The Mark Inside

by Amy Reading

  After their indictment, the former mayor McAleer helped post Lips’s bond, joining with the former assistant fire chief and Lips’s sister to raise the $20,000. Anderson’s bond in the same amount was posted by a fellow deputy sheriff and a mysterious woman named Venus Morgan, reputed to be the wife of an oil stockbroker. Before their trials could get under way, the newspapers reported, Lips made a full confession to District Attorney Woolwine. “We were tempted and we fell,” he reportedly said as he bowed his face into his hands. Not so, cried Lips to the newspapers the next day. “Neither of us has seen the District Attorney since our arrest over a month ago,” he claimed. “It seems this statement at this time is along the lines of the District Attorney’s policy, when he said, ‘If you can’t convict a man, mess him up so he will not be able to walk the streets of Los Angeles.’ ” Both deputies continued to plead not guilty.

  Lips’s trial began on June 16, 1921. The first witness was Norfleet, whom the Los Angeles Times described as “a small, compact, quiet-looking man” and a “hero.” The newspaper marveled over Norfleet’s restrained testimony, noting that he could have stolen the show by describing his cross-country adventures but instead opted straightforwardly to answer the prosecutor’s questions. The prosecution also called Sheriff Al Manning, the manager of Mrs. Furey’s bank, and the manager of the bank that held Anderson’s safety-deposit box. But the star witness of the trail was Mrs. Dede Furey, who had been estranged from her husband since four months before her son’s birth and who wanted no part of his criminal enterprises. She testified to cleaning out the fund of money she’d been saving for her son’s musical education. The International News Service reported, “Her recital of the sacrifice of savings of the past 10 years in order to help her husband was almost totally devoid of emotion.”

  The defense rested without submitting a single witness or piece of evidence. In his closing argument, Lips’s attorney admitted that the deputy sheriff had indeed overstepped his job description in asking Furey for the money and that Lips was guilty—guilty of an excess of pity in allowing Furey to raise bail money before being booked to ensure that he could return to his family as soon as possible. The jury took twenty-seven minutes to find Lips guilty. The decision was appealed all the way up to the California Supreme Court, but ultimately Lips was sentenced to one to fourteen years in San Quentin. Anderson was able to delay his trial for another year, until finally, in April 1922, he too earned up to fifteen years.

  But at Christmastime back in 1920, Norfleet did not yet have the satisfaction of knowing the crooked officers would be straightened out under the iron of his sworn testimony. All he knew was that he could not rely on their surveillance and that Furey could be anywhere. And then he got another lucky break. A contact he’d made in the telegraph industry informed him that Dede Furey had just received a last-minute Christmas present from her husband: Furey had wired her a sum of money from Jacksonville, Florida. Was this tip, too, a ploy to get him out of town and out of the state? Norfleet, apparently, never even considered that idea. Three and a half hours later, he was on an eastbound train in blistering pursuit of a nemesis who grew in his mind with each close call and missed opportunity.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A Small History of the Big Con

  In his heyday, newspapers called him the “internationally known confidence man,” “one of the smartest confidence men ever to operate in this country,” and “one of the most dangerous confidence men in America,” yet despite a fulsome chronicle of his deeds in hometown newspapers across the country, Joseph Furey never quite rose to public consciousness as an outlaw. He was born in Vancouver, Washington, in the mid-1870s, and almost as soon as he was able, he started getting himself arrested, serving time in 1895 and 1897. In the first decade of the twentieth century, he booked stays in jail cells in Portland, San Francisco, Kansas City, and Trenton. His prison vacations were always short, and he was always back on the streets within months. As early as 1904, newspapers began identifying him to their readers as “well known to the police as an expert at the bunko game”—well-known if not yet particularly adept.

