The Harmony Kid made his living as a traveling gambling cheat in the U.S. and was known from coast to coast. While primarily a card and dice sharp, Lawrence Varner (1865-1933) also perpetrated swindles related to roulette and horse races. He he obtained his moniker because he was born and lived for decades in New Harmony, Indiana.

He was “one of the most notorious gamblers and sporting men in the country,” wrote The Democrat in 1892. That newspaper shared what a colleague of Varner said about him: “That fellow has won more money in the last two years than any three men in the country in his life, but it goes like the wind. He is never broke, though, and has lots of friends in every city in the Union.”

Cons and other crimes were part and parcel of Varner’s career despite his having a family of his own. Here we create a snapshot of his “professional” life through some highlights, presented chronologically.

1886: His Unfailing Bones

This year, craps was introduced in Cincinnati, Ohio. Using his trusty method of cheating, the Harmony Kid stunned the naivete right out of two of the game’s operators there, taking one for $900 ($25,000 today) and the other for $1,100 ($30,000).

During play, Varner “would sling his money around promiscuously and give the house dice a wicked twist with the result that one of them would jump off the table, and on to the floor,” described The Daily Times-Star (June 10, 1924). While retrieving the errant die, he switched out both for his own set of stolen tops and buttons, misspotted dice with which one can’t roll certain losing combos. Varner’s bones lacked ones and sixes, minimizing his chances of landing on the dreaded seven. 

“To add insult to injury, the ‘Harmony Kid’ wrote a scurrilous letter to each of the Cincinnatians in which he told [them] that what [they] didn’t know about that little old game would fill a cistern,” reported The Daily Times-Star (June 10, 1924).

For the rest of his life, the Harmony Kid steered clear of Cincinnati.

1889: Escalated Card Game Dispute

During an argument with an Indiana saloonkeeper, Dallas Tyler, in Washington, Indiana, about a card game, Varner shot him. The bullet hit Tayler on the inside of one of his legs. Varner escaped, and Tyler survived.

1890: Wedding Bells Ring

The Harmony Kid married Laura Warden in Kentucky and went on to have at least two children.

1893: Arrested for Murder

Varner was charged with murdering a George Franklin, who’d been found dead on the train tracks in New Harmony with a fractured skull and two head gashes. He’s last been seen at the fair. It’s unclear why the Harmony Kid was fingered for the crime. During his trial, the jury couldn’t agree, with 10 for acquittal, two for conviction. Eventually, the case was dismissed.

1898: Off To The Great White North

During The Klondike Gold Rush, Varner and some buddies traveled to this region in Canada’s Yukon Territory to make a fortune. Their hopes were dashed, though, when they discovered there really wasn’t any money there for the taking. After six months with nothing to show for their time spent there, the group returned to the Lower 48.

1900: A Needle In A Wheel

With fellow gambling cheat and Indianan Jim Pents, the Harmony Kid swindled Columbus, Ohio gambling room owner John Alexander, known as the Black Prince, out of $400 ($11,000 today) at the roulette wheel. Varner and Pents had broken into Alexander’s place of business the day before and inserted a needle into the wheel. Pressing on the needle stopped the wheel.

On the day of the swindle, the two showed up dressed as farmers. They played some faro and lost. The roulette wheel operator enticed them to try their luck with him, so the duo made a few bets and lost. Then a third man, a secret associate of Varner and Pents, entered the business. He acted as though he was just watching the action, but intentionally stood blocking the operator’s view of the Harmony Kid.

Pents made the bets, and when he signaled, Varner pressed the needle. Every time they did this, they won, an average of $53 a turn. Alexander paid them in certificates of deposit but later, when he discovered they’d rigged his wheel, he stopped payment on them.  

“Not long ago [Varner and Pents] cleaned up $1,400 in Lexington by the same game,” reported the Greencastle Star-Press (July 28, 1900). “They have skinned a [gambling] bank in almost every big city in America. Both men have been principals in similar skinning affairs for years back.”

