by Paul Martin
Weil also found time to write the story of his life, a collection of vivid, often humorous anecdotes filled with a Runyonesque cast of—in his own words—“pickpockets, thieves, safecrackers, and thugs of every degree,” along with “cardsharps, swindlers, gamblers, policemen, and politicians.”21 Published in 1948, when Weil was in his early seventies, “Yellow Kid” Weil: The Autobiography of America’s Master Swindler resoundingly confirmed the adage that there’s a sucker born every minute.
Though the Kid had gone straight, the Chicago police continued to haul him in for questioning now and then, perhaps out of habit or just for old times’ sake. The Chicago Tribune, which had generated a mountain of copy on Weil’s escapades over the years, still followed him, running stories periodically as he grew older. It was a lengthy series, since Weil lived to be one hundred. In 1974, the paper interviewed the ninety-nine-year-old former grifter, who was then living in a convalescent center. Asked what he would change about his life if he could live it over again, the doddering fraudster, who once joked that he was writing a book called Crime Does Not Pay—Enough, was quick to reply: “I’d do it the same way again.”22
In a previous interview, Weil had lamented that his line of criminal endeavor was fading away. “There are no good confidence men anymore,” he said, “because they do not have the necessary knowledge of foreign affairs, domestic problems, and human nature.”23 Weil’s comment reflected the tendency we all have to think that we’ve lived through some golden age. In truth, the confidence game is alive and well. Weil himself knew that the big con would never disappear. As he observed on his ninetieth birthday, “Just look at the gullibility of the American public today. I tell you there are vast sums of money to be made by a man with imagination.”24 That was one quality Yellow Kid Weil never lacked.
Alvin Thomas
The fantastical tales about him abound, and if only a tenth of them are true, he must have possessed the conjuring skills of Merlin the Wizard, the wiles of Huck Finn, and the athletic prowess of Tiger Woods. His real name was Alvin Thomas, although the world came to know him better as the nattily dressed, viper-eyed gambler Titanic Thompson—a man who would wager on anything, from whether he could throw a walnut onto the roof of a five-story building (he could, but he substituted a nut filled with lead to pull it off) to whether his water spaniel could retrieve a marked stone from the bottom of a fishing hole (the dog managed it, although the sucker he bet against didn’t know that the bottom of the fishing hole was covered with similar stones with identical markings).
In his glory days—from the 1920s to the 1940s—this tall, slender, dark-haired hustler from the Ozark hills fleeced cigar-chomping mobsters at poker and country club dandies at golf with equal ease. He even mastered bowling and horseshoes to round out his betting arsenal. Gambling was like breathing to the man they called Titanic. It was a passion he followed for all of his eighty-one years. Born in poverty, Thompson won millions, only to die broke in a Texas old folks’ home. But it was a hell of a ride getting there—a tumultuous, not altogether savory trip in which he claimed five teenage brides, killed half a dozen men, and rubbed elbows with leading figures in crime, sports, and entertainment.1
If Titanic Thompson wasn’t taking money from Al Capone with one of his inventive “proposition” bets (wagers on an individual’s ability to accomplish some improbable feat) or beating champion golfers such as Byron Nelson at their own game, he was comparing card tricks with magician Harry Houdini or playing one-pocket pool with legendary shark Minnesota Fats. His flamboyant lifestyle even provided artistic inspiration: writer Damon Runyon based one of his short story creations on Thompson—the carousing gambler Sky Masterson, a character made famous in the hit Broadway musical Guys and Dolls. Pro golfer Paul Runyan summed up Thompson succinctly: “He was crooked and unscrupulous. He was also the most fascinating human being I ever met.”2
For a man who won close to a million dollars in a long-running 1920s poker game in San Francisco (equivalent to more than $11 million today), Thompson wasn’t obsessed with wealth. Money was simply his means of keeping score.3 Like many a gambler, he was motivated by the exhilaration of scheming up some new wager and coming out on top. It’s what prompted him to bet that he could hit a golf ball five hundred yards (he did it by hitting his ball onto a frozen lake) and to hone the improbable talent of flinging playing cards through an open transom window from across the room—just in case the opportunity ever came up to wager on it. Chances are, if someone had bet Titanic Thompson that he couldn’t jump over the moon, he would have simply asked for odds.
