The Mark Inside

by Amy Reading

  Roy Samson, for his part, sped back downtown to the Lookout, where he encountered Louis “Thick Lips” Mushnick coming out the door. Samson pointed him back into the room with the muzzle of his gun, packaged him up with Tip Belcher, two spielers, a bookmaker, and a steerer, and sent the lot of them to the church. He swept clean every desk drawer, confiscating account books that tallied the victims’ totals and the banded stacks of the gang’s boodle, $2,108 worth of bills made to look like $135,000. Then Samson posted a Ranger and a deputy within the Lookout to apprehend any swindler who came in for his day’s orders, and throughout the afternoon they caught five more men. Samson next visited the stock exchange in the Denham Theatre building where Norfleet had earned his $201,500, but it was deserted. Other teams swooped in on swindlers’ hotel rooms and apartments. They hit the tip-off headquarters on Seventeenth Street. They plucked swindlers right off street corners as they zoomed around the city. Two men stood on Seventeenth dividing $1,400 between them when they looked up to see Van Cise’s deputies. The swindlers began to run but were caught after only a few yards. Such was life in Denver that the sight of a pair of men clutching a handful of bills being chased and caught by two other men in plain clothes caused no stir whatsoever, and no one reported the event to the police.

  As each man arrived at the church, he was first brought to the minister’s study, where five deputies sat behind a desk to book the prisoners. As the swindlers stood there, they could not help but look above the desk to a sign that displayed Psalm 1:6: “For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous, but the way of the ungodly shall perish.” Nonetheless, they breezily handed over false names and addresses along with the contents of their pockets and were not overly troubled by the obviousness of their own lies. “If your name is Bob Williams, how does it happen that your belt buckle bears the initials J.S.R.?” a Ranger asked a prisoner. “I had a very dear friend who died suddenly and his wife gave me his belt as a memento,” replied “Bob Williams” easily. The men handed over fake bonds, jewelry, keys to rooms in the city’s finest hotels, dice, playing cards, and cash. One man who claimed he was a waiter carried on him $1,312. Almost to a man, they possessed train tickets for cities like Omaha and Chicago. Each man relinquished his shoes, and some of them were further stripped of their clothes if they had tried to secrete drugs, and the Rangers collected opium, morphine, and hypodermic needles. Their possessions were placed in burlap bags, one per man, and they were each given an itemized receipt. Norfleet and two of Van Cise’s detectives sat behind a curtain to identify the swindlers without themselves being identified, and Norfleet was gratified when Mr. Zachary, the exchange secretary with the lavish mustache who’d denied him his $201,500 payout, was brought before him and identified as Len Reamey, bookmaker.

  Then the prisoners were led upstairs to the kindergarten room. As they sat in miniature red wooden chairs, Van Cise further questioned them and matched them to the photographs he’d collected from rogues’ galleries around the country. The prisoners were photographed against a brick wall, and they resisted mightily, producing some truly gruesome images. Tip Belcher looks inebriated, with his eyes closed and his mouth sagging open, and he had to be held upright by a man behind him with an arm around his neck. In Duff’s photograph, two men are restraining him as he struggles to get out of the frame. Duff’s eyes are also closed and his mouth wrenched in a grimace, revealing his gold teeth, while one man clasps his arms down and another man holds on to either side of his forehead. Lou Blonger, though, hunches calmly against the wall in his undershirt, his face in profile and his long nose pointed downward.

  After their inspection with Van Cise, the men were led down to the church’s assembly room in the basement, where a section had been roped off to corral them under the Rangers’ guns. Only when he reached the basement and saw his men penned like cattle did Blonger lose his poise. His head bowed and his muscles seemed to soften as he sank into a chair. For the rest of the afternoon, he sat alone and silent within the milling group, “like a great, gray spider spinning out his thoughts of other days,” wrote Frances Wayne, one of the Post reporters and the only woman in the room. The rest of the men soon grouped themselves by kind, and Wayne detected three distinct castes. There were five young men in the remnants of flashy clothing who looked as if they’d come from lower-class backgrounds and had something to prove. Then there was a slightly older, more sophisticated group of men who cast contemptuous glances at the five young bucks. And lastly, there were the elder statesmen who might have been mistaken for prominent businessmen in any city in America. But for all the dignity on display in the basement, there was plenty of ignominious behavior. Prisoners outnumbered guards two to one, and several men tried to sidle past the ropes and out the door, but the Rangers took a regular census and no one escaped. Others tried to buy their way out. One of Van Cise’s deputies reported that bribes ranged from $100 to $500 or “any amount asked,” not to mention jewelry and watches, if the officer would help them secure a bondsman.