1903: Clever Horse Race Scam

The Harmony Kid employed a system for betting on the horse races at the pool rooms in New York, New York that generated between $2,000 and $3,000 (about $55,000 to $82,000 today) a day. After months of doing this six days a week at such enterprises in The Big Apple, the proprietors caught on, and they all banned him from their business.

Varner’s scheme was this: In the morning  at every pool room, he left a note with his bet, which was on a horse to come in as good as third. He purposefully always bet on a favorite because there wasn’t any third place money for the horses in this class in any race. He also indicated he wanted the form sheet in a certain newspaper to dictate his payout should he win. Those amounts tended to be prohibitive.

So every time Varner’s horse lost, the bookies had to give Varner back the money he bet, and any time his horse won, they had to pay him a large amount.

“In other words, the poolroom men were being constantly drained out of their money without a chance of winning a cent,” reported The Ottawa Journal (Nov. 7, 1903).

1904: More Creative Cheating

With an accomplice, also from Indiana, the Harmony Kid pulled a different, less complicated roulette cheat. In a gambling room in Pekin, Illinois, the two slowly made their way over to the roulette wheel. After playing and losing for a bit, Varner asked the wheel operator for some cigars. He went to retrieve some, and while away, the Harmony Kid somehow plugged the wheel. After that, the two cheats won on nearly every turn. They only played for a half-hour, but in that time racked up $465 ($13,000 today).

Also this year, Varner fleeced various bookmakers in Hot Springs, Arkansas out of about $9,000 ($247,000 today) in all. At several betting parlors, he and eight other swindlers wagered on various horse races. When the results came over the wires, everyone in his group won and collected their winnings. The announced winners, however, weren’t the actual winners.; the broadcast was fake, previously arranged by Varner.

For this fraud, Varner ultimately was arrested in St. Louis, extradited back to Arkansas and held over for a grand jury investigation. The charge was obtaining money under false pretenses. What happened in the case is unknown as the story disappeared from the headlines.

1910: Four-Minute Fraud

The Harmony Kid blew into Reno, Nevada on a train. It was the last chance to gamble there, as a new law mandated a permanent statewide shutdown by midnight that day. After ambling through the three still open casinos, he sat down to play craps in the Casino. By this time, he’d modified his dice switching modus operandi, pulling them from a sleeve as he pushed it up. Using his infamous misspotted dice, he took the house for $500 ($14,000 today) in only four minutes.

“He made every kind of a complicated bet, shooting continuously, and keeping the dealer so busy paying him that he could not notice the alarming number of sixes and eights,” reported the Reno Evening Gazette (Oct. 1, 1910). “Time up, the Kid left $30 or $40 in bets on the table, substituted the square dice and crapped out immediately.”

He stealthily merged with the crowd and moved to and out the door. Next, he went to the Palace, but quickly left when the craps dealer saw him, as the two knew one another. To make his escape, Varner drove to the neighboring town of Sparks and caught the train out there.

1920: Taking It Overseas

By year-end 1910, all legal gambling in the U.S. had gone away and with it, opportunities for the Harmony Kid to earn money in the way at which he excelled. It appears as though he spent some years serving the country during World War I.

Afterward, in 1920, he went to Europe for the purpose of “commercial business,” as a “salesman,” according to his passport application. Most likely, the only selling he did there was of the lie he was an honest gambler.

There was no mention of him in American newspapers until his passing, in 1933, at which time he was back in the States, Chicago specifically.

Do you know anything about the Harmony Kid you could share?

——————————-

Photos: all from freeimages.com

Sources

Castle Mona, home to the Manx, or Isle of Man, Casino, 1964

1961-1966

“When you bring in gamblers, you bring in trained law violators, and to expect them not to break the law is to expect the tides not to rise,” Wallace Turner wrote in Gambler’s Money.

The Manx Casino, also called the Isle of Man Casino, named for its locale, was a case in point.

A Dubious Proposition

The enterprise came about despite and after much opposition to the idea. The roughly 300 Methodist Manx “raised hell about a gambling joint on the island,” Turner wrote.

