As good as Lou might have been at making friends,
the Blongers had their enemies as well.

Ed Burns ("Big Ed")

REVOKED, 1882

Burns was notorious throughout the West as a killer and con man, fond of the top and bottom scam where rubes bet that the top and bottom faces of any given throw of three dice would not add up to twenty-one — an impossibility. And if the mark was wise? Bet against it and use marked dice. He was also fond of the gold brick scam.

He was run out of Leadville in 1879 for his association with claim jumpers, bunco men and "chronic bondsmen," according to the warning pinned to a man hung by a Leadville mob. Sam and Lou were in town at the time, too. Later Burns and his gang of thugs and con men ran things with a high hand in Benson, near Tombstone.

Then Marshal Sam Blonger kicked Big Ed out of Albuquerque in February, 1882. Beside the threat Burns presented to the town's peace and tranquility, surely he represented a threat to whatever Sam and Lou might have had working on the side.

Ed later worked with Soapy Smith in Denver, perhaps in competition with the Blonger Bros. and their cohorts, till Smith fled town for the Klondike.

"Ed Burns, the notorious hold-up, was escorted to the train last night by Marshal Blonger, and sent on his way south with instructions never to show his thieving mug within the city again."

More about Big Ed

Charles M. Fegenbush ("The Baron")

REVOKED, 1898

AKA: Fegen-Bush, Fagan-Bush, Fagenbush

In 1898, Lou found himself the victim of one of his associates, Charles Fegenbush. Thinking he was financing a stock swindle, Lou gave Fegenbush and John Weaver $1000 in hopes of a ten percent return. When the check disappeared, and Fegenbush insisted he didn't have it, Lou went crying "bunko" to the cops — who couldn't believe their ears. The story was recounted often among Denver policemen for many years.

Fegenbush was apparently quite busy at the turn of the century, often working in concert with partner Harry DuBois. Wire fraud, fake mining stock, even a mail swindle involving toy watches in boxes of salt were their stock in trade. The Baron was apparently good at bribery too, getting the police chiefs of both Chicago and New York in hot water for fixing his and other arrests.

More about Fegenbush & DuBois

J. Frank Norfleet

BANNED, 1921
may be in disguise

Taken, twice, for a total of $45,000, Norfleet pursued Joe Furey and his gang across thousands of miles, at his own expense, just in time to help Col. Van Cise spring his trap on the Blonger gang.

The diminutive retired farmer spent more than two years tracking down the gang — who worked under Lou's protection when in Denver — personally apprehending one member at a time, acting as a lawman when necessary, other times posing as a sucker and always packing heat.

More about Norfleet

Len Reamey ("Les Randle")

REVOKED, 1922, uncontested

Young and handsome, Reamey found a place on Lou Blonger's big store crew as a Bookmaker in the fake exchange, responsible for presenting a believable front to the operation and handling the exchange of money.

Following the bust in 1922, Reamey — called Les Randle in Van Cise — was persuaded to turn state's evidence by his distraught wife and District Attorney Van Cise, sealing Lou's fate.

It was Reamey's description of the payoff game to Van Cise that we adapted for our page about the rag.

Len's descendants report that after the trial, he went straight and never looked back, becoming a model citizen and family man.

More about Len Reamey

William Sturns ("The Painter Kid")

REVOKED, 1922

The inspiration, perhaps, for The Sting's Kid Twist, William Sturns was a steerer for the Blonger gang for over three years. He was thought by his fellow Denver grifters to have been the writer of a series of letters sent to Van Cise early in his investigation, laying out the gang's structure and methods. He claimed to have been double-crossed on a payoff and wanted to see the operation go down.

Adjutant General Thomas J. Tarsney

BANNED, 1894

In 1894, when Colorado Governor D.H. Waite wanted to send the militia into Denver to break the influence of gambling on local politics, he needed a man in command who was willing to take up arms against the elected municipal government — even though the governor knew he lacked the authority to take such action.

Thomas Tarsney, adjutant to General Brooks, and Waite's fellow populist, took the challenge, bringing the militia and their field artillery, gatling guns, even signal corps on bicycles to downtown Denver to face down the Denver municipal employees, sheriff's police, and an army of deputized gamblers and thugs, all comfortably hunkered down within the fortified walls of City Hall. Ultimately the strength of the municipal force intimidated Waite and Tarsney, and the battle remained a standoff until the intervention of the state Supreme Court.

Still, Tarsney had made no friends in the halls of power, nor the gambling halls, of Denver, where the Blongers were major players. Shortly after the confrontation, Blonger's place was closed along with Soapy Smith's Tivoli and others.

A few days later, a miners' strike in Cripple Creek seemed to be getting out of hand, and once again Tarsney and his militia were pressed into service. Waite was openly sympathetic to the plight of the working man, and hoped the strike would end well for the miners, who wanted an eight-hour day instead of nine, and $3 a day.

On arriving, Tarsney determined that the local sheriff had called for the militia to help him serve arrest warrants on the strike leaders and others, and Waite gruffly recalled the troops, unwilling to assist the sheriff and his master, the mine owners association. When the violence increased, Waite sent the militia once again, this time to stand between the strikers and an army of "special deputies" numbering nearly a thousand, many recruited among the policemen and firemen that had been recently fired in Denver — those who had faced down Tarsney only days before.

In the end, the militia did disarm the strikers and allow the deputies to make their arrests, though many of the leading agitators had already fled. And so it was that those sympathetic to mine owners like Sam and Lou Blonger, who owned the Forest Queen on Ironclad Hill, found it easy to blame the disgruntled miners when Tarsney was tarred and feathered outside of Colorado Springs. He was in town to see to the defense of the arrested strikers.

