by Amy Reading
At 4:45 on the afternoon of the sixth day, after 102 hours of deliberation, a bailiff announced to Judge Dunklee that a verdict had been reached. The judge summoned the lawyers back to the courtroom. The twenty defendants took their seats, palpably nervous for the first time. Lou Blonger’s impassivity was smeared with a weak smile. Adolph Duff’s tremble was visible to the thronged spectators. After all the exits were locked and deputy sheriffs had taken up their positions, the judge convened the court, scanned the verdict, and then handed it back to the clerk to read: “We, the jury, find the defendants guilty as charged in the information.” Thirty seconds after the clerk uttered the word “guilty,” before he’d even finished listing all of the defendants’ names, the Post’s extra edition, which it had prepared in advance, was out on the streets.
Several of the wives in the audience burst into noisy tears, but the twenty men on trial were silent. Jackie French raised an eyebrow but did not pause in the cleaning of his fingernails. And the prosecution refrained from a single cry of triumph. At defense counsel’s request, Judge Dunklee polled the jurors: “Was this and is this your verdict?” The answer of juror number three, George E. Sharp, caused considerable commotion: “It is—under the conditions. I was sick and had to get out of there.” Attorney Hawkins leaped to his feet and demanded that the juror explain his statement, crying out that his verdict had been coerced. The judge questioned him repeatedly, and eventually Sharp simplified his answer to “It is,” which the judge let stand. He formally dismissed the jury after thanking them for their extraordinary service, and as they gathered their overcoats and left the courtroom, they were enveloped by reporters. Juror Sharp was photographed leaving the courthouse on the arm of one of Lou Blonger’s personal attorneys. Only then did the courtroom break out into a rising hum of conversation.
A deputy sheriff then called the twenty convicted criminals to order, and they rose from their seats. Every last spectator noticed Lou Blonger’s weak step, his hands grasping the railing, and his ashen countenance. Under heavy guard, the men were guided over “the bridge of sighs” from the West Side courthouse to the county jail, where they too were assaulted by reporters. “Perjured evidence,” said Lou Blonger heavily. “That’s what convicted me. I’m speaking for myself and not for the others. Reamey never saw me in his life. When he testified that I had handed out a bundle of money he lied. Not a single one of the alleged victims ever testified that he saw me, or identified me in any way.” Meanwhile, District Attorney Van Cise was held up in the courtroom by the congratulations of the spectators who rushed to his side. As soon as he had the chance, Van Cise wired to Norfleet in Hale Center, “All con men convicted. My thanks to you for your good citizenship.”
Over the next two months, as the convicted bunco men waited in the county jail for their sentences, Blonger made all the gestures of a warrior only temporarily defeated and preparing his glorious comeback. The very day after his conviction, miners in his Forest Queen silver mine found a four-foot-wide vein of gold, said to be worth many thousands of dollars, enough to fund several years of legal delays and appeals. As the entire city of Denver implored Van Cise to run for mayor, Blonger sat in his jail cell and made his own political appointments, naming the men he thought should be the next mayor and governor. He also loudly indicted his lawyers for botching the trial; he wanted to testify in his defense, Blonger claimed, but his attorney prevented him. The seventy-three-year-old’s power was draining away from him, though, most noticeably in terms of his health as he suffered from asthma, heart trouble, and swollen legs and ankles.
On June 1, 1923, Judge Dunklee called the twenty prisoners back into court to hand them their sentences. Though they were each eligible for up to thirty years in the state penitentiary, Judge Dunklee was comparatively lenient, giving Blonger, Duff, French, and eight others seven to ten years, and three to ten years to another eight men. One man, Grove Sullivan, escaped sentencing on the grounds of insanity. Attorney Hawkins immediately prepared an appeal to the supreme court, but in early October, Blonger and his crew learned that they’d been denied a writ of supersedeas, which would have allowed them to remain free until the higher court had heard their appeal, and which also meant that a reversal was unlikely. “It’s all over—we’ve got to go,” Blonger was overheard sobbing to his wife on the phone. As he turned away from the phone, he stumbled forward and had to be carried to his cell. On October 18, 1923, after meeting with two Catholic nuns, phoning his wife to instruct her not to accompany him, and shaking hands with all of the guards, Blonger departed for the Cañon City penitentiary. As he was helped into the car by his physician and a friend, Blonger was too overcome with tears to speak and could only curtly wave his hand to those who had gathered to watch his departure.
