by Amy Reading
Only one thing was left to do. Van Cise abandoned the scene. Or at least he loudly announced to various city officials that as he had not had a break since he took office, he would take advantage of the fine weather to spend a month in the mountains, far from the reach of telephones and telegrams. In truth, he was holed up in a mountain resort sixty miles away, in constant communication via mail, telephone, and wire. As a bonus, his assistant Kenneth Robinson had persuaded one of their wealthy patrons to give him the use of his Packard, and he was able to make regular deliveries of the documents and reports that Van Cise needed.
The deception worked perfectly. Within days of Van Cise’s departure, the underworld passed along a message: the season would open on July 26, and the new Lookout would be at 729 Seventeenth Street. Suddenly Blonger’s schedule was booked solid with meetings with police captains and Hal Crane, the deputy sheriff, in his office, and the mayor and the manager of safety at city hall. The bunco hangouts were thronged; on one day alone Andy Koehn trailed twenty-three swindlers to their various hotel rooms and boardinghouses. Van Cise’s heart gladdened to hear that Duff and Tip Belcher had been spotted outside the Denham Theatre building handing out checks to their crew. They must be feeling safe to be so brazen, and the money must be flowing.
In his mountain hideaway, Van Cise was as busy as Blonger. Once again, he marshaled his military expertise to design a plan for what he began to call D-day and H-hour, the moment so long in coming when he could swoop in and arrest Blonger and his entire gang. He was confident that he possessed enough evidence to tie the men together. All that he needed, the last merest detail, was evidence tying them to the business of swindling. He must catch them in flagrante delicto. With his growing powers of persuasion, Van Cise recruited two men to pose as suckers, a Houston lumber dealer named Hoxie Thompson and a wealthy Nebraska farmer named J. W. Bryan. Van Cise instructed them to act conspicuously like themselves in all the preferred con man fishing grounds. As soon as one or both men snared a bunco team, Van Cise would name D-day and H-hour.
Van Cise called up the governor of Colorado and divulged the entire plan to him. Governor Oliver Shoup then gave him command of fifteen Colorado Rangers, who would aid Van Cise’s deputies in making simultaneous arrests at Blonger’s office, the Lookout, the fake exchanges, and the cigar stores and lunch counters. Van Cise tapped a handful of World War I veterans to serve as drivers. And then he cast around for a jail in which to house his charges. The city jail would never do; as soon as the first prisoner arrived, the tip-off would go out, the swindlers would vanish, and the raid would be over before the day had gotten started. Van Cise thought about it for all of three seconds before the solution came to him: his church. The First Universalist Church at Colfax and Lafayette was temporarily closed and without a minister. No one would think to look for Blonger and his corporation at the First Universalist. With that final detail, the trap was set, and Van Cise was poised to pounce on the Denver underworld with one terse phone call.
That’s when Norfleet strode into town.
CHAPTER TEN
The Raid
Tap, tap, tap. As Norfleet hobbled down the street, his back hunched over and one hand clutched to his hip, the sound of his cane on the pavement echoed the sound of another cane behind him. Without looking, Norfleet knew he’d succeeded in drawing the attention of Bill Mooney, a veteran of the swindling fraternity whom he had recognized by the deep scar on his cheek, visible even underneath the blue-tinted glasses he’d adopted in his disguise as a blind man. Walking slowly to ensure he didn’t outpace Mooney, Norfleet made his way toward the post office. He was careful to keep his hand on his concealed gun and his Panama hat on his shaggy bowl cut. Norfleet approached the general delivery window, and as soon as Mooney was in earshot, he squeaked out in a high voice, “Any mail for L. A. Mulligan?”
There wasn’t, of course, so Norfleet headed back out to the street. He stopped by the entrance and waited as his follower emerged, passed him, and made his own way down the street. In only minutes, the Denver underground would learn that a new mark had arrived in town.
Norfleet hadn’t even left the vicinity of the post office before the first steerer approached him. Norfleet recognized him, too: Fred Soloman, an especially smiley representative of the tribe who introduced himself as Whatley. Norfleet responded with his own pseudonym and an elaborate personal history that touched on all the important points: his background as a hick cotton grower in Ferris, Texas, the black gold under his fields, his wife back home ready to sign a lease to an oil company. That afternoon, each man parted from the other satisfied that he’d performed his role well. Norfleet felt he’d learned enough about the Denver crew to warrant calling Colonel Van Cise on his secret emergency telephone line. It was the least he could do for the district attorney and his covert campaign against the bunco men.
