LOU BLONGER

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 December 1940, Page 6

LOU BLONGER

PRINCE OF RACKETEERS. Most of us are worldly-wise enough not to be taken in too easily with some of the gangster pictures we see at the cinema. We nod rather knowingly when we come out and say that of course that sort of stull' - is pretty good on. the screen —but it doesn't happen in real life. Oddly enough there are—or perhaps it would be safer to say there have been —men in real life as strange as anything ever seen on the screen. Lou Blonger was one of them —as most folk in Denver, the Colorado city, know to this day. He appeared there as far back as 1880, and he was there till August, 1922. Then he went to prison and died there. But Lou Blonger was a prince of racketeers. He had his minions of the underworld. He led a double life, and he carried it all off amazingly. A French-Canadian, he was not without his good points, ready with his great wealth to do anyone a kindness, but a law-breaker out-and-out, buying injustice and terrorising the neighbourhood.

For Lou Blonger had a happy way of dispensing favours. With his gold pencil he would tick off the names of judges, police officials and lawyers as he read them out from a typed sheet, and to all against whose name there was a tick a basket of cherries would be sent. Cherries are harmless enough, you would think, but those who received the cherries knew they were still in Lou Blonger’s favour —or, rather, that they had to do as he wished —or get out. Those who did not receive the cherries might well tremble in their shoes —for their day in Denver and neighbourhood was short indeed.

It is declared that this generoushearted man was the biggest trickster in America, and that his gang was the most powerful of any that have ever been known. However that may be, it remains true that for something like 40 years this king of the underworld kept all the power of the law under his thumb.