Reformed and Unreformed Sharps: Jonathan Green, George Devol

As we've seen in previous articles, knowing the contents of an opponent's facedown hand in a single $100,000 pot could set up a cardsharp for life – not that, having pulled off this trick once or twice, a sharp was very likely to retire.



One sharp who did call it quits was Jonathan Harrington Green. Born in 1813, Green served time at a young age in a Cincinnati prison for petty theft and vagrancy. Older inmates taught him to cheat at faro and monte, and upon his release in 1829, he headed straight for the steamboats, where most high-stakes gambling took place. But the most popular game on the rivers wasn't one he'd learned in prison; it was a newfangled 20-card contest called poque. Using a deck stripped of the deuces through nines, two, three, or four players were dealt a five-card hand before vying with bets for the pot. The game was dominated by sharps using mirrors, cold and marked decks, and elaborate signaling systems. Even so, the new breed of suckers preferred poque to monte and faro, believing it offered them better odds, which in turn made it both more challenging to play and harder to cheat at. It did and it didn't, of course.



During his 12-year sharping career on the riverboats, Green said he learned to read a marked deck "as easily as the average man reads his newspaper." He also noticed that poque wasn't listed in Hoyle, or for that matter in any publication he'd come across, so he took it upon himself to put its rules and tactics onto paper. What Edmond Hoyle had been to whist, Green would be to poque, though first he would post a few danger signs. In light of the cunning of his fellow blacklegs, he believed it was only fair to identify poque as "The Cheating Game."



Green's warning was also a byproduct of his conversion to Christianity. At some point in his late 20s, he suddenly declared himself a reformed gambler and made it his business – literally – to inform the American public about crooked card games. In 1843 he published An Exposure of the Arts and Miseries of Gambling, Designed Especially as a Warning to the Youthful and Inexperienced Against the Evils of that Odious and Destructive Vice. If this best-seller's 28-word title somehow failed to make its message fairly clear, the message was repeated in the melodramatic lectures Green began giving to sold-out auditoriums across the country. In them he spoke of being raised motherless and lured by older criminals into life as a swindler before he was finally saved by a newfound devotion to Jesus. And now here he stood, admonishing the good people of his audience to avoid games of chance with a vengeance.



Feeling his preacherly oats, he began publishing a series of repetitive sequels – Gambling Unmasked, The Gambler's Mirror, A Report on Gambling, Gambling Exposed, The Reformed Gambler, The Gambler's Life – designed to capitalize on the success of An Exposure. Abridged editions were sold at his lectures for $4 per dozen to those wishing to carry the crusade even wider.



Not one for half measures, Green proclaimed from the podium that all decks of playing cards were marked by the manufacturers. To prove it, he offered money to a randomly chosen volunteer from the audience to leave the theater and purchase a deck from any nearby shop. When the man or woman returned with a deck, Green would break the seal, shuffle, spread the cards facedown on a table, and begin declaring the rank and suit before turning each one faceup. He was right every time.



More than a few people, especially the gamblers in the audience, publicly accused Green of choosing confederates guaranteed to return with marked decks. When that proved not to be the case, skeptics began watching the performances more closely. It turned out that Green was using a tiny mirror at the edge of the stage table to peek at the face of each card as he pretended to scour its back for a mark. In other words, he was making himself rich and famously righteous by fixing the evidence that all card games were fixed. The larger irony was that his claim was essentially true as far as high-stakes poker was concerned, though his mirror would tend to disprove this. So what was a sucker to think?



Undeterred, Green upped the ante, speaking and writing of ever more grandiose conspiracies foisted upon honest citizens. His book The Secret Band of Brothers purported to expose what he called "a wide-spread organization – pledged to gambling, theft and villainy of all kinds." The Band was founded, he wrote, on July 12, 1798, and soon included 200 Grand Masters, each with six Vice-Grand Masters and assorted other villains: pickpockets, horse race and cockfight fixers, strong-arm enforcers and cold-blooded murderers, all of whom communicated with coded messages left under bridges, in caves and tree hollows, and so on. Making the band even more insidious, its Masters were highly respected pillars of the community, "men of wealth and influence in almost every town," Green darkly warned. "They are sometimes lawyers, and jurors, and even judges."