In Cañon City, Blonger changed dramatically. He grew pale, palsied, and weak, but he also grew garrulous. When the news of his double life with the young Iola Readon broke in the newspapers, he uncharacteristically granted an interview, though he denied everything. “Say, what would a girl want with an old man like me,” he said, laughing. For better or worse, he did finally get his opportunity to testify under oath. One of his marks, John S. Peck of Flemingsburg, Kentucky, named Blonger, Duff, French, and others in his suit to recover the $17,000 they’d taken from him in Denver. Blonger admitted that he’d once been involved in the Denver gambling scene but said he had given it up when gambling became illegal. He stated his occupation as farmer. And he claimed Adolph Duff was the true ringleader and that any paperwork found in his desk relating to the management of the bunco crew must have been put there by Duff. The courts would eventually find against Blonger in the Peck suit.
Blonger even effected a reconciliation with his wife, Cora. Though she never once appeared in the courtroom, she began visiting him regularly in jail when no one else would, bringing him clothes and news of his legal appeals. “Toward Lou Blonger I have the same kindly feeling as I would for a brother who had always been kind to me,” she told the Rocky Mountain News. It was rumored that at one of her visits, the couple signed papers giving over his property to the “motherly, gray-haired” Mrs. Blonger. Perhaps she had learned a little something about disguising her cunning while she lived with Lou Blonger.
Blonger declined rapidly, and soon Cora was the only visitor his doctors allowed him. He began to lose his eyesight. He was ordered to stay off his feet and cease playing the card games that had been his only solace. He was restricted to a milk diet, supplemented by the digitalis that kept his heart going.
Six months after arriving at the penitentiary, he would be dead. In the last two weeks of his life, he would try desperately to obtain a transfer to a private hospital, so much did he dread dying in the prison, but to no avail. His body would be transferred to a Denver funeral home, where for several days he would be visited by a line of mourners, from Civil War veterans to beggars to businessmen. Mrs. Blonger would be the executrix and sole heiress of his estate, but there wouldn’t be much left after the state and federal government had collected back taxes, the cost of his prosecution in the state courts, and the judgment against him in the Peck case.
Adolph Duff would also die “stony,” as the gamblers say, or penniless and estranged from his family and friends. In 1929, after serving four years in the penitentiary and then returning to Denver to try to gamble back his fortune, Duff would be found dead on the seat of his coupe, a suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.
In October 1923, as the Blonger organization prepared to move from the county jail to the state penitentiary, Norfleet and his daughter, Ruth, circled around W. B. Spencer’s haunt in Mineral Wells, Texas. They enlisted the help of the local police chief, but after a day of no results they headed east to Fort Worth, then to Dallas, dealing out Spencer’s photograph to every police station along the way. In Dallas, Norfleet met with the detective chief and the Bertillon expert, and both men promised to tap their networks for any information. Norfleet took his daughter back home, then returned to Dallas, whe
re he received a wire from George Chase, a Bertillon expert in the Salt Lake City Police Department: a man answering Spencer’s description was there. Arrest him, Norfleet telegraphed back, and he hitched a ride with a honeymooning couple down to New Mexico and then over to Utah. He didn’t allow his hopes to soar. Well, maybe he did a little.
And when he walked into the jail, there was his man—for real this time, and most definitely behind bars. “How are you, Spencer?” Norfleet asked solicitously. “Don’t you call me Spencer! I am Mr. A. P. Hunt,” answered the prisoner, and he was indeed booked as Hunt, a salesman arrested for violating the narcotics law. But his story fractured when a petite woman on the other side of the bars ran up to Norfleet and cried, “Spencer isn’t our name. Our name is Harris! That’s Charlie and I’m Mildred.” In only a few minutes, Spencer had broken character and confessed to everything. “That man,” he complained, pointing to Norfleet, “can be in the way more than any damned man in the world. He always comes along at the right minute for himself and the wrong minute for me.” As his wife began to cry in contemplation of their grim future, Spencer comforted her by saying, “I’d rather die and go to hell tonight than live as I have since I met Norfleet. Every knock on the door, every telephone bell, every stranger in the night has raised hell with my nerves.” Or at least that’s how Norfleet remembered Spencer’s words.
