Lou Blonger (May 13, 1849 – April 20, 1924), born Louis Herbert Belonger, was a Wild West saloonkeeper, gambling-house owner, and mine speculator, but is best known as the kingpin of an extensive ring of confidence tricksters that operated for more than 25 years in Denver, Colorado. His "Million-Dollar Bunco Ring" was brought to justice in a famous trial in 1923.
Blonger's gang set up rooms resembling stock exchanges and betting parlors that were used by several teams to run "big cons". The goal of the con was to convince tourists to put up large sums of cash in order to secure delivery of stock profits or winning bets. The depiction of the "Wire Con" seen in the movie The Sting is a fairly accurate representation of a typical big con.
Blonger had longstanding ties to numerous Denver politicians and law enforcement officials, including the mayor and the chief of police. In 1922, however, District Attorney Philip S. Van Cise bypassed the Denver police and used his own force, funded by donations solicited in secret from local citizens, to arrest 33 con men, including Blonger, and bring the ring to justice.
Childhood
Lou Blonger was born in Swanton, Vermont, on May 13, 1849, the eighth of 13 children. His father, Simon Peter Belonger, was a stonemason born in Canada of French ancestry. His mother, Judith Kennedy, was raised in an orphanage in Nenagh, County Tipperary, Ireland.Swinbank Family Bible, in possession of Joseph Swinbank. (Mary Swinbank was Lou Blonger's sister.) The Belonger family migrated from Vermont to the lead mining village of Shullsburg, Wisconsin, when Lou was five years old. After his mother died in 1859, Lou lived with his older sister and her husband for a few years. Around this time Blonger began using a shortened version of the family name (omitting the first "e"), as most of his brothers did.
Blonger followed brothers Mike and Joe into the Union Army in 1864. Although he was still three days shy of his 15th birthday, Blonger was mustered in as a fifer at Warren, Illinois, and served a few weeks with Company B of the 142nd Illinois Regiment before suffering a leg injury at White Station, Tennessee. He spent the remainder of his 100-day enlistment recovering at the Marine Hospital in Chicago.Blonger pension file.
At the conclusion of the Civil War, Blonger reunited with his brother Sam, ten years his elder, who had spent the war years prospecting in Colorado and driving freight over the mountains in California and Nevada. Lou was living in Mount Carroll, Illinois, with a friend named William Livingston when Sam returned. While Sam courted and eventually married Livingston's sister Ella, Lou attended high school. Later Sam sent his brother to study at Bryant & Stratton Business College in Chicago.
In the Western boomtowns
In 1870 Sam and Lou Blonger, along with many of the Livingstons, left the Midwest for the western frontier. Following the path of the newly completed Transcontinental Railroad, they briefly ran a hotel and saloon in Red Oak, Iowa, before moving on to Salt Lake City, Utah and the nearby mining towns of Stockton and Dry Canyon. In a pattern that repeated itself at many of their stops, Lou owned and operated saloons with assorted entertainments while Sam developed mining claims in the surrounding mountains, served occasionally as a peace officer and, in his spare time, raced horses. Similar stops followed in Virginia City, Nevada; Cornucopia, Nevada; Silver Reef, Utah; and again in Salt Lake City.
Moving to Colorado in 1879, Lou Blonger took a shot at running a vaudeville theater in Georgetown, while Sam made an unsuccessful bid to become the first mayor of nearby Leadville. p. 213. There the Blongers were joined by two other brothers: Simon, the eldest, who worked as superintendent at the Robert E. Lee Mine, and Marvin, the youngest, also a miner. Available at ancestry.com. Soon afterward, Sam and Lou were on the move again, this time to the burgeoning railroad town of New Albuquerque, New Mexico (soon to merge with Albuquerque).
Albuquerque days
Sam Blonger was appointed marshal of New Albuquerque in February 1882 and quickly deputized his brother. Newspaper accounts indicate that while the brothers engaged in a few shootouts and jailed their share of vagrants, they also took plenty of time off to pursue other interests: prospecting, horse racing, and even running a brothel.See series of newspaper clippings at BlongerBros.com.
For a couple of months the Blongers were toasted as the solution to the town's law enforcement problem (a previous marshal, Milt Yarberry, had murdered two citizens). When Sam and Lou were joined briefly by brother Joe, a prospector in the nearby Cerrillos Hills, a local newspaper wrote: "The three brothers are all of them young, nervy and square western men and it would be a good thing for the town if they were all on the police force."
In April 1882, Lou Blonger served as acting town marshal while Sam traveled to Denver to negotiate the sale of a mine. Lou's stint roughly coincided with the escape to New Mexico by the Vendetta Posse, composed of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and five others. Hoping to make their way to legal sanctuary in Colorado, the men took temporary refuge in New Albuquerque after killing several men to avenge the murder of Wyatt's brother Morgan. According to one theory, Lou or Sam (or both) may have been called upon to provide shelter for the posse members during their stay.
Sam Blonger's appointment as marshal of New Albuquerque lasted just five months. He was relieved of his duties while on a trip to Kansas City, and soon afterward, Lou and Sam split up for the only extended period of their adult lives. Lou spent the next few years in the New Mexico towns of Silver City, Deming, and Kingston, living at least part of the time with Frank Thurmond, a well-known gambler, and his wife, Carlotta Thompkins (better known as Lottie Deno). Blonger also got married, probably in 1884, to Emma Loring.