The Manx government itself wasn’t sold on it entirely, which led to heated debate. Even England hadn’t considered legalizing gambling yet and wouldn’t do so until 1962.

“Some politicians portrayed casino gambling as an act that could subvert the Isle of Man’s respectability, but also one that surrendered national sovereignty by making the Manx Treasury subservient to the taxation revenue procured from multinational gambling magnates,” Pete Hodson wrote in the 2018 article, “‘The Isle of Vice?'”

The Manx House of Keys legalized gambling with a 15-to-9 vote on the Pool Betting Act in 1961.

Two years later, in May 1963, the Manx Casino debuted, the first gambling house in the British Isles.

“Anxious politicians and members of the public were reassured that the casino would be subject to tight regulation, and that unruly behaviour would not be tolerated,” wrote Hodson.

Americans At The Helm 

Initially, the gambling enterprise was sited in a temporary spot, inside Castle Mona, a hotel in the Douglas Promenade. Plans called for it to be moved later to a permanent location.

Casino Ltd., a group of Americans, held and operated the gambling concession. They included three Maryland businesspeople: William A. Albury and John D. Hickey, who headed it, and silent partner Helen Saul who provided most of the required upfront capital. Frank O’Neill, 49, was the casino director; Las Vegan William Paris, 39, was the deputy director; Raymond Gavilan, 45, supervisor; and Arthur P. Anderson (Hickey’s nephew), 23, cashier. James D. Gilson was another employee.

The syndicate was to pay the Manx government €5,000 pounds a year plus 15 percent of its profits.

Because half of the island’s economy relied on tourist spending at the time, the casino catered to the middle and lower classes.

“The betting was to be on the ‘Woolworth principle,’ of small stakes and large turnover of bettors. No French phrases were used,” Turner wrote. “[Patrons] even were offered lessons in roulette, chemin de fer, blackjack and craps.”

Prediction Comes True

After employee Gilson tipped off the police, they raided the casino in December and investigated the finances. O’Neill, Paris, Gavilan and Anderson were arrested and charged with conspiring to steal money from the Manx Casino since it opened and receiving stolen money, “‘thereby defrauding both the casino company and the government,” Manx Attorney General David Lay said, as quoted by Turner. The quartet was jailed and stripped of their work permits and passports.

Six months later, in late June, the former casino employees’ trial began.

Lay, the prosecutor, argued the four employees had engaged in fiddles, or types of swindling, including fudging the amounts on cash-out slips, I.O.U.s and checks, to allocate money to be skimmed, which then had been. From the skim, the wages of the four men had been paid. In carrying out these irregularities, Lay said, the defendants had defrauded the casino company and the government.

Palace Hotel & Casino, Douglas, Isle of Man

Defense Barrister Rose Heilbron countered that the defendants simply had been following orders of their bosses Albury and Hickey in regards to the skimming and their pay. As such, the company had known all along the funds were being stolen.

Rather than the four employees, Heilbron purported, Casino Ltd.’s two executives, who since had fled the Isle of Man, should’ve been the ones on trial. One had to wonder why they weren’t, she noted.

She charged that Albury and Hickey “had drawn cheque after cheque for unknown purposes. The fiddle had been to give the two tax-free living. The casino had provided the perfect front for all Albury’s activities” (Liverpool Echo and Evening Express, July 1, 1964).

Ultimately, the jury found all four men guilty of conspiring to steal. The judge sentenced them to spend six months in prison, pay a fine — O’Neill and Paris, €300, Gavilan €150 and Anderson €75 — and possibly be deported.

(A swindle by a different set of Americans would take place in England in 1969.)

The Next Phase

In 1964, the Palace Coliseum, in the Douglas Promenade, was demolished, and in its place a new building was constructed for the Manx Casino and a hotel.

The gambling facility, which Scottish actor Sir Sean Connery ushered in, opened in May 1966 under a different name, Palace Hotel & Casino.

“I wish the people in London could see the Casino,” he said. “There is nothing like it there!”