But one of the perpetrators was caught, and under the questioning of Denver detective Peter Eales he confessed that the deed had been done by El Paso County deputies, who after the strike found themselves unemployed and without prospects.

Two weeks later Eales returned to the Springs, this time accompanied by two city detectives, and mine owner Lou in tow. But to what end?

More about Gen. Tarsney

Philip S. Van Cise ("The Colonel")

BANNED, 1921

Col. Philip S. Van Cise, an idealistic young veteran of the Great War, became Denver's district attorney when his adversaries split the Republican primary vote and gave the reform vote an edge. Lou Blonger attempted to garner influence, as usual, by contributing to the Colonel's campaign, but was rebuffed by the upright Van Cise.

After his election, Van Cise conducted an extensive secret investigation of Lou's bunco empire without the knowledge of Denver's corrupt police, using undercover agents, hidden microphones, and a camouflaged observation post to track Lou's activity. The operation was funded by the contributions of sympathetic citizens.

The Colonel sprung his trap on August 24, 1922. A squadron of Colorado Rangers and civilians fanned out across the city in an attempt to arrest as many of the known gang as possible before the word leaked out through talk on the street, a suspect's wife, or even the Denver police. They got thirty-two in all.

To maintain secrecy, the suspects were taken to a vacant church near the business district where they could be held incommunicado.

At trial, the bunco gang's defense team — all the defendants were tried at once — felt confident enough of the outcome they presented no defense, claiming the prosecution had not made their case. Compromised jurors stretched the deliberations out to 100 hours, to no avail. Lou got seven years, but died after only six months in the pen.

After his conviction, Lou pleaded with Van Cise for some hope of parole after a short time in jail. His reply, in part:

"You have been a criminal from the time of your youth. You have been the fixer of the town. You have prostituted justice. You have bribed judges and jurors, State, City and police officials. You have ruined hundreds of men. With that record, tell me why a death sentence is not your due?"

"As to your plea for parole, I say no, emphatically and for all time no. Before the king of the underworld is pardoned, the penitentiary doors should be torn from their hinges and all other occupants be first turned out. They would be less dangerous than you. You have met your day of judgment and the death sentence is your due. I will fight to the last any attempt to give you leniency of any kind or description."

More about The Colonel

Governor Davis H. Waite ("Bloody Bridles")

BANNED, 1894

"It is infinitely better that blood should flow to our horses' bridles than our national liberties should be destroyed."

Elected governor of Colorado as a populist in 1892, Waite twice found himself sending the Colorado militia to deal with forces in league with the Blonger Bros.

In 1894, Waite tried to end the influence of gambling interests on Denver justice and politics by installing his own police commissioners. He called in the militia under General Tarsney to force out the old gang at city hall, but it was too late. The building had been fortified and stocked with arms and dynamite. The battlements were manned by cops, detectives, firemen, politicians and sheriff's police, whose ranks were swollen to some two hundred by newly-deputized gamblers, con men and thugs.

Waite got his way when the state Supreme Court decided in his favor. The barricades had held, but the court took them down, the police and fire boards replaced, and the gambling joints closed — only to move undercover, or to the suburbs where the commerce was welcome. Peepholes and other methods of hiding evidence proved very effective in making convictions rare.

As the owners of downtown gambling joints, Sam and Lou Blonger would have had a stake in this fight, though we can't yet implicate them directly.

Later in 1894, striking miners at Cripple Creek shut down mines throughout the area, where Sam and Lou Blonger owned at least two: the Newport and the Forest Queen. The strikers barricaded themselves atop Bull Hill, and the El Paso County sheriff, in concert with the mine owners association (and therefore the Blongers), recruited hundreds of deputies from across the state to break the strike, including over a hundred from Denver — mostly cops and firemen fired by the new police commission, and various thugs that had faced the militia at city hall only days before.

Again Waite called in the militia, this time to protect the strikers — who were well-armed and roughly matched the deputies in number — from the sheriff's "special police". For their part, the sheriff and his new deputies were aching to have a crack at the strikers, and none too happy about the prospect of the militia's arrival.

Ultimately the intervention of the militia led to the disappearance of the primary union agitators and the surrender of the strikers, but Waite had made his loyalties clear. Whether Sam or Lou were among the deputies, or helped to recruit them, we cannot say — but we can suggest without fear of contradiction that the Blongers were not fans of Bloody Bridles Waite.

Waite is perhaps most fondly remembered today for his proposal to send Colorado silver south of the border to be minted into "Fandango dollars". Just kidding. He is not fondly remembered.

More about Governor Waite

Jesse Wheat

ALERT, 1893

Sam wasted no time after his divorce from second wife Sadie in 1893, promising himself to Jesse Wheat, then reneging and marrying Virginia Pierrepont two months later.

If you see her, BOLT THE DOOR and CALL SAM.

"Jesse Wheat has been jilted and she is not happy. Samuel H. Blonger is the man who she says disappointed her, and she thinks the anguish of mind that she has suffered by his cruel action is worth just $25,000. She has sued Mr. Blonger in the district court to recover this amount. In her complaint she alleged that the defendant on Aug. 1 last promised to marry her and that he renewed his promise at various times since then. Recently, however, his manner changed and he refused to marry her. Blonger's first wife obtained a divorce from him on the grounds of extreme cruelty some time ago. The above is from the Denver Times. Mr. Blonger was marshal of Albuquerque in the early days. While here Sam was regarded as a very pleasant gentleman but bad associates in Denver no doubt ruined him."