by Amy Reading
Nonetheless, the Blonger ring’s defense counsel seemed to succeed only in alienating the spectators, the press, and the judge with its age-old tactics. Hawkins and Crump objected to the state’s every word and introduced frivolous motions to exhaust time, money, and patience; then they grew fiery with righteousness whenever the prosecution made a procedural move, arguing passionately for the defendants’ right to a speedy trial. When Judge Dunklee finally broke his impassivity to rebuke the defense counsel for its unprofessional conduct, the spectators in the courtroom exploded with cheers, whistles, applause, and foot stomping. The uproar lasted for several minutes, until finally the judge ordered the courtroom cleared for the rest of the day. The bailiffs pulled out their billy clubs, but the crowd obediently shuffled out on its own, content to have expressed its pent-up feelings.
The bunco trial was turning out to be a good show after all, despite its repetitiveness. Sucker after sucker climbed onto the witness chair and spun out his story, at once improbable and increasingly commonplace. The spectators enjoyed the contrast between the different men on the stand: Simon Oppenheimer, a New York city resident who almost lost $50,000 to the swindlers, but who lost not a particle of dignity in his battle of wits with the defense counsel; Alfred Schedin, a Minnesota carpenter whose simplicity and honesty contrasted with Oppenheimer’s shrewdness and who seemed especially to touch the audience with his pathos; C. E. Henson, a dentist from Oklahoma who lost $25,000 and then gave his last $200 to one of his swindlers to pay his expenses back home. Several moving picture house proprietors began to complain that they were losing too much business to the bunco trial.
Two weeks into the trial, J. Frank Norfleet, “nemesis of the speakeasy gentry,” took the stand, sans glasses and mustache. While the special prosecutors spent a few minutes organizing the exhibits they planned to have him identify, Norfleet leaned forward from the witness stand with calm intensity to peer at the defendants. The bunco men averted their faces and squirmed away as he scrutinized their faces and filed them in his mental database. Finally, Special Prosecutor White began direct examination. “Thrill followed thrill,” reported The Denver Post, “as he related the crucial moves in his vendetta against the facile-tongued parasites of society,” his disguise, the letter written in the bath, the fake toothache, and the self-inflicted vomiting. The defense counsel objected to every exhibit and every other word, but the judge overruled them. Their only success came when they prevented Norfleet from testifying as to why he held such an overlarge hatred of confidence men in general, thus blocking his story of the Furey gang and limiting his answers to his time in Denver.
It wasn’t until his second and final day of testimony, when Horace Hawkins cross-examined him, that Norfleet had occasion to reach for his gun—and Hawkins followed suit. The two men stood up, each with his right hand in his pocket, and edged toward each other. But it was only a bit of stage play. Hawkins asked Norfleet to reenact his arrest of Arthur B. Cooper, the inaugural act of the raid, and if there was a touch of real menace under the campy gesture, it was purely one-sided, as Norfleet remained perfectly jovial in the headwind of Hawkins’s invective. The defense counsel’s strategy toward Norfleet was to impugn, deride, and besmear the deceit he had practiced upon the unsuspecting swindlers in an attempt to discredit the arrests. Norfleet deflected the defense’s most forceful arrows simply by agreeing that he’d lied his way into the swindlers’ confidence. All that the defense had accomplished in their cross-examination, his amiable replies seemed to say, was to prove that deception was odious.
And then Norfleet left Denver and returned to zooming across the continent in search of Spencer, while the bunco trial wheeled slowly into its third week, and then its fourth. Norfleet was one of the last suckers to testify, and each of the ropers and spielers had been enmeshed in the web created by the overlapping testimony of so many victims. Only now did the prosecution begin to enfold Blonger and Duff—whom the Post had taken to calling “Blue” Blonger and Adolph “Bluff”—by calling upon hotel proprietors, Western Union officials, and letter carriers to link the co-conspirators to the everyday activities of their crew. The trial entered its fifth week, then its sixth. On the day that Van Cise’s deputy Fred Sanborn testified to finding a check in Lou Blonger’s desk for $39.77 made out to W. W. Arnett, a local agent of the federal department of justice, the jury shrugged and sent one of its members to the judge to ask him to speed up the trial. The next day, another jury man approached the bench with an even stronger version of the same plea. The trial entered its seventh week, a state record.
