity, 1624 Arapahoe. Stayed about two minutes and went down Arapahoe to 19th and doubled back on Curtis to Champa 9. Appeared to be looking at buildings but watched everything and every body. It is impossible to get within a block of him without his attention.
Maiden haunted Loritz’s cigar store, Clayton’s diner, the newsstand at the Albany Hotel. He followed “the bunc with the undershot jaw,” “the blind bird,” “the Miami bunc.” As he wore grooves in the sidewalk, he began to decipher the map his own footsteps were drawing. “I saw the bunc that limps come out of 1515 Grant. It looks as if the entire place is a bunc hangout and I don’t believe that any mistakes would be made if the whole place was pinched.”
The Dictaphone wires continued from the attic outside the building to a telephone pole on the sidewalk and then across the street to a room that Koehn had rented as an observation post, where he could both listen in and spy on Blonger’s conversations. This perfect setup was Van Cise’s first big mistake. After two weeks of listening to monotonous, generic business conversation, Koehn was jolted awake when he heard Blonger rage to a colleague, “See that room across the street where the shades are down? The District Attorney has two detectives over there. They have a tap on my telephone and hear every word we say.” Blonger said that he’d have a friend at the telephone company check out the room across the street, and he swore if he found anything, he would sue the district attorney. Koehn scrambled to clean out the room while Van Cise called his own friend at the telephone company and arranged to have him send a friendly crew to the lookout who would neglect to find the wires from across the street.
Van Cise had violated one of the most basic principles of observation posts that he’d learned in the war: never locate them too close to the subject. For the second round in his offensive, Van Cise located the listening post around the corner and out of sight of Blonger’s office. He then constructed an authentic observation post in an old loft across the street from the American Bank Building, punching a hole in a windowless brick wall through which he fitted a telescope, then built a black-painted box around the spy hole.
The last plank in Van Cise’s campaign was to pay for it all. He couldn’t ask the city for a penny without tipping off the machine, so his only recourse was to raise a secret fund from private individuals. He drew up a list of fifty wealthy Denver philanthropists, and then he began to show that list around town, asking his fellow lawyers and bankers for testimonials on each of the men. After cross-referencing these recommendations and rejecting anyone with a single slight against his reputation, Van Cise was left with thirty-one names. One by one, he made appointments to see them in their plush lairs. He’d open the meeting with a well-rehearsed spiel about Blonger’s stranglehold on Denver civic life. He’d show the blute, a suitcase full of evidence that he’d borrowed from federal indictments against con men: documents like a $100,000 bond of the Metropolitan Bonding and Security Company, stationery stamped with the Masons’ seal, buy and sell tickets on the International Exchange, and a newspaper clipping about a young trader making a fortune at a regional brokerage house. Then Van Cise would end with the convincer, a sheaf of letters from Blonger’s marks proving that the con really did work but that the victims of the con were also the very men poised to help end it in the city of Denver. All thirty men on his list—and one woman—responded unhesitatingly by pulling out their wallets, and their donations totaled almost $15,000. A year later, a prominent businessman who had not been on the list of thirty would hear of Van Cise’s campaign and would rush into his office. “Colonel, is there anything wrong with me?” he would ask in dismay. “Haven’t I lived a long and upright life in this city? Haven’t I contributed to every worthy enterprise in the history of Denver? Why didn’t you come to me and ask me for funds? Why was I left out?” Van Cise would calmly explain that they simply hadn’t known the man well enough at the time. Somewhat mollified, the man would ask how much more money was needed to fund the sting, and he would instantly write a check for the full amount.
Though his naïveté was diminishing by the day, Van Cise still had much to learn about his enemy, and early in the conspiracy he made another costly error. Blonger’s wastebasket had yielded the information that Adolph Duff would be stopping at the Baltimore Hotel in Kansas City for a month or so. Van Cise saw an opportunity to get more information on Duff without exciting his suspicion. He wrote to his counterpart in Kansas City, explaining his secret campaign and asking that he find a pretext for detaining Duff, photographing and fingerprinting him, and then letting him go. A few days later, Blonger’s wastebasket informed him that Duff had skipped over to St. Louis, “as our friend Van Cise has all the dope.” Much later, Van Cise would learn the path of his letter: from the Kansas City district attorney, to the chief of police, to the captain of detectives, to two detectives on the squad, then to Duff himself. In just one sheet of paper, Van Cise had given up nearly his entire strategy. Luckily, it only took another sheet of paper to cover up his mistake. He wrote to the Kansas City DA again to convey the sad news that his investigation had been halted because the city council had refused to allocate the funds.