Born in the fall of 1892, Alvin Clarence Thomas inherited the betting bug from his daddy, a gambler who abandoned his family when his son was just a few weeks old. Young Alvin grew up near Rogers, Arkansas, under the tutelage of his stepfather, grandfather, and six uncles. At the end of the workday, after they’d finished tending their pigs and chickens and maybe cutting a few railroad ties for cash, the menfolk taught Alvin how to play cards, checkers, and dominoes. “I didn’t have much education,” he said of himself, “but I had a natural head for mathematics,” adding that he “worked out odds on just about everything you could put money on.”4 And put money on things he did. When he was sixteen, he blew the Arkansas dust off his shoes and headed for the bright lights of Missouri, after promising his mother he would never drink or smoke. He kept that promise, although he found plenty of other vices to fill his time.
Roaming from town to town, “Slim” Thomas, as he was called back then, polished his skills at cards, dice, and pool. For a few months, he worked as a trick shot artist with a traveling medicine show (an expert marksman before he was old enough to shave, he would later win the Arizona state trapshooting championship four years running). Around the time that he turned eighteen, the young gambler acquired a thirty-foot riverboat in a crap game. He didn’t own the boat for long. During a cruise, a gambler named Jim Johnson accused him of cheating at dice and pulled a knife on him. Johnson then assaulted Thomas’s girlfriend, trying to rip her clothes off. Thomas whacked Johnson on the head with a hammer and threw him overboard. Drunk, unable to swim, and probably unconscious, Johnson drowned.5 Luckily for Thomas, the local sheriff was a crook. In exchange for the riverboat and a cash bribe, he let Thomas off.
In the spring of 1912—just after the British ocean liner Titanic went down in the North Atlantic—the young gambler found himself in Joplin, Missouri, where he won $500 shooting pool with a character named Snow Clark. In one of his typically offbeat wagers, Thomas bet Clark another $500 that he could jump over the pool table without touching it. He performed the stunt easily (“I could jump farther than a herd of bullfrogs in those days,” he said).6 As Thomas was pocketing his money, a bystander asked the name of the lean, leapin’, pool-playin’ stranger. “It must be Titanic,” Clark said, because “he sinks everybody.”7 At that moment, Slim Thomas became Titanic Thomas. A few years later, he began calling himself Titanic Thompson after newspapers in New York got his last name wrong—which was fine with him, since he preferred to shroud his real identity.
Throughout the 1910s, the reputation of the hustler from the Arkansas sticks grew steadily among the checkered fraternity that traveled a mostly southern and Midwestern circuit in search of betting action (this was before Las Vegas and Atlantic City became gambling meccas). In addition to his proficiency at sports, games of chance, and inventive proposition bets, Thompson became known for his icy nerves. He said that he got “a very calm feeling” whenever “there was big trouble or big stakes,” and he always carried a pistol in case anyone got frisky with him.8
In 1919, Thompson shot and killed two men in St. Louis when they tried to steal his winnings from a crap game, and he later gunned down another pair of robbers who were trying to hold up a poker game in St. Joseph, Missouri. Because all four victims were known criminals, no charges were filed. In 1932, Thompson shot and killed a masked man who tried to rob him at a Texas country club. The thief turned out to be the sixte
en-year-old caddy who’d carried Thompson’s clubs that day. Before the boy died, he confessed to police, and again no charges were filed. Thompson expressed remorse for the youngster’s death, but not for the other four slayings. Of those killings, he said, “They needed it.”9
By the Roaring Twenties, when jazz, gambling, and Prohibition-era booze were the country’s main entertainments, Thompson had graduated to the status of high roller—someone who isn’t afraid to lay down staggering wagers. Decked out like a Wall Street lawyer, he haunted swank hotel rooms and fancy clubs in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Even the big-time games weren’t always on the up and up, since gamblers at that level seemed to take pride in seeing who could cheat most effectively. Thompson himself could deal off the bottom of the deck or mark the cards in just a few hands, with no one the wiser.10
On the evening of September 8, 1928, Thompson took part in a historic marathon poker game in New York City. Among the shady characters seated around the table was mob boss Arnold Rothstein, reputed to be the man who fixed the 1919 World Series. Rothstein lost around $500,000 in the course of the game, according to Thompson, but instead of paying up, Rothstein handed out IOUs.11 The players left holding his markers weren’t too happy, even though they knew the game had been rigged. Several weeks went by and Rothstein still hadn’t paid up. Then on the night of November 4, while Rothstein was in a third-floor room in the Park Central Hotel, someone shot him in the groin. Rothstein staggered down to the hotel service entrance and was rushed to the hospital. He died two days later.