Every last person in Denver sat up a little straighter at noon on March 8th. The prisoner dock, a row of benches behind the witness stand that had been used as additional seating for spectators in the crowded courtroom, was suddenly cleared. Sheriff Doc Dawson escorted a slight man with narrow shoulders and a long face onto the stand, past twenty pairs of glaring eyes behind the defense counsel’s table. As the audience stood up to get a better view of him, Sheriff Dawson took up a post behind the witness and stared hard back at the audience. So the rumor that had been circulating for weeks was true: Van Cise had flipped one of the bunco men. Special Prosecutor Riddle stepped up and asked the witness to identify himself. “George L. Reamey,” he answered, and that was all he managed to say for the rest of the day. The defense attorneys instantly objected to his presence on the witness stand, and for the next three hours and forty minutes lawyers for both sides presented intricate arguments for and against his testimony.
George L. Reamey was known to his friends as Len, and to his marks as Mr. Ross, Sprague, Bracken, Brown, Turner, or Rogers. Norfleet knew him as Zachary, the extravagantly mustachioed exchange secretary who had worked with Felix and Cooper. The rumor was that Reamey was sore at Blonger for refusing to post his bail; after five years of faithful service, he felt he deserved more. And so he instructed his wife, a tall, good-looking brunette from an honest background, to phone Van Cise and offer up his testimony in exchange for immunity.
The district attorney had received many such overtures in the months after the arrests, what he called “an interesting but highly secret game developed on the part of the wives to see which one could first obtain the ear of the District Attorney.” Some of the wives carried genuine propositions from their husbands; others tried to entice Van Cise into a compromising romantic situation. He declined all such proposals, until the phone call from Mrs. Reamey. She said her husband was one of the senior members of the conglomerate, and she was so demure and so exact in her statements on the phone that Van Cise brought her to his home. He interrogated her for two hours, then sent her away with a list of questions for her husband, hoping the answers would tally with what he already knew from the Dictaphone. For two weeks, Mrs. Reamey visited her husband in jail and clandestinely procured information for the district attorney. At last, Van Cise was able to accept Reamey’s offer to turn state’s evidence. He sent Mrs. Reamey out of town, waited twenty-four hours to ensure her safety, and then brought Len Reamey to his office for his first official interview, returning him that night to a special guarded cell. As a bookmaker, Reamey was just beneath Jackie French in the hierarchy, and he was privy to almost every swindle that threaded through the fake betting parlors and stockbrokerages at the heart of the big con. He was present in the Lookout every time a mark’s touch was divvied up. He could supply the inside story on nearly every tale that the parade of marks had already told on the witness stand.
The defense counsel argued that Reamey could not testify as a prosecution witness until the charges against him had been dismissed and he had been freed. The special prosecutors countered that they could not risk turning him loose. The reason they maintained the charges against him and kept him in jail was for his own safety; the very second he left their protection, he’d be subject to threats, intimidation, or worse. At the end of the afternoon, Judge Dunklee agreed with the prosecution and cleared Reamey to testify the next day.