When Van Cise first met J. Frank Norfleet, he was decidedly underwhelmed. He had, of course, heard of the Texas sleuth—everyone had. They had even exchanged letters when Van Cise had taken office, and Norfleet had helped him understand the complex network of bunco artists that stretched across the nation. Van Cise was expecting a “he-man,” but, as he later wrote, “Norfleet did not look the part. Instead of the steely gray eyes of fiction, he had watery blue ones. Instead of the powerful, crushing grip, he had a soft and flaccid paw. Instead of being tall and broad-shouldered, he was a little fellow about five feet six inches tall, weighing about one hundred and twenty-five pounds, and had a soft, drawling Texas voice.”
Norfleet had sneaked into Denver, just as Captain Bruce of Colorado Springs had begged him not to do, and he had made a beeline for the district attorney’s office. His plan was to contribute his expertise to the sting in return for first dibs on W. B. Spencer, should he be unearthed in town. But Norfleet found the DA’s team harder to crack than a swindling syndicate. First he met Roy Samson, the former superintendent of the FBI who had resigned his post to join Van Cise’s team. Samson spirited Norfleet down to a room in the basement of his office building and wasted no time telling him, “For God’s sake keep out of sight. If the con men find you are here, you will spoil the work of fifteen months.” Samson promised Norfleet that he’d find Spencer for him, but only if Norfleet would agree to their conditions: “Don’t go out-of-doors in the daytime, and if you go around at night, keep off the main streets and out of leading hotels.”
When Van Cise finally granted him an audience, it was only to further tighten the restrictions on his movements. Van Cise ordered him to stay away from the district attorney’s office, the hotels, the Civic Center, and the capitol grounds. He was expressly forbidden to speak to any police officers, almost none of whom could be trusted. If Van Cise could have found a pretext for locking Norfleet up, he might have. Instead, he gave Norfleet a secret telephone number only to be used in an extreme emergency. Under no circumstances should Norfleet communicate with him through normal channels. And with that, Van Cise let him out of his sight, assuming he’d lie low. Norfleet had neglected to mention anything about a Mr. L. A. Mulligan.
But that August day in 1922, when he heard Norfleet’s voice on the line, Van Cise had to admit that Norfleet was onto something. Van Cise’s phony marks had been fishing for weeks without catching any swindlers, and here Norfleet had caught two with his first cast, making him instantly indispensable. Van Cise invited him to a planning meeting of the sting operation that night at Roy Samson’s home. The entire team was there, and they were thrilled to hear of Norfleet’s success. They gave Norfleet full permission to carry on with his con, and everyone recognized that the power dynamic within their team had flipped: now Norfleet had the upper hand. As Norfleet later wrote, “I offered my services to them under the condition that I be allowed a free rein and an unrestricted hand in dealing with the situation. I made it clear that I wished to act on my own judgment entirely, but would depend upon their support when the time came.”
It’s tempting to speculate on what Van Cise might ha
ve felt when he realized how much he depended on the famous rancher, so fired up with his own righteous fury and so confident in his ability to outsmart the sharpest of the nation’s criminals. When he published his own memoir in 1936, fourteen years after D-day and twelve years after Norfleet’s own autobiography, Van Cise was scrupulously professional when describing this moment, calling Norfleet’s arrival “the greatest kind of luck” and lauding Norfleet for being “as brave and fearless a man as ever rode the Western plains.” But Van Cise’s memoir does not quite interlock with Norfleet’s to form a seamless whole in their relation of the events that August, and their points of difference, though minuscule, tell their own story of a tussle for ownership over the operation.
Van Cise claims, for instance, that he stripped Norfleet of his guns before sending him back out in disguise, because he was unwilling to risk that the ever-meticulous Denver police would detain him for concealing a weapon. Van Cise writes that Norfleet entered the swindlers’ game the next day “as helpless as a child.” Norfleet, for his part, says he was armed to the teeth. Surely, knowing what he did about the Furey gang and what they would have done to him in Florida, Norfleet carried a gun, and just as surely he lied about it to the man who would be his colonel.
