It was a sweltering August in Monte Carlo, the exotic Monégasque playground, a setting of wealth, glamour, intrigue and – inevitably where money is involved – scandal, jealousy, greed and crime. In this gem of luxury and Mecca of gambling, located between the sparkling Mediterranean Sea and the majestic Alps in one of the smallest countries in the world, there was the aroma of wealth on every street. And money always attracts unwelcome guests.
It was populated with larger-than-life characters, some of whose obsessions and decadent tastes were touched by evil and some of whose actions would have led to tragic consequences with or without the influence of the famous casino. The casino was the focal social point, like its companion the Opera House, for the titled, the rich, the hangers-on, the professionals and the desperate.
Just over four decades before, the ruling Grimaldi dynasty and Monaco faced bankruptcy. The first effort to establish a casino was teetering on the point of failure. The main problem was the lack of customers caused by the difficulty of reaching Monaco from the rest of Europe.
Then, in 1863, the twin brothers François and Louis Blanc, successful casino owners in Germany, took over the gambling operation. Like many a gambler, the Blancs epitomised the famous expression later coined about the Principality of Monaco: “A sunny place for shady people.”
Born in 1816 to a poor tax collector, they showed from an early age an intense interest in gambling and financial operations. By careful gambling and speculation in stocks, they accumulated some modest capital and opened a bank, by any other name a firm specialising in stock speculation. They understood that to win in the stock market they needed to acquire exclusive information. They were able to infiltrate a communications system owned by the French government and bribe a few well-placed employees. In the next two years, they enjoyed steady profits from buying and selling government stocks. Eventually their scheme was uncovered. They were charged with corruption but, by hiring a top lawyer and pleading that they were doing nothing different from what the Rothschilds did, they were acquitted.
The bank was closed and they decided to concentrate on gambling. They acquired a concession and opened a casino in Homburg in 1863, which was an immediate success. Dostoevsky wrote his story “The Gambler” on the basis of his gambling on roulette in Homburg, where he lost all his royalties on future works.
François Blanc, keeping his eye on potential competition, went to Monaco and made an offer to Prince Charles III to buy a concession on the casino for 50 years for the sum of 1.7 million francs. On March 31st 1863, the prince approved the deal.
The Blancs lavishly decorated the casino. New hotels and villas were built, work began on a railway to connect Monaco with other coastal cities, and a new service of bigger and better steamers was instituted between Nice, Genoa and Monaco.
They also insisted that the place where the casino was located – Les Spélugues – had to be renamed. The name basically meant “The Caves” but had the connotation of “a den of thieves”. The new owners of the concession must have thought it was a little too close to the bone. After some thought Prince Charles agreed to commemorate his name and call it Monte Carlo – Mount Charles.
The railway opened in 1868 and the flow of visitors increased dramatically. Over the next decades the profits grew to such an extent that the Prince was able to abolish all taxation on the principality’s citizens. The number of hotels expanded from 2 to 48; the numbers of jeweller’s and florist’s from 3 to 15 and 1 to 15 respectively. In 1900 there were 85 wine merchants and the Opera House and Oceanographic museum were established.
The Blancs paid the Prince of Monaco a yearly subsidy of millions of francs for permission to carry on their business in his territory. The administration paid a revenue to its shareholders of over 25 million francs per annum. The authorities were pledged, for the state of their own continuance, to pay any player on the spot, no matter how great the winnings. The coffers of the principality overflowed beyond belief, so much so that the head of the Grimaldis was able to abolish taxation on the citizens of the state. Even greater evidence of wealth was provided by the death of Louis Blanc in 1879, who left control of the Casino and a fortune of 72 million francs to his son Camille.
At the end of the 19th century almost a million tourists were visiting annually. Monte Carlo had become the favourite playground and gambling destination for players, aristocracy, royal families, self-made millionaires, great artists and inevitably conartists and chancers of every nationality – and of course women of loose morals and intent.