  Tip Belcher, Kid Duff, and Lou Blonger on the day of the raid (photo credit 1.10)

  From out of the bustle, one diminutive figure emerged. J. Frank Norfleet descended to the church basement, grabbed a straight-backed chair along the edge of the assembly room, and proceeded to hold forth, while Frances Wayne of the Post and Eugene T. Lindberg of the Times transcribed his every word. He began at the beginning, with the fateful day in November three years previous when he encountered the Furey gang, and he brought the story right up to the present moment, a kind of practice run for his later memoirs. The transcript of Norfleet’s statement that ran in both papers perfectly matches his book—except for one embellishment. When one of the reporters asked Norfleet how he was paying for his manhunt, given the financial embarrassments into which the Furey gang had placed him, Norfleet replied, “Why, I put over a deal in California while I was out there first looking for Furey at San Bernardino. I cleared $100,000 on the deal, and that’s how I got the money to keep up the chase.” He tossed off this detail, never to be repeated or elaborated, exactly like a con man bragging about taking off the touch.

  Despite all the reporters milling about the assembly room, not a single word about Van Cise, Blonger, or Norfleet was published in the newspapers that day. Van Cise’s campaign to exclude the press from the sting had worked right up to the midnight before the raid, when an anonymous caller telephoned Forbes Parkhill of the Post and told him, “The Rangers are coming to town early in the morning.” Parkhill thought the call referred to the Industrial Workers of the World, whom the commanding officer of the Rangers, Colonel Patrick Hamrock, had lately taken to denouncing. Parkhill headed to the capitol building first thing the next morning, and as he lingered in the halls, he noticed a number of the district attorney’s staffers, all of whom fled before his approach. He overheard one of the deputies say on the phone, “I’ll see you at the church.” Finally he confronted Colonel Hamrock, and when the colonel steadfastly turned away all his questions, telling Parkhill that it was “Van Cise’s party,” the reporter tried a bluff. “If you won’t play ball with the Post,” he said, “I’ll have to go out to the church myself.” Colonel Hamrock blanched. Afraid that Van Cise would think he tipped Parkhill off, he decided his safest course was to bring Parkhill to the church himself, and thus Parkhill gained exclusive access to the headquarters of the raid as it progressed.

  But Van Cise forestalled the biggest scoop of the reporter’s career by calling up the paper’s managing editor, summoning him to the church, and persuading him to hold the story off for one day so he could net as many swindlers as possible. Meanwhile, a reporter from the Times overheard Parkhill on the phone say, “I’ll be at the Universalist Church,” so the process repeated itself, with a reporter demanding access to the raid and Van Cise calling his managing editor to beg for another day of silence. The next day, August 25, 1922, both papers splashed banner headlines above the masthead and told the story of the raid from several different angles. “When the
first reports of the wholesale arrests spread thru Denver this morning the whole city gasped,” wrote the Times, “as people recognized in the prisoners friends and acquaintances who posed as brokers, capitalists, planters and other persons of wealth, firmly intrenched in magnificent houses and secure social positions.” Two days later, the Rocky Mountain News criticized the Post for omitting Lou Blonger’s name from the list of prisoners in the church jail and noted Blonger’s friendship with Tammen, but regular readers might have interpreted this as professional jealousy, for the News had missed the raid entirely. Many years later, Parkhill admitted that Tammen had ordered Blonger’s name suppressed at first, but the very next day the story was too big to continue that practice, and the Post became the most complete source for the turmoil into which Van Cise had plunged the city of Denver.

