Lou Blonger and the Wire
The film The Sting, which starred Robert Redford and Paul Newman, depicted a type of con called the wire, in which the results of horse races were known by the operators of an illegal Chicago horse betting parlor prior to announcing the race to its customers. As shown in the film, operating such a con was an elaborate scheme involving many players, and in the film, the idea was to con one person out of a large sum. In reality, the wire scheme was a tried and true method of bilking multiple customers out of large sums of money and was used successfully by con artists both for horse racing and the stock markets in many cities, particularly in the emerging towns of the western frontier.
Lou Blonger was a Wisconsin boy of 14 when he enlisted in the Union Army as a musician in 1864. His enlistment ended with him in a military hospital in Chicago, recovering from injuries sustained in Tennessee. After studying business for a time in Chicago Lou, his brother Sam, Sam’s wife, and several of her relatives went west along the newly completed Transcontinental Railroad. They worked in saloons and taverns, and sometimes as deputies, at various stops. For a time Lou was a marshal in New Albuquerque, where he aided the Earps and Doc Holliday as they escaped following the killings of several of the Clanton allies known as the Cowboys.
By the late 1880s, Blonger was in Denver, operating multiple saloons and gambling houses, through which he developed a daily numbers racket. In the early 1890s, the tourist trade was developing, fed by the burgeoning railroads, and Blonger used hired men to steer tourists into his businesses, where they were exposed to stock swindles using the Chicago and New York stock exchanges. Blonger developed several “long cons”. He paid law enforcement officers and politicians to look the other way as his schemes grew, and by the mid-1890s he left the saloon and gambling parlors to set up an office in a bank, intent on more lucrative schemes.
By then Blonger owned several mines in the Denver area, and had opened branch offices in Florida and Cuba, where stock in the mines was bought and sold. Betting parlors using the wire to fleece customers were in operation in Denver, Hot Springs, Miami, and Havana, all based on the activity at various race tracks. Stock brokerages, also using the wire operated in “respectable” offices in Denver and San Francisco. In the first and second decade of the twentieth century, Blonger had over 50 con artists working the streets of Denver alone, selling non-existent real estate, mines which he knew to be tapped out, and offering sure tips on horses and stocks before steering the mark to the betting parlors or brokerages.
In late summer of 1922 Blonger’s luck ran out, as raids launched by the state of Colorado rounded up more than 30 of his operatives, as well as Blonger himself. At his trial, his operations were labeled the “Million Dollar Bunco Ring” in the press. Blonger seemed at ease throughout his trial, which was explained in the jury room when one juror announced that he had forwarded his $500 bribe from Blonger to the judge, but at least three other jurors, whom he could identify, had not. The press also revealed that the con artist had for twenty years lived with his wife during the week and his mistress on weekends, neither of whom were aware of the other’s existence. Blonger died in prison in 1924.