The police arrested George McManus, a hulking “commission broker” (bookmaker) who’d gambled with Rothstein on September 8. Prosecutors contended that McManus held a grudge against the mob boss stemming from that evening. Titanic Thompson wasn’t present at Rothstein’s murder, but he was called as a witness in McManus’s trial. Like the other participants in the September poker game, Thompson made McManus out to be a model citizen, and the bookie was acquitted. Privately, Thompson was sick over Rothstein’s death. Half the money Rothstein had written IOUs for should have been his, and now he could never collect. Even more maddening, he was slapped with a $12,700 default judgment in favor of Rothstein’s estate when the gangster’s lawyers produced promissory notes Thompson had signed.12
Thompson just shrugged it off, knowing that bad luck was part of his trade—like the misfortune he routinely encountered at the racetrack. “I lost about $2 million fooling with the horses,” he recalled.13 In a race in Tijuana, he lost $150,000 on what he thought was a sure thing. He bet on a long shot named Nellie A after bribing the riders of the other horses to throw the race. To improve his odds, he let it be known that a sharpshooter was waiting to pick off any jockey who came in ahead of his horse. Things went according to plan, with Nellie A far ahead of the pack as the horses came toward home—until the poor animal fell down with a broken leg just short of the finish line. That may have been the only horse race in history in which every rider in the field struggled to avoid coming in first. Thompson would have pocketed more than a million dollars if Nellie A had made it a few more yards.14
Thompson fared better at horseshoes, largely because he manufactured his own “luck.” When he took on world champion tosser Frank Jackson, Thompson tilted things in his favor by building a horseshoe court that was forty-one feet long. Regulation courts are forty feet long. After practicing on his rigged court, Thompson challenged Jackson to a match. At the end of the game—as Jackson paid out the $2,000 he’d lost—the champ expressed wonderment at why his tosses had kept coming up short.15
One sport Thompson didn’t have to cheat at—at least not much—was golf. He didn’t take up the sport until he was almost thirty years old, but he was a natural. In the first eighteen-hole match he ever played, he won $56,000. After that, he said, “I went purely crazy over golf. For the next 20 years I had a club in my hands nearly every day.” People who saw how good he was encouraged him to turn pro, but he refused, saying he “couldn’t afford the cut in pay.” In the 1920s and ’30s, “a top pro wouldn’t win as much in a year as I would in a week,” he said.16
Just to keep things interesting, Thompson pulled off some remarkable golf course scams. “No matter how good I was,” he said, “I always liked to have an edge.”17 He once magnetized the putting green cup liners before a match and then played with golf balls with steel cores. Another time, he lifted the cups just enough to make his opponent’s putts veer away from the hole if they weren’t dead center. Since he could play equally well right- or left-handed, he used that ability to his advantage. After clipping some hotshot while playing right-handed, he would propose a rematch, offering to play left-handed to even things out. He knew it was a “lead-pipe cinch” that any dupe who accepted the offer would end up reaching for his wallet.18
Thompson was an equal-opportunity hustler. He beat professionals, fellow gamblers, and local duffers who thought they had game, but he always made sure that he only won by a stroke or two so he wouldn’t frighten away prospects. Pro great Sam Snead called Thompson “golf’s greatest hustler.”19 The legendary Ben Hogan said he was “the best shotmaker I ever saw.”20 Byron Nelson, who once won eleven consecutive tournaments—and lost a money match against Thompson in 1934—said Titanic would have done well on the professional tour, although by the time pro purses began to balloon, the gambler-golfer was well past his prime.21
Titanic Thompson’s heyday occurred in an era when many people viewed itinerant gamblers as romantic characters, and Thompson was the most colorful of them all. Like a Hollywood leading man, he always surrounded himself with attractive women—the younger the better. He married his last wife, Jeannette, in 1954. He was sixty-one, she was eighteen. Jeannette stuck with her man until he grew too old to keep up his rambling ways. In 1973, she moved him into a nursing home in Euless, Texas. They divorced so that Thompson could qualify for government aid, and he died the following year.