The courtroom was
, if possible, even more crowded on March 9th, with spectators standing against the walls and in the aisles, riveted to the sound of Reamey’s thin but unwavering voice. The audience’s rapt attention struck some in the crowd as an opportunity, and hats and watches vanished that day. Duff leaned forward and hooked his chin on Attorney Hawkins’s shoulder from behind, staring at Reamey with his jaw relentlessly chewing something, while Reamey proceeded to hand him over to the jury. He said that Duff had put him to work as a steerer when he had first arrived in Denver in 1918. In 1921, Duff opened his own store in Kansas City and Jackie French ran it, coaching Reamey to be a bookmaker. That season, he booked three marks for free to prove his mettle, then he took the touch off fourteen more marks, and soon he was promoted up the hierarchy in Denver. Whenever Reamey related part of his bookmaker’s script, his voice would speed up and flatten to a monotone, and the special prosecutors would have to ask him to slow down; the defense counsel complained that he sounded like a phonograph. He gave the big con a new name. It was a tripartite drama of three acts: steerers “bringem,” spielers “bunkem,” and bookmakers “bouncem.” The “tricky twenty” glared at him minute by minute, and they swore at him as he entered and exited the courtroom during recesses, always accompanied by at least two armed guards, but he never lost his composure, and he never faltered in the relation of his story.
Throughout Reamey’s testimony, Blonger leaned impassively against the railing of the prisoner dock, and for the first three days his name was mentioned but once. His turn came on Reamey’s fourth day on the stand, and the bookmaker’s testimony was the first that directly implicated Blonger in the state’s case. He said it was Blonger who brought him back to Denver that year, after years of proving himself under Duff. He described running into Blonger in a hotel lobby in Hot Springs, Arkansas, early in 1922. He asked if the store would be open that season, and Blonger replied, “Sure, come on out,” offering Reamey 5 percent of every swindle he booked for them. He told how, at the opening of the store, Duff sent him over to Blonger’s office and instructed him to park across the street and honk his horn twice; Blonger then emerged from the building and handed Reamey the boodle, $500 in $1 bills.
Reamey then methodically ran down through the calendar, cataloging each swindle that occurred, year by year, and mapping out how the Blonger organization had split the money in each case. At last, Reamey was revealed as the source for the list that Van Cise had published the previous October which totaled Blonger’s profits at half a million dollars. He also revealed the backstory of another list, the running tally of Denver swindlers that Van Cise and his crew had drawn up the night before the raid, only to discover it on Duff’s person the next morning. Reamey said Duff got it from Blonger, who obtained it from a Denver detective named George Sanders, who’d received it from a police officer in Colorado Springs, where Van Cise had sent an earlier draft to his good friend Captain Bruce. The existence of the list had not troubled Duff and Blonger, Reamey asserted. They had assumed the police would alert them as soon as Van Cise was ready to make a move, and they could simply go undercover.
Reamey gave the flip side of the swindles that the jury had heard about from the marks. The defense could do little to stop the flow of damaging testimony. “The phonograph is revolving again,” complained Horace Hawkins when Reamey launched into yet another version of his spiel, but Judge Dunklee snapped back, “It is improper to refer to the testimony of the witness as a phonograph. If it is a fact that they did use the same language and make the same talk every time, then it would sound like playing the same record on a phonograph.” Hawkins’s objection was overruled.
Reamey testified for six devastating days, and he was a paragon of calmness—until the cross-examination. As if admitting defeat, the defense counsel did not challenge a single one of Reamey’s statements, but instead aimed their fire at his character with a long string of invented claims. Wasn’t it true that he was known at the racetracks as Reamey the Rat? Hadn’t he at one time spied for the Pinkerton Detective Agency? Wasn’t he drug addled when he was arrested the previous August? Wasn’t it true that he fought a man over a woman, stabbed him with a knife, and had to leave town? Reamey denied all but the last of those claims, allowing a small smile to ornament his reply that he did, indeed, lightly scratch a man in a fight. But when Attorney Crump characterized Reamey’s wife as a prostitute, Reamey jumped out of his chair with his fists clenched, causing Crump to run behind his lectern and change the subject. Crump’s mention of drugs allowed Special Prosecutor White to reexamine Reamey on the subject, and Reamey claimed that Duff and French had given him their opium to store in a safety-deposit box. As Reamey left the stand for the last time, he tried in vain to catch French’s eye.