  Joseph was one of a distinguished brotherhood of criminals. His father, Terence Furey, was a respectable citizen in Vancouver, but he spawned five sons who resembled one another in their hulking size and their illegal proclivities. One son, John, managed to avoid a life of crime, but only because he died early of blood poisoning, contracted when he was bitten in a brawl in Portland, Oregon. Tom, Harry, and Edward were as shiftless as their brother and frequently worked with him, but only Edward attained Joseph’s level of professionalism and notoriety. Only a year apart and strikingly similar in appearance, Joseph and Edward were frequently mistaken for each other, which perhaps explains why Edward helpfully tattooed his own initials on his forearm. At first, the brothers worked short cons that netted them a few hundred dollars at a time. One of them would befriend an out-of-town businessman and lure him into a crooked poker game presided over by the other brother, and the mark would leave $500 or so poorer. They hadn’t yet fixed law officials in their favor, which was why their arrest warrants were so numerous, but Joseph Furey invented a successful method of escaping prosecution: he faked his own death. He “died” by gunshot in Boston in 1904, and when the reports of his death reached San Francisco, the police cooled off their search for him. He kept getting arrested, spending time in a southern Indiana penitentiary in 1912, and kept accumulating unfulfilled warrants throughout New York, Washington, D.C., and Florida. He forfeited bail in San Diego in 1912 and was ordered out of Long Beach in 1914.

  An undated mug shot of Joseph Furey from a San Francisco rogues’ gallery (photo credit 1.5)

  Interestingly, Furey was given a rare opportunity to step out of the underworld. Had he wanted to, he could have lived a life a lot more like Norfleet’s. In 1909, he was living in Warsaw, Indiana. He traveled west to see his family in Washington for the first time in seven years, and as he passed through Montana, he entered his name “just for a lark” in the Flathead Reservation land draw. Over the objections of the Spokane, Salish, and Kootenai Indians who lived there, the federal government had decided to sell over 400,000 surplus acres in twenty-eight hundred parcels, and in August 1909 it held a lottery to determine who among the six thousand interested buyers could file claims. Joseph Furey was the first name drawn, entitling him to choose a section, a 640-acre parcel worth as much as $50,000, and take possession of it under homestead laws for as little as $1.25 to $3.00 an acre. Seattle-area newspapers were quick to identify the lottery winner as a man with a criminal past, despite his father’s protestations that Joseph was a reputable liquor salesman and it was his look-alike brother Edward who was the family rapscallion. Joseph Furey did not redeem his winning ticket for the sedentary life.

  In the next decade, his profit margins began to widen. In 1914, Joseph and Harry took $14,000 from a Nevada millionaire using a cruder version of the swindle by which Joseph would eventually con Norfleet. Edward Clifford left his hometown for the first time in forty years in order to deliver his daughter to a convent in Los Angeles. The Fureys lured him into what he thought was a fixed horse race, and they allowed him to win $1,500 before inducing him to wager a small fortune. A friend of the millionaire’s grew concerned and alerted the police. Harry was arrested in San Jose, and Joseph was arrested in San Francisco. At first, Joseph calmly accepted the bracelets, assuming he was merely being picked up on suspicion. When he realized the extent of the charge against him, he tried to swallow the millionaire’s bank draft. And yet just ten days later both brothers walked out of jail. The mark refused to file an official complaint. The following year, Joseph not only convinced a farmer from Council Bluffs that he had inside information on horse racing, he actually sold the mark the headquarters of his swindling operation for $20,000, leading him to believe that he could take over the fixed-race franchise and reap untold millions. The headquarters were, in reality, the upper three floors of a department store in Peoria, Illinois.<
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  By the end of the decade, Joseph had refined his script into a masterpiece of deception, and he headed his own crew of swindlers who routinely extracted tens of thousands of dollars from their marks. Edward, for his part, worked with Nicky Arnstein, the dastardly husband of the actress Fanny Brice, on a Wall Street heist that netted an extraordinary $2 million. How did these two petty crooks graduate to the highest reaches of their profession?

  The answer is simple: they worked under the tutelage of the masters, the very men who invented the tricks with which they conned their marks. In the century’s first decade, Joseph and Edward restlessly circumnavigated the country as lone grifters who occasionally worked with each other to take the touch off a sucker. By the century’s second decade, their travels grew more focused as their feet found the grooves of an underworld trail etched on the nation’s landscape, and they began to work with men whose names were famous in saloons and pool halls but virtually unknown outside of them. Their swindling education follows the historical path of the big con itself: they started in the West and gradually made their way to the big eastern cities.