On their most picayune disagreement—really, just a pen stroke of difference between the two accounts—it is Norfleet who must be doubted. Throughout his autobiography, Norfleet refers to the alias he used in the sting as “Mulligan,” but in Van Cise’s memoir the name is “Mullican.” Van Cise saved a note that Norfleet scribbled to him during the sting: it is signed “Mullican.” Perhaps Norfleet simply had trouble remembering his alias. Or perhaps Norfleet changed his pseudonym ever so slightly from an unusual name to a more generic one because, back in June 1920, six months after he was swindled, he had sold seventy-seven hundred acres from his ranch to recoup his losses, and his buyers were W. M. Mullican, Lon A. Mullican, and Clark M. Mullican. Norfleet did not want his autobiography to reveal that when he was casting about for a country bumpkin to impersonate, he settled on the fine personage of L. A. Mullican. Yet in most respects Van Cise’s memoir and the documents that have survived from his long surveillance agree with and sometimes amplify Norfleet’s story.
Norfleet’s sting properly began the next morning, when he put on his bunchy suit and his too-small Panama hat and headed for the Brown Palace Hotel on Seventeenth Street, the elegant anchor of the city’s business district and the main pond in which the steerers fished. Robert Maiden, one of Van Cise’s private detectives, was watching him, and he recorded in his surveillance notes that Norfleet first entered the Brown Palace on August 22, 1922, at 11:10 a.m.
As soon as he did, Norfleet saw a steerer lounging in a club chair, but first he would play his big entrance to the hilt. He walked into the atrium under the stained-glass ceiling eight stories above him, a room that had held royals, millionaires, and Roosevelts. He stood for a moment in his homespun shagginess, letting his incongruity sharpen, and then he pounced on a man who had just entered the atrium with his two young daughters.
“Well, well, I thought I knowed you,” Norfleet exclaimed, pumping his hand. “You’re Mr. Woolridge from down my way in Texas, ain’t you?” But the man laughed and said that no, he was Jennings from Nebraska, and he took his leave, shepherding his girls through the tables of ladies sipping tea. It was enough. Norfleet heard a voice with a familiar twang behind him.
“Are you looking for someone? May I help you, sir? You seem to be a stranger!” He turned to see a sleek, dark-haired businessman with a neatly trimmed mustache. From his years of studying rogues’ galleries, Norfleet knew him to be Leon Felix, but the man introduced himself as A. C. Davis from—wouldn’t you know it?—Houston, Texas. He guided Norfleet over to the front desk, and together they ascertained that Mr. Woolridge had not yet checked in. Felix took Norfleet by the arm and steered him out of the hotel to an elegant Cadillac parked on Seventeenth Street. “Guess we Texans will have to throw in together,” he said, and he offered his services as a tour guide for the lonely cotton grower so far from home. For the rest of the day, as they laced through city parks, museums, and the zoo, Felix gently pumped Norfleet for information like an oil rigger relentlessly performing its job of extraction. Norfleet took the first opportunity to fumble out of his pocket the letter he’d forged from his wife: “The drillers have struck oil in the corner of our field. They have quit drilling, and the company is leasing every acre of land they can get around this well. I am now holding down a lease on 236 acres of our land with my signature and I recommend that you come home at once and sign this lease so we can get the money and then you can go back to Denver and stay as long as you please.” He could almost see the calculations behind Felix’s eyes as he read the letter.
It wasn’t until the next day that Felix began to turn the conversation toward himself. On a drive up to Lookout Mountain, Felix declared, “It’s too slow waiting for your money to grow. Not for me. I like mine quick!” Out came the scripted story of the reckless young speculator on the stock market, the judge who helped him with a side deal, the thousands of dollars in frictionless profit. As they returned to town, Felix parked the car under a shade tree near the capitol to finish his story.