  Thirty-four of the city’s busiest swindlers, including the kingpin and his lieutenant, were captured on that mild summer day. Despite Van Cise’s efforts to place an airtight seal around the operations, word of the raid did leak out as the day progressed, and a few dozen con men escaped the Rangers and deputies. That morning, as Norfleet paraded one of his men through the lobby of the Metropole, he attracted the notice of a man loafing in the corner, a former city detective who’d recently finished serving jail time for blackmail and robbery. The ex-convict recognized the man in cuffs and called in the tip to the police station, which then called Blonger’s office. The phone in the Lookout also got quite a workout that day, because that afternoon, when the swindlers’ wives and girlfriends hadn’t heard from them, they began to call Duff and Belcher, and when they couldn’t get either man on the phone, they began to call each other, sounding the alarm. Van Cise estimated that about forty swindlers evaded arrest.

  Robert Maiden, in his zeal to scoop up swindlers from the sidewalks around the capitol, had arrested three innocent men, and they were let go. One of the men, a shoe clerk from Parkersburg, West Virginia, was guilty of nothing more than reading a letter from his wife on a bench near the capitol. He managed to escape the car at Sixteenth and Broadway but was chased by two Rangers, cuffed in the ear hard enough to draw blood, and dragged back into custody. That night the newspaper called him a “desperate character.” He was forced to spend the night with the bunco prisoners before his identity was obtained and he was let go with a curt apology from the district attorney. But on the positive side of the ledger, at least five marks escaped the penultimate act of the big con in which the touch is taken. They’d gone home to fetch their money in amounts ranging from $5,000 to $50,000, when the raid prevented them from handing it over and proceeding to the blow-off. At the end of the day, the prisoners were divided into two groups and sent to the county jails in the nearby towns of Golden and Brighton. Van Cise had one more major target on his list and wasn’t going to take the chance of lodging his guests at the Denver County Jail.

  For the second straight night, Van Cise went without sleep. He had been combing through Kid Duff’s memo book when he saw the following notation: “Call French at Estes Park.” Jackie French, the Beau Brummell of the bunco men, was one of the swindlers Van Cise wanted badly, a bookmaker who had one famous week in February 1922 when he made $120,000 from one mark, $200,000 from another, and $25,000 from a third. After the last of the Denver bunco men were secured, Van Cise and Roy Samson drove to Estes Park with a couple of Rangers, and at three o’clock in the morning they found French at the Stanley Hotel, the fanciest place in town, along with at least $2,000 worth of diamond jewelry. In the predawn hours, French was reunited with his Denver colleagues, while Van Cise headed downtown to prepare for the arraignments the next morning.

  Norfleet was only too glad not to return to the Metropole on the evening of the raid. He checked into the Columbia Hotel, where he planned to stay as long as Van Cise needed him for the criminal proceedings against the Blonger gang. His three most recent antagonists, Davis, Miller, and Zachary had been unmasked as Felix, Cooper, and Reamey and were locked up behind bonds of $25,000 apiece. But Norfleet began to get antsy. Glad as he was to help cripple the bunco operations for the entire city of Denver, those men were never his targets. Norfleet came to Colorado in search of W. B. Spencer, but he was not one of the men scooped up in the raid. Norfleet had no doubt that any of the men now behind bars could lead him to Spencer. The interrelatedness of the bunco network was everywhere on view in the documents that Van Cise had seized. Duff’s little memorandum book contained Charles Gerber’s address, and the district attorney’s team counted Gerber as one of the men who got away, before they realized a few days later that Norfleet had long ago sent him to the Texas penitentiary. Though he had never met Duff before, Norfleet decided he was his man.

  He read in the newspapers that Blonger and Duff, alone among the thirty-four men, had been able to post bond and would be released the next day. Patrick “Red” Gallagher, another one of those men who is “well-known in sporting circles,” pledged half of his interest in the Lewiston Hotel as security for the bonds, and the courts waived the requirement that each criminal supply two bondsmen. Norfleet stationed himself outside the jail, and as Duff emerged with Gallagher, he moved in and, without bothering to introduce himself, asked, “Do you think Spencer is worth all of this tribe we have taken in, and all the others I’ll get while I’m hunting for him?” Norfleet says Duff was aghast at the idea that the entire raid might have been avoided had Norfleet located Spencer. “My God!” he burst out. “Why didn’t you come to me, Norfleet, and tell me what you wanted. If you had come to me first you could have had your man and your money back within three days!” Gallagher glared at him meaningfully, but Duff went on to say that the last he’d heard, Spencer was staying at the Empire Hotel, run by a woman named Mrs. Franklin.