Like Norfleet before him, Van Cise soon learned to turn his ingenuousness into his biggest asset. Blonger was suspicious of Van Cise but complacent in his estimation of the district attorney’s abilities. Van Cise decided to bumble the suspicion right out of Blonger. He learned that Blonger had purchased the Anna Gould mansion, a former brothel that had been vacant for several years. The red-light district was a perennial scourge to city reformers, and so with very little exertion Van Cise cooked up a plan to get the churches to raise funds for a raid against all the whorehouses on the row. Then he called Petie Beers, owner of the A&B Taxi Company and the center of the underworld grapevine. Van Cise waved a fistful of checks from the churches and threatened to shut down the whorehouses that Beers and Blonger owned. Beers was astonished, because neither he nor Blonger owned a brothel, but he dutifully passed the threat up the hierarchy. That afternoon, Van Cise heard the result of his little scheme on the Dictaphone. Blonger said to Duff, “What do you think that goddamn fool is up to now? That fund that we thought he was raising to attack me with he is getting from the churches to shut up the row, and a fat chance he will have.” Blonger was mystified by the whole affair. “Now, how did he find that out about Beers being the tip off? That fellow is funny. I can’t make him out. At times he is right; other times he doesn’t know anything, just plain dumb.” One of the detectives on the force told Duff that there was a Dictaphone in Blonger’s office, so he and Duff tore the room apart, but when they didn’t find one, they figured the detective was only trying to squeeze them for more money.
When the swindling season approached in 1922, Van Cise’s second year in office, he began to see the effects of his campaign. That spring, a spieler approached Duff and Blonger for work, and they granted him permission but warned him that no one was likely to make much money that summer. Van Cise wouldn’t take their bribe, they told the spieler, but they would do the best they could without him. As Lou handed one of Duff’s minions the boodle for the season, he sighed and told him to try to get along with as small a bankroll as possible, only five hundred $1 bills. The summer approached, the city streets bristled with tourists and businessmen, and the chatter in the underworld increased as steerers and spielers moved back to town, ready to assume their places on the Denver stage—but the big store stayed closed. Arch Cooper met a new man in town who told him, “There is nothing doing here yet as everybody is scared to death of the D.A.” The standoff seemed to grow worse when the postal inspectors contacted Van Cise and asked his permission to nab a con man named Walter Byl
and whom they sorely wanted for a 1918 swindle, a plan that might have scared the swindlers away for the rest of the year. Van Cise soon figured out a way to work the situation to his advantage. He allowed the federal authorities to arrest Byland the instant he came to town—and then he studiously ignored him. For two weeks, Blonger let his man sweat it out in jail, until finally Duff said, “Hell, the District Attorney is dead from the neck up. If he wants any con-man, he wants Walter. And he doesn’t even know who he is. Let’s spring him.” Their lawyer posted bond, and soon Byland was free to steer for Blonger.
Then Van Cise repeated the stunt. Arch Cooper had identified the Black and White Cigar Store on Eighteenth as one of the gang’s meeting places. Conveniently, it was also a bootlegging joint, so Van Cise pulled off a nighttime raid, arresting the owner and detaining the two customers in the back with glasses raised to their lips. Luck was with him: they happened to be Audley Potts and William “the Painter Kid” Sturns, both known members of Blonger’s gang. The next morning, in their presence, Van Cise searched their wallets and found bonds from the Metropolitan Bonding and Security Company, buy and sell forms, and the rest of the usual paraphernalia. After conscientiously studying them, Van Cise turned to his associates and said, “Why, these seem to be respectable businessmen of rather large means. I see no reason to arrest them.” Later on the Dictaphone, Blonger delivered his own lines right on cue: “That fellow don’t know anything. The damn fool had both Potts and Painter, and read all their stuff, and doesn’t know a con man’s layout when he sees it. He’s just a big bag of wind, and will never get wise to anything.”