Norfleet looked down the street. Yes, there was the next character in the drama, a man who he would later learn was named Arthur Cooper. Seconds later, Felix seized his arm and pointed urgently at Cooper, walking toward them with his face buried in a bouquet of yellow telegrams, a tall, blond fellow in a crisp blue coat, white flannel trousers, straw hat, and an enormous diamond stickpin that glinted in the afternoon sun. The instant he passed the Cadillac, Felix whispered hoarsely, “Speak of the devil, and his image appears! There he is—the mysterious stranger. I can hardly believe my eyes. But it is true!”
Norfleet, mustering all the cornpone he had inside him, shouted, “Tackle him! Tackle him! Find out how he does it! Get him to learn you how.”
Cooper was letter-perfect as he huffily rebuked them and then softened when he realized they were friends whom he could trust. He introduced himself as P. J. Miller, and only minutes later the three men were headed to the exchange, an imposing brick building at the corner of Eighteenth and California. Cooper took $40 of Felix’s money and transmuted it into $120, then invited them into the sanctum. There Norfleet was introduced to the third player, the secretary of the exchange, a Mr. Zachary, whom he did not recognize but whose inky-black hair, florid complexion, and extravagant waxed mustache would be easy to remember. At the end of the afternoon, Zachary counted out $201,500 into Norfleet’s arms, then just as quickly repossessed it and sent the three men on their way.
From this moment onward, Norfleet knew, few of his experiences would be routine. The swindling script would continue to structure his relationship with Felix and Cooper, but he would simultaneously need to record every detail as evidence for Van Cise and be prepared to improvise his way out of a situation that was rapidly seeming like captivity.
Norfleet counted his steps as he was ushered into a nondescript hotel somewhere in downtown Denver. Thirty-one paces from the front door to the stairs at the rear. The stairs turned to the left, then deposited him at a landing and an elevator. Up to the third floor, down a corridor utterly lacking in identifying details, to room 310. Norfleet burned the map into his mind. They entered a large room, comfortably furnished for the three men, with an adjoining bathroom. There was a folding bed just to the left of the main door. If Norfleet took that bed, he would be hidden from anyone entering the room until the door was closed. Norfleet casually strode to the window. Outside, he saw the back of the Brown Palace Hotel, as well as several billboards. He added them to his mental map.
The men settled into the room, and Norfleet sat patiently as the two swindlers began to give him the breakdown. Cooper told him about a rich uncle who could lend them the entire $100,000 needed to bail out Norfleet’s winnings, and Felix jumped in to say that if that idea didn’t pan out, he had
$50,000 worth of Liberty Bonds to lend to the cause. Just then, they heard cries of “Extra! Extra!” floating up from the street. Felix fetched a newspaper, and the three of them crowded around to read the breaking news. Felix and Cooper were disappointed to learn that it was only the latest installment of the labor dispute unfolding in the Colorado coalfields. The governor believed that a riot was about to erupt, and so he had sent the Rangers out to quell the uprising. Felix and Cooper returned to their unpacking, but the news ratcheted up Norfleet’s inner turmoil by a few more notches. Those Rangers were supposed to come to his rescue in a few days. The governor had just commandeered his saviors.
With the appetites of innocents, Felix and Cooper made plans for dinner. They contrived to eat in shifts, one man guarding Norfleet in the room while the other ducked outside. When Felix brought him back a sandwich, Norfleet was catapulted into a new bind. He could not eat the sandwich for fear of poison, but he could not be seen to distrust his friends. Thinking quickly, he improvised a toothache, which provided him the excuse he needed to bring the long summer day to a close. There he was on the bed, a forlorn Texas hick with an agonizing toothache, and underneath that, a hardened rancher with an outsize grudge. And underneath that? Did Norfleet lie there and think about how he might someday narrate this moment? After all, it doesn’t make sense that the men trying to extract money from him would poison him before he’d even sent home for the cash. Certainly his life would have been in danger had they known his true identity. But death by poisoning was unlikely at this stage of the script. Norfleet’s narration prompts the suspicion that he amplified his own personal danger in order to charge heroically out of it. Van Cise’s version lends credence to this suspicion. He says that he gave Norfleet precise instructions to fake a toothache and get in touch with the district attorney from the office of Dr. William Smedley of the Smedley Dental Group later in the week. The other patients sitting in the waiting room would, in reality, be Van Cise’s men, planted there to identify the swindlers. Norfleet’s flash of genius was preordained by Van Cise.