"What you are doing tonight is a better argument against the Klan than any I could possibly make," Van Cise shouted. "Tonight we see the mob, and we see what mob rule means."
Only a few people in the front rows heard him. The police refused to interfere. It was after one in the morning when Van Cise and his chief investigator made their retreat out a rear door, narrowly ahead of a tar-and-feather party. Their car was chased, shots fired.
Denver Public Library, Western History Collection
The Fighting DA: To bring down the bunco ring, Philip Van Cise used surveillance methods borrowed from military espionage.
Mark Manger
The Big Store: Lou Blonger (top) ran Denver's underworld for decades; his partner, Adolph Duff (below), called the shots for dozens of top con men.
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Click here for a rogues' gallery of the Blonger gang that Philip Van Cise busted, and
click here to read "Love Crazy," another crime story from Denver's Roaring Twenties.
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Klan-backed candidates swept the primary and the fall elections. Judge Morley became governor. Van Cise didn't run for a second term, but he didn't go out quietly, either. One of his last official acts was to charge Grand Dragon Locke and six of his men with the abduction of a nineteen-year-old East High student, who was forced to marry his pregnant girlfriend under threat of castration. The kidnapping case was eventually thrown out by a Klan judge, but it brought ridicule on the KKK leader. Soon the tax men were on Locke, too, and the group's power in the state began to fade.
Van Cise's own battle with the goons in white continued well after he left office. In 1926 the Klan staged a parade in Denver on Memorial Day. At a service for military vets, Van Cise denounced the group for usurping a holiday dedicated to the "heroic dead." A few days later, as seven-year-old Edwin Van Cise watched with uncomprehending delight, a cross was burned on the front lawn of the Colonel's home.
Other feuds proved to be even more enduring. The Denver Post had omitted Blonger's name in initial reports about the bunco arrests because he was an old chum of Harry Tammen, the paper's co-owner. In 1932, Van Cise defended the Rocky Mountain News against a libel suit filed by Tammen's surviving partner, Fred Bonfils. Van Cise insisted on deposing Bonfils at length about his colorful life, packed with flimflams and swindles — revelations the News plastered on its front page.
Bonfils fought the process strenuously and died before the lawsuit got to court. The Bonfils family blackballed Van Cise for decades afterward, insuring that his name wouldn't appear in the city's largest paper and that he would never be a viable candidate for a judgeship in their burg.
"My mother wasn't allowed in Junior League," Cindy Van Cise recalls. "Helen Bonfils was the one who kept it going for years after Fred died, but eventually it was settled."
Drama still occasionally visited the Colonel during his long banishment. In 1943, the two hoods tried to snatch him off his front porch. Two years later, the wealthy husband of a client stormed into his office while Van Cise was discussing her divorce case. The husband pulled out a gun. Van Cise wrestled him for it. One shot grazed the attorney's leg.
In the 1950s, Van Cise surfaced briefly as a special prosecutor investigating the Smaldone crime family. But he had few opportunities to tackle the black-and-white world of prosecuting crooks; he was mostly consigned to the gray world of civil litigation. His own son, a junior member of the firm, had to step in to settle cases when the old Colonel proved too inflexible in his views of what was right and wrong. In his spare time, the senior Van Cise built what was said to be one of the most impressive stamp collections in the country.
Even more remarkable is his contribution to the annals of crime literature, Fighting the Underworld, published in 1936. David Maurer, a professor of linguistics who became fascinated with con men and their slang, consulted with Van Cise while preparing his own survey of large-scale American confidence games, The Big Con, a seminal 1940 work that provided ample inspiration for The Sting a generation later.
Van Cise's book has been out of print for decades. Historian and University of Colorado Denver professor Tom Noel hopes to persuade his fellow university press boardmembers to republish it soon. "I was amazed when I read it," Noel says. "You don't think of this kind of gangland warfare and police corruption as standard for Denver. We like to think we're a cleaner, more moral place."
The story behind the Colonel's book is even darker, with a less satisfying ending. It's a cautionary tale about the Mob and the mob, about daring crusades and personal sacrifices too quickly forgotten. Van Cise knew that justice sometimes needs help to be just.
His admirers hope that some day there will be justice for Van Cise — perhaps even an entire justice center dedicated to a man who made it possible in this city for there to be such a thing.