Reamey’s stories had been so effective that they prompted the prosecution to alter their strategy. Andrew Koehn and Robert Maiden, two of Van Cise’s private detectives, were next on the stand, but in a move that would have been unthinkable just a few weeks earlier, Van Cise elected to withhold the evidence he’d so painstakingly gathered from the Dictaphone. The defense had vigorously objected to Dictaphone conversation as “of doubtful competency,” pointing out that the detectives had never met or spoken with the persons whom they claimed to overhear on the Dictaphone. The special prosecutors shocked the courtroom by agreeing to forgo such testimony. They were leery of introducing “reversible error” into the long and costly trial and potentially handing the defendants a lever with which to overturn the jury’s decision in the event of a conviction. And then, after only a few more routine days of testimony, livened only by the drunken appearance of Lou Blonger’s brother Joe, who was promptly asked to leave (“I object, if the court please,” cried Joe. “Objection overruled,” muttered the bailiff as he dragged the man out), the prosecution rested its case on March 23, 1923.
Seven minutes after the state rested, Attorney Crump rose to announce that the defense also rested. Just like that, the landmark case—the longest criminal trial in Colorado history, longer than the Chicago trial of a hundred Wobblies for espionage, longer than the glamorous murder trial of Harry K. Thaw, sixty-two days long, in which eighty-three witnesses testified, 524 exhibits were submitted, and the stenographer logged 1.4 million words totaling four thousand pages, a stack nineteen and a half inches high—ended without the defense calling a single witness and without either side making a closing argument. The city was stunned, and speculation bloomed, grew, and fed upon itself. Some watchers noticed that twenty new beds had just been installed in the lower west wing of the county jail, and they assumed the jury would return a verdict of guilty within hours. The theory was that the defense was banking on the state supreme court to reverse the decision and prompt a lengthy retrial, for which the prosecution would lose most of its witnesses by attrition. Others looked outside the courtroom for evidence. They observed that Denver gamblers were offering two-to-one odds against conviction. Why such good money on such a long shot? People assumed that the “sure thing lads” knew that the jury had been rigged. Within the first two hours of the jury’s deliberation, as the defendants paced between the courtroom and an anteroom, reports filtered out that the jurors had taken two ballots on blanket verdicts for all twenty men, and that both ballots had stood at 9–3 for conviction. By the end of that day, they’d cast twenty-five ballots—all of them at 9–3 for conviction.
Despite the defection of their number-four man, the top three leaders of the conglomerate were feeling confident that night, as Van Cise discovered the next morning when four empty whiskey bottles were brought to his desk. They’d been discovered in the grand jury room of the West Side courthouse, where Deputy Sheriff Tom Clarke had watched over the three defendants free on bail: Blonger, Duff, and French. Four more empties were found in janitors’ closets, and a full bottle of whiskey still sat in silent testimony on the table in the room, as did a mess in the lavatory where one of the partygoers—perhaps one of the six women who’d been seen to enter the room—had gotten sick. The ru
mor on the street was that the party was to celebrate the successful fix. The next day, the ballot stood at 11–1, with no news to break the monotony of the wait except the forced resignation of Sheriff Clarke for his complicity with the accused. A third day of deliberation, a Sunday, during which a pastor warned in his sermon that if the jury failed to convict the bunco men, citizens would lose faith in the ability of the municipal institutions to provide law and order, and the Ku Klux Klan would see a rise in its membership. Then a fourth, during which the judge called the jurors back to the jury box to give them the “third degree instruction” for how to resolve the deadlock of a lone dissenting juror. As the twelve men filed into the courtroom, their faces appeared drawn and tense, and rumors flew that they’d been arguing to the point of fistfights. A fifth day, during which a grand jury indicted Blonger, Duff, French, and Clarke for “violation of the intoxicating liquor law,” and the incredulity of the Denver populace grew. One juror received a letter threatening his death if any of the swindlers were acquitted. Van Cise spoke up to say that that particular juror’s integrity was beyond reproach, and then he dashed back into the courthouse for a secret conference, supposedly to prepare a handful of arrests for bribery if the jury was hung.