SHADY PEOPLE & HIGH SOCIETY
During 1873, Joseph Jagger, an engineer from England, gained world publicity by ‘breaking the bank’ at Monte Carlo.
Born in the village of Shelf near Halifax in Yorkshire, he had gained his practical experience of mechanics working in the cotton-manufacturing industry. He extended his experience to the roulette wheel, speculating that its outcomes were not purely random sequences but that mechanical imbalances might result in a bias towards particular outcomes.
In 1873 he hired six clerks to clandestinely record the outcomes of the six roulette wheels at The Beaux-Arts Casino at Monte Carlo. He discovered that one of the wheels showed a clear bias in that nine of the numbers – 7, 8, 9, 17, 18, 19, 22, 28 and 29 occurred more frequently than others.
He placed his first bets on 7th July 1875 and quickly won a considerable amount of money – £14,000 (roughly £896,000 nowadays) – and over the next three days amassed £60,000 in earnings, with other gamblers in tow to emulate his bets. In response, the Casino rearranged the wheels, which temporarily threw Jagger into confusion.
After a losing streak, he finally recalled that a scratch he had noted on the biased wheel was not there any more. Looking for the telltale mark, he was able to locate his preferred wheel and resumed winning. Coming back at him again, the Casino began to move around the frets (the metal dividers between numbers), daily. Over the next two days, Jagger lost and gave up, but took his remaining earnings, then about £65,000 (roughly £4,160,000 nowadays) and left Monte Carlo, never to return.
Jagger resigned from his job at the mill and invested his money in property.
Of course, the Blancs wanted the publicity generated by stories of big winnings . . . as long as no run of luck cost the Casino too much . . . or ran too long. If a gambler won more money than available on a particular table, he was said to have “faire sauter la banque” (‘broken the bank’ or, literally, ‘blown up the bank’) and a black shroud was placed over the table until a new game was set up. No gambler, however, came even close to winning the whole reserves of the casino and the Blancs could rest confident that no one ever would.
Charles Deville Wells was a gambler and confidence trickster. From his childhood, he dreamed of being rich. He referred to himself as an inventor, which in itself was an invention, and sought bank credit to help him develop his ideas. He also got funds from private investors who were as always looking for quick and easy returns. They would only find out much later that the con artist was investing their funds in a very old invention called the roulette wheel.
In July 1891, Wells went to Monte Carlo with £4,000 he had collected from investors and in an eleven-hour session broke the bank twelve times, winning a million francs. At one stage, he won twenty-three times out of thirty successive spins of the wheel. Wells returned a second time to Monte Carlo in November. During this session he made another million francs in three days, including successful bets on the number 5 in five consecutive turns.
Despite hiring private detectives to check out his actions, the Casino never found any evidence of a particular system employed by the winner. Wells later said it was just a lucky streak in which he employed the high-risk strategy Martingale which was simply doubling the stake after a loss in a bid to catch up on winnings on previous spins of the wheel. He put his gambling feats down to bravery and guts. “Anyone is free to watch me play, but the general defect of the ordinary casino player is that he lacks courage,�
� he said. Crowds constantly surrounded any table he was playing at, many copying any bets that he made.
In April of 1892, Fred Gilbert wrote the song, well known to this day, which was a hit when sung by musical-hall star Charles Coburn, entitled “The Man Who Broke The Bank At Monte Carlo”. It was apparently inspired by Wells – it certainly helped Wells to become a celebrity.
I’ve just got here, through Paris, from the sunny southern
shore;
I to Monte Carlo went, just to raise my winter’s rent.
Dame Fortune smiled upon me as she’d never done
before,
And I’ve now such lots of money, I’m a gent.
Yes, I’ve now such lots of money, I’m a gent.
Chorus
As I walk along the Bois Boolong
With an independent air
You can hear the girls declare
“He must be a millionaire.”
You can hear them sigh and wish to die,
You can see them wink the other eye
At the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo.
