Phil Van Cise: Scourge of Denver's Underworld

But then something goes terribly wrong. The stranger decides to take a plunge on one more surefire stock tip and ends up using the money the visitor has deposited, too. He gets the tip wrong and loses it all. The investor curses him for his idiocy, and the two men get into a raging fistfight. The clerk kicks them all out of the exchange. The investor tells the visitor not to worry, he will get his money back, and puts him on a train to Chicago or Kansas City to await further instructions.

If the sucker squawks — that is, if he goes to the police — he's taken all over town on a wild goose chase. The cops don't seem to know how to find the exchange. Frustrated, the sucker finally heads home. Sometimes he writes an angry, embarrassed letter to the Denver district attorney.

Van Cise started getting the letters as soon as he took the job. There had been numerous complaints about the stock con over the previous few years, none of them properly investigated. The Colonel talked to postal inspectors and others familiar with big con operations and soon figured out why.

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.