Lou Blonger. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 ...
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2026/06/1114 分