I patronised the tables at the Monte Carlo hell
Till they hadn’t got a sou for a Christian or a Jew;
So I quickly went to Paris for the charms of
mad’moiselle,
Who’s the loadstone of my heart – what can I do,
When with twenty tongues she swears that she’ll be true?
When Wells entered a night spot, the orchestra would strike up the tune of the popular hit. It seemed he had it made; even if he paid off his investors and creditors with a good profit, he would have plenty left over. But it was not the road the rotund little conman wished to travel. And like many of his kind he was just as adept at spending the money, living a lavish lifestyle.
He maintained the myth that he was a brilliant inventor and had come up with the idea of a fuel-saving device for steamships. He persuaded many wealthy investors to again sink money into this spurious venture. In the winter of 1892 he made another trip to Monte Carlo in a large yacht, the Palais Royal, with his young mistress Joan Burns, on the pretence that the yacht was being used to test his device.
He had another lucky streak, breaking the bank six more times, but then proceeded to lose all his winnings and the additional money he had conned from investors in the interim with the excuse that the fuel device had to be repaired.
The game literally was up and Wells was later arrested at Le Havre and extradited to England to face charges of fraud. He was found guilty at the Old Bailey and sentenced to an eight-year prison term.
He was another of those rogues who ignored the lessons of the past. He later was again imprisoned for three years for fraud and, after serving his sentence, left England for France of all places where he got up to his old tricks, under the name of Lucien River, and a financial scam involving no less than 60,000 depositors promised interest of 1% per day – which landed him another prison sentence of five years.
Apparently this time he flew the coop again and was arrested in Falmouth, in a finely fitted steam yacht and with some of his ill-gotten gains on board, before being returned to France to face a tune of an entirely different melody than the one that made him famous.
He died in poverty in Paris in 1926.
Florenz Ziegfeld, the American master showman, went to Monte Carlo in 1906, won a million dollars in the casino and saw the Folies Bergère in Paris. Inspired by this, the first Ziegfeld Follies appeared on Broadway in 1907-08. He was famous for lavender shirts, long telegrams, long-distance telephone calls and frequent unreasonableness. He owned six custard-coloured Rolls Royces and travelled in a private railroad car.
Lily Langtry, the famous British actress and mistress of royalty (Oscar Wilde was quite smitten with her), liked to visit Monte Carlo in her spare time and visited the Casino regularly, losing frequently before in 1907 becoming the first woman to break the bank. She was 54. Her final home was a villa in Monaco which she named ‘Le Lys’. She had married Hugo De Bathe, 19 years her junior, in 1898. He lived in Nice and was only called on occasionally to take the bare look from her on social occasions. When his father Sir Henry de Bathe died she took on the title Lady de Bathe, despite the fact that her marriage was nothing but a sham. Her constant companion, friend and confidante was Mathilde Peat, the widow of her butler.
The French Riviera was the destination, winter and summer, for Europe’s élite. Queen Victoria, the Czar of Russia, King of Bavaria, and merchant magnates such as Thomas Lipton were among the familiar faces in the area. Between rounds of claypigeon shooting and roulette at the Casino in Monte Carlo, the wealthy travellers moved about on their private yachts, anchoring in the bay of Villefranche-sur-Mer.
In 1907, the Belgian King Leopold II owned most of Cap Ferat and was prevented from expanding his domain by Parisian baroness, Mme Beatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild of the famous banking family, who purchased seven hectares on the narrowest strip of the isthmus. She had fallen in love with the area after visiting her husband’s cousin, Theodore Reinach, who was building a Grecian-style villa in Beaulieu-sur-Mer. She decided to build a summer palace inspired by the Italian Renaissance. Pink was her favourite colour and she would dress from head to toe in it with matching parasol and handbag. Her villa in Monte Carlo was called “Rose De France”. There she invited her friends to lavish parties reminiscent of the best days of the ancien régime.