———————–

Sources

Frank Jay Gould

1929-1933

Le Casino Municipal in Nice, France refused to cash Frank Jay Gould’s check so he could keep gambling there. This irked him. Gould wasn’t just a member of the bourgeoisie. Rather, he was an uber-wealthy American who’d been living and investing millions of dollars in various business ventures in the French Riviera since 1913.

I’ll show them, he thought; I’ll build the most magnificent, classiest gambling house in all of Europe—”a palace the Caesars could not have built,” Gould said (Lima Sunday News, Jan. 15, 1933). I’ll put it close to that municipal casino and call it the Palais de la Méditerranée (the palace of the Mediterranean).

That’s what he did. He went all out and spared no expense. The grand cost came to $5 million (about $76 million today), an amount his wife (the third one) was said to have won in just a week at the gaming tables. The project took nearly two years to complete.  

Gould engaged architects Charles and Marcel Dalmas, who designed the building “like a modernized palace of ancient Rome,” reporter Alice Langelier wrote (The Bee, Nov. 29, 1929).

Showcasing a neoclassical style, the expansive casino was built out of 1,000 tons of marble and 90 tons of steel and boasted high-vaulted ceilings, frescoed walls, glass chandeliers, immense mirrors and “expensive tricks of illumination and decoration to add to its charm,” the Lima Sunday News reported. The foyer staircase was one of, if not the, largest, in history. The interior displayed works, many of them well-known, of more than 100 artists.

“Inside there is none of the usual white and gilt adornment associated with all casinos. It is artistic, harmonious, but at the same time almost ‘home-like,'” noted Langelier.

The luxurious Palais featured a series of gambling rooms “with the ‘class’ nicely graduated from low to high: in one room tourists can play for a few francs a throw, in the next the stakes are a little bit higher, in the next they are higher yet — and so on, until the expensive private parlors are reached where only American millionaires, Indian potentates and the like are admitted,” according to the Lima Sunday News. One room contained 42 baccarat tables accommodating up to 500 players and space for up to 1,000 spectators. 

The house of pleasures also contained an elaborate theater, fine dining restaurant and wine cellar stocked with roughly 4,000 bottles.

The magnificent structure “stands on the best part of the Promenade des Anglais, facing the sea, and at night is easily seen by its cornices of concealed light and the white glow which bathes it from barrel-shaped searchlights on its terrace,” Langelier described. “This super-casino covers two acres of territory and swings like Brooklyn Bridge on supports from its columns.”

“The gambling king of France’s” Palais de la Méditerranée debuted in 1929, during the Jazz Age, and exemplified the period’s glamour.

When tourism was high and business was good, the casino, located a half-mile from Nice’s Casino Municipal, yielded an annual profit of about $785,000 ($15 million today).

Work Of Another Disgruntled Man

Four years later, a fire ravaged the Palais. In the hour it took firefighters to put out the flames, the architectural masterpiece got ruined.

“The gorgeous interior was destroyed, its costly marble wall cracked and broken, its glass chandeliers worth thousands shattered,” The Hammond Times reported (Nov. 24, 1933).*

It was believed an arsonist had set the blaze, a male job applicant whom the Palais had refused employment.

————————–

* Subsequently, the Palais was completely restored and remained a viable business until 1978, when it was shuttered. The original property was demolished in 1990 except for two facades that were preserved as historical monuments and a modern hotel-casino was built in its place, now the Hyatt Regency Nice Palais de la Méditerranée.

Sources

1969

For a week in May, the leader of a group of U.S.-based gamblers rented the Villa Casino, which overlooked Hyde Park in West London, along with two craps tables, the latter for $2,500 (about $17,000 today) and 10 percent of the profits.

They offered a gambling trip to England for $960 ($6,500 today) for roundtrip air fare, a week’s hotel accommodations and $960 worth of chips. Such packages, or junkets, to that country had been popular. Travelers paid one amount for airfare, meals and lodging but individually covered all wagers beyond the allotted amount.

The gambling syndicate’s guests, 40 American high rollers, mostly from the Boston, Massachusetts area, flew into town by charter on Monday, May 12.