A psychologist would say that Titanic Thompson had a debilitating addiction. “He didn’t waste his time with anything that interfered with gambling,” Jeannette Thomas admitted, “not food or sleep or love.”22
Reflecting on his long career, Thompson wrote this self-appraisal in Sports Illustrated in 1972, two years before his death: “I was smart, which is better than lucky in some ways, and I was very cool and steady and a fine athlete, so I usually had the edge in most games. To be a winner a man has to feel good about himself and know he has some kind of skillful advantage going in. It’s like what I told a judge one time when I was charged with operating a game of chance. ‘Your Honor,’ I said, ‘this charge couldn’t be right. There wasn’t nobody in that room had a chance but me.’”23
Excelling at gambling might not be much to hang your hat on as a lifetime’s accomplishment, but it was the hand that Titanic Thompson decided to play. And according to his wife Jeannette, this scheming, cheating, wayward child of the backwoods “enjoyed every minute he lived.”24
Charles Davenport
Growing up in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the early 1900s, young Carrie Buck impressed those she met as serious and self-possessed, someone whose quiet demeanor hinted at a life filled with challenges. Of humble origins—her widowed mother had given her up to foster care as a child—the stocky, dark-haired girl didn’t let her difficulties get her down. She enjoyed reading the newspaper, liked to fiddle with crossword puzzles, and always made herself useful around the house. She was a bit awkward in social situations, but otherwise she was a thoroughly average teenager. No one had any reason to think differently of her. Then something terrible occurred that changed Carrie’s life forever.
In 1923, when she was seventeen, Carrie Buck was raped by a nephew of her foster parents. The girl became pregnant, and her foster parents—perhaps embarrassed by what their nephew had done—decided to hide the girl away by committing her to the Virginia Colony for the Epileptic and Feebleminded, a mental facility in the town of Lynchburg. Carrie’s birth mother had p
reviously been committed to the same institution, accused of being mentally deficient and promiscuous. The same reasons were given for Carrie’s incarceration. It was a classic case of punishing the victim.
Carrie had her baby in the spring of 1924, the same year that Virginia passed a law permitting the involuntary sterilization of those judged to be mentally impaired.1 The statute grew out of the early twentieth century’s widely influential eugenics movement, a now discredited cousin of genetics that attempted to improve American society by “breeding out” a long list of undesirable traits ascribed to minorities, the poor, and certain immigrant populations. At the same time, eugenicists hoped to foster the increase of good breeding traits by encouraging “high-grade” citizens to go forth and multiply (the word eugenics means “well born”).2
It’s no surprise that complacently comfortable white folks conceived and promoted this scheme of biological discrimination. According to eugenicists, if you weren’t of Nordic or Anglo-Saxon heritage, your genes were second rate. Even if you were white, if you happened to be epileptic, mentally ill, illegitimate, unemployed, homeless, a sexually active single woman, an alcoholic, a convicted criminal, or a prostitute—all signs of “feeblemindedness” or “hereditary degeneracy”—you were a threat to the purity of the nation’s gene pool. Eugenicists advocated three ways of dealing with the perceived problem of bad genes: immigration restrictions, the prevention of “unfit” marriages, and involuntary sterilization of “defective” individuals in state care, chiefly mental patients and prison inmates.3