Hue Jackson’s Hall of Fame Scammers: Lou Blonger

Welcome back to another exclusive sneak preview of the Hue Jackson School of Scam Artistry!

With football now having wrapped up for the next few months, I’ve now got myself a little more time to devote myself to scamming those most deserving of it. That’s surely not you – after all, you’re paying me weekly to listen to things you can merely read for free on the internet… but I’m adding value. Trust me. Wish I’d had a little more time to get in on all this GameStop hustle, but there will be more. It’s up to you, studying the art of the con intently, to figure out what is and isn’t legit business moving forward. Speaking of which, your exclusive content this week discusses the nature of fake business in depth. Listen on…

LOU BLONGER: PROSPECTOR, DICEMAN, KINGPIN

BORN: May 13, 1849, Swanton, VT

DIED: April 20, 1924, Cañon City, CO

The Wild West era of American history is often heavily romanticized, with Hollywood’s cinematic golden age responsible for much of the colorful history of gunslingers, barmaids, cattle rustling, and street duels. Much has been dramaticized, but at its core, the heart of America’s frontier expansionism, and its place in national mythology, is due predominantly to some extremely colorful characters. Names like Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, Butch Cassidy, and Jesse James, heroes and villains alike, have become household names in the decades since, but for every famous name, there are thousands more with stories that easily rival our famous legends. Lou Blonger is more than deserving of a place in the pantheon of all-time great figures of western American history.

Born in Vermont to a French-Canadian father and an Irish mother, Lou Blonger was the eighth of thirteen children – a good Catholic family, clearly. With a number of older brothers as role models, it was clear from an early age that Lou was destined for trouble. As a fourteen-year-old in 1864, Lou signed up, illegally, to fight for the Union Army in the Civil War, playing the fife and leading the 142nd Illinois Regiment into battle at White Station, Tennessee, where he suffered a leg injury. Upon war’s end, Lou joined his older brother Sam, and after finishing high school and college in Illinois, left with Sam for the West.

Lou, Sam, and Sam’s wife Ella lived in a variety of states and territories, crisscrossing around from Iowa, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada, before eventually landing in Colorado on a permanent basis. They engaged in a variety of (perfectly legal) activities, including mining, owning saloons, horse racing, running a vaudeville theater, and even some mild dabbling in politics and law enforcement.  It was in Denver around the year that 1890 that Lou first discovered organized crime in a serious way.

At this time, Lou and his brother Sam owned and operated several saloons in town, including the Elite Saloon, which became the go-to spot for gambling. Cards, dice and stiff drink were always on hand, and with Denver politicians and law enforcement already known for being extremely corrupt, the Blonger brothers rapidly got rich. In particular, they targeted tourists as potential customers of their saloon, using a large network of “steerers” who would casually direct new arrivals in town to enjoy an evening at the Elite. On the extremely rare occasions where the house lost, Sam and Lou still had plenty of money coming in, as their stakes in the Forest Queen gold mine in the mountains outside Cripple Creek provided a steady reserve of income.

In the early 1910s, Lou was working towards bigger and bigger cons, with the largest one known in contemporary history as the “million-dollar bunco ring”; as Blonger became wealthier, he expanded his operations beyond just his saloon. Working with Adolph W. Duff, his new second-in-command, his swindling racket exploded in scale and size, reaching far beyond its original roots in cards and dice, into a massive numbers racket (an illegal lottery with daily payouts), and, finally a “big store”, which features posing as a legitimate company that convinces marks to put up huge sums of cash in exchange for stock dividends or horse racing bets, to be paid at a future date. For those of you who’ve seen the movie The Sting – part of this con being successful is taking great pains to make sure everything looks completely, 100%, above-board. It takes meticulous planning and skill to pull off the Big Store, and it’s harder still to keep pulling it off in the same location, day after day, week after week, year after year. That Blonger kept it running as long as he did is testament to his talent as a “fixer”, the man who could make problems disappear with a snap of the fingers.

To put in perspective just how profitable Lou Blonger and his boys were: his office had a direct private phone line to Denver’s chief of police, and it only ever took a single phone call to make trouble go away. They’d had enough money to purchase the elections for Wolfe Londoner, mayor of Denver beginning 1890, and Robert W. Bonynge, Congressman beginning 1902. For over 25 years, the Blonger crime empire ruled alone over the city of Denver; they’d chased out their only competition, Soapy Smith, back in 1897, when the Klondike gold rush began in the Yukon.

In 1922, the new District Attorney, Philip Van Cise, finally brought down Lou Blonger and his gang of con men, but it took a gigantic effort. Van Cise was aware of how the Denver police force was in Blonger’s pocket, and thus in the summer of that year, began a massive private investigation. He assembled his own private police force, paid for by numerous wealthy benefactors, and on August 24th, with eighteen Colorado Rangers in tow, arrested Blonger, Duff, and 31 other men.

Blonger’s trial in February 1923 lasted over seven weeks, with testimony from hundreds of victims who’d been cheated and swindled out of vast sums of money. It even featured some blatant jury bribery by the defense, who managed to bring the crime to light thanks to an upstanding mechanic, Herman Okuly, who reported being paid $500 in cash to the judge after playing along with the ruse.

The Denver Post added further intrigue to the legal proceedings when they published an article revealing that Lou had been living a double life for over twenty years, living with his wife Nola on weekends and his mistress, Iola Reardon, during the week.

Even with some of the best legal help in the country, Blonger couldn’t wriggle his way out of this one. He was found guilty of conspiracy and fraud and sentenced to seven years in prison. Being quite elderly and in poor health to begin with, Blonger died in prison, of multiple organ failure, on April 20th, 1924. His criminal empire brought him immense wealth – almost certainly over a million dollars a year at its peak – as well as notoriety – though it is also quite probable to say that he wasn’t so fond of that.

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Information from this article taken from here, here, here, and here. Banner image by The Maestro.