Seventeenth and Market: Soapy Smith's Sucker Trap

As you pass the corner of Seventeenth and Market, know that the original building is gone, torn down decades ago, but for a brief decade this corner was the headquarters of the most successful con man in the American West. Jefferson Randolph Smith, born in November of eighteen sixty, opened the Tivoli Club here in eighteen eighty eight with a partner named Ed Chase, in a four story building put up by the developer William Deutsch. Above the staircase that led to the upstairs gaming rooms, Smith hung a sign in Latin that read caveat emptor, let the buyer beware.

Every man who climbed those stairs read it, thought he was in on the joke, and lost his money anyway. Smith's signature grift was the prize package soap racket. He wrapped a nickel bar of soap in plain paper, then with a flourish wrapped a one dollar bill, a five, a twenty, a hundred around a few of the bars, hidden under another layer of paper.

He stacked them on a sidewalk crate. He demonstrated, tore one open, pulled out a bill. The crowd surged.

They bought. Shills in the crowd, plants Smith had paid, identified the marked bars and bought them at a dollar each, while the suckers bought paper wrapped soap. The bills went back into Smith's pocket.

He ran the same con on fake stock exchanges, lottery houses where no one ever won, rigged faro, and three card monte. By eighteen eighty nine the Denver papers were openly calling the city government the firm of Londoner, Farley, and Smith, after Mayor Londoner, Police Chief Farley, and the con man who paid them both. Denver had become Smith's town.

He left for Creede in eighteen ninety two when reform finally broke his grip, lost his Creede operation in the silver crash of eighteen ninety three, and showed up in Skagway, Alaska in eighteen ninety seven to do it all again. On the night of July eighth, eighteen ninety eight, at nine fifteen in the evening, he walked onto the Juneau Wharf with a Winchester rifle to confront a vigilante named Frank Reid. Reid shot him in the heart.

His reported last words were, my God, do not shoot. Reid died twelve days later from his wounds. They recovered Smith's stolen gold from his trunk six days after that.