Phil Van Cise: Scourge of Denver's Underworld

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.

The end came sooner than he'd hoped, before he could collect all the evidence he needed of police payoffs. But he risked losing most of the gang if he delayed any longer. A lengthy list of suspects had found its way to Denver police detective George Sanders, who'd taken it straight to Blonger's office.

"What of it?" Blonger blustered into the Dictaphone. "You fellows are still with me, and that fellow can't make an arrest without using the police."

Not all of Blonger's associates were so confident; only the need to collect on several cons-in-progress was keeping the slickers in town. Van Cise hurried back to town to spring the trap.

At five in the morning, August 24, 1922, he unlocked the doors of the First Universalist Church on the corner of Colfax and Lafayette. Van Cise was a member of the church, which at the moment "had no minister, was temporarily closed, and was ideally located for a jail," he wrote. He handed out assignments to his investigators, several armed volunteers and a team of state police — some in uniform, some in plainclothes. Not a single Denver cop was among them.

It was time for the king of Denver's underworld to come to Jesus.

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Roy Samson, the ex-fed Van Cise had put in charge of the roundup, scooped up Kid Duff as he left his apartment house on Lincoln Street. In Duff's pocket was the highly classified list of suspects Samson had sent to a trusted Colorado Springs police captain. Blonger was quietly arrested in his office, all his files and papers seized.

Leon Felix, alias R.C. Davis, sleepily opened the door of his room in the Metropole Hotel and found a gun in his face. He was surprised to learn that the sucker he was in the process of trimming was actually Frank Norfleet, a Texan who'd been wreaking havoc on con men all over the country after losing $45,000. Norfleet had tracked his prey to Denver and cheerfully gone undercover for Van Cise in order to help with the roundup.

"Dapper" Jackie French, one of the top phony stock clerks in the business, was cuffed at the fashionable Stanley Hotel in Estes Park. Infamous steerer Elmer Mead, "the Christ Kid," was found rooming with a man he was about to skin that very day for $50,000. The sucker was outraged at his friend's arrest and tried to post bond for him.

Some of the con men tried to bribe the state rangers with cash or jewelry. No dice. By nightfall Van Cise had 33 of the world's smoothest operators locked up in the church basement, where they would be held incommunicado until hefty bonds could be set. They sat in chairs designed for children's Sunday school lessons, using their straw hats to shield their faces from pesky reporters and photographers. Above their heads, the wall bore quotations from Scripture:

THE WAY OF THE TRANSGRESSOR IS HARD

THE WAY OF THE UNGODLY SHALL PERISH

"This is the goddamnedest jail I've ever been in," one of the gang muttered.