  Confidence artistry is distinct from other criminal subcultures in several ways. It is not defined by ethnic or clan ties and does not owe its cohesion to a shared culture imported to this country by immigrants. While Mafia operatives are deeply rooted in their respective towns and are relatively powerless when they leave their own territories, confidence artists are itinerant and can set up a con virtually anywhere. Confidence artistry is not a crime of vice, though it is related to gambling, prostitution, and saloon keeping. It cannot be fully explained as a corollary to machine politics, Prohibition, and ethnic syndicates held together by violence. If organized crime exploits the opportunities created by a weak central government, confidence artistry profits from a strong economy, by filling in the uncharted terrain that opens up when business innovation gallops ahead of legislation.

  The big con of the second and third decades of the twentieth century was, first and foremost, an outgrowth of the railroad boom. The first glimmer of what would become the big con sparked and flared into life at the westernmost stop on the Union Pacific Railroad. In Cheyenne, Wyoming, an aptly named nineteen-year-old called Benjamin Marks hit upon the innovation that would turn the short cons of the nineteenth century, all those green goods and goldbricks, into the underworld corporations, what might be called the con conglomerates, of the twentieth century. Marks, who was born in Waukegan, Illinois, showed an early aptitude for deception by getting himself enrolled in the Union army at the age of thirteen, serving as a dispatch bearer. When the war ended, he went west, landing in Cheyenne in 1867 at the same time that the railroad arrived. The Union Pacific, in its slow dash to complete the transcontinental railroad, had reached the summit of the Black Hills that winter and was forced to wait, gathering men and materials, until construction could resume in April. More than ten thousand people massed in the brand-new town. General Grenville Dodge, the chief engineer of the Union Pacific and the man who platted the city, seemed chagrined at what he’d wrought, calling Cheyenne “the greatest gambling place ever established on the plains” and “full of desperate characters.”

  Marks hung a tray from his neck and began to deal three-card monte games for the settlers and speculators, but the streets were thick with portable tables, and Marks could barely scoop in a living. He took the radical step of moving his game off the streets, at once jacking up his profits and vaulting the con into an entirely new dimension of urban relations. He rented a storefront in downtown Cheyenne, filled its window with tempting merchandise, and displayed a sign announcing that the price of everything in the store was a dollar or less. Marks never sold a single item. As soon as a potential customer entered the store, “salesmen” would entice him toward the crooked card games under way at barrels behind the merchandise, utilizing the same bait-and-switch, mules-then-real-estate tactic that Furey’s gang would someday use to ensnare Norfleet. Marks’s Dollar Store took off and spread like a franchise. Soon frontier towns all along the railroad featured their own versions (one of them even turned into a legitimate department store when its proprietor realized he could earn more by selling goods at a dollar—some at a profit and some as loss leaders—than he could dealing monte). Dollar Store proprietors relished the control they wielded over their games. For the first time, the swindle unfolded, in the con historian David Maurer’s terms, as “a carefully set up and skillfully managed theater where the victim acts out an unwitting role in the most exciting of all underworld dramas.” To Maurer, Marks had “revolutionize[d] the grift.”