In 1888, a woman calling herself Kitty Blonger shot and killed a man who tried to break into her room in a Peach Springs, Arizona, brothel. Lou Blonger soon arrived to arrange her defense, and eventually she was acquitted. Kitty had previously worked in Albuquerque, where she had a soiled reputation. She may have been one of Blonger's madams, but the exact nature of their relationship has not been determined.
The Denver underworld Soon after the Kitty Blonger trial, Lou Blonger relocated permanently to Denver, rejoining his brother Sam. The pair operated several saloons and gambling houses in the area of Larimer Street and Seventeenth Street over the next few years, including the magnificent Elite Saloon at 1628 Stout Street, with its mahogany fixtures and frescoed ceiling. In addition to hosting the typical array of poker and faro tables, the Blongers' operation also branched out into the "policy racket" (also known as the "numbers game"), an illegal lottery that paid out on a daily basis. The Blongers aggressively targeted tourists, who were lured to the saloon by a network of henchmen called "steerers" and then cheated out of their money. The sophistication of the swindles developed over time. In the early years they were as simple as marked cards or loaded dice; later, elaborate "big cons" became the Blonger trademark.
Denver had a reputation as a wide-open town in the 1890s. Gambling shops bought protection from the police force and the mayor's office and operated openly except when occasional crackdowns were required for show. In addition to making direct payments to authorities, Sam and Lou Blonger also engaged in election fraud for candidates from both parties, from Denver mayor Wolfe Londoner in 1890 to Congressman Robert W. Bonynge in 1902. Testimony in the latter case indicated that Blonger's network of steerers had already been in place for several years.
The Blongers' policy shop had plenty of competition, including saloon man Ed Chase and Soapy Smith, the famous Western con man. Smith was an uneasy Blonger ally for a while, but the frequent quarrels between steerers from the rival groups suggested a confrontation was brewing. In 1895 Smith went on a drunken rampage through several Larimer Street establishments including the Blongers' saloon, where police removed him; one account alleged that Lou Blonger was crouched behind the cigar counter, ready to unload a shotgun.Collier, p. 208. In the wake of the rampage, Smith and his brother Bascomb were charged with the attempted murder of a saloon manager. Realizing he had lost control of the situation, Soapy left for the mining boomtown of Skagway, Alaska, in 1897, ceding control of Denver's underworld to Lou Blonger.Collier, p. 209-10.
The Forest Queen
In 1892 Sam and Lou Blonger found the gold mine they had been looking for in the mountains above Cripple Creek, Colorado, and named it the Forest Queen ().Forest Queen location certificate, filed 1892-04-18. Sam and Lou had several partners in the mine at different stages of its development, some of whom were extraordinarily well-placed. Two of them, Neil Dennison and Robert W. Steele, served as district attorney in Denver during the 1890s. Dennison was the son of a former governor of Ohio and Steele later became chief justice of the Colorado Supreme Court.Jackson. A third partner of note was J. W. McCulloch, manufacturer of Green River Whiskey, who supposedly traded 20 barrels of his product for a piece of Lou Blonger's stake.
Once developed, the Forest Queen provided its owners with periods of steady income, if not the fortune that came out of the nearby Independence Mine. Lou and Sam Blonger claimed, bought, traded, and sold several mines in their lives, but both held onto the Forest Queen to the end, leaving their interest to their wives.
The Blongers were keen observers in the frequent labor struggles between miners and mine owners. Conditions reached a head in 1894 during the "Battle of Bull Hill", when striking miners took up arms in the hills near the Forest Queen. Lou Blonger and several allies from Denver were frequent visitors to the area during the months-long dispute and its aftermath, calling themselves "detectives".
"Million-Dollar Bunco Ring"
As his gang branched out into bigger and more complicated "big cons" that attracted a more well-to-do clientele, Lou Blonger found he no longer needed his saloon and the relatively small take it provided from card and dice games. Eventually he moved into headquarters in the American National Bank building on Seventeenth Street and styled himself as a mining magnate. A crucial moment in the development of the bunco gang was Blonger's partnership in 1904 with Adolph W. Duff, who had operated his own gang of confidence men in Colorado Springs before being run out of town by the police.Van Cise, p. 10. With Duff handling the details of coordinating gang members and scheduling locations for the scams, Blonger was free to conduct the business of schmoozing public officials and bribing law enforcement, all while cultivating the image of a model citizen. In the summertime he made the rounds of friendly politicians and policemen, paying off favors with boxes of cherries from his orchard in suburban Lakewood.Van Cise, p. 11.
For the next 18 years Blonger and his gang operated virtually unmolested by local law enforcement. Gang members were specifically instructed not to solicit victims from Colorado, concentrating instead on out-of-state tourists who would find it difficult to help prosecute a criminal case. Only twice during this period did Blonger come close to arrest. The first was in 1910, when he escaped prosecution in connection with the Maybray Gang of Council Bluffs, Iowa.Van Cise, p. 9. The second occurred in 1915, when Blonger was implicated in a swindling scheme uncovered by carpenters remodeling his office building.