  Norfleet thanked him courteously, then dashed over to the Empire, only to learn that Spencer had checked out the morning of the raid. Later, he would find out that Spencer had actually been detained in the middle of August by city detectives while working in an unsanctioned part of town. They were about to take him in, when Duff walked by. “He’s all right,” Duff informed them. “He’s working for Blonger and me in our mines and is a pretty good fellow, but doesn’t know much.” Yet somehow he knew enough to avoid Van Cise’s men a few days later. But Mrs. Franklin had a consolation prize for Norfleet. Spencer had left behind his suitcase with a note instructing her to forward it to him in Salina, Kansas. The suitcase was stocked with the usual con man paraphernalia, labeled everywhere with the name of Harris, the same name Spencer had used with Norfleet three years previously in Dallas. And there, amid the papers, was Norfleet’s gun, missing since Spencer had confiscated it in the Westbrook Hotel in Fort Worth. Curiously, Norfleet does not mention being reunited with his gun in his memoirs; the detail only appears in Van Cise’s book. Norfleet left for Salina that very night.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Pure Speculation

  From The New York Times to The Oakland Tribune, the nation’s newspapers trumpeted the smashing of Lou Blonger’s swindling ring. “Bunko Trust Broken When Arrests Made,” they cried. “Supposed ‘Sucker’ Traps Swindlers.” The joyful headlines were tempered by a fair bit of background exposition within the articles themselves, because no one outside of Denver had heard of Blonger. But everyone had heard of Norfleet, and he cast a long shadow over the ostensible protagonist and villain of the drama. The Denver Post portrayed Philip Van Cise as the hero, but newspapers outside of Colorado focused almost exclusively on Norfleet, and Van Cise seemed only too happy to shift attention away from himself. “They picked the wrong bird for plucking when they picked Norfleet,” he said in his statement to the national press. “They tried to work a $50,000 swindle on the man who caught Joe Furey.” Two days after the raid, Norfleet gave a statement of his own to answer the question that was, apparently, on America’s lips: What would be next for the famous manhunter? Why, he’d keep at it, of course. “I know 24 men in Texas and elsewhere who have been robbed, broken-hearted, and some have
died because of the villainy of these confidence men,” he said. “Somebody’s got to fight them to a finish and I’m the man that’s willing to do it.” Norfleet was by now issuing his comments with a showman’s flair. He looked forward to the day when the quest was over, he told reporters, and he could return home to “let Ma make a fuss over me and feed me some of those biscuits and waffles and corn pone and baked ham that Ward and Gerber ate before they took us in to the tune of $45,000.”

  It was shameless, really, the way Norfleet pandered to his audience. Already by 1922, the script for Norfleet’s drama was as established as Blonger’s swindling script, and Norfleet fully inhabited the role of the good guy who had snared the charismatic outlaw, a kind of white-collar cops-and-robbers tale. He was a descendant of the Pinkerton detective and an ancestor to the G-men and the hard-boiled detectives. And he was a cousin to the stockbroker, a figure very much on the minds of readers in the 1920s for whom the new era of high finance was a frontier as untamed as the West.

  The newspaper readers who sat in their armchairs and thrilled to Norfleet’s dangerous deeds could defend their interest in his racy story by the notion that the telling of the tale itself extracted a further measure of justice, because broadcasting their swindling methods in the newspapers warned away potential victims of future cons. Based on this very logic, the 1920s witnessed an explosion of articles about confidence artistry, especially in the monthly magazines that catered to middle-class readers. Suddenly, like never before in American culture, confidence artistry became an urgent and endlessly fascinating topic of conversation. Virtually every issue of The Saturday Evening Post or McClure’s contained an article from a state attorney general exposing the latest fashion in financial chicanery, or a confession from an anonymous mark about how easily his confidence had been purloined. Each one of these articles was framed as an object lesson in what to avoid. After all, as the business editor of The World’s Work observed, “If there is one thing that financial crooks fear more than an active, conscientious officer of the law it is the light of publicity.” Yet if that were true, why were so many financial crooks publishing their tell-all memoirs at precisely the same time that Norfleet was unearthing them from their dens?