Green made these allegations in the 1840s and '50s, an era during which the cultural pendulum swung wildly between unbudging special interests and fanatical reformers. Much more important, the question of whether the territories west of the Mississippi should become free or slave states was being intensely debated by, among countless others, senators Thomas Hart Benton, John C. Calhoun, and Stephen A. Douglas, and Congressman Abraham Lincoln. As America's fledgling republic was slowly torn apart by social and constitutional crises, God's support was claimed by both sides of almost every issue. As Lincoln would later remark while drafting the Emancipation Proclamation: "I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and that by religious men, who are equally certain that they represent the divine will. … These are not, however, the days of miracles, and I suppose it will be granted that I am not to expect a direct revelation. I must study the plain, physical facts of the case, ascertain what is possible, and learn what appears to be wise and right." And he did.



As far as poker was concerned, God-fearing politicians in the Know Nothing Party supported Green's calls to ban all games of chance. Yet even the liberal Republican Horace Greeley editorialized in the New York Tribune "that not less than five millions of dollars are annually won from fools and shallow knaves, by blacklegs, in this city alone; and not less than a thousand young men are annually ruined by them." Other reformers were less willing to throw out the baby with the bath water. It seemed wise and right to them that gambling be restricted, but that a square game of poker for affordable stakes should be legal.



However much he may have overstated his case against card games, Jonathan Green had introduced poker to the general public and contributed inadvertently to its outlaw cachet. He helped to expose and quash cheaters, mainly by alerting potential suckers to the hazards of gambling with the likes of Tom Ellison, James Ashby, Jimmy Fitzgerald, and George Devol.



While not much is known about the first three sharps, Devol's raucous and relentlessly self-justifying 1887 memoir, Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi, made him notorious in his day and ours. Born in 1829 near the steamboat docks of Marietta, Ohio, Devol left home at age 10 to work as a cabin boy, beating Sam Clemens to the punch by a good dozen years. Clemens was 8 when he vowed to find work on a packet, but he didn't land a job on one until he was 22. Then again, Clemens remained an honest practitioner throughout his life, whether as a typesetter, prospector, steamboat pilot, or writer. The same can't be said for Devol.



Young George's apprenticeship as a blackleg included stints dealing faro, craps, 21, and monte before moving on to brag and then poker. While working his schemes aboard a Rio Grande steamer in 1846 – on his way, so he said, to fight in the Mexican War – Devol decided the world would be a better place if, instead of enlisting, he remained behind in camp and cheated American troops, which he did to the tune of $2,700.



While Devol was making his bones in Mexico, Second Lieutenant Ulysses S. "Uncle Sam" Grant was serving there as a regimental quartermaster, though he also won a pair of medals for bravery in daring frontline action. Between battles, however, Grant indulged his tastes for alcohol and brag, a game he'd learned as a West Point plebe in 1839, before poker had reached the Hudson River. Despite his successes in the Mexican campaign, Grant was forced to resign from the Army in 1854. His commanding officer alleged he was intoxicated while paying their troops, and he forced Grant to make a hard choice: resign or face a court-martial. Grant chose the former option. He went on, as we know, to become the Union's military savior, but this less mature Grant was the kind of soldier Devol would have targeted in Mexico.