That night, Norfleet telegraphed his triumph to his friends in district attorney offices and police departments across the Southwest, and newspapers from Los Angeles to Dallas carried the news of his final triumph. In March 1924, after he served time for his infractions in Salt Lake City, Spencer was found guilty on two counts of theft against J. Frank Norfleet and sentenced to eight years in the Texas penitentiary. Spencer appealed and was freed and was jailed again in a roller-coaster ride of legal complexities. And then, in 1927, Governor Miriam “Ma” Ferguson granted Spencer a full pardon, on the grounds that he suffered from chronic rheumatism and his family was “destitute and dependent on his wife’s father for sustenance.” In fact, Spencer was one of thirty-seven hundred pardons that Governor Ferguson issued during her two years in office, reportedly in exchange for bribes priced in accordance with the severity of the crime. Spencer became the only swindler on Norfleet’s long list of prey to squirm out of his net. But by then, Norfleet’s autobiography had been serialized, published, and serialized again, and his reputation had been hardened in the kiln of public adoration. He was the Boomerang Sucker who kept arcing back until he had snagged every last one of the men who dared to make him look foolish.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Mark Inside
In the summer of 1957, Philip Van Cise received a letter penned in a sprawling hand. It was from Norfleet, then ninety-two years old, and it comfortably complained about the latest version of their long-ago adventures to appear in the media. The Norfleet story had been told many, many times in the intervening thirty years, and each of the writers invariably got something wrong. This writer, one John Gregor of True magazine, as Norfleet wrote to Van Cise, “told at Least 3 lies About me in his story he says I Smoked Cigars Drank Whiskey And Swore or Cussed. I have never yet Done Either.” Gregor portrayed Norfleet complacently sipping drinks in his Fort Worth hotel room while Furey and his gang skipped town. Then Gregor invented a phone call to disturb Norfleet’s boozy calm; when he picked it up, Norfleet heard Furey say, “Hello sucker!” Norfleet was glad to know that he wasn’t the only one to be outraged by Gregor’s literary license. “I was just Ready to write True Magazine,” he wrote to Van Cise, “No use You have told it to them mildly.” Apparently, both men had been grooming their reputations in their twilight years, but True declined to publish either letter.
After the climax of events in 1923, Norfleet returned to his ranch a changed man. Even if he had wanted to recapture the lifestyle he’d enjoyed before his collision with the Furey gang, he wouldn’t have had an easy time of it. His four-year absence from the ranch meant that its income had plummeted. He had funneled all available profits from cattle raising to manhunting, and he’d even taken $40,000 from his son Pete’s burgeoning sheep and cow farm. In 1924, the Norfleets found themselves unable to make their mortgage payments. The bank was about to foreclose when a rancher named Berryman stepped up with a better offer. He bought the 4,989-acre parcel for $153,000 and then rented it back to the Norfleets. They soon moved to a smaller ranch, where they pared down their livelihood to gamecocks and racing horses.
For the rest of his life, Norfleet sought every possible opportunity to capitalize on his story. He told his saga so many times that he soon sounded like the phonograph that characterized his enemies’ spiels. Truly, for Norfleet, the con would never die. The tale of his manhunt became his urtext, his explanatory narrative, the organizing logic of his very identity. He cultivated his legacy for the next forty years, feeding, fertilizing, and harvesting it like the world’s most miraculous cash crop. By packaging and selling his thrilling melodrama in as many different media as he could, Norfleet took part in a distinctly modern trend that the confidence artists themselves had initiated: the commodification of personality.
First there was his autobiography. Norfleet: The Actual Experiences of a Texas Rancher’s 30,000-Mile Transcontinental Chase After Five Confidence Men came out the same year he rescued his ranch from foreclosure, and the local reviews were adulatory. The Lubbock Morning Avalanche declared, “English literature has been enriched by a most gripping, startling compilation of thrills, laughter and pathos, held together by a thread of stupendous human endeavor, tempered by tolerance and compassion.” The paper meant it as a compliment when it wrote, “The plot of this true account is as perfectly constructed as any work of a master fiction writer.” The Dallas Morning News was a speck more temperate in its evaluation. It heartily approved of the book as “our own indigenous detective story—of, by and for Texas”—none of the tweedy armchair cogitation of a Sherlock Holmes for Norfleet, no sir. But the News did find the book to be “cheap and crudely sensational.” The reviewer saw all its flaws and its singular virtue. “The book, in many ways, seems to be modeled on the dime novel of a generation ago. But one must admit in all honesty that Norfleet himself stands out to the reader of the book in a vital and memorable clearness and it seems entirely possible that he contains the germ of a legendary hero that may someday develop to the proportions of a Jesse James or even a Robin Hood.”
