Phil Van Cise: Scourge of Denver's Underworld

The man who picks up the mark is called the steerer. When the time is ripe, he signals a lookout; the second stranger, known as the spieler, soon appears. Of course, the stock exchange clerk who handles "the boodle" — stacks of flash money consisting of one-dollar bills, with hundreds on the top and bottom — is in on the scam, too. The exchange can be set up and disassembled in minutes, because everything, including the phones, are fake.

The game is a version of the Payoff, the most lucrative of all confidence games (except, possibly, the Nigerian e-mail scam). Federal agents told Van Cise the same gang operated in Florida and Cuba in the winter, sometimes using the Wire, a rigged horse-betting parlor swindle, instead of the stock exchange. But Denver was the Big Store, the place with "ironclad protection," in part because the con men who flocked there every summer were careful not to trim locals. That made it easier for the bunco detectives, who were in on the take, to cool the suckers and hustle them out of town.

Van Cise began building files on the bunco ring. There appeared to be dozens of steerers drifting in and out of town over the summer, working downtown and the Capitol grounds, as well as a few accomplished spielers and clerks — maybe fifty to seventy-five top con men in all. The reported swindles in 1921 alone came to close to a quarter of a million dollars, and that was just what he could document. Some suckers never filed a complaint, and others refused to testify in public court. They couldn't handle the disgrace.

The DA had been in office only a month when a minister in Indiana committed suicide after being fleeced out of church trust funds by bunco men in Denver.

Breaking such a well-entrenched gang of thieves was going to take mounds of evidence, Van Cise realized. He had to tie the seemingly random scores back to Duff and Blonger and the cops. And he had to do it outside the usual channels of law enforcement. He decided to approach this covert operation as if he were still tracking the enemy in wartime intelligence — using observation posts, surveillance techniques, spies and feints to gather all the information he could before launching a frontal attack.

But first he had to raise a war chest for a private posse. He went to thirty prominent, civic-minded princes of the city, including Claude Boettcher, William Iliff and George Cranmer, a classmate at East High. Swearing them to secrecy, he raised $15,000 and used it to hire top investigators and ex-federal agents with no ties to the Denver police. One undercover operative was assigned to identify the steerers working the streets downtown and tail them to their nests. Another spent long hours in speakeasies and pool halls frequented by the con men and their business associates. A third posed as a hosiery salesman and rented an office across 17th Street from the "insurance agency" where Blonger and Duff spent their days.

But visual surveillance was only the beginning. Van Cise went to the telegraph and telephone companies and handed out subpoenas. He wanted a copy of every telegram Blonger and Duff sent or received, a record of every long-distance call. With the help of the building manager, he arranged for a janitor to deliver the daily contents of Blonger's wastebasket to the DA's office.

Most daring of all, the Colonel sent his men on a late-night raid of Blonger's office, during which they installed two Dictaphones, one in a chandelier and one in the attic above. The machines required a hundred pounds of wet batteries that frequently gave out, and a phone company engineer had to be brought in to string wires to the stakeout room across the street. But when it was done, the stakeout man could see Lou Blonger blowing his enormous nose — and hear the trumpet blast through earphones at the same time. A stenographer was assigned to take notes and try to make sense of the bugged conversations, dense with grafter slang about "going fishing" or "putting the bee" on someone.

For months Van Cise collected intel, matching faces to mug shots and getting positive IDs from victims of the con. The operation was far from flawless; Lou Blonger was no dummy, and exposure was always one misstep away. Early on, Blonger got a vague tip that his office was bugged. He had the phone checked and found nothing, but he and Duff started lowering their voices anyway.

Fortunately, while the gang had their tipsters, they'd sprung a few leaks, too, including an anonymous letter writer who teased Van Cise with intimate details about Blonger's pals on the force and in the press. And even the gang's informants could be used to advantage; Van Cise fired one spy in his office and kept another around, the better to feed false information to Blonger.

The Dictaphones whirred. The evidence mounted. Sensing trouble, Blonger delayed the opening of the 1922 "fishing season" in Denver. Van Cise announced plans to summer in the mountains and sent out other signals that his office had little interest in the shearing of tourists. Reassured, the con men came to town and went to work. Monitoring the situation from a command post near Mount Audubon, the Colonel prepared to attack.