These were the “rock stars” of Monte Carlo’s heyday, living a life of leisure, luxury and wealth, but behind the glittering façade the truth was they were all at the same time both parasites and prey of the all-devouring Casino.
THE LURE OF THE CASINO
An empire built on a simple premise: lust for money. The centre of it all: the Casino, that magnificent edifice, a glittering, white palace set in gorgeous gardens with their palm-trees, giant geraniums and mimosa.
Away across the white balustrade of the broad magnificent terrace could be heard the whistle of the express “Flower Train” which travelled daily from Cannes to Boulogne faster than the passenger-de-luxe, bearing carnations, mimosa and violets from the Côte’Azur to Covent Garden flower market. Beyond stretched the sapphire Mediterranean – in the distance the blue hills of the Italian coast.
The privileged denizens of this fantasy palace were inevitably clad in evening dress, the monde and demi-monde temporarily on equal footing. Eagerly they climbed those fateful steps and entered an enormous hall of great height with a polished parquet floor, the walls covered by huge pictures let into the gilded panelling, separated from each other by pilasters of gold. Ceilings, where electric lights glowed, were painted and the general effect was of almost overpowering magnificence. At one end of this hall a series of swing-doors constantly opened and closed again. At the doors stood alert sentinels in long frock coats, watching in grave silence as the crowd moved to the inner sanctum – for beyond this huge room there was another and even a larger one, crossing it at right angles, and beyond that, still another.
Inside these salons, at intervals, under the domed roof, long tables were set, each one as long as two billiard tables. The glorious Mediterranean sun was kept out by thick expensive curtains, while over each table, as well as electric light, oil lamps, shaded green with billiard-table effect, cast a dull, ghastly illumination on the strained and flushed faces of the players. People may have wondered at this antiquated addition to the electric light. It was purely pragmatic in purpose and added as a result of a raid one night on the tables when the perpetrators cut the supply and in the darkness grabbed all they could get.
On each table, a long expanse of green baize cloth, marked with numbered squares and triangles, while at one end were two huge diamonds of red and black in either corner. Dividing each table at the centre was the wheel and the croupier with an ivory ball.
The ritual at the roulette tables was as predictable as a religious ceremony, though the congregation as a whole would scarcely be welcome in a church of any denomination. Th
ey were all to a man and woman more like participants at a masked ball, with feelings, fear, tension, apprehension to be buried behind the disguise of indifference, win or lose. The upper-class players should not give way to euphoria or annoyance; money in their world should be so subservient to gentility as to be above thought and certainly expression. They were supposed to be ignorant of the realities, but even this breed was not immune to the consequences of speculation. There were enough of their kind resting in a certain weedy ‘Suicides’ Graveyard’ not far distant to prove that point. And the palpable atmosphere of acute tension gave the lie to the indifference on the faces – the atmosphere and the combined odour of nervous perspiration and for the most part very expensive perfume.
The little ivory ball spun and fell on a numbered spot. The whirling of the wheel at the bottom, the opposite course of the ball, and the triangular silver stars which broke it, all made it a matter of chance into which apartment upon the wheel the ball was going to fall. So rapid was the paying out and gathering in of the money at the tables, the wheel was spun every minute and a half. The little cards, printed in red and black, which were provided by the casino authorities for recording the play, were pricked each time the wheel was spun. The flow of pernicious chance was hardly interrupted. The gamblers, the great and the greedy herd, imagined all sorts of repetitive patterns. Notes were taken feverishly in a sweat-induced haze to establish a repeating sequence and then bet on the opposite for the following run. Money was placed on the numbers from every part of the table. Sometimes the people pushed it themselves onto the chosen numbers, sometimes when they were too far away they gave it to one of the croupiers, who sat round among the crowd and pushed coins to the destined spot with their long Indiarubbertipped rakes.
Behind each croupier, a higher seat was occupied by the official in charge and constantly from his lips came the famous line:
“Faites vos jeux, messieurs! Faites vos jeux!”
Murder in Monte Carlo Page 10