Norfleet certainly thought so. The next year, he accepted a contract to tour on the vaudeville circuit “at a liberal weekly stipend.” The year after that, he embarked on his own lecture tour of the United States, following the same scribbled trail over the map that he’d marked on his original chase. And the year after that, he helped to found the Imperial Press of Sugar Land, Texas. One of his partners in the venture was W. T. Eldridge, a man who had reason to be expansive toward the enterprising rancher. Back in the days of his manhunt, when Norfleet’s identity was discovered in the Daytona Beach clubhouse high over the cliff and he’d made his armed escape, Steel and the other swindlers fled the house right after him. Unbeknownst to Norfleet, there had been a con in progress on the second floor, and as buy sheets and telephone receivers clattered to the floor in the wake of the exodus, one man stared around him, puzzled. W. T. Eldridge had been about to hand over $75,000 in the stock market swindle. When he later read the rest of the story in Norfleet’s first autobiography, he thought the adventure should be better told. Imperial Press hired a Texas newspaper columnist named Gordon Hines to interview Norfleet and completely rewrite his autobiography, which was then sold for $2 a copy. The second edition is largely identical to the first, only peppier; Hines never wrote “gun” when he could write “gat” or “blunderbuss” or “persuader.” And unlike the first edition, the second acknowledges the fantastic nature of the story. “For the benefit of doubters,” wrote Hines in a foreword, “considerable substantiating material has been added to this work,” including photostats of the front pages of Denver newsp
apers from Norfleet’s testimony in the Blonger trial. Hines and Norfleet tried to trim the humbug from the edges of the adventure tale.
In 1929, Norfleet began filming himself for a motion picture version of the swindle and the revenge, but Black Tuesday brought the scene to a halt, and a dancer named Jackie Dola sued Norfleet for neglecting to pay the $125 weekly salary he’d promised for her acting services. He also regularly traveled to New York City to appear in radio broadcasts.
None of these enterprises ever amounted to anything, but to Norfleet they must have felt like movement, progress, feats of savvy and cunning. And in between telling his story to anyone who would pay him, Norfleet just kept apprehending criminals. He couldn’t help it. People would approach him with their stories, and before he knew it, he’d find himself on a train, pursuing a slight lead with a heavy pistol in his pocket. In 1927, he tracked down a murderer in Arkansas and brought him home to Texas, his seventy-seventh criminal. The newspapers adored him, and his every step brought headlines. In 1928, he declared that he’d set himself a new goal of arresting one swindler for each $1,000 of the $45,000 he’d lost to the Furey gang. How many notches were there on his gun? reporters wanted to know. None, Norfleet told them, because “I only put notches on when I miss a shot.” In 1940, when he was seventy-five years old, he arrested his ninety-third man; surely forty-five of them were swindlers.
Stills from Frank Norfleet’s never-released silent film, starring himself (photo credit 1.12)
His name regularly cropped up in newspaper articles having nothing to do with him. Any time the victim of a crime helped to arrest his or her perpetrators, he or she was referred to as “another Norfleet.” A swindler named J. R. Bing was arrested for taking $16,000 off a Reno man, and Bing proudly identified himself as a member of the “J. Frank Norfleet gang,” claiming to have been arrested and convicted by the famed manhunter in 1924 along with Joe Furey. As late as 1939, marks were still succumbing to what was now referred to as the “old Norfleet swindle”—the phonograph of the big con revolved around and around long after the Roaring Twenties had stopped winding it. Indeed, Norfleet himself was not immune to deception. In 1958, when he was ninety-three, a man named Dallas contracted to buy seven Thoroughbred horses from him, payable by installment, then vanished with the valuable mounts. This event, alone among the many deeds of Norfleet’s lengthening life, was not publicized in the newspapers; it was not discovered until the next century when someone in New Mexico unearthed a cache of letters to the county sheriff, one of which was Norfleet’s appeal for help in the matter. But it was that first, spectacular deception that captivated Norfleet, and as long as he was physically able, he made the rounds of all the cattle sales, rodeos, and county fairs in the Southwest, selling copies of his autobiography by hand from the side of the cow pens. He boosted the price to $3, then $4, and was shameless about signing a copy of his book over to someone and then asking him or her for payment.