The vast military expenditures of the Civil War only quickened Devol's blackleg heart. "Paymasters in the army were among the best suckers we had," he explained, especially when they were drunk. He admitted to cheating them out of so much cash that Gen. Benjamin Franklin Butler, the military governor of New Orleans, was forced to find a provost judge willing to sentence Devol to a year in prison in 1862. But Devol simply fleeced the wealthy Southerners locked up with him, using their money to bribe his jailer into chaperoning him around the local red-light district. And he almost certainly bribed Louisiana Gov. George Shepley to pardon him, with the proviso that he not play cards with any member of the Union army. Devol broke this promise almost immediately, bilking another paymaster out of $19,000. Yet because Gen. Butler's command had been transferred to Virginia, Devol remained in business another two years – until Gen. Stephen Hurlburt protected the payroll by closing Southern gambling houses.



"After cheating all the soldiers I could at cards and there was no one else to rob," Devol returned his focus to civilians. One especially devious ruse was accepting backers in a high-stakes head-to-head poker match. Believing Devol's talent as a cardsharp guaranteed he would win, the backers enthusiastically put up five-figure sums. Devol then proceeded to lose on purpose to a partner, and the two split the money in secret.



A muscular man with a particularly thick skull who also packed a revolver he called "Betsy Jane," Devol would literally butt heads with any unarmed victim who crossed him. Said one former tough guy: "The first lick he hit me, I thought my neck was disjointed; and when he ran that head into me, I thought it was a cannon ball." When challenged by circus performer William Carroll, billed as "The Great Butter" because he smashed through heavy doors and claimed he could kill any man or beast with his forehead, Devol knocked him unconscious. When Carroll came to, he declared, "Gentlemen, at last I have found my papa."



Before Emancipation, Devol had gone out of his way to befriend slaves, gentry, poor whites, and free men of color. He bragged that he could impersonate a white deck hand or even a Negro musician – anything to avoid gun-toting passengers he'd bilked. After one hasty disembarkation at the wharf of a sugar plantation, Devol's guise as a planter was clinched, he wrote, when "all the niggers came to shake hands and say 'Glad youse back, Massa George.'" Yet when Massa George won a slave or two in a poker game, he cashed them in for $1,000 apiece when the boat reached New Orleans.



Before he retired, Devol claimed he'd won more than $2 million – about $50 million in today's dollars – but had lost nearly all of it back to even more crooked faro dealers and poker sharps. "It is said of me that I have won more money than any sporting man in this country," he wrote in 1886. "I will say that I hadn't sense enough to keep it."



Despite decades of cheating, Devol maintained that he always adhered to a code of "honor among thieves." He even insisted that the MO of most sharps was more ethical than the ways of the bourgeois, religious, and commercial worlds. "A gambler's word is as good as his bond, and that is more than I can say of many business men who stand very high in the community," he wrote. "The Board of Trade is just as much a gambling house as a faro bank. Do not the members put up their (and sometimes other people's) money on puts, calls, margins, and futures?" Not only that: "The gambler will pay when he has money, which many good church members will not."



He also claimed to have never taken money from a friend and, more dubiously, to have always checked with a riverboat's clerk to make sure his victim had sufficient funds to get home, plus a comfortable cushion besides. And when he castigated "hook-nosed sons of Abraham" for what he deemed their money-grubbing venality, it's hard to imagine a blacker pot making such a scurrilous charge.



Devol nonetheless was compared in his day to the hero of an 1844 novel by Johnson Jones Hooper called Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, which appeared more than 40 years before The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The son of a devout minister, Simon is determined to make his living as a riverboat gambler. "Simon! Simon!" his father yells, "you poor unlettered fool. Don't you know that all card-players, and chicken-fighters, and horse-racers go to hell? And don't you know that them that plays cards always loses their money, and -" At which point Simon interrupts him to ask, "Who wins it all then, Daddy?" A born hustler, Simon understands in his bones what his father cannot – that poker is a zero-sum game. And surely George Devol would agree that for every sucker getting up from the table with his pockets turned inside out, there was a skillful player or, even more likely, a con artist sitting behind a righteous heap of swag. And that it was better to be him than the sucker.



Next issue: Draw and Jackpots.