Phil Van Cise: Scourge of Denver's Underworld

"We will give you money to leave the country."

"Absolutely not. I will not consider it."

"You may not go to the pen in Colorado," French went on, "but you know Duff can frame up a sucker and get you brought back to Omaha, and the fixers can bury you there. And if he can't do it in Omaha, Joe Rush and I can do it in Chicago."

Reamey told French to do what he liked. He was going to testify. And he did, burying Duff, Blonger, French and the rest. At least one of Blonger's associates tried to bring a gun into the courtroom while Reamey was on the stand, but he was frisked and arrested.

Still, it might have all come to nothing if not for an honest juror named Herman Okuly. A shady figure appeared at Okuly's door one night to offer him five hundred bucks for a not-guilty vote. Okuly pretended to play along, but he had his employer contact Van Cise. Okuly believed that three other jurors had taken the money.

The oddly confident defense declined to put on a single witness or even offer a closing argument. While the jury deliberated, deputy sheriff Tom Clarke allowed Blonger, Duff and French to hold a drunken party in a vacant courtroom. A pretty widow was observed in a "prolonged osculatory exchange" with Jackie French. The uproar over the empty whiskey bottles and puke left behind cost Clarke his job.

The jury was split 9-3 for conviction. On the fourth day of deadlock, Okuly decided to rattle the three men who were trying to hang the verdict. "The difference between me and you three sons of bitches is that I turned my five hundred dollars over to the judge and you've still got yours," he said.

Feeling the noose around their own necks, the trio soon reversed their votes. At a quarter to five in the afternoon of March 28, 1923, guilty verdicts were returned against the entire Tricky Twenty.

It was the end of the Blonger mob — and of the cops and power brokers who'd thrown in with them. A hasty attempt was made to draft Van Cise for the mayoral election, now less than two months away. He declined.

Mayor Bailey was toast. A grand jury report issued days after the verdict declared that the city administration was "rotten," including eight officials who were "totally unfit to hold any offices in this city." George Sanders, the police detective who'd worked most closely with the con men, retired a week later, claiming a disability.

The con men became convicts. Most of the key players received sentences of seven to ten years. A few of their wives followed them to Cañon City, only to be accused of stealing furs from the poshest store in the little prison town.

Adolph Duff did his time like a stand-up guy. But he couldn't face the hard luck and penury that greeted him upon his release. His wife left him, and in 1929 he was found dead of carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage on Clarkson Street.

Blonger didn't last that long. He'd sat apart from the rest at trial, cool and aloof, as if this was all somebody else's worry. But the 73-year-old man who showed up at Van Cise's office after the verdict to plead for mercy was feeble, haggard and scared. He begged the Colonel to intercede, to not let him die behind bars. Van Cise thought of the preacher who killed himself because of a Blonger swindle and turned him down flat. "Neither your sickness nor your impending death should be considered," he said. "I will fight to the last any attempt to give you leniency."

Blonger died in prison five months later. He was widely eulogized as a picturesque character, generous with his friends — and, according to one obituary, "ever ready to lend a helping hand to the man in need."

Smashing the bunco ring had unseen consequences. For one, it effectively killed a campaign to recall the now wildly popular district attorney. Blonger's bunch had supported the recall, but it had actually been launched by the Colorado Law Enforcement League, a front organization for the Ku Klux Klan.

The reborn KKK had made its pointy-headed presence felt in Colorado shortly after Van Cise took office. They firebombed the houses of three black families who moved into white neighborhoods and posted scurrilous fliers in Catholic and Jewish areas. The incidents coincided with a national surge in Klan membership, but Denver seemed particularly receptive to the group's exotic mix of pageantry, secrecy and racism.