Lou Blonger
Lou "The Fixer" Blonger (May 13, 1849 - April 20, 1924), born Louis Belonger, is best known as the organizer of a massive bunco ring that employed hundreds of grifters in its heyday and stretched from Denver to Cuba.
Between 1890 to 1922, Blonger presided over a con game "franchise" of sorts where dozens of suckers were moved through a system designed to separate them from large sums of money as painlessly as possible. Complicated plays like The Wire con and The Rag were employed, cons that used fake stock exchanges or betting parlors where the mark could be convinced he was betting on a sure thing. The depiction of the Wire con as seen in the movie The Sting is a fairly accurate representation of such a play.
Blonger's role in those years was as Fixer and godfather. You couldn't work in town without his permission -- and giving him a large cut of your take -- and if you should be arrested, a phone call downtown (on his private line to the Chief of Police) could literally get you off with a slap on the wrist. Known to con men across the country as The Big Store, Denver was a wide-open town under Lou's protection.
As a young man, Blonger served uneventfully in the Union Army, then went west from his Wisconsin home with his older brother Sam. Between 1866 and 1882, the brothers hopped from one boomtown to the next, owning saloons and prospecting in Utah, Nevada and Colorado. Moving on to Albuquerque, the two served as marshals there at the time of Wyatt Earp's Vendetta Ride out of Arizona.
Settling in finally to the increasingly metropolian Denver area, by the 1890s Lou and Sam were rich men. They owned one of the most popular nightspots in the bustling frontier town, The Elite Saloon. Much of their wealth was in their many mining claims, and some from their business interests, but much undoubtedly was attributable to an already long career of cheating, swindling and graft. Lou faced legal trouble now and again over the years from a few he had conned, but plied his trade largely unscathed until his 70s.
In 1922, however, District Attorney