  Marks might not have fully realized what he had invented. Certainly, he didn’t stick around long enough to appreciate it. That same year, he moved to Council Bluffs, Iowa, where the Chicago and North Western Railway had just been completed. He set up some tables on the second floor of the Hoffman House on West Broadway, just above a saloon, and got to work dealing crooked faro games. In the 1870s, he shared the plentiful Omaha/Council Bluffs business with aristocrats of the trade like Doc Baggs, Canada Bill Jones, Charley White, George Devol, and Frank Tarbeaux. Business sagged when Tarbeaux unwisely swindled a Union Pacific executive out of $1,200, causing the railroad to crack down on the cardsharps riding its rails. Canada Bill tried to broker a deal, offering $10,000 to the railroad’s general superintendent if he’d let them run three-card monte on UP trains, even volunteering to limit their dealings to Chicago businessmen and Methodist preachers, but the official turned him down. Gradually, the gamblers departed Council Bluffs for plumper depots, and Marks had the town to himself. He fixed it right up, placating government officials with cash and establishing Council Bluffs as a “right” or fixed-up town for a little honest wagering. He abstained from drinking and smoking, and he participated with gusto and goodwill in local politics. He soon developed a reputation among sporting men as a square dealer with a kind heart, the sort of man who would make sure you had a ride home if you lost your horse at one of his tables. In 1898, he built a freestanding casino in Council Bluffs that offered roulette, faro, craps, slot machines, and trapdoors in the floor for drunks or cheats who needed time to cool out in the basement pokey.

  Marks possessed in full the con man’s genius for taking advantage of circumstances and turning them to profit. At the turn of the century, he presided over a lavish mansion on Lake Manawa, outside of Council Bluffs, but what looked like a millionaire’s hunting lodge was actually a stage set cobbled together from the detritus of modernity. After the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition closed its doors in Omaha in 1898, Marks bought one of the buildings, an elaborate two-story log cabin of native pine with gables and verandas that the State of Minnesota had erected. Marks disassembled the building, marked all the logs, and floated them down the Missouri River. When he reassembled them, he expanded the building with telephone and telegraph poles, and he used glass from obsolete streetcars to fill in the windows.

  Not coincidentally, Marks’s thousand-acre property straddled two counties, and Marks sited his building precisely on the boundary line between them. On those rare occasions when one county’s law enforcement chanced to raid the joint, Marks’s dealers and patrons simply moved over to the other side of the building and out of their jurisdiction. The first floor of the cabin was entirely given over to gambling, with a little counting room to one side. The second and third floors contained bedrooms in which Marks’s wife, the imperious Mary Marks, presided as the town’s high-class madam. Mary’s refinement and Viennese fashions were so exalted that the socialites of Council Bluffs earnestly desired her company, and they called on her one afternoon to beg her to renounce her career. Mary thanked the women for their good favor but declined the offer. Then she noted that it was getting upon five o’clock and if the ladies would only wait a few moments, their husbands would be finishing upstairs and could walk them home. The Markses’ reign in Council Bluffs was never thereafter challenged.

  Marks constructed a one-mile h
orse-racing track near the log mansion, and it was here that he made his second major contribution to the development of the big con—as well as his only mistake. Marks joined forces with John C. Mabray, a con man who had apprenticed in Webb City, Missouri, in the art of faked athletic contests—horse races, boxing, wrestling, and footraces—for the so-called Millionaires’ Club. The basic script went like this: A steerer befriends a mark and introduces him to another man who works as the secretary for a group of millionaires, a sporting bunch of men who own, say, a racehorse that they occasionally pit against other horses in friendly wagers. The secretary is disgruntled with his employers and needs some help with a scheme he has cooked up. He has found a horse who can beat the millionaires’ horse; all he lacks is someone to represent himself as the horse’s owner and place his bet. When the mark sees the secretary’s horse gallop around the practice ring, his own heart and avarice gallop in stride, and he agrees to play the part. The secretary tells him to bring along a bank draft for a few thousand dollars, because the millionaires won’t do business with anyone whom they don’t consider their equal. The match is arranged, the bets are placed, and the bank draft that was only supposed to be a stage prop is inevitably cashed so that the mark may tap into the game with his own money. Often the action is paused while the mark goes on the send for more money, this time in the tens of thousands of dollars. The starting gun goes off, and the secretary’s horse leads by many lengths—until suddenly the jockey starts up out of the saddle, gurgles, and dies, falling to the dirt in a splatter of blood. Loath to be caught at the scene of an illegal race in which a jockey has died, everyone swiftly finds the nearest exit. The secretary whispers to the mark that the millionaires will contact him at home and everything will be set right.