Suspicious Activity

During the many games of craps the vacationers played, the croupiers, at crucial points, swapped the dice for misspot ones, in this case dice with two sides bearing the same number of spots. One of these dice men was Clayton P. Gatterdam, a 48-year-old ski school proprietor from Fort Worth, Texas. Gatterdam* was a reputed crossroader, a hustler who traveled around, cheating others at gambling for money.

By using crooked dice at the Villa Casino, the operators fleeced the players out of about $26,400 ($181,000 today) over three days! 

Caught Bang To Rights

On Thursday at around 1 a.m., police burst into the pink, cottage-style building and arrested seven of the hosts. They were charged with involvement in the management and organization of unlawful gaming and conspiring to cheat and defraud. Gatterdam was charged also with possession of seven pairs of misspot dice. (Gambling was legal in England at the time, but cheating by those who ran it wasn’t.)

Undercover police agent and gambling expert, Detective Constable Brian Gillard, 26, had infiltrated the Villa Casino crowd and had watched the games for days before requesting the raid. It’s unknown how initially he’d become aware of the shady goings on.

Intended To Swindle

In a preliminary hearing the following Wednesday, the seven arrestees pleaded innocent. The magistrate agreed to bail of 15,000 pounds, or $36,000 ($247,000), apiece provided they give their passports to police and check in with them daily.

“The bail is the highest set in London for some time,” reported the Orlando Sentinel (May 16, 1969).

At their trial in mid-July at Old Bailey, officially called the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales, all of the defendants pleaded guilty. They admitted to having conspired between April 1 and May 15 to obtain property belonging to others dishonestly through deception with dice in craps games. They also admitted to being involved in conducting games in such a way that the odds weren’t favorable to all players equally.

Gatterdam was sentenced to three months in prison. The six others were fined $4,800, $6,000 or $7,200 ($33,000, $41,000 or $49,000), for a total of $33,600 ($230,000). All were discharged on the condition they don’t cheat at gambling again in England in the subsequent two years.

—————————

* About 1.5 years earlier, in October 1967, Nevada Gaming Control Board agents caught Gatterdam using misspot dice in craps games while working as a stickman at the Incline Village Casino at Lake Tahoe.

Sources

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Montreux Casino, 1971

1971

The sight of Switzerland’s Montreux Casino burning down on December 4, 1971 was the inspiration for Deep Purple’s hit song, Smoke on the Water.

A fan firing a flare gun during a Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention concert caused the conflagration of this then-90-year-old establishment. The casino subsequently was rebuilt.

Here are the lyrics, which tell it all:

We all came out to Montreux
On the Lake Geneva shoreline
To make records with a mobile
We didn’t have much time
Frank Zappa and the Mothers
Were at the best place around
But some stupid with a flare gun
Burned the place to the ground

Smoke on the water, a fire in the sky
Smoke on the water

They burned down the gambling house
It died with an awful sound
Funky Claude was running in and out
Pulling kids out of the ground
When it all was over
We had to find another place
But Swiss time was running out
It seemed that we would lose the race

Smoke on the water, a fire in the sky
Smoke on the water

We ended up at the Grand Hotel
It was empty, cold and bare
But with the Rolling truck Stones thing just outside
Making our music there
With a few red lights, a few old beds
We make a place to sweat
No matter what we get out of this
I know, I know we’ll never forget

Smoke on the water, a fire in the sky
Smoke on the water

Songwriters: Ritchie Blackmore, Ian Gillan, Roger D Glover, Jon Lord, Ian Paice

1840s-Today

Gambler Francois Blanc, at his casino in Bad Homburg, Germany, introduced roulette in the early 1840s with only 0 and no 00 on the wheel and table layout, a choice he stuck with when he assumed control of the Monte-Carlo in Monaco two decades later. This roulette version became the European standard.

In contrast, American roulette games contained both 0 and 00, which afforded casinos about a 5.26 percent advantage.

The European version reduced the house’s edge by as much as half, and because players stood a greater chance of winning with no 00 involved, it grew much more popular.

Photos from Wikimedia Commons: by Betzaar.com, European Roulette and American Roulette

1907-1918

In 1918, the United States Army requisitioned Le Casino Municipal de Beausoleil, in France on its border with Monaco, for a YMCA center for World War I infantrymen on leave. In the main former gambling room, food was served to doughboys, including American-style bacon and eggs in mornings and, on Sunday afternoons, housemade donuts.

Between 1914 and 1918 the French had used the Beausoleil casino as a hospital. When the gaming house had opened originally in 1907, it’d offered baccarat and petits-chevaux.

1913

During this year, the tail end of the second wave of massive Polish emigration, about 3.5 million people, primarily peasants from poor rural provinces, was taking place. Looming on the horizon was the outbreak of World War I, when Poland would become the locale for much of the Eastern Front’s operations.

Gambling had become a way of life for Poles.

In The Headlines

This is evidenced by the article with a Warsaw dateline, “Spirit of Chance Grips Poland in Deadly Grasp,” which the Nevada State Journal published on Nov. 12, 1913. It reads:

“Just now a gambling mania is sweeping across Poland. Today everybody in the country gambles, from the prince at his clubs to the cooks and scullery maids in the kitchens; from the lady of fashion in her boudoir to the ballet girls at the theater, who spend their time between the acts in trying their luck with cards.

“In nine private houses out of 10 the inmates sit up night after night till four or five o’clock in the morning — and often begin again after lunch. They like the money, the presence of the actual coins. When they cannot have these, they gamble with wooden cocks [roosters],* pebbles and dominoes. They will walk a mile to rub shoulders with a hunchback for luck and sit for hours waiting to slip into the seat of a lucky player.

“To what length a woman will go when bent on trying her luck with cards, an incident which recently happened at Warsaw will prove. A woman, young, good-looking and well-off, who plays a great deal of poker and bridge, and has lately lost tremendously over them, determined to force luck her way.

“Every gambler knows that a piece of the rope with which a man has been hanged makes a better mascot than anything else under the sun. The woman determined to get one. But as suicides by hanging are comparatively rare in Poland, she saw no chance of getting one that way. One evening at a card party she mentioned this and bemoaned her failure to find out where such ropes are.

“‘Why not go to the citadel and get a piece of the rope a bandit has been hanged with?’ suggested a young man, little dreaming that he would be taken seriously. She was delighted, never having thought of that before. After many visissitudes [sic], she finally secured a part of a rope used in a series of executions.

“Gambling goes on in the streets to an enormous extent. The police are supposed to punish offenders, but it makes very little difference. On Sundays and saint days, when the people come out of church, you can see within a stone’s throw of the entrance a table on which is an artificial cock, with a very pointed tail and beak. This turns on a pivot, and around the table are numbers, as in roulette. The players lay on their money, the owner of the cock, gives it a spin — and you have Monte Carlo on a small scale — out in the open air. The cocks are used because the original roulette sets, with a needle, were forbidden by the police. As no law has been made against the cocks, they are used instead. When they are tabooed, the gambler’s ingenuity will invent something else.

“Some woman in the city tried to open a club where poker could be played from morning to night. The committee was overrun with applications for membership within 24 hours of its formation. Unluckily for them, the police stepped in and put a stop to it. Every little town in Poland is cursed with gambling hells. When they cannot get the license they open as concert rooms, motion picture shows, and so forth. A man will take a room in a provincial hotel, and like flies drawn to a honeypot, the men for miles around come in to play.”

———————————-

* The rooster is a common subject of Polish folk art, appearing in various media from wood to paper, and is depicted on the country’s Coat of Arms.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons: by pl:user:follow by white rabbit

1963

On his third spin of the roulette wheel, having bet on the number 17, actor/producer Sir Sean Connery won, not just once, but thrice … in a row.

With this wager, he raked in 17 million lire, or $27,000 (about $218,000 today), at the Casino de la Vallée in Saint-